Well, among other things, they appear to have given homing pigeons a way to get 'home' ... from the Telegraph:

Pigeons have taken the easy route home and followed major roads and other human thoroughfares for thousands of years, researchers claim.
 
The study, published yesterday by a Swiss team, provides "statistical proof" that the carrier pigeon's uncanny ability to find its home coop depends a great deal on trunk routes, suggesting that the birds have probably relied on human directions as long as people have been changing the landscape.

The study of birds released from sites around Rome to their loft in Testa di Lepre, 12 miles west of the city, showed that the pigeons do not travel as "the crow flies".

They followed SS Aurelia, Italy's old coastal highway, and preferred this route to a greater extent than the newer and larger highway A12, or the railway.

The SS Aurelia traces the ancient imperial Via Aurelia, which was begun in 241 BC and connected Rome to what is now southern France, providing a hint that the birds have relied on human directions for more than two millennia. [more]

Hollywood Reporter has an excellent, lengthy article on how difficult it was to get the Oliver Stone Alexander flick into production ... the incipit:

It's late at night in Paris, early in July -- but as most frenchmen are winding down for their annual summer break, France's newest citizen, Oliver Stone, is maintaining a breakneck pace in the editing room, struggling to ready his $150 million historical epic "Alexander" for a Nov. 5 U.S. release through Warner Bros. Pictures.

This is the final march in a battle Stone has waged for more than a decade, vanquishing competing projects, overcoming budgetary hurdles and conquering logistical concerns including real war.

"I'd say I'm pretty happy we got through it alive," says an exhausted Stone, who spends his days shuttling on the Chunnel train between Paris and London. "We're halfway through the hard-editing process, right in the middle, and everything is coming together," he adds, sounding satisfied -- and relieved.

"Alexander," the most expensive film made to date by the Academy Award-winning writer-helmsman -- who crafted his oeuvre with such films as 1986's "Platoon," 1987's "Wall Street" and 1991's JFK -- also has been the most challenging. It involved a cast and crew of 300, shooting on three continents and monetary backing that prompted one source to call it "a case study in film finance," what with its large number of foreign presales coupled with German equity funds and sale-and-leaseback incentives.

Stone's production saga began 15 years ago when he conceived of making a film about Alexander the Great, a Macedonian general who conquered the known world by age 25, circa 356-320 B.C. Around 1990, Stone commissioned a writer to pen a novel about the enigmatic early master of the universe; many ideas were put to paper, but the book never saw the light of publication.

Stone moved on to other projects but admits that the story continued to tug at him. Look closely at his 1991 film "The Doors," and one can see lead actor Val Kilmer, as rock god Jim Morrison, morphing into Alexander. "I have always been fascinated by the character, but he has always been very resistant to dramatization," Stone says.

Stone attempted to revive the project in 1996, joining forces with independent film kingpins Andy Vajna and Mario Kassar; again, though, it floundered. Not until 2000, when Ridley Scott's best picture Oscar winner "Gladiator" proved that sword-and-sandal epics again were viable as blockbusters, did industry interest in the Alexander character reach a tipping point.

By 2001, Warners had teamed with the Canton Co. and Senator Films on an Alexander project scripted by Christopher McQuarrie (1995's "The Usual Suspects"), with Matthew McConaughey earmarked to star. Martin Scorsese eventually threw his lot in with the studio, bringing along Leonardo DiCaprio (star of Scorsese's 2002 drama "Gangs of New York") and financier Initial Entertainment.

Meanwhile, producer Dino De Laurentiis leaped to option a trio of Alexander novels by Valerio Manfredi and, with the backing of Universal, secured Oscar winner Ted Tally (1991's "The Silence of the Lambs") to craft a script reserved initially for Scott and later for Australian director Baz Luhrmann (2001's "Moulin Rouge"), who reportedly planned to film the epic on his native continent.

Even Mel Gibson entered the Alexander sweepstakes, announcing that his Icon Prods. would make a 10-part series for HBO based on the life of the iconic warrior.

But Stone was not about to let his dream project slip away. He had an open invitation to make a film for indie mogul Moritz Borman and decided that this was the time to call in the chit.

From the Herald:

The Ancient Olympics began with just a single race, the stade, or stadion race, over a distance arrived at because it was supposedly 60 times the length of the god Heracles' foot: 192.27 metres.

The first winner of the stade, Koroibis of Elis, was named from the plain of Elis upon which Olympia stands. The king of Elis was called Aethlius, from whose name the word "athlete" is said to derive.

After 13 Olympiads, the two-stade race, diaulus, was added, followed at the next celebration by the 24-circuit dolichus. The pentathlon, meanwhile, is attributed to Jason, of Argonaut fame. It comprised a stade run, a standing long jump with the use of hand-held weights (many examples, bearing the monogram of their owners, survive in museums), the discus, javelin, and wrestling.

Chariot racing was practice for war, and boxing was sometimes to the death. The historian, Pusanias, describes how in the Nemean Games, with night falling, it was agreed before witnesses that each fighter would allow his rival to land a punch.

Kreugas of Epidamnos aimed his blow at the head of his rival, Damoxenos, who then told Kreugas to raise his arm. Damoxenos drove his straight-fingered punch below Kreugas' ribs, grabbed his intestines, and tore them out.

Kreugas died immediately, but Damoxenos found himself disqualified. He had struck five blows (one for each of his fingers) not one. Kreugas's corpse received the olive crown, and a statue was erected to him in Argos.

Wow ... and I thought decisions by judges in figure skating were strange.

Interesting (or symptomatic) that I've never heard of a 'summer camp' called Classical Pursuits offered by Ann Kirkland at the U of Toronto ... Globe and Mail writer Sandra Martin participated in one devoted to reading the Iliad ... here's a middle bit from her account of the 'camp':

Homer could have been a solitary exercise — impressive on the subway or lying on the beach — but I opted for a group effort so that I could trade impressions and insights with other aficionados. And I knew just the place: Classical Pursuits, a week-long summer camp for intellectuals run by Ann Kirkland at St. Michael's College at the University of Toronto.

Like so many other tourist-driven businesses, Classical Pursuits has suffered from the SARS scare and the Iraqi war. To try to boost attendance, Kirkland was offering a two-for-one deal this summer. Bring a friend and pay approximately $1,000 for six days of discussion groups, museum tours, gallery outings, plays, a daily buffet, or watching, as I did, Wagner's Gotterdammerung on video every afternoon along with commentaries from opera buff Iain Scott.

For an extra $400, you could have breakfast and accommodation in the college.

About 140 people took Kirkland up on her offer, or twice as many as last year's “small but happy group.” Consequently, my study group had about 15 people, and was dominated by Americans, many of whom were inclined to use the generic “we” when talking about aggression and hubris.

One couple, Bill and Peggy from Syracuse, had used the half-price deal to cross the lake on the new ferry from Rochester and see the sights in Toronto. They dropped out after three days and headed back home to their animals. It wasn't such a loss because Bill, an anthropologist by training, was more interested in talking about warrior codes among the samurai in Japan and the Maya in Mexico than in reading Homer or sorting out the gods from the mortals.

There are only two prerequisites if you want to join a shared inquiry group: Read the book ahead of time (even if you have signed up at the last minute, as I did), and arrive with an open mind. Unlike Bill, I was more than willing to play by the rules, but I couldn't find the prescribed text, a colloquial translation by Stanley Lombardo, complete with references to medics, and exhortations to “Get a grip.”

Lombardo is a professor of classics at the University of Kansas, who has developed a sideline in delivering dramatic readings from his book on American college campuses. He's working on an audio book to increase the audience for his wares. Who says academics aren't entrepreneurial?

After phoning five bookstores and checking out two libraries, I searched my own bookshelves and came up with an old translation by Erewhon author Samuel Butler that I had inherited from an ancient aunt. I didn't need to worry about having the wrong translation, because three other members of the group arrived brandishing rival translations like warring shields on a battlefield. Joan from New York was a Richard Lattimore loyalist, while Suzanne from Chicago preferred Robert Fagles. Martha from Toronto loved her Lattimore but she kept her preference mostly to herself.

Neither Joan nor Suzanne was prepared to switch to the agreed translation. Whenever we read a passage from Lombardo, there was a scramble to find the corresponding section in Fagles and Lattimore. Often Suzanne and Joan, or both, would then insist on reading the version in their texts.

Meanwhile, I kept searching for Lombardo and finally found one copy at the University of Toronto Book Store, and sprinted over there at lunch the first day to make sure that I at least was on the same page as most of the group.

The translation problem is a bigger issue than you might think. Entire books have been written about the more than 200 translations of Homer produced from George Chapman in 1611 to Alexander Pope's rhyming couplets in 1720 to Christopher Logue's War Music, which was a finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize two years ago. Keats, the romantic poet, wrote a laudatory sonnet, On First Looking into Chapman's Homer, that is now more famous than the translation that inspired it. Dr. Johnson much admired Pope, while contemporary American critic Gary Wills thinks Logue has brought Homer “crashing” into our own time — and Logue doesn't even know Greek.

Why we were reading Lombardo was hard to determine, since Don Whitfield, the original tutor for our group, had to cancel at the last minute because of a death in his family. I knew we were in trouble when Priscilla from Toronto asked Mark, the well-meaning substitute, about Keats's poem the first morning and all he could muster was a bemused expression.

Judy from Chicago became the de facto leader because she kept dragging us back to the text — the Lombardo one — even when Suzanne periodically waxed enthusiastic about nuclear holocausts. Not only had Judy bought the assigned book; she had trained assiduously before coming to Toronto by spending the previous six weeks reading nothing but The Iliad and related books on Greek mythology and history. [the whole thing]

More info on U of T's Classical Pursuits is available. It appears to have no specific connection to the department of Classics, and has ties with Chicago's Great Books Foundation. I've often wondered why Classicists don't seem to be involved with such things ... if they are, please tell me!

In anticipation (apparently) of the 'Amazon' episode of PBS' Secrets of the Dead series, the Chicago Tribune had an interview with archaeologist Jeannine Davis-Kimball:

Q. Why does the idea of Amazon women continue to draw interest?

A. The Greeks began using the idea of the Amazons, and Greek hero fighting the Amazon [to convey] that it was better to be a good wife and stay home so you don't end up dead like the Amazons. That was actually what some of the Greek orators talked about. In our culture, women are supposed to, in general, be sort of docile and to follow the lead of the men. ... When you have a culture that's entirely women, that's entirely independent and in fact dominant, and can go out and fight the men, that creates some sort of tension and probably that's the reason [the interest] has continued so long.

Q. So, to clarify, does this mean the Amazons really did exist?

A. As far as I'm concerned the Amazons are mythological people. ... We don't have any archeological evidence of a race of women living completely isolated from males. The actual women warriors of the Sarmatians probably were the basis for the Amazons.

Q. What were their lives like?

A. Sarmatians were nomadic people. They have no defense walls or massive military forces like we find in Greek and Roman culture or even today's culture. So the children, boys and girls, were taught to ride and had to learn to defend themselves. During that particular time, and in other nomadic cultures as well, the women become warriors and are called upon to defend. I don't think they're out there attacking but rather are in a defensive mode. They're quite capable of shooting a bow and arrow and using a sword ... to protect their families and their herds and their entire lifestyle. ... Over time, that type of lifestyle changes. If you compare the lifestyle of the Sarmatians to the Genghis Khan period of nomads, women were attacking. Women were used as auxiliary forces [in battle] and were quite proficient.

Q. A silly question but I can't resist: Were the Sarmatians giant blonds?

A. These people are not giants but are large-boned, sturdy. Some of the women were 5'6", 7, 8. Tall. They were not runts by any means whatsoever. ... These people are large, robust, healthy, strong individuals. Probably their genetic makeup had a lot to do with it as well as their good diet. They had a very high-protein diet so they had strong bones and good teeth. Were they blond? They probably varied because of the mixture of populations ... we're talking about a vast area of different genetic links.

Q. How did you feel when the link was established with the 9-year-old girl, Meiramgul?

A. I didn't have any idea when we started doing the DNA that we would find this very rare genetic link between the women from the excavation with Meiramgul and her mom. That was a complete surprise for everyone. ... I had known that nomadic people had a great diversity. As they traveled, they encountered other populations and there was bound to be intermarriage. ... I did not expect anything to be so widely dispersed, that was really further than I had anticipated.

Q. What was she like and what is life like in her village?

A. She's a very nice little girl, very helpful with her family, always wanting to do something and that's very typical of that population. It's a lifestyle of complete simplicity. Her family [has] no contact with urban areas. In general, that society doesn't change very much. They're not subject to the kind of things that induce change, such as television, computers, Internet, radio, transportation. They're not subject to many outside influences. I doubt if Meiramgul had ever seen a Westerner before.

Q. What's the most important lesson we can learn today from ancient societies?

A. Our society is so complicated today. We have so many people compared to the few people existing in the world at that time, the interactions are so different. We should look more at history and at political/economic situations, particularly political situations. We should look more into history to see what the history was of particular regions. If we were to look at the history of the Middle East, for instance, we would see that we shouldn't expect to go in there and modify it completely overnight. It's been going on for a long time, a real long time! [Laughs] We really should pay more attention to history. [more]

In this regard, folks might also be interested in the webpage(s) designed to accompany the episode at PBS.

Clearly the editor of the La Vista Sun must have stepped out when this one was submitted:

An age-old art, henna has been found on mummies in the tapestries depicting the meeting of the Queen of Sheeba and King Soloman, and is seen in the pyramids on Cleopatra, Barnhardt said.

Wow ...

I'm sure this is a spurious link, but it adds another dimension to the Academy Awards (and various other big events) ... the Washington Post has a Q and A thing on the origins of the 'red carpet':

Q: Why is the red carpet red? How long has it been the fashion for celebrities arriving at a publicity event to walk a red carpet?

A: I was shocked to discover, with my own eyes, that the red carpet at the Academy Awards is really more pink. That's because the pink somehow shows up as red in all those flash pictures and on television, whereas true red tends to look black. (Also, Charlize Theron, who appeared this year looking like she'd been dipped in Cheeto dust, seemed more tan in the press photos.)

But enough Charlize, let's dish Clytemnestra: According to the Times of London, which also tried to pinpoint the origin of the red carpet, it was the character of Clytemnestra who first "rolled out the red carpet" (some sources think it was purple) in the 458 B.C. play "Agamemnon" by Aeschylus. It's Greek tragedy, so it's a messy story: Clytemnestra wanted to kill Agamemnon because he sacrificed their daughter to the gods, who then supplied him with wind to sail to Troy.

Now here comes the moral of the tale: Clytemnestra tried to trick Agamemnon into arrogance by laying out a red carpet on his return -- for if a mere mortal walked on something so gorgeous, it would surely invite the anger of the gods. Which is how Agamemnon wound up at Betty Ford and saw box-office receipts for his next three movies progressively plummet. When you walk on the best threads, you're coming dangerously close to the pitfalls of fame.  

The Sunday Herald has a piece contrasting the ancient Olympics with their modern counterparts ... it's probably the only time we'll see the word amphictyony in the popular press, so we better give it some attention:

THEY called it an “amphictyony”. By the time the first official Olympic Games began in ancient Greece in 776BC, their venue Olympia had become the centre of a federal league under religious sanction – an early version of Brussels, although it of course has forgotten about the religion. Olympia was to western Greece what the city of Delphi and its oracle was to the north. As the Games went on, Olympia became revered and respected across all those rocky crags and inlets, those olive groves and sheep fanks that the Romans were to call Magna Graecia – big Greece.

And that mattered. It brought with it a state of being – peace – which the ancient Greeks philosophised about interminably, but were otherwise utterly unable to bring about. For the duration of the four-yearly Olympic Games, the city-states of the competitors not only accepted but respected the “Olympic Truce”. This is important. Because when the ancient Greeks weren’t fighting each other, they were fighting someone else like Persian satraps. When they weren’t doing that, they were thinking about who they could fight. So the Olympic Truce was no mere vision. It was a “mission statement” with wings. And it worked.

By contrast, when pyrotechnics and puppeteers open the Olympics in Athens on August 13, the world’s 87 or so current wars – depending on your definition of what is or isn’t a war – will continue regardless. Just by being there against huge odds, athletes from the Congo or Angola or Sudan will attest the power of the Olympic spirit. There will even be competitors from Iraq. But back home, sadly, the families and friends of such participants will still be fighting in some forgotten war. [more]

It's interesting that reviews of Troy continue to trickle in ... here's the incipit of one from Bad Subjects which clearly hasn't been written by your typical 'thumbs up' or 'four stars' hack (I'm omitting the quotation from Ovid which introduces the thing):

This summer's blockbuster action film season brought Troy and The Chronicles of Riddick to the screen. Troy is a social palimpsest for Bush culture, a point at which the values propagated by the Bush administration can be read for effect: determined militarism, subordination of citizens to aggressive state policy, and a campaign against male effeminacy. The Chronicles of Riddick, on the other hand, is a study in anti-Bush culture and a film of resistance.

Wolfgang Petersen's Troy is a deep cultural fantasy, a disturbing vision articulated from within the oppressive illusions of Bush culture. As Greek warriors led by an Aryan fair-haired Achilles invade Troy and slash their way through dark-haired Trojans, the film scenario reproduces the Iraq invasion zeitgeist. The siege of Troy was a clash of civilizations, the McGreeks versus the Trojan Jihad. According to Homer, the war culminated the conflicts of its time: economic, political, and cultural. It was the war of annihilation of its day, a war that determined history, a war of Bush versus bin Laden dimensions.

In Troy, Greece, putative mother of Western civilization, has been modeled once again to new global exigencies, as it has been since the Renaissance. The Iliad is adaptable to the spirit of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as the Stanley Lombardo colloquial translation so neatly illustrates with a cover photo taken from the invasion of Normandy. That adaptability is available because, like many canonical works, the Iliad is uncanny, shifting, and refuses definitional confinements. It remains an open and self-renewing text in the sense that Harold Bloom perceives canonicity as "a mode of originality that either cannot be assimilated, or that so assimilates us that we cease to see it strange."

But where in the Iliad we still encounter bizarrerie, in Troy the visual and sexual could not be more ordinary despite the virtual scenery and slogging virtual massed troops. There is no uncanniness in Troy. Achilles is a predictable one-dimensional man, a well-muscled bourgeois stick-figure; there is no place for doubts, bisexuality, or open personality. In classical tradition, Achilles is both arch-male and girlish, sometimes a man and sometimes a girl. "What was the name of Achilles when he was a girl?" was a favorite question of emperor Tiberius to his scholars, and a Pompeii fresco depicts Achilles hidden among girls. But Troy never images Achilles as the other, that is, as fully human.

And yet Brad Pitt brings to the character a queer something, a frisson of recognition. He does not need the paraphernalia of gayness to be gay: he worked out, fasted, made himself younger, and transformed into a savage white-boy Narcissus. The result is an inadvertent American racial satire of the pied classical Greek boy, the kuros. Alongside his sexual obfuscations, the Achilles of Troy is a pastiche that fails to recognize its racial borrowings. It is a pastiche that seizes on a buffed-up military physique to conceal an underlying disquiet over possibilities beyond strict heterosexuality, as if swordplay could subdue sexuality. [more]

Looks like someone got a thesaurus for their birthday ...

This quote keeps turning up in the myriad (literally) news thingies I'm wading through, so I might as well post it:

Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss clearly lost none of her sass in prison: she has announced plans to open a brothel in Las Vegas, as soon as prostitution is legal there. "Alexander the Great conquered the world at 33 and died. I did it when I was 22," she adds mysteriously. [from GQ]

... and if you look off in the distance, you'll see Nemesis and Zeus discussing how they will punish this bit of hybris.

The About.com action and adventure movie guy has a brief interview with Colin Farrell about the upcoming Alexander flick ... an excerpt:

What did you think when there were several competing Alexander the Great projects?
I don't know. The story is only three thousand years old. Of course, welcome to Hollywood. In the same year, “Hurry, who's going to make the first f*cking one?” It's like Jesus. I know that Oliver has been working on his or thinking about his for ten or twelve years.

Was it your toughest role yet?
Yeah, it's been the toughest that maybe I'll ever do.

Why?
You’re playing Alexander. It's just a life with so much loss and so much ambition and so much destiny and so many questions and very few answers. It was physically, emotionally, psychologically draining. There was so much philosophy, thought and feeling and pain that went into it. For my money, it's a pretty sad story. It's not “Alexander the Great, Tada!” It's a pretty sad, heavy story.

Did you look at the Richard Burton one?
Yeah, I watched the Richard Burton one. Ours is not as stiffly classic. I mean, Burton is a f*cking genius. F*cking Richard Burton, oh my God. But the whole piece as an energy was for my money far too soupy. These men, even ours will probably be too f*cking gentle. But these were f*cking animals. They were animals, even the king. It wasn’t sitting on the throne in a castle. He was on the battlefield with blood, sweat and tears. And society was rough. It was honest, but it was rough. They drank a lot. They cussed a lot. Their dialect would've been something far more animal than, “Hello, I'm Alexander, the king.” It would've been guttural, something that sounded not Arabic, but something that sounded a little Latvian or Lithuanian. There would've been animal sounds, but there wasn't. In ours, Oliver was lucky enough that he let us Irish boys use Irish accents and Welsh boys use their Welsh accents and there's a couple of English actors in there. But it's primarily a Celtic sound. So I use my own speech, but I cleaned up the diction. I cleaned it up a little bit. So that's how it differs. It's more real as a result I hope. [the whole thing]

Uh oh ... mixing accents is one of those things that really irks me in movies (the 'classical' case was Amadeus, which quickly became unwatchable for me) ... dang.

A brief item from Indolink ... Rafi U. Samad, Greeks in Ancient Pakistan:

The invasion of Alexander the Great of the territories,which now constitute Pakistan ,was an event of great sagnificant not only because of the extraordinary nature of the military expenditure undertaken by one of the worlds greatest conquerors;but also because it was the first time that direct contacts were established between Europe & South Asia.Alexanders invasion opend up a new era of mutually benificial trade and cultural exchanges between the two regions,more than 4000 kilometers apart.

The fairly intense interaction between ancient South Asia and Greece,which commenced with the invasion of invasion of Alexander in fourth century BC, continued for almost seven centuries till the middle of 5th century AD.After Alexander it was the Seleucid and Bactrian Greeks settled in West and Central Asia,who continued to interact from across the borders,before the Bactrian/Indus Greeks conquered Gandhara and Punjab in the begining of 1st century BC.The Indus Greeks were succeeded by the philhellenic Scythian,Parthians and Kushans,who continued to rule Ancient Pakistan,till the middle of 5th century AD

During this extensive period,the nature and extent of Greek involvement and the impact,which the interactions produced in Ancient South Asia and Greece,has been the subject of much controversy.This book incorporates the latest material,which has become available through the research of international scholars.This material has been critically evaluated and supplemented by the author´s own critical analysis of the Hellenistic influences on local art and the influence of eastren Philosophy and religions on the intellectual movments in Greece and elsewhere in Europe.

The book also seeks to identify places and regions mentioned by Alexander´s Generals in their accounts of his military campaigns in the territories,which now constitute Pakistan.It provides latest information on the Alexandrias and the cities founded by the Indus Greeks in this region and on the cantoments and military posts established by Alexander.

Martin Winkler (ed.), Gladiator: Film and History

Benjamin Isaac, The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity 

Linda Jones Hall (ed.), Confrontation in Late Antiquity: Imperial Presentation and Regional Adaptation.

Martin M. Winkler (ed.), Gladiator: Film and History.

Scott Bradbury, Selected Letters of Libanius, from the Age of Constantius and Julian.

Peter Kingsley, Reality.

Jenifer Neils, John H. Oakley (edd.), Coming of Age in Ancient Greece: Images of Childhood from the Classical Past.

Nina Mekacher, Marek Palaczyk, Esther Schonenberger, Matrizengeformte hellenistische Terrakotten. Amphorenstempel Grabungen 1965-2001.

Benjamin Acosta-Hughes, Elizabeth Kosmetatou, Manuel Baumbach, Labored in Papyrus Leaves, Perspectives on an Epigram Collection attributed to
Posidippus.

David A. Lupher, Romans in a New World: Classical Models in Sixteenth-Century Spanish America.