ante diem viii kalendas februarias

• Sementivae or Paganalia (day 1) -- Sementivae was a festival of sowing which was actually a moveable feast (although I'm not sure of the moveability criteria; I'm guessing that the first day falls between January 24 and 26). By Ovid's time it appears to have been coincident with Paganalia, which also obviously has some rural aspect to it. It appears to have been a two-day festival with an interval of seven days between (corrections on this welcome ... my sources seem muddled on this one)
• 41 A.D. -- recognition of Claudius as emperor by the senate
• 98 A.D. -- death of Nerva (?)
  

::Tuesday, January 25, 2005 5:35:30 AM::
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Today's selection:

coruscate @ Dictionary.com

lucid @ Merriam-Webster

narcokelptocracy @ OED (not specifically etymologized, but clearly with Classical antecedents) [note in passing: couldn't the word mean "those who rule by stealing sleep" ... i.e. your children?]

facundity @ Worthless Word for the Day

::Tuesday, January 25, 2005 5:31:17 AM::
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Huygens in Titanem descendit (21.1.2005)

Modulus spatialis Huygens, quem percontatrum Cassini in spatium cosmicum portaverat, postridie Idus Ianuarias in Titanem appulsus est, quae maxima luna est Saturni.

Descendens magnam copiam photographematum in Terram misit, in quibus superficies Titanis lapidibus sparsus et alveis sulcatus conspicitur.

Alvei vestigia cursus lavae aut fluminum esse creduntur. Investigatores putant naturam Titanis talem fere esse, qualis Terra illo tempore fuerit, quo prima forma vitae apparuerit; Titanem esse in systemate solari unicum satellitem, divitem compositionibus organicis, qui atmosphaeram habeat.

Insunt in percontatro Cassini et in modulo Huygens etiam instrumenta Finnica.

Modulus Huygens, a Procuratione Spatiali Europaea (ESA) factus, nomen habet ex Christiano Huygens, astronomo Nederlandiensi, qui anno millesimo sescentesimo quinquagesimo quinto primus Saturni lunam Titanem animadvertit.

Aequalis eius fuit Iohannes Dominicus Cassini, astronomus Italicae originis, ex quo percontatrum Cassini appellatur.

Tuomo Pekkanen
Nuntii Latini, Finnish Broadcasting Company (YLE)
(used with permission)

::Tuesday, January 25, 2005 5:24:38 AM::
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There's a new supplementum preview (full articles) available at the Ancient Narrative site. Here are links to the individual articles (pdf) ... they're somewhat 'buried' at the AN site:

Michael Paschalis, Stavros Frangoulidis, "Introduction"

Helen Morales, "Metaphor, Gender and the Ancient Greek Novel"

Ken Dowden, "Greek novel and the ritual of life: an exercise in taxonomy"

Gareth Schmeling, "Callirhoe: God-like Beauty and the Making of a Celebrity"

Michael Paschalis, "The Narrator as Hunter: Longus, Virgil and Theocritus"

Ewen Bowie, "Metaphor in Daphnis and Chloe"

Tim Whitmarsh, "Heliodorus smiles"

Niall Slater, "And There's Another Country: Translation as Metaphor in Heliodorus"

Richard Hunter, "'Philip the Philosopher' on the Aithiopika of Heliodorus"

Judith Perkins, "Trimalchio: Naming Power"

Stephen Harrison, "'Waves of Emotion': An Epic Metaphor in Apuleius' Metamorphoses"

Luca Graverini, "Sweet and Dangerous?: A Literary Metaphor (aures permulcere) in Apuleius' Prologue"

Stavros Frangoulidis, "A Pivotal Metaphor in Apuleius' Metamorphoses: Aristomenes' and Lucius' Death and Rebirth"

Paula James, "Real and Metaphorical Mimicking Birds in the Metamorphoses of Apuleius"

Andrew Laird, "Metaphor and the riddle of representation in the Historia Apollonii regis Tyri"

Catherine Connors, "Metaphor and politics in John Barclay's Argenis (1621)"

... in case I've messed up a link, check out the AN page itself

::Tuesday, January 25, 2005 5:19:45 AM::
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::Tuesday, January 25, 2005 5:12:05 AM::
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::Tuesday, January 25, 2005 5:06:54 AM::
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I'm assuming we'll get more details on this one from the Turkish Press:

Heavy rainfall in Athens has brought an unexpected find: an ancient marble statue which had been buried in a ditch near the capital, Greek archaeologists said Monday.

The 1.8-metre (5.9-foot) tall marble torso of a young man was accidentally discovered Friday by a passer-by who alerted authorities, said Yiorgos Steinhauer, director for Athens classical antiquities at the Greek culture ministry.

Pending its exhibition, the first century AD statue was transferred to the archaeology museum at the Athens port of Piraeus.

The statue is a Roman copy of an ancient Greek original and possibly represents Apollo -- ancient god of medicine, music, poetry and prophecy. Ancient artists represented Apollo as an archetype for manly youth and beauty.

The statue could have been recently discovered by building workers during residential construction, and thrown into the ditch for fear that archaeologists might stop the works if alerted to the finding, Steinhauer said.

::Tuesday, January 25, 2005 5:02:49 AM::
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When I was a wee lad, my father read (not to me) some massive biography of Churchill and was forever thereafter dragging paradigms from Churchill's life. I can't recall him ever mentioning Classics or anything, but the Telegraph fills in that lacuna with a blurb meant to preview a Radio Four program:

"You could say," continues Bragg, his words flowing out in the unfeasibly fluent sentences of a seasoned commentator, "that what Churchill brought to a unique situation was a lifetime of preparation." Rotten at classics, worse still at maths, Churchill had left Harrow School in 1893 with a prize for English the only exception to a singularly unimpressive academic career. He was nevertheless accepted into Sandhurst Military Academy, albeit only after passing the entrance exam on the third attempt, and swiftly dispatched to India. "When he got there," says Bragg, "he discovered a lot of very clever young men and realised that if he really wanted to get ahead in politics, he would have to educate himself."

In the following six months, Churchill devoured 12 volumes of Macaulay, all 4,000 pages of Gibbon's Decline and Fall..., Plato's Republic (in translation), Aristotle's Politics (ditto), Darwin's On the Origin of Species, Schopenhauer on pessimism and Smith's Wealth of Nations. This feat of scholarship furnished Churchill with the immense vocabulary, thorough grasp of rhetoric, and gift for the memorable phrase that would later serve him so well as a statesman and eventually, in 1953, win him the Nobel Prize for Literature.

::Tuesday, January 25, 2005 5:01:05 AM::
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::Tuesday, January 25, 2005 4:57:41 AM::
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Well, I guess we knew this would happen ... Stone's Alexander has been nominated for a pile of 'anti-Oscars', otherwise known as the Razzies. According to a Reuters piece (which can't be cleanly excerpted here), Alexander is up for worst picture, Colin Farrell up for worst actor, Val Kilmer for worst supporting actor [strange ... most reviews I read thought his performance was one of the few redeeming features of the movie]. There are three other nominations unspecified.

::Tuesday, January 25, 2005 4:53:28 AM::
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Living in Antiquity:
Jews, Greeks, and Christians

October 5-7, 2005

An Interdisciplinary Conference Sponsored by The Core Humanities Program Villanova University

Plenary Speakers
Daniel Boyarin, University of California
Remi Brague, The Sorbonne, Paris
Paula Frederiksen, Boston University

Call for Papers

In the Greco-Roman world various groups had to negotiate cultural and religious space within the empire.  Some were official, some tolerated, and others illicit.  Recent scholarship on the complexity of these relationships and interactions has opened up new ways to understand our western tradition.

This conference focuses on the intersection of Jews, Greeks, and Christians in antiquity.  It is an interdisciplinary effort to examine this period from different religious, social, philosophical, and cultural perspectives.  The aim is to deepen our understanding of how these three traditions thought of their gods, themselves, and the world around them. What did they have to say to one another?

We welcome a wide range of approaches to this topic.  Some papers will proceed historically, considering how diverse communities actually lived in one another's company. Other papers will make their own comparisons with a view to elucidating philosophical or theological issues across traditions.  Still others will take a more literary approach to key texts.  We are especially interested in papers that speak to an interdisciplinary audience.

For further information, please contact one of the conference coordinators:
Tim Horner                 Peter Busch
timothy.horner@villanova.edu    peter.busch@villanova.edu

... seen on the Classicists list

::Tuesday, January 25, 2005 4:48:46 AM::
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The New York Daily News has a couple of 'graphs on how Discovery Channel was promoting their upcoming (this weekend) Pompeii show:

Ancient disasters may be fun to learn about - so long as they don't remind you of modern ones.

Last week, the Discovery Channel promoted its Jan. 30 movie "Pompeii" by having models dressed as Romans hand out hot volcanic rocks to freezing New Yorkers.

We hear execs also talked about raining ash on Times Square - just like Mount Vesuvius did on Italy almost 2000 years ago. Cooler heads nixed the idea because of the Asian tsunami disaster and memories of 9/11 soot clouds at Ground Zero...

::Tuesday, January 25, 2005 4:47:07 AM::
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This is the first time I'm seen this as a passing remark ... we'll see if it becomes one of those 'regular' things journalists toss out to try and add some interest to their stuff. Talking about the West Nile Virus, the Pasadena Star-News claims:

The virus, which some scholars speculate killed Alexander the Great, struck El Monte resident Dick Crook in July. He came down with a 104-degree fever and suffered sudden nausea and fatigue.

::Tuesday, January 25, 2005 4:45:05 AM::
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11.00 p.m. |HINT|  The Sunken City
The ancient Roman city of Ostia was once a vital seaport. Yet it died a slow, painful death. This documentary explores the reasons for its demise and looks at the abandoned wasteland today.  

HINT = History International

::Tuesday, January 25, 2005 4:41:20 AM::
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