Insula Thula

This morning I finished reading Girl Meets Boy, a novel with a bit of a Classical theme by Booker nominated author Ali Smith.

I was given this as a present, and immediately looked it up on Amazon: the review there said it was a new take on the myth of Iphis from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Having read it, I wouldn’t say it was an adaptation of the myth as such. Ovid’s story is used prominently, as is the name “Iphis”, but it’s not a straight “modern version” of an old story.

Fortunately, it’s actually a lot more than that. It takes Ovid’s story of sex change and rolls it up in a story of a whole range of modern gender issues, from the grandfather who starts his stories, “When I was a girl…” to the political activist who androgynously wears a kilt for her acts of vandalism, to the sister who teased someone for being a lesbian at school and is now desperate to find the “right” word for it.

My favourite bit of social commentary is the two guys in the pub holding a long conversation about lesbianism: “See, that’s what I don’t get… Because, there’s no way they could do it, I mean, without one. So it’s pointless.” We’ve all heard it.

Alongside the fluid conception of gender in society, there is also a focus on self-definition and our place in the world. Either politically aware, devious or completely naive, the characters all react quite differently to living in modern-day Scotland while injustices rage elsewhere. I learned a good consumerism fact too: bottled water costs the consumer around 70,000 times more than the same measure of tap water.

So, although it purports to be based on the Metamorphoses, I’m happy to say that Girl Meets Boy stands really well alone without a close knowledge of Ovid. If you’d like to get a little bit of Classics into your day, this is the way to go.

I am rare in the Classics department here for not being that into Homer.

Of course I know how important the Iliad and the Odyssey are. They are a landmark achievement in Western culture - a massive written work in what had previously been an oral culture. For various reasons, chief among them a great book by Albert Lord, I believe Homer to have been an oral poet who dictated his masterwork to someone who wanted to fix the text. I think that he was an excellent poet, but the vision for writing his poem down was not his - had he written it down himself it couldn’t have been anything like as good, because he had learnt to compose only orally. (This is all from Singer of Tales, really, and is based on comparative work with Serbo-Croatian oral poets.) The poems are massive - performed at a normal speed, they would take about three days to recite in full, I believe. They are the foundation of Western literature as we know it, quoted and adapted right down to the modern day (for example, Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?).

And that’s just it - they’re its foundation, not its pinnacle. They are a huge achievement, and very intricately and cleverly written, but why should the first product of Western literature also be the best? I find that a little bit defeatist. Maybe it’s just because I far prefer the challenge of finding the inspirations and quotations, finding out what the author had read to influence his views that way. That’s a bit hard if there’s nothing extant which went before.

I also find the Homeric debate a bit hard to get to grips with, at least when writing about the poems. Because no one is sure that Homer a) was one person who b) wrote both the Iliad and the Odyssey and who c) innovated hugely on an existing oral tradition, it’s a bit hard to find any kind of authorial intention. Any sentence like, “Homer connects this with this” or “Homer skilfully reminds us of such-and-such” has to be quickly culled: you can’t prove he did anything.

Also, and I know this makes me sound a bit bitter, it’s really hard. The Greek you are initially taught is from fifth-century Athens; Homeric Greek is a least three centuries earlier, in Ionic and Aeolic, with archaic features. It’s a little bit like, having been taught modern English, being asked to read something written by Shakespeare, in which Shakespeare quite commonly uses words and constructions from Chaucer and Scots English.

Anyway, I want to eat some breakfast now - I’ll just finish by saying that we should be confident that the world has produced some great literature in the last 2800 years. We change, we adapt, we quote, we invert, we subvert, we challenge - and I find all that really exciting.

I never know quite what I think about the Parthenon marbles - well, except that I’d rather not call them the Elgin marbles. I suppose my gut reaction is always that they should be returned - and the new museum they’ve built for them is beautiful, from the two rooms I saw in September last year. But I can see the BM’s point too. Yes, they kept them safe from a place which was periodically a war zone; they made casts and preserved and curated. (Of course, they also cleaned them aggressively, removing all traces of original paint - but no one’s perfect, right?) And in any case, if Greece gets the Parthenon marbles, how much are they going to have to give back?

The British Museum is, after all, one of the least British things around - it’s full of artifacts from hundreds of world cultures. If Greece wants their most important artifacts back, where will it end? I’ve seen Egyptian stuff in the most unlikely places - Durham, Madrid, Chicago - though they seem to have given lots away pretty freely (there’s a whole Egyptian temple which they bequeathed to Madrid… and another in the Met, I think). In a way, I don’t have much sympathy for the BM (as though they think that they have some kind of right to having a really good museum of other people’s stuff, you know, as it’s London) but that’s probably because I’d never been there as a child. In fact, I first went in September, having done a year of a Classics course in which hip old lecturers told us all of Elgin’s sneaky looting, and just before I was going to see the Parthenon itself; to me, the marbles were always tied up with theft.

Who owns history, though? That article really got me thinking. In a way, phrases like “World Heritage” (”inheritance of mankind” in Italian) imply that somehow we should all have a share in these things; we should be able to see them without travelling all those miles to Greece or Egypt; they should be spread around the world for all to enjoy. Would I be on the path I’m on now if I hadn’t seen those ancient things as a child?

Probably, actually. My main memory of Classics as a child was a big book of beautifully illustrated Greek myths I had when I was about ten. So maybe it wouldn’t have mattered for my education, and maybe some countries don’t mind having their history spread around the world. But when they do, that should probably be respected.

I just want to take a couple of minutes out of a hard-working afternoon for a silly word in my homework.

mango, mangonis - a slave dealer, often with the pejorative sense of a dealer who gives slaves an appearance of greater value by adorning them

Mango has the same meaning in English too.  If I had translated “mangonum” as “of the mangoes” in Horace Epistles II.2, though, I don’t think my teacher would have found that very funny.

Nachleben is one of those excellent new words (often German) which I hear in a lecture and then can’t find in any dictionary… As I understand it, though, it literally means “afterlife”; in a literary sense, it means the reception of an author after his death.

It was the inimitable Simon Goldhill who used the word (it’s quite exciting being lectured by him, as he’s a bit famous for a Classicist - I read his book when I was still at school). If you read Sex, Love and Tragedy, you’ll probably be able to extrapolate out from there what his lectures tend to be like.

Anyway, he told us the story of the Nachleben of Lucian, and I’d like to share it - if it’s wrong in the details, that is doubtless a reflection on my note-taking ability.

Lucian was a Greek writer and satirist from around 125 - 180CE. He refered to himself as a Syrian, though jokingly. When Greek was rediscovered in Western Europe, just after the invention of printing, Lucian became one of the first Europe-wide bestsellers - translated in Latin by Erasmus and Thomas Moore as a joint project. He was banned by the Catholic church and Luther hated him; nevertheless, he was the main teaching text for beginners in Greek. This is a great paradox - whatever religion you were, you were doing something rebellious just by learning Greek in the first place.

Lucian remainded risque, but central to the curriculum until the 19th century. In 1899, a man named Houston Stewart Chamberlain, an Englishman living in Germany, wrote Die Grundlagen des Neunzehnten Jahrhunderts. Read a description of his work on the Wikipedia article, and it will sound very familiar. Enough to say, perhaps, that Hitler travelled specially to kiss Chamberlain’s hands when he’d died.

In this work, which set up the Teutonic race as the inheritors of the Greek and Roman culture, and the Jews as the ultimate enemy of the Aryan race, Chamberlain slammed Lucian for being Semitic, journalistic and degenerate. Overnight, opinion of him changed - he was removed from the syllabus of every university, and was referred to in reference works as “the Jew”. Only in the last ten or fifteen years has he started to regain popularity - but you can still see the traces of twentieth-century eugenics on opinion of him in plenty of places. The Wikipedia article on Lucian, for example, is not very flattering - and simultaneously says that he was Semitic in origin rather than Greek. Once one of the most central Greek authors, now barely anyone has heard of him - I certainly hadn’t until he turned up on my reading list for this year.

As Simon Goldhill said to us in portentous tones, “None of us can read him innocently.”

So, just took a look at the blog stats for my very first two days. I was expecting perhaps eight viewings or so, half of which would probably have been me.

No. Forty-two.

Not only that, but someone out there got to me by following a link on rogueclassicism, which shows the latest entries in various classical blogs on its sidebar. I went to the site to check - there I am. The internet has seriously impressed me today.

Debate raging on how useful Latin is, I see…

I’m fairly used to this, as you can imagine: telling people you’re off to university to study Classics usually has this response. I find this fair enough when they say something like “That seems a bit useless - why don’t you do medicine/engineering/nursing/law instead?” All right, curing cancer/building bridges/defending human rights are all more useful than, say, Ovid. But that’s not usually what people say. I normally get something like what a taxi driver once said:

“Classics seems pretty useless. My daughter’s doing English Literature.”

Ah well. I mentioned in my comment on my last post that Seneca was influential in the Elizabethan period, especially for his drama. This is really interesting, so I thought I’d share some details. (I’m getting most of this from the notes to this book, which I’d highly recommend - the translation is very readable.)

During the Elizabethan period, knowledge of Greek was not that common in England - Erasmus had brought back to Western Europe a couple of generations previously. The playwrights would have found it difficult to use Classical Athenian drama as their model - so they used Seneca’s Latin adaptations, which were also successfully put on in their own right. Things like ghosts, the horror climax (eg, a shocking murder) and banquets were all very much influenced by Seneca.

Here’s just one example of an epigram which started with him and went through the hands of many Elizabethans:

“per scelera semper sceleribus tutum est iter” (The safe way through crime is by [further] crimes) - Seneca, Agamemnon

“The safest path to mischiefe is by mischiefe open still.” - Studley, Medea

“The safest passage is from bad to worse.” - T. Hughes, The Misfortunes of Arthur (1587)

“Black deed only through black deed safely flies.” - Marston, The Malcontent (1604) (the next speaker replies “Pooh! per scelera semper sceleribus tutum est iter.”)

“Things bad begun make strong themselves by ill.” - Shakespeare, Macbeth (1605)

“The ills that I have done cannot be safe / But by attempting greater.” - B. Jonson, Catiline (1611)

“Small mischiefs are by greater made secure.” - Webster, The White Devil  (1612)

There are more, but this is getting a bit long! E.F. Watling, who wrote this introduction, sums up by saying “The parallels are so frequent that the translator of Seneca must have the curious feeling that he is trying out English constructions which Shakespeare and Marlowe will later improve on.”

Hopefully this goes some way towards showing how “relevant” Latin literature can be.

It’s this kind of thing which makes me want to be a Classics teacher. Everyone talks about the subject having a resurgence, with more secondary school pupils wanting to study it to some level every year - so how is it fair that the government and universities feel unable to supply the teachers?

I met a teacher once who said that the decline of Latin and Greek in schools started when Oxbridge dropped it from their requirements in 1965. It got even worse, according to her, when the National Curriculum came in, dictating who was entitled to what. Even now the Curriculum has been loosened up a little, there’s no going back for schools who had to remove it from their timetables to meet targets.

Classics will never disappear from the universities, I think; there will always be research. But to me it’s really important to bring Latina and Greek to someone who otherwise would never have had the opportunity to study anything like that. That’s where Classics can really make a difference in the next few years.

Well, this is the first day of my new project… a Classics blog. I’m an undergraduate Classicist at the moment, and I really love it - so I’d like to record and share all the little things I find which particularly interest me.

The name itself, Thula (more usually spelt Thule, but that username was taken…), is the result of one of those interesting finds. I found it in Seneca’s Medea (379):

Tethysque nouos detegat orbes
nec sit terris ultima Thule.

And Tethys will expose new worlds / and Thule will not be the ends of the earth.

The note in the Loeb said that, in the sixteenth century, these lines where taken as a prediction of the discovery of America.

I like that about Classics sometimes - how everyone has always tried to find themselves in texts which are so old, like when they used to say Virgil was a Christian. But that’s what we all do when we read: if we didn’t see ourselves in these texts, no one would think them worth keeping. Or at least, they wouldn’t keep them to read as literature.