The Chicago Blog

Beginning this month we will offer a free e-book each month. If you'd like to give our Chicago Digital Editions a try, or if you just want to score some good reads, check in regularly for the free e-book of the month. And for all our currently available e-books, see our list of e-books by subject.

This month's selection is The Birthday Book by the Roman writer Censorinus.

Nearly 2,000 years ago, the Roman scholar Censorinus bestowed upon his best friend a charming birthday present: The Birthday Book, which appears here in its long-awaited first English translation. Laying out everything he knew about birthdays, the book starts simply, but by the conclusion of this brief yet brilliant gem, Censorinus has sketched a glorious vision of a universe ruled by harmony and order, where the microcosm of the child in the womb corresponds to the macrocosm of the planets. Alternately serious and playful, Censorinus touches on music, history, astronomy, astrology, and every aspect of time as it was understood in third-century Rome. He also provides ancient answers to perennial questions: Why does the day begin at midnight? Where did Leap Year come from? Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

E-books from the University of Chicago Press are offered in Adobe Digital Editions format for Mac, PC, and a number of mobile devices such as the Sony Reader, IREX, BeBook, and more. Check out these links to find out more about Adobe Digital Editions or more about e-books from the University of Chicago Press.

Archived in Classics | UCP News
Posted by TXM at 01:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

An interesting review of Maria Wyke's new book Caesar: A Life in Western Culture appeared in the August 18 edition of the Wall Street Journal. In the review, Peter Stothard praises the book for its insightful exploration of the various ways in which modern culture has invoked and appropriated Caesar and his legacy—from Mussolini, seeking a Caesarian mandate for this own grand ambitions, to Caesars Palace, Las Vegas:

Ms. Wyke's concern is how we have created and adapted Caesar's image and historical importance over the past 2,000 years… The principle behind this kind of study is known as "reception theory." Its typical proponent is skeptical of how much we can know of what someone like Caesar and his contemporaries did and thought; a reception theorist is much more confident of how we have come to use and think about them ourselves. A comic book can thus be as important as a commander's campsite. A bust loudly but unconvincingly proclaimed by its discoverer to be authentic is as significant as a newly interpreted paragraph from "De Bello Gallico." The skill of a reception theorist such as Ms. Wyke lies in what she chooses to include and what she chooses to leave out.…

Ms. Wyke, however, is a sophisticated practitioner of her craft, a professor of Latin at University College London and a graduate of the British Film Institute. She is the pre-eminent British authority on the relationship between modern film and classical history. She wittily describes how Bernard Shaw's distaste for the "deification of Love" in his play "Caesar and Cleopatra" was overridden for the 1945 movie version—and for all later movie attempts on the same theme. She also notes that the Caesars Palace Casino, built in 1966 and inspired by the sword-and-sandal movies of the era, came deliberately without apostrophe: Everyone could be a Caesar.…

Read the rest of the review on the Wall Street Journal website.

Also read an excerpt.

Archived in Biography | Classics | History | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 12:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last week in the June 16 New York Times cultural critic Edward Rothstein had an interesting commentary on the New York Botanical Garden drawing on Robert Pogue Harrison's new book, Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition, to help him place the concept of the garden in the wider context of western history and demonstrate its enduring cultural and historical importance. Rothstein writes:

From medieval cloisters, botanical gardens made their way into universities, beginning with the University of Pisa in 1544. Later the garden's terrain expanded with botanical expeditions, oceanic trade and imperial adventures. Victorian botanical gardens could be encyclopedic in scope, arranging their displays according to Latin classifications of species by the Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus.

Now, in our humid, dry, cooled or heated greenhouses, we shun such systematic display. Instead we replicate ecological niches, miniature worlds that supposedly show nature at work: the desert, the rainforest, the tropical pool. But peel back the environmental stagecraft, and the scientific cultivation continues with even greater passion…

There is something moving about the entire enterprise. In a remarkable new book, Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition, Robert Pogue Harrison (who wrote similar meditations on cemeteries and on forests) elicits some of the meanings that have accumulated around the idea of a garden, from myths, in which the chosen few "can possess the gift of their bodies without paying the price for the body's passions," to places like Versailles, which reflect "an aesthetic drive to tame, and even humiliate, nature into submission." In those royal gardens Mr. Harrison also finds the urge to encompass and incorporate and comprehend: "the militant humanism of the age."

Our age's humanism is much more modest. We are self-effacing to a fault. We don't seem to be taming nature, but to be permitting its full range of expression. We allow it to express multiple perspectives. We don't permit any habitat to dominate, and we defer to the demands of each. We seem to submit to nature. Of course we are creating images of ourselves.

Read the rest of the article online at the NYT website.

Also read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Anthropology | Books for the News | Classics | History | Literature | Philosophy | Religion
Posted by TXM at 01:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In today's edition of the New York Sun Eric Ormsby reviews two new histories of children's literature including Seth Lerer's new book, Children's Literature: A Reader's History from Aesop to Harry Potter. In the review Ormsby praises Lerer for his ability to capture the special role the iconic books of childhood play in the lives of young readers. Ormsby writes:

In Children's Literature: A Reader's History from Aesop to Harry Potter Seth Lerer notes that the history of children's books is a study "of books as valued things, crafted and held, lived with and loved." This fundamental insight gives a human touch to what might otherwise have been a dusty foray into long forgotten hornbooks and primers. But Mr. Lerer, a philologist by training — and professor of English at Stanford — loves words, as well as the books made from them, and he is an impassioned reader. Whether he's discussing the grim New England Primer of 1727 or the decisive impact of Darwinism on late-19th-century children's fiction, he has a keen sense of what he nicely calls "the pocket-worlds of childhood.…" As Mr. Lerer says, "the adventures of the child go on in secret spaces: in the purses, pockets, tills, and palms of life." The most successful children's books are those which capture something of that childhood sense of secrecy.

Read the rest of the review online at the New York Sun website.

Also read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Classics | History | Literature | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 12:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Nothing banishes winter's lethargy more quickly than that first sight of the green of spring, as trees bud and our gardens, once again, burst into glorious bloom. For Robert Pogue Harrison, it's not just the depths of winter that gardens help us escape: throughout human history, gardens—both real and imagined—have been essential places of refuge and comfort in the face of a harsh, often violent world.

Employing the richly learned and allusive approach that he brought to his classics, Forests and The Dominion of the Dead, Harrison explores here the central importance of the human urge to nurture and cultivate gardens. Beginning with ancient conceptions of the garden as a place for the quiet work of self-improvement that is crucial to serenity and enlightenment, Harrison then travels widely through the history of Western culture. Enlisting such varied thinkers and writers as Voltaire and Calvino, Boccaccio and Arendt, Harrison profoundly demonstrates the role the garden has long played as a necessary, humanizing check against the degradation and losses of history.

Read the press release.

Archived in Anthropology | Classics | History | Literature | Philosophy | Press Releases | Religion
Posted by TXM at 01:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In Children's Literature: A Reader's History from Aesop to Harry Potter, Seth Lerer tells us the bedtime story of Western culture's obsession with books for the young. He traces the transformative power of literature across centuries, from the moralizing allegories of antiquity to the swashbuckling epics of the nineteenth century and the acerbic self-awareness of Judy Blume and Weetzie Bat.

Written with the panoramic scope of a distinguished scholar and the affection of a parent and avid reader, Children's Literature reminds us of the sublime power of books in an era when videogames, MySpace, and text messaging compete for the free time of our youth.

Read the press release.

Archived in Classics | History | Literature | Press Releases | Reference and Writing
Posted by TXM at 01:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In a book we published a few years back, British classicist Simon Goldhill explained the Greek and Roman roots of everything in contemporary Western culture, from our political systems to the quest for the perfect body. Still, we have traveled some ways from those classic roots, which perhaps accounts for why the works of Greek dramatists can seem so ancient and foreign when performed on a modern stage. Most of the action takes place offstage, the characters do more speechifying than dialogue, and a chorus shuffles on and off.

Goldhill's latest book, How to Stage Greek Tragedy Today, tackles this problem. Writing in a Commentary magazine blog, the Horizon, drama critic Terry Teachout discussed the book last week. Teachout noted that "most contemporary productions of Greek tragedy are exercises in theatrical futility" and summed up Goldhill's contribution:

His approach is at once deeply informed by the best academic scholarship and no less deeply rooted in a commonsense understanding of what works on stage. The result is one of the most instructive and lucidly written books about theater to have been published in recent years. No one whose interest in drama is more than merely casual should pass it by.

Archived in Classics | Literature | Reviews
Posted by DB at 02:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Literary Review is currently running a piece on Simon Goldhill's new book, How to Stage Greek Tragedy Today. As the Review's Fiona Macintosh notes, with new productions of Greek drama flooding the world of theater, Goldhill's book makes a timely effort to address the challenges involved in updating these ancient masterpieces for the modern stage. Macintosh writes:

Since the 1960s there has been an explosion in the number of performances of ancient plays not just in Europe, but increasingly across the globe—in Asia, Latin America, and Africa. In many ways, Goldhill's new book is a response to this phenomenon. As he explains, directors or actors who are about to work with a Greek play regularly turn to scholars of ancient tragedy for assistance; and one frequent question concerns what they should read. Goldhill says his book grew out of one such query from Vanessa Redgrave, when she was having a difficult time in West End as the eponymous heroine of Euripides' Hecuba, with a director she couldn't abide and in a part which had just been played superlatively by Claire Higgins at the Donmar Warehouse…

The review continues:

As one would expect from Goldhill, author of a number of respected discussions of Greek tragedy, the sections on the individual plays are lucid and highly informative. There are also particularly important caveats for the theater practitioner.… However, it is not just the would-be practitioner who could benefit from reading this book: there are equally good nuggets for the seasoned scholar of Greek tragedy. None better, perhaps, than this one concerning the theatrical genre that has drained more ink down the centuries than any other: 'Tragedy is a genre of conflict, not only between people or between ideas, but also conflict about what words mean.' With a definition of tragedy as succinct and incisive as this one, some might even be tempted to adopt this definition and cast the notoriously open-ended Aristotelian one to the wind.

Archived in Classics | History | Literature | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 09:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Sacramento Theatre Company reimagines Euripides' Electra as Electricidad, while off-Broadway's Signature Theatre puts on Iphigenia 2.0 and an Indian director stages Raja Oedipus, an adaptation of the famous Sophocles play featuring Karbi gods and goddesses in place of the original Greek deities: if you've seen any of these recent performances—or one of their countless counterparts on stages across the globe—you've experienced the timelessness, renewed popularity, and ever-broadening reach of Greek tragedy. But how are today's productions different from their ancient peers? What are the best strategies for interpreting these dramas on contemporary stages? In this follow-up to his acclaimed Love, Sex & Tragedy: How the Ancient World Shapes our Lives, renowned classicist Simon Goldhill responds to these questions (and many others) with his long-awaited guide How to Stage Greek Tragedy Today.

Read the press release.

Archived in Classics | Education | History | Literature | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 03:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last Saturday's Chicago Tribune ran a great piece on David Grene's recently published memoir Of Farming and Classics—a wonderfully original account of the author's double life as a preeminent professor of classics at the University of Chicago and hard-working, old-fashioned farmer in rural Illinois and Ireland. Staff reporter Ron Grossman writes for the Tribune's Books section:

David Grene could easily be described with the cliché "last of a breed," but he was also the first of his kind. Or, at least, the first in a long time.

In 1937 he came to the University of Chicago to teach classics and, a few years later, bought a farm near Lemont. It wasn't a hobby farm. Working the land himself, Grene disdained tractors in favor of horses, often coming to class with manure-caked boots. He later farmed in his native Ireland.

His personal style reincarnated that of the Roman aristocrats, with their love of the soil and taste for good books. Greek literature traces to Hesiod's Works and Days, with its anticipation of The Old Farmer's Almanac, a poetic tour of the agricultural year. Plantation owners in the antebellum South could often conjugate Latin verbs, but in the 20th Century, the study of ancient languages, once the centerpiece of a liberal education, precipitously declined. With Grene's death in 2002, the scholar-farmer probably entered the history books forever.

Fortunately for Clio, the Muse of history, Grene's memoirs have just been published. Of Farming & Classics delightfully recounts an era before corporate agriculture did in the family farm and pettifogging professionalism insulated the ivory tower from the larger world.

Read the rest of the article on the Tribune's website.

We also featured several excerpts from Grene's book previously on this blog:

Dublin Theatre in the 1920s and '30s
Learning Greek and Latin in Dublin Schools
Honors Classics at Trinity College

Archived in Biography | Classics | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 12:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In his new book, The Secret History of Emotion: From Aristotle's Rhetoric to Modern Brain Science author Daniel Gross embarks on an intellectual voyage to examine the history of emotions in western culture. Writing for the Times Literary Supplement reviewer Stephen Pender praises Gross's newest work for delivering a fascinating counterpoint to the way we generally understand emotions today. Pender writes:

One way to prise open the emotional sphere is to situate the passions socially, to investigate their exigencies with an eye on the polis. And we have a fine guide in Daniel Gross, the author of The Secret History of Emotion. To recognize the social in the passionate, Gross urges a turn to Aristotelian traditions, and in particular to the Rhetoric, which offers "a pragmatic phenomenology of the passions." In opposition to "current platitudes of emotion," Gross offers a bold, compelling and occasionally rebarbative argument about the turn from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century political rhetoric, which articulated the social and the particular in the passionate, to a hopelessly insular psychology, marked by disingenuous universalizing and specious materialism.… Gross's deft and remarkable book should be required reading for neurobiologists and, of course, for humanists of every school.

Archived in Classics | History | Psychology | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 02:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last week, the Times Literary Supplement ran a review of David Grene's posthumous memoir, Of Farming and Classics. Weaving together Grene's life as a professor of classics at the University of Chicago with his alter ego as a farmer in Ireland and in Illinois, Of Farming and Classics delivers a refreshing and intelligent take on classical scholarship in the twentieth century. TLS reviewer Edith Hall seems to agree when she writes:

David Grene's experience of Irish, British, Austrian and American Classics across the whole period from the 1920s until 2002 makes this slim, deftly written, posthumously published volume an illuminating read for every classical scholar engaged with the current quest for the subject's roots, and the excavation of the way that it has evolved over the past century and a half. But Grene's memoir is made really memorable by his "other", bucolic voice; for his account of twentieth-century Classics runs in tandem with his memories of his other profession, as a dairy farmer in Illinois and subsequently in Wicklow and Cavan in Ireland.…

Belonging to two social worlds gives him an unusually keen eye for the precise nuances of social class and the ways in which they are defined and displayed. [For example,] looking at the effects of the British Empire on both farming and Classics produces a sophisticated reading of some aspects of both professions.… He [also] sees parallels between the mental attitudes and skills required of a satisfactory and personally satisfied small farmer and a university teacher: "some degree of intellectual discrimination and willingness to disregard the attraction of being like most other people". He draws a few inspiring connections: for example, his charming account of how the myth of the centaur emerged from the magical synergy between a sensitive horse and a skilled rider. When talking of his own ecstasy in ploughing an Irish furrow with a team of horses, he alludes to passages in Hesiod and Aeschylus before drawing attention to what he perceives as the contentment of the ploughman in Breughel's famous painting of the fall of Icarus.

We previously posted three excerpts from Grene's book to this blog including "Dublin Theatre in the 1920s and '30s", "Learning Greek and Latin in Dublin Schools" and "Honors Classics at Trinity College."

Archived in Biography | Classics | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 02:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The April 6 Times Literary Supplement carried an appreciative review of Holt N. Parker's translation of The Birthday Book—an entertaining third-century treatise on all aspects of the birthday. Roman grammarian and writer Censorinus originally wrote the book as a birthday gift for a friend, and TLS reviewer Karl Galinsky notes that Parker's translation qualifies as "the perfect present for someone who has everything." Galinsky writes:

The range of topics and their constellation offers something for everybody, whether in quaint "Ripley's Believe or Not" fashion or truly useful information that is not simply esoteric.

Parker and the University of Chicago Press have entered into the spirit of this enterprise nicely. The book is produced handsomely in small format, and the text is interspersed with some helpful diagrams and illustrations. In addition, there is a useful glossary and notes that do not smother.

We previously posted an excerpt from the book: Censorinus's meditation on the puzzle of the chicken or the egg.

Archived in Classics | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 01:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

It was his birthday, so it's fitting that Thomas Jones had a piece in the London Review of Books yesterday on The Birthday Book, Holt N. Parker's translation of the third century Roman scholar Censorinus' meditations on that most personal of holidays. Expanding the concept of the birthday to comment on everything from music and history, to astronomy and astrology, Censorinus' book is a sublime picture of the universe as it was conceived by the Romans. But, as Jones notes, though the work has had significant influence on western culture, until now it has only been accessible to those who read Latin:

Though this is its first translation into English, The Birthday Book enjoyed many centuries of popularity. "It has come down to us through a large number of manuscripts from as early as the beginning of the eighth century AD," Parker says, and "was among the earliest books printed in Europe, with a first edition in 1497, and new editions in 1498 and 1500, with eight more in the 16th century alone." Copernicus and Kepler were both familiar with it. And even if the book itself has since fallen into obscurity, its form is recognizable in such modern assemblages as Schott's Miscellany or Does Anything Eat Wasps?

The Birthday Book has long been cherished by classicists and poets, but with this graceful and lively new translation—accompanied by an illuminating introduction and detailed notes—Holt Parker unearth's one of the Roman world's lost treasures for modern readers.

We previously posted an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Books for the News | Classics
Posted by TXM at 03:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In the year AD 238, in the capital of the Roman Empire, the scholar Censorinus gave a present to his best friend, the noble Quintus Caerellius. The gift was this charming work, which he called The Birthday Book (De die natali liber). In its few dozen pages, Censorinus sets down everything related to the idea of birthdays. He begins simply, with the right way to sacrifice to one’s birthday spirit. By the time he has finished he has sketched a glorious vision of the universe ruled by harmony and order, where the microcosm of the child in the womb corresponds to the macrocosm of the planets.—From Holt N. Parker’s Preface to The Birthday Book by Censorinus

Part 4, "Seed and Conception"

1. Your lifetime starts on your birthday, but there are also many things before that day which pertain to the origin of humankind. It seems relevant, therefore, to say something first about the things which are themselves first in the order of nature. So I shall briefly set out some of the opinions which the ancients held about the origins of mankind.

2. The first and general question treated by the men of old who were learned in wisdom was this: Everyone agrees that individual humans are created from the seed of their parents and in succession propagate offspring, generation after generation. But some authors have maintained that they were never born from anything except human beings, and that there never had been any beginning or starting point to the human race. Others maintained that there was a time when humans did not exist and that they were allocated a particular point of origin and beginning by Nature.

3. The authorities of the first opinion, that humans have always existed, are Pythagoras of Samos, Ocellus of Lucania, and Archytas of Tarentum, all Pythagoreans; but Plato of Athens, Xenocrates, and Dicaearchus of Messenia and other philosophers of the old academy seem to have held the same opinion. Also Aristotle of Stagira, Theophrastus, and many other important Peripatetic philosophers wrote the same thing. They gave, as illustration of this fact, a puzzle which they said could never be solved: Are birds of eggs created first, since an egg cannot be created without a bird and a bird cannot be created without an egg?

Continue reading "An excerpt from The Birthday Book by Censorinus" »

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Classics
Posted by TXM at 02:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Yesterday's New York Sun carried a review of David Grene's Of Farming and Classics: a Memoir that made a few insightful remarks about the atypical synthesis of classical literature and farming that lies at the heart of Grene's autobiography.

Writing for the Sun, reviewer Victor Hanson notes that in bringing together the disparate worlds of farming and classics Grene places himself in closer proximity to the world of the ancient Greeks than one might think. Hanson writes: "Nine out of 10 ancient Greeks were rural people. The majority of them were farmers. And that truth is reflected in many of Homer's similes in his Iliad and Odyssey, Hesiod's Works and Days, Aristophanes' Acharnians, or the vast treatises of Theophrastus, where so often Greek thought is expressed through the life of agriculture."

Thus, Hanson's review notes that Of Farming and Classics delivers to a modern audience several vital lessons embedded in an ancient synthesis of farming and philology: "First is the symbiosis between the life of contemplation and action—and just how it is that hard physical and dirty work offers real value in rediscovering nature, bringing with it a certain pragmatism that permeates reading and thinking.… Second, Grene reminds us of what constitutes success in life. It surely wasn't nice homes, large farms, distinguished titles, or top salaries. Rather, as we read here, Grene was more interested in students, and above all in imparting some wisdom gained to others that neither Greek nor farming alone might bequeath, but could in concert."

To find out more about Grene's captivating autobiography take a look at these excerpts we previously posted to the blog:
Dublin Theatre in the 1920s and '30s
Learning Greek and Latin in Dublin Schools
Honors Classics at Trinity College

Archived in Biography | Classics | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 03:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

David Grene (1913–2002) taught classics for many years at the University of Chicago. He was a founding member of the Committee on Social Thought and coedited The Complete Greek Tragedies. Six months of every year, though, he worked his farm in Ireland. This is an excerpt about how his interest in theatre developed, from Of Farming and Classics: A Memoir.

Until the age of eleven, my only experience of the theater was at the yearly Christmas pantomime, to which our whole family always went. These are not pantomimes in the strict sense of dumb show, but a traditional form of comic entertainment put on at Christmastime. The greatest of them in my time was the one done year after year at the Gaiety under the leadership of Jimmy O'Dea and Maureen Potter. These were a wonderful pair of genuinely amusing comedians, and they ran the show to suit themselves. But prior to them, it was not like that. Most of the theaters in Dublin (the Gaiety, Royal, Queen's, and Olympia) put on a separate pantomime every year. Each pantomime was sketchily based on a folk story—Cinderella, Jack and the Beanstalk, Dick Whittington, or others—and there was an intermittent effort to include a few scenes from the original story, especially the finale. All the rest of the show was given up to variety turns such as jugglers, clowns, and animal acts. One curious feature that even then stood out for me was that the hero and heroine were, conventionally, always represented by women. Thus, the principal boy was invariably a girl. I suppose this was for fear that simple sexual relations would creep across the footlights and disturb or corrupt the young. Also in a pantomime such as Cinderella, the two ugly sisters were both played by men. The men's voices, and even on rare occasions somewhat risqué jokes, enclosed an area of a cruder humorous mood suitable to its masculine representation and unthinkable for the delicacy of the women.

Every pantomime was dominated by its particular song, and depending on how catchy it was or how funny, we would hear everyone from businessmen and women to delivery boys whistling and singing it for months. I remember one of them which went like this:

How can a guinea pig wag his tail
If he hasn't got a tail to wag?
All the other animals, you will find,
Have got a little tail to wag behind.
If they'd only put a tail on the guinea pig
And finish up a decent job,
Then the price of a guinea pig would go right up
From a guinea up to thirty bob.

I am afraid that much of the funniness of this depends on knowing that a guinea is twenty-one shillings; as a coin of the realm, it had vanished even when I was a boy. But it was the unit in which you purchased various high-grade goods, such as fancy suits. I am glad to notice that it survives in similar snobbish settings. Christie's in London continued with it until the pound went metric, and you still buy racehorses in guineas in Newmarket. A shilling—twenty to the pound—was vulgarly a bob. I still know the tune of that song.

Continue reading "Dublin Theatre in the 1920s and '30s" »

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Biography | Classics
Posted by TXM at 12:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

David Grene (1913–2002) taught classics for many years at the University of Chicago. He was a founding member of the Committee on Social Thought and coedited The Complete Greek Tragedies. Six months of every year, though, he worked his farm in Ireland. This is an excerpt about his early education from Of Farming and Classics: A Memoir.

The school my parents chose for me was St. Stephen’s Green and was essentially one of these small private Protestant schools. It was not a boarding school, but otherwise the atmosphere was very like that described by George Orwell in Such, Such Were the Joys. The fees in the bigger private schools like High School or St. Andrew’s (where I went toward the end of my schooldays) were certainly rather less than in a place like St. Stephen’s Green, and both varieties cost far more than what my parents should have sensibly entertained as possible for them. I believe that the smaller schools were associated with a more explicit version of gentlemanliness. In the larger private schools quite a few of the pupils came from what was very nearly working class. Anyway, my parents decided that the small and exclusive Stephen’s Green was absolutely best for me, and by scraping and saving they sent me to it.

So during my schooldays—from about eight to seventeen (kindergarten occupied the years from six to eight)—I attended two Dublin private schools. I was in Stephen’s Green for about seven years and St. Andrew’s for two—the years directly before entrance to Trinity College. I certainly learned a great deal of languages in St. Andrew’s and was well taught. But I still do not think that much which formed my mind or my intellectual interests would have happened but for one master in the first school, Dicky Wood. I can still see him, old (though not quite so old as I am now) with a red, round face and one slightly crossed eye, wearing very respectable grey suits. He had been retired from a provincial school, bigger than ours, some years before, and when he came to Dublin had been taken on as a cheap staff member at Stephen’s Green. He was so excessively tenderhearted and so irresolute that he found it very hard to keep order in his class. When the boys made a row, or were talking and inattentive, he was quick to put the offenders’ names in the Detention Book, but almost always succumbed to their pleas before the end of his hour and rubbed the names out again. But give him a small number of impressionable boys, and he was a different being—and his passion was for Greek literature.

Continue reading "Learning Greek and Latin in Dublin Schools" »

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Biography | Classics
Posted by TXM at 03:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

David Grene (1913–2002) taught classics for many years at the University of Chicago. He was a founding member of the Committee on Social Thought and coedited The Complete Greek Tragedies. Six months of every year, though, he worked his farm in Ireland. This is an excerpt about his university education from Of Farming and Classics: A Memoir.

The men who taught Honors Classics in Trinity College had enough of the unusual and exotic to furnish a mysterious element to our education. They were nearly all of the recognizable British eccentric type, something grown much rarer since. There were five or six of them lecturing, or teaching if one preferred that title, and at least three of them—the seniors of the group—combined a well-deserved reputation for scholarship, backed up by a fair amount of scholarly publication, with a remoteness from ordinary life, and manifest loneliness, and very notably an inability to act or speak or dress like any normal members of their class and kind.

There was J. G. Smyly, one of the leading papyrologists of his day. Literary and other texts in Greek were preserved on papyrus for many hundreds of years before people came to use the expensive calfskin and other materials. But papyrus was not very lasting, and most of what has come down to us in papyrus is fragmentary. Indeed, many of the papyrus fragments are not literary at all. An unkind classicist vexed at the intrusion of the archaeologists once angrily discounted the value of learning from the contents of "thousands of washerwomen's bills in Egypt." Smyly and the two Oxford scholars B. P. Grenfell and A. S. hunt had edited a huge body of this material, called the Tebtunis papyri. At the time I came to college Smyly was temporarily doing a job that he found slightly uncomfortable. The professor who was responsible for Indo-European Comparative Philology had died, and the exam paper in the subject, which was always a part of Scholarship in classics—a very difficult and extensive exam in the middle of the Honors classical course—had to be set by someone, and lectures given as a preliminary. Smyly was taken out of retirement for the purpose because of the enormous knowledge of rare Greek words which he had picked up from his readings in the papyri. These words tended to be useful for explaining the various shifts in sound and form in the evolution of the comparative philology process. Smyly certainly knew something about the theoretical side of comparative philology—mostly Antoine Meillet's seminal text of the midtwenties, Introduction à l’étude comparative des langues indo-européennes—but he made quite fascinating the use of the rare words to illustrate Meillet. He made me feel a passionate, almost romantic, interest in comparative linguistics because of his own odd approach.

Continue reading "Honors Classics at Trinity College" »

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Biography | Classics
Posted by TXM at 01:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Lustful Stoics, moral hypocrisy, divided selves—on Shadi Bartsch’s sexy and philosophical journey through classical notions of selfhood, we encounter all of these, plus much more. Exploring the links among vision, sexuality, and self-knowledge in the ancient world, Bartsch argues here that this unexpected ménage á trois has much to teach us about how the ancients understood what it meant to be a person.

Read the press release.

Archived in Classics | Philosophy | Press Releases
Posted by DB at 06:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Boston Review recently reviewed Danielle Allen's Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown v. Board of Education. From the review by Nick Bromell: "Allen understands that democracy originates in the subjective dimension of everyday life, and she focuses on what she calls our 'habit of citizenship'—the ways we often unconsciously regard and interact with fellow citizens…. [Her] focus on race is entirely appropriate."

"Don't talk to strangers" is the advice long given to children by parents of all classes and races. Today it has blossomed into a fundamental precept of civic education, reflecting interracial distrust, personal and political alienation, and a profound suspicion of others. In Talking to Strangers, a powerful and eloquent essay, Danielle Allen, a 2002 MacArthur Fellow, takes this maxim back to Little Rock, rooting out the seeds of distrust to replace them with "a citizenship of political friendship."

Read an excerpt and interview with the author.

Archived in Black Studies | Classics | History | Politics and Current Events | Reviews
Posted by at 10:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)