ARE ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA OVERRATED? I posted here about the power that T.S. Eliot found in the words “Ah, Soldier!” Mary Jane commented to me that one of the ways that the words can be interpreted is: “Soldier, there is so much to say that I won’t be able to say.” This is consistent with Shakespeare’s portrayal of Antony and Cleopatra as figures of epic importance—Antony the great soldier and Cleopatra a queen from a great dynasty. Mary Beard had a review in the Financial Times (August 14-15) of a book —ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA by Adrian Goldsworthy—which does what Mary Beard calls “ambitious debunking” of Antony and Cleopatra. She says that Goldsworthy “is excellent in puncturing the myth of Antony as a great Roman military tactician and an experienced soldier.” Goldsworthy “is also refreshingly frank about the unimportance of Cleopatra herself.” Since the power of Rome was in control, all “petty monarchs such as Cleopatra” could do was to curry favor with Rome.
Archive for the ‘History’ Category
ARE ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA OVERRATED?
Thursday, September 2nd, 2010KABADDI—THE WORLD’S OLDEST SPORT?
Tuesday, August 31st, 2010KABADDI—THE WORLD’S OLDEST SPORT? The Wall Street Journal (August 26) had an article about kabaddi, which is the national game of Bangladesh and the state game of several states in India. This wikipedia article lists 31 countries that are members of the International Kabaddi Federation. According to this site, “The history of Kabaddi dates back to the pre-historic times….and….Historians find resemblance with the technicalities of Kabaddi with a situation in the great battle of Mahabharata. Further: “According to the Buddhist literature, Gautama Buddha played Kabaddi for recreational purposes.” Although boxing, wrestling and track and field events go back to classical Greece and Rome, I can’t think of any team sport that goes back as far as kabaddi.
WHITE SCULPTURES AND DARK INTERIORS.
Sunday, August 29th, 2010WHITE SCULPTURES AND DARK INTERIORS. I posted on the colors of ancient stautes here. Lee Bryant sent me this article and the comments which point out how the disappearance of the colors has changed our aesthetic judgments. One comment argues that neoclassical painters (think Ingres) formed an idea of severe white beauty because of the accidents of time. Another comment argued that painters, especially the Dutch painters of the 1600’s, chose dark colors under the influence of earlier Italian painters without realizing that those earlier “paintings were covered in the soot and ash from centuries of candles and oil lamps.” Others pointed out the irony that we are troubled by the idea that ancient sculptures were colored because our idea of beauty has been shaped by the white statues.
RESEARCH ON WHETHER POWER CORRUPTS.
Saturday, August 28th, 2010RESEARCH ON WHETHER POWER CORRUPTS. I posted here on Lord Acton’s observation that: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men….” Jonah Lehrer had an article in the Wall Street Journal (August 14-15) and here at his blog, The Frontal Cortex, on psychological research which seems to support Lord Acton. He cites studies which show that entering college freshmen with the highest scores on agreeableness and extroversion wind up at the top of their social hierarchy and says that studies of the military, corporations and politics give similar results. Then Lehrer cites Dacher Keltner, a psychologist at Berkeley on what happens after power has been achieved: “Mr. Keltner compares the feeling of power to brain damage, noting that people with lots of authority tend to behave like neurological patients with a damaged orbito-frontal lobe, a brain area that’s crucial for empathy and decision-making.” It may be that one reason for the lack of empathy may be what is shown by Chekhov: servants are not seen. Lehrer says that people in positions of authority “spend much less time making eye contact, at least when a person without power is talking.”
HISTORICAL RESEARCH YET TO BE DONE.
Friday, August 20th, 2010HISTORICAL RESEARCH YET TO BE DONE. I was thrilled by a sentence in a review by Stanley Wells in the Times Literary Supplement (August 13) of a book about Shakespeare authorship controversies. Wells is replying to a contention that every surviving scrap of paper from Shakespeare’s time has been examined by scholars. Wells says: “In fact, record offices are stuffed with unexamined documents of the period.” Annalisa recognized how pleased I was that there is still so much for scholars to do and reminded me how excited she was by the possibilities she imagined in the landscape and barrows near Stonehenge. And there are all the papyrus fragments yet to be deciphered and published and the mountain of potshards at Mount Testaccio.
GARUM—THE IMPORTANCE OF ROTTEN FISH.
Thursday, August 5th, 2010GARUM—THE IMPORTANCE OF ROTTEN FISH. Garum was a fish sauce made by the fermentation in brine of the innards of fish. The article on Portus that I linked to yesterday says that archaeologists at Portus have found hundreds of amphorae which were used to transport oil, wine and garum—evidence of the widespread Roman trade in those commodities. Fraser and Rimas discuss garum as one of the pillars of the Roman diet. It was an important source of protein, vitamins and other nutrients and was a staple in the diet of the poor. At the same time, there was an upscale market for premium garum. Most of the recipes in one Roman cookbook include garum as an ingredient. Fraser and Rimas quote Pliny that unguents (for perfume) were the only liquids that sold at a higher price. This wikipedia article quotes Seneca as protesting against what the article calls the “expensive craze” for garum. Seneca described garum as: “that expensive bloody mass of decayed fish.” I am curious as to what garum tasted like, and, given its former popularity, it does seem that there might be a business opportunity for some entrepreneur.
ROMAN WAREHOUSES.
Wednesday, August 4th, 2010ROMAN WAREHOUSES. One of the things that the dig at Portus has turned up is “the remains of a large Roman warehouse.” The reference reminded me of a recent interview on NPR with Evan D.G. Frazier and Andrew Rimas, the authors of EMPIRES OF FOOD—an interview which led me to buy the book. They said that Roman warehouses were as important an engineering accomplishment as Roman roads or Roman bridges. The Roman Empire relied on grain from the periphery. Grain imported from Africa constituted one third of the needs of Rome. Winter storms closed the Mediterranean shipping lanes for four months of the year so that grain had to be stored for considerable periods. On the radio, the authors discussed the problems that the Roman warehouses had to solve. The grain exerted a lot of lateral pressure. Humidity has to be less than 15% to keep grain from spoiling. Grain has to be kept below 60 degrees Fahrenheit to deter bugs. The Romans devised a standardized model for warehouses in the same way that Roman army camps and Roman roads were standardized. They had walls a yard thick with raised floors for circulation of air. One storehouse was about ten times as large as the Colosseum.
A ROMAN CANAL.
Wednesday, August 4th, 2010A ROMAN CANAL. This article (link from Instapundit) describes the discovery by archaeologists of an enormous canal connecting the new port at Portus (new in the reign of Emperor Claudius) to Ostia, the old port for Rome. Ostia was 15 miles from Rome along the Tiber River. The canal is about as wide as an American football field is long. Its width dramatizes the scale of the imports arriving in Rome by way of the Tiber. “The dig … is shedding light on the extraordinary trading network that the Romans developed throughout the Mediterranean basin.”
WERE THE HOMERIC GREEKS COLOR-BLIND?
Sunday, August 1st, 2010WERE THE HOMERIC GREEKS COLOR-BLIND? I posted here on the issue of whether speakers of a language with more words for a color are better at distinguishing those colors. (For example, Professor Boroditsky in her article says that Russian-speakers are better at distinguishing shades of blue because Russian has an extra distinction between light blue and dark blue.) A review by Clive Cookson of Guy Deutscher’s THROUGH THE LANGUAGE GLASS in the Financial Times a few weeks ago (June19/20) had a story about language and color that had an interesting twist. In 1858, William Gladstone, who was to have long service as British Prime Minister, advanced a theory about the Homeric Greeks. (Back then, a Prime Minister could be a classical scholar.) Gladstone published what Cookson describes as “an exhaustive study [which] showed the black-white-nature of the Homeric world; blues and greens are never mentioned, and Homer’s few colour descriptions often seem off-key.” Linguists usually frame this kind of debate in terms of the effect of language on the perception of color. Gladstone reversed the argument. He claimed that the Greeks were unable to see color the way modern people could because their eyes had not evolved to perceive color. This 1878 article from the 1878 London Times (Ah, the wonders of the internet) quotes Gladstone as arguing that …”the organ of color was but partially developed among the Greeks of the heroic age.” Cookson says: “In keeping with the new enthusiasm for Darwinian thinking, scientists proposed that full colour vision had evolved over the past 2,000 years or so in response to all the new colours of modern civilisation.”
JOUSTS OF WAR.
Monday, July 19th, 2010JOUSTS OF WAR. As with the combatants today, there were knights who courted danger. In jousts of war, the lances were uncapped. Mortimer describes one joust in 1351—a “behourd”, an older form of jousting in which two teams of knights fought—in which 30 knights fought on each side. On one side, 30% of the knights (9 out of 30) died. Mortimer points out that the odds are better in Russian roulette. In another joust of war with 20 on each side, 3 knights were killed. Both sides had agreed not to wear armor or other protective clothing. (!) Mortimer observes how unusual it is recorded history to have “the richest, most powerful and most privileged members of society risk injury and death for the sake of your entertainment.”
