Classic Virginia Classics

As for me--the story of the last eighteen yeears has been evenetful as such a lapse of time must be eventful to every man who thinks--My path is thickly strewn with abandoned projjects, with hopeless failures; here and there a trivial success, all alaaong, I may say, with the traces of honest effort. ... Impatient in most things, I hace not been impatient of my obscurity. If I live long enough, I hope to do something for my proper sphere of work. If I do not--I am content.

So Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve, in a letter of May 20th, 1873,  nearing the end of his 18-year career as Professor of Greek (really, "classics") at thee University of Virginia, reprinted in  The Letters of Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve (Ward Briggs, ed., 1987).  It's a career that makes a fit foil for the to the current uproar at the University of Virginia. where, it appears the "classics" still play an important, if obscure, role    Briggs fleshes out his account of the career in an essay, “Basil L. Gildersleeve at the University of Virginia,"  in a collection edited by Briggs and Herbert W. Bernario. I wouldn't be surprised if somebody hunkered down behind the defense line at the Virginia classics department today harbors copies of these close to his heart, to ward off incoming, and to remember an age almost incomprehensibly different from the present. 
 

Gildersleeve (and indeed, with him Virginia classics) appears by all accounts to be the very central-casting model of 19th-Century higher education: the son of a minister, he recalled as an adult that he had read the Gospel of John in Greek at the age of five, “and I have,” he said, “virtually thought in Greek ever since” (Letters 1). He got his classical education in Germany—then surely the best available. He came home, so it seems, in his early 20s already stern and austere—also, not least, a devoted Southerner who a few years later took a bullet for the Confederacy in the (ahem) War of Northern Aggression (Briggs said the wound “identified [Gildersleeve] for years to come as a symbol of broken Southern nobility”).

Gildersleeve came in time to play a pivotal, perhaps the pivotal, role in establishing classics as an academic discipline in the United States.  But much of his conspicuous work in the field cameto psass after he left Virginia for Johns Hopkins. His Virginia years evidently comprise largely the grubby and anonymous task of everyday teaching. “He was forced,” Briggs says, 
 

to prepare nearly 70 lectures semester with scant library facilities; he was forced to do his own primary reading, to do his own work without secondary literature or scholarly support; he was forced to cover all of Greek literature, language (at three levels), and Greek history each term, and for six years he had to do the same with Latin.

In short, he appears to have lived his life in in an intellectual milieu which probably does not exist anywhere on the planet today. By way of backhanded summary and encomium, here is a comment from a review of his work on Gildersleeve's work in Greek syntax:

The acute observation, that the use of ἄν and κε in final constructions depends on the force of ὥς ὅπως, and ὄφρα as conditional relative or temporal adverbs explains much which before seemed inexplicable.”

--Quoted in John Vaio, “Gildersleeve the Syntactician,” in Briggs and Bernario, ed., at 37

Well, that's all right then. Basil Gildersleeve, the soul of Virginia classics.

Founding Narrative

Such things should be said beside the fire in winter-time when a man reclines full-fed on a soft couch, drinking the sweet wine and munching chick-peas - such things as: "Who and whence are you? and how old are you, good man? how old were you when the Mede came?'

Arnaldo Momigliano. Alien Wisdom: The Limits of Hellenization 

(Kindle Locations 1431-1433). Kindle Edition.

Momigliano clarifies: 

The arrival of the Mede in Ionia - that is, Harpagus the Mede's conquest on behalf of Cyrus the Persian about 545 B.C. - was the beginning of a new age for Xenophanes of Colophon. He himself had left his native city as a young man in consequence of that event. At the age of 92 he was still alive, about 472 B.C. The Persian conquest of the kingdom of Lydia involved in one form or another all the Greeks of Asia Minor. The Greeks had crossed swords with the Assyrians and had had their troubles with the Egyptians, but had never lived inside a great empire - at least not after the Hittite Empire of which they remembered nothing. The Lydian rule had been easy to accept, as Lydia was soon dominated by Greek culture - open to Greek traders, artists, soldiers and oracles. Cyrus was as epoch-making for the Greeks as he was for the Jews - though the reasons were different.

Id., 1433.

The Mountains Looked on Marathon....

Two days after the Greek elections might not be the ideal time for this.  Unfortunately, there is no convenient time for this.

Uneasy Lies the Head

 [I] boni príncipi temono non per sé, ma per quelli a’ quali comandano, e li tiranni temeno quelli medesimi a’ quali commandano; però, quanto a maggior numero di gente commandano e son piú potenti, tanto piú temono ed hanno piú nemici. Come credete voi che si spaventasse e stesse con l’animo sospeso quel Clearco, tiranno di Ponto, ogni volta che andava nella piazza o nel teatro, o a qualche convito o altro loco publico, ché, come si scrive, dormiva chiuso in una cassa? o vero quell’altro Aristodemo Argivo, il qual a se stesso del letto avea fatta quasi una prigione, che nel palazzo suo tenea una piccola stanza sospesa in aria ed alta tanto che con scala andar vi bisognava, e quivi con una sua femina dormiva, la madre della quale la notte ne levava la scala, la mattina ve la rimetteva?

 That is:

[G]ood princes do not fear for themselves but for those whom they rule, while tyrants fear those whom they rule; hence the greater the number of people they rule and the more powerful they are, the more fear they feel and the more enemies they have. How fearful and of what an uneasy mind was Clearchus, tyrant of Pontus, whenever he went into the market place or theater, or to some banquet or other public place, who, as it is written, was wont to sleep shut up in a chest! Or that other tyrant Aristodemus, the Argive, who made his bed into a kind of prison: for in his palace he had a little room suspended in air, so high that it could only be reached by a ladder; and there he slept with his woman, whose mother would remove the ladder at night and replace it in the morning.

 So Baldassare Castiglione, The Courtier, Book IV, part 24  (Charles S. Singleton trans., Anchor Paperback ed. 1959).  The anecdote derives from Plutarch.  Shakespeare says that "uneasy lies the head that wears the crown," but he seems to have been thinking of all crowned heads without reference to general beneficence.  

One Thing I Still Don't Know

Is why The Classical Tradition by Anthony Grafton and others is so cheap. I found mine in the bookshop at the Metropolitan Museum of Art at about $40. I did something mean; thinking it must be a mispricing, I snapped it up on the spot. I got my comeuppance, though: I got home to find I could have had it at Amazon for about $32. 

At first look, I would have guessed anywhere from $100 to $300. Not that it is worth that much (except maybe it is), but rather because publishers don't feel ashamed, even in the age of online bookstores, to slap a fancy price on an impressive item.

And impressive is certainly the right word: 1001 (sic) pages of suavely elegant essays intended (quoting the preface)   "to provide a reliable and wide-ranging guide to the reception of classical Graeco-Roman antiquity in all its dimensions in later cultures."
Which is to say: not the stuff you are likely to find in a random Google search, and precisely not what you will find in Google. This is a non-vacuous point: for years I kept my old one-volume Columbia Encyclopaedia on the ready because it had lots of stuff I simply couldn't find on the web. As time went by it was clear that its continuance was largely sentimental, like an old wife dog that you can't bring yourself to put down after so long an attachment. But where on the we will you find the kind of succinct elegance chosen here more or less at random:

Petrarch...made clear that he brought a new viewpoint to the study of the ancient historians. Like Trevet, he knew and prized the great compendia of Eusebius-Jerome and Augustine as well as the ancient historians. But it was Livy and Suetonius--as well as Virgil and Ovid--whose work he designated his 'favorite books' in a programmatic list, made up almost entirely of pagan authors. 'What else,' Petrarch asked, 'is history but the praise of Rome?' Though the question was rhetorical, Petrarch's answer was extremely substantive...

Match that, Jimmy Wales!

Beard Blows a Whistle on Kagan

I wrote a while back about the professor whom I quite liked though he didn't seem to have read anything new since graduates school.  Sounds like he is not alone:

...it is not the shadow of the nineteenth century that hovers most threateningly over Kagan's Thucydides, but the shadow of recent scholarship.  This book is, for the most part, rooted in the work of the 1960s and 1970s as is amply reflected in the footnotes (most of the "keen readers" of Thucydudes' text to whom Kagan referrs are keen readers of a generation or two ago; most of his "brilliant modern historians" were writing half a century go).  Occasionally he alludes darkly to up-to-the-minute "literary" approaches to the History,, those that treat Thucydides as a "purely literary genius, free from the trammels of historical objectivity."  If these allusions refer to the dominant strand of research in Thucydides over the last thirty years or so--studies that stress above all the literary construction of his History, and to links to other genres, cuch as drma and poetry--then Kagan has hardly appreciated their point at all.

 That's Mary Beard in the New York Review of Books for Sept. 30, reviewing Donald Kagan's new Thucydides.  Yet like me with my laggard professor, on the whole she rather liked it.

Copyright Cheesiness

Here's a bit of copyright cheesiness which is probably not illegal (what kind of copyright overreach is illegal these days?) but represents, at least, a want of gentlemanly courtesy on the part of a publisher.

Anyway, I'm lookin' at a copy of SuperReview: Greek, billed as "All You Need to Know!" from somebody called "The Research & Education Association," with a copyright date of 2001. What caught my eye was that it's not modern Greek; the cover specifies "Classical/Ancient." No kidding? A modern mass market publisher turning out a study guide on so esoteric a topic?

Well, no. If you know any Greek at all, a five-second flip through the pages will confirm that there is (virtually) nothing new about this book at all. The style, presentation, even (perhaps especially) the type face are a dead giveaway that it goes back to another century, perhaps more.

Twenty seconds on Google Books is enough to confirm the suspicion: in fact, what we have here is The First Year of Greek, assembled by James Turney Allen, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Greek at Berkeley. The title page says it was published by The Macmillan Company with a copyright date of 1917.

I suppose, then, you could say it's fair game, out of copyright. And really, now, is this anything worse than what Dover does when it reprints oldies and sells them cheap (Powell Portland was selling the SuperRerview Greek for as comparatively modest $8.95).

Well, yes it is different. For the fact is, granting all the subtle cues, still there was not a murmur of a trace of a whisper of a hint that this was an old text repackaged. We do have a copyright notice; it says "Copyright 2001 by Research & Education Association." No mention of the original Macmillan copyright. The book does list Allen's name in the author position on the title page,but it adds "...and the Staff of Research & Education, Carl Fuchs, Language Program Director." If this is the way these guys do business, I'd say ol' Carl has a pretty easy gig.

Other than that, zip. Well, there is a scattering of pictures, at least one of which shows tourists in shorts and tee-shirts, but that does more to enhance than correct any possible deception.

The text, by the way--in terms of content, it's pretty respectable, intelligently selected to make its point. But the support stuff--review questions and suchlike--is primitive compared to what we would expect today. If you really want top refresh your Greek, I think you want the admirable offerings from the Joint Association of Classical Teachers, available via Cambridge University Press. Of course, you might be dishonoring the memory of James Turney Allen, but that has already been done.

Afterthought: Or maybe it's not fair game. I learn here that a second edition was published in 1931. Apparently Allen himself died in 1948. Could it be that some kind of copyright claim continues via this 1931 text?

Cool New Google Toy: Herodotus Maps

This has got to be the coolest new Google plaything I've seen in quite a while--Herodotus maps. I suspect Herodotus would have loved it. I'll bookmark it right next to Google Maps War & Peace.

H/T Rufus.