NUNTII: Randall Nichols Gets an Award ...

... and the APA is hit with an interesting typo:

When Randall Nichols recently received a major award for his achievements as a high school classics teacher, it brought back fond memories of his former professors at UCSC.

“Whenever I am asked why I became a high school classics teacher, I remember three professors from my undergraduate days at the University of California at Santa Cruz: John Lynch, Mary-Kay Gamel and Gary Miles,” Nichols wrote in a recent issue of the classics journal Amorpha.

“The excellence of their teaching drew me to classics. They encouraged me along the way and their educational beliefs and practices have influenced mine.”

Nichols is now in his 19th year of teaching Latin and Greek to 8th- through 12th-graders at the Westminster Schools of Augusta, Georgia. He has been named STAR teacher in his county and was awarded an National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship to study Greek and Latin lyric poetry in the summer under classics scholar Gregory Nagy at Harvard. He also serves on the Advisory Committee for the National Latin Exam.

The rest is in the UCSC Currents ... the action hero Amorpha will soon be coming to a comics rack near you ... perhaps she's already there.

::Saturday, December 13, 2003 3:57:03 PM::
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THIS DAY IN ANCIENT HISTORY

idus decembres

• rites in honour of Tellus, the earth goddess which perhaps included
  a lectisternium (a 'dinner party' at which images of the god(s) would
  'dine' with participants) in honour of Ceres
• 304 A.D. -- martyrdom of Lucy of Syracuse

::Saturday, December 13, 2003 6:50:01 AM::
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REVIEW: From BMCR

Michael von Albrecht, Cicero's Style: A Synopsis Followed by Selected
Analytic Studies. Mnemosyne Suppl. 245.

::Saturday, December 13, 2003 6:37:41 AM::
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REVIEW: Greek Gods, Human Lives

The New York Times has a review (written by Oliver Taplin) of Mary Lefkowitz, Greek Gods, Human Lives: What We Can Learn From Myths which begins rather provocatively:

Web rumor has it that ''Troy,'' Wolfgang Petersen's big-budget Hollywood version of the ''Iliad,'' will be godless. The screenwriter David Benioff has apparently decided to jettison Zeus and the whole Olympian apparatus. And he has a point, surely. How can you transplant that part awesome, part trivial extended family of self-centered hedonists into a realistic movie? Some may recall the gods in ''Clash of the Titans'': Laurence Olivier and a cluster of stars looked like World War I generals at a toga party as they petulantly shoved armies and fleets around a map of the world. Or suppose you turn the gods into eerie special effects: they would seem like extraterrestrial psychic forces from ''Star Trek.'' In our day the Greek gods make humans look like either pawns or robots.
 
Benioff is quoted as saying, ''The classicists are not going to like it.'' That is to turn classicists into a much more unanimous bunch than they are in reality. But there is at least one distinguished professor who will not like a godless ''Iliad'' at all -- Mary Lefkowitz of Wellesley College. Her thought-provoking new book, ''Greek Gods, Human Lives,'' is precisely an attempt to write the gods back into Greek myths. She maintains that modern accounts concentrate on the human dimension of these extraordinarily resilient tales, with a distorting playing down of the divine. Joseph Campbell -- whose highly influential hero (''The Hero With a Thousand Faces'') is presumably still waiting for the lights to change on the corner of 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue -- is perhaps her central target.

More ...

::Saturday, December 13, 2003 6:31:39 AM::
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AWOTV: On TV Today

Apologies for yesterday's listings ... I think I mixed them up. Today we have:

3.00 p.m. |DTC| Spartans at the Gates of Fire (Episode 1)
"For 2,500 years, the Battle of Thermopylae has been as a
fierce conflict in the history of warfare. New research brings
the ancient battlefield to life and reveals whether 7,000
Spartan and Greek soldiers could have held off the Persian
invasion."

4.00 p.m. |DTC| Spartans at the Gates of Fire (Episode 2)
"For 2,500 years, the Battle of Thermopylae has been as a
fierce conflict in the history of warfare. New research brings
the ancient battlefield to life and reveals whether 7,000
Spartan and Greek soldiers could have held off the Persian
invasion."

6.00 p.m. |DCIVC| The Greatest Journeys: Greece: Journeys
to the Gods
dna

6.00 p.m. |DTC| Ancient Ancestors: Princess and the Pauper
"The discovery of thousands of skeletons in the heart of London
astonished archaeologists. It looks like hundreds of people were
struck down by something deadly and dumped in a mass pauper's
grave, along with the body of a young Roman in a sarcophagus."

DTC = Discovery Times Channel (US)

DCIVC = Discovery Civilization (Canada)

::Saturday, December 13, 2003 6:26:15 AM::
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