LAST POST

I think I"ve eaten up enough bandwidth today (more than 25 items posted!), so let's end on a humorous note:

Source ...

::Sunday, December 07, 2003 7:41:12 PM::
Comment on this post @ Classics Central

REVIEWS: From Scholia Review

Continuing our mammoth postathon today:

Hanna M. Roisman and Joseph Roisman (edd.), Essays on Homeric Epic. Colby Quarterly 38.1 & 38.2

Elizabeth H. Sutherland, Horace's Well-Trained Reader. Towards a Methodology of Audience Participation in the Odes.

::Sunday, December 07, 2003 7:34:13 PM::
Comment on this post @ Classics Central

BULLETIN BOARD

Clearing up the backlog from the past couple of weeks while I have the chance (how many times can kids watch "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" in one day???)

Events

CONF: Ancient Letters

CONF: Second International Conference on Athenaeus'Deipnosophists

CONF: Feminism & Classics IV "Gender and Diversity in Place"

CFP: TRANSLATION AND 'THE CLASSIC':

CFP: Hittites, Greeks and Their Neighbors in Ancient Anatolia

CFP: NOCTURNAL GREECE AND ROME

CFP: Fashion, Trend, and Novelty 
7th Annual UNC-Duke Graduate Colloquium in Classics

CFP: Challenging Traditions: The Social and Political Function of the Minor
Genres of the Early Roman Empire

All Events (use the calendar on the events page)

Jobs

Trinity College: Classical Art/Archaeology Generalist (three year)

UMich: Classical Archaeology/Generalist (one year)

BrockU: Greek Archaeology (tenure track)

POSTDOC: Bryn Mawr

All Jobs (use the calendar on the jobs page)

::Sunday, December 07, 2003 7:26:17 PM::
Comment on this post @ Classics Central

CHATTER: One of those Nagging Questions

I think I've mentioned before how a whole pile of racehorses seem to turn up in my daily scans for matters Classical. Of late, there have been tons and tons of references to stakes races which are some sort of 'Alcibiades' stakes, success in one of which seems to be a necessary precursor to a spot in the Breeder's Stakes. In any event, turns out that all these stakes races are named after a great mare from the 1920's named Alcibiades. There's a page which lists her forebears, and there's plenty of Classical and Classically-inspired names ... Alcibiades was sired by Supremus; her mother was Regal Roman. Supremus, naturally was sired by Ultimus. Regal Roman's mother was Lady Cicero; her sire was Cicero (makes sense!). Apparently Alcibiades is buried in an unmarked grave.

There ... now you have something to talk about during that awkward ride up the elevator with the department head.

::Sunday, December 07, 2003 4:34:20 PM::
Comment on this post @ Classics Central

CHATTER: More Holiday Stuff

The Marin Independent Journal tells us about the history of wreaths:

HOLIDAY WREATHS - a tradition in many families - are most frequently used to adorn doors, windows and walls these days, although they were originally designed to decorate the hats and bonnets of the royal classes of ancient Persia, Artemia and Parthia.

They were called diadems, which came from the Greek word diadema, which meant "a thing bound around."

During the early Olympic games, wreaths rather then medals were awarded as prizes. The host city would fashion a circular garland out of native foliage such as laurel and olive leaves to be worn around the champion's head. For those of you keen on phrases, if you've ever wondered where the phrase "to earn your laurels" came from, or the origin of giving an olive branch as a sign of peace, it was during these times.

The ancient Romans soon jumped on the wreath wagon, adorning their military and athletes' heads with these lush garlands to represent victory. Soon, the world's fanciest people became enamored of these decorative headpieces and quickly added their own touch of jewels and precious metals, eventually creating what we now know as, you guessed it, the crown. The word crown comes from the Latin word corona, which means wreath or garland.

Folks might be interested in reading the extensive article in Smith's Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities (via Lacus Curtius) to get 'the rest of the story' as it applies to coronae etc..

::Sunday, December 07, 2003 4:11:08 PM::
Comment on this post @ Classics Central

GOSSIP: Yet Another Movie?

Seen in passing in Egypt Today:

As I leave our cinema gossipers, I hear another bit of interesting information: Young actress Riham Abdel Ghafour has turned down an offer to star in an Egyptian-American film, The Marriage of Cleopatra. "She says she refused to do it because of the historical inaccuracies she detected in the script," one says. "No, I believe she just won't do nudity," another says. Who knows?

::Sunday, December 07, 2003 4:04:55 PM::
Comment on this post @ Classics Central

NUNTII: Apartheid Fallout

There's some sort of release of information going on in South Africa concerning folks who were 'watched' by police because of their anti-apartheid sentiments from 1950-1990 or so. According to IOL, among them was (at least one) Classicist:

Corresponding with The Sunday Independent via e-mail from Australia, Saul Bastomsky said he was not aware that the files had been released. He lectured in classics at Pietermaritzburg university in the early 1960s, and was a friend of Tom Sharpe, Harry Gwala "and others who were not [to say the least] liked by the regime".

His involvement in the Congress of Democrats saw his banning, and his citizenship was taken from him when he left the country in 1965. He retired from Melbourne's Monash University as head of classics and archaeology in 1998.

Bastomsky wrote to the South African high commission in 1999 asking to see his files, but was told that they could not be found, possibly having been destroyed by the former security police.

"I certainly am going to apply to see these files," he wrote. "I don't like being lied to.

"In Australia I was active in anti-apartheid doings as well as taking part in the general cultural life here. I enjoy the country. I married an Australian in 1969 and now tend to consider myself more Australian than South African. I do not associate with the newly arrived white South Africans and tend to regard them with some suspicion."

::Sunday, December 07, 2003 4:02:23 PM::
Comment on this post @ Classics Central

NUNTII: Remains of Ancient Persian Fleet Found

This is one I missed in "explorator" both this week and last (thanks to SW for the heads up). Kathimerini reports on the discovery of what might be Mardonius' wrecked fleet near Mt. Athos:

Significant discoveries that may point to the location of a sunken fleet led by the Persian general Mardonio have been made by an underwater archaeological team working at the eastern side of the Mt Athos peninsula in October, organized by the Underwater Antiquities Ephorate in cooperation with the Canadian Archaeological Institute and the Greek Center for Marine Research.

Particularly encouraging was the discovery of a metal object identified as the point to the bottom of a spear, a rare find in the sea.

The exploration, led by the ephorate’s director Ekaterini Dellaporta and Professor Shelley Wachsmann of Texas University, provided many positive results that will ensure its continuation next season with permission from the Culture Ministry.

The goal was to discover the Persian fleet of some 300 ships that sank during a storm near Mt Athos during Darius’ first attempt to invade Greece in 493 BC.

Two-and-a-half millenia later, scientists are trying to find traces of this history. Exploration over an area of 173 square kilometers of seabed at a depth of 480 meters, east and southwest of the peninsula and in the Ierissos Gulf has been undertaken using Side Scan Sonar. Within the gulf, the exploration team of two archaeologists and a member of the Greek Marine Research Center, which had made available its oceanographic vessel, the Aegean, found a wreck containing amphorae dating from the Classical or early Hellenistic periods.

An area marked out by the ephorate was monitored by the bathyscape Thetis and the underwater Remote Operated Vehicle (ROV) Achilleas, which also examined another area of seabed where in 1996 two local fishermen (the Sakkalis brothers) had pulled up in their nets two copper Corinthian helmets dating from the Classical period. The objects were found at a depth of 110 meters.

The ephorate considers the most important find to date that found at 96 meters, enclosed within a pot. According to an initial evaluation, is a piece of metal that was attached to the bottom of spears during Classical times. Similar objects have been found on land, but rarely in the sea. The point where it was found, which is also where the two helmets lay, indicates the existence of a wrecked warship.

::Sunday, December 07, 2003 3:57:51 PM::
Comment on this post @ Classics Central

NUNTII: Q&A from USA Today

USA Today has one of those question and answer things ... today one of the questions is about Roman fountains:

Q: How did the fountains of Greece and Rome work without electric pumps to push water so high?

A: Simple gravity can do spectacular work. Start someplace high — say, the Alban Hills, rising southeast of Rome to 3100 feet (945 m). This elevation can generate a hefty head of pressure — 1300 psi (25 times the standard city water pressure these days).

Aqueducts carried water into cities from nearby heights. Roman engineers often ended the aqueduct with an elevated cistern to store the water at pressure. The cistern usually fed a display fountain at its base.

The Segovia aqueduct, for example, stands 93.5 feet (28.5 m) high. An elevated cistern built at the end of this aqueduct would generate 39 psi — more than enough to drive fountain water 50 feet (15 m) into the sky.

Who needs a pump?

::Sunday, December 07, 2003 3:52:44 PM::
Comment on this post @ Classics Central

REVIEWS: The Latest from BMCR

Sarah Scott, Jane Webster (edd.), Roman Imperialism and Provincial Art.

A. Erskine (ed.), A Companion to the Hellenistic World.

John R. Bartlett (ed.), Jews in the Hellenistic and Roman Cities.

::Sunday, December 07, 2003 3:48:33 PM::
Comment on this post @ Classics Central

OBIT: W.W. Cruickshank

An interesting obituary (written by Paul Cartledge) for schoolmaster W.W. Cruickshank turned up via the Independent today:

W. W. Cruickshank was a schoolmaster of genius, who with his equally remarkable colleague E. P. C. Cotter helped to produce more than 100 Oxbridge entrance award- winners (Scholars, Exhibitioners) in the St Paul's School eighth (sixth) form in a period from the late 1940s to the mid-1960s of the last century. Brilliant Pauline classical schoolmasters go in pairs: Hillard and Botting, North and Hillard. Cotter and Cruickshank rank alongside them. Horace's poor schoolmaster Orbilius, with whom Dr Cruickshank liked to compare himself, would have had to look to his laurels.

Born in 1912, the son of an Episcopalian minister, William Walker Cruickshank was educated at Rossall School and Brasenose College, Oxford, from where he graduated in Literae Humaniores in 1936. His 1955 London University doctoral thesis on "Topography, Movement and Supply in the Warfare of Ancient Greece, South of Thessaly and Epirus" was completed in his spare time and examined by the eminent Professor of Ancient History at University College, A.H.M. Jones. It reflected Cruickshank's war experience first in military intelligence specialising in topography in 1940, and later at the Cairo GHQ of the Middle East theatre from 1941 to 1945, during which among other notable achievements he managed to clash fiercely with a certain Brigadier J. Enoch Powell, another classicist of distinction.

He began his career as a sixth-form schoolmaster at Christ College, Brecon, from 1936 to 1939, and resumed teaching after the Second World War at Vine Hall in Kent from 1945 to 1947, before being appointed, on a temporary basis, at St Paul's in London (then in Hammersmith), in 1947. From 1954 to 1973 he served as Head of Classics, taking his turn also as Commanding Officer of the St Paul's Combined Cadet Force.

Classics then and there meant an almost unrelieved diet of Latin and Greek language and literature, followed - at some distance - by Ancient Greek and Roman History. Pupils typically spent some 27 periods out of 35 each week on such fare, and, since they had taken their O Levels at 14 or 15, had the special pleasure of sitting A Levels in two successive years, followed by the seventh-term Oxbridge entrance. Cruickshank took particular care to go minutely through a pupil's multitudinous seen and unseen translations and compositions, not so much face to face but side by side. This would often be to the pupil's extreme chagrin and embarrassment, as he was confronted not only by a sea of red ink but also by a grade that scraped the lower reaches of the alphabetic barrel, as not even the question marks and brackets could disguise.

In his retirement he amused himself with a garden and bees in Dorset and by keeping up with his former pupils' careers; in the case of those who became academics, he took a delight in purchasing their latest book and adding it to an expanding shelf devoted to supporting that diversion. On his 80th birthday in 1992 he was presented with a Festschrift entitled Apodosis or "Return Gift" - the contributors including Alan Cameron, Michael Crawford, Richard Gombrich, John North, Robert Parker and Martin West. It was a small but heartfelt return for the very large gift he had bestowed on so many pupils consistently and devotedly over so many years.

It also prints his Latin version of P.G. Wodehouse's "Archibald's Imitation of a Hen Laying an Egg", a classic of that near-defunct genre of composition.

 

::Sunday, December 07, 2003 3:45:25 PM::
Comment on this post @ Classics Central

AWOTV: Weekly Listings

The ad-free weekly version of my AWOTV listings have been posted. Enjoy!

::Sunday, December 07, 2003 3:43:17 PM::
Comment on this post @ Classics Central

THIS DAY IN ANCIENT HISTORY

ante diem vii idus decembres

• 43 B.C. -- death of Cicero (Marcus Tullius Cicero) as he half-
  heartedly fled the proscription of Marcus Antonius et al.

::Sunday, December 07, 2003 9:50:28 AM::
Comment on this post @ Classics Central

NUNTII: Akropolis World News

Here's the latest headlines from Akropolis World News. Click on a headline to be taken to the Classics Greek version:

USA eyes return to the moon - Rumsfeld vows to support Georgia - Taiwan plans missile vote
        
Glaciers could melt within one century
        
Album Lennon signed for killer for sale

::Sunday, December 07, 2003 9:22:03 AM::
Comment on this post @ Classics Central

NUNTII: Nuntii Latini

Here's the latest headlines from YLE's Nuntii Latini:

Res Indiae et Pakistaniae

De catarrho epidemico

Adenauer optimus Germanus

De exercitatione corporis

Qualis tempestas fuerit

Tranquillitas in Georgia restituta

Lege plura ...

Audi ...

::Sunday, December 07, 2003 9:18:06 AM::
Comment on this post @ Classics Central

NUNTII: Explorator 6.32

The latest issue of "explorator" has just been posted ...

::Sunday, December 07, 2003 9:08:12 AM::
Comment on this post @ Classics Central