Classical Bookworm

BBC Radio gets Juvenal

The subject of this week's Greek and Latin Voices on BBC Radio 3 is the Roman satirist, Juvenal. Though his name is not too familiar, some of his sayings are: "bread and circuses"; "rare bird"; "who will watch the watchers?"; "sound mind in a sound body" (mens sana in corpore sano). I think he would have laughed heartily at the blogosphere:

Since there are so many poets wasting paper and everyone’s time anyway – why not write? (Book I, Satire I, It is Hard Not to Write Satire, line 19)

Here are the programs for this week:

Monday: Maria Wyke sets Juvenal in a literary context and considers how Dr Johnson reworked Satire 3 into his poem, London.

Tuesday: Contemporary writer and satirist Alistair Beaton explains his admiration for Juvenal and how many of the morally questionable ideas of 2nd century Rome are still relevant to 21st century Britain.

Wednesday: Dr Fred Jones of Liverpool University examines Juvenal's literary techniques and discovers a collage of genres taken from both Roman and Greek literature.

Thursday: Dr Susanna Braund looks at recent re-interpretations of Juvenal's Satires and sets Roman satire into a wider context of Roman anxiety about masculinity.

The 15-minute talks will be archived for a week at The Essay.

The History of Herodotus on BBC Radio 3

The subject of this week's Greek and Latin Voices on BBC Radio 3 is the Father of History, Herodotus.

Monday: Prof Christopher Pelling explores the work of the great Greek historian Herodotus, whose The Histories, the story of the Greco-Persian war in the 5th century BC, was considered the first work of history in western literature.

Tuesday: Author Tom Holland recalls his schoolboy passion for Herodotus' shaggy dog stories, complete with naked queens, dolphins and cannibals, and how, through Herodotus' account of the wars between Greece and Persia in the 5th century BC, he was given his first taste of tragedy.

Wednesday: Prof Emily Greenwood considers the enduring popularity of Herodotus' work and his importance in travel writing, journalism, anthropology, science, and the art of storytelling. In the light of Herodotus' tales of cryptic gifts of animals and arrows, goat-footed men, and bald-headed tribes, she also explores what this 5th-century BC historian can tell us about cultural diversity today.

Thursday: Prof Paul Cartledge looks - through the writings of Herodotus - at the famous battle of Thermopylae, where the West met the East, as 300 Spartans faced the might of the Persian army at a pass known as the 'Hot Gates', and the West won and remained free - just. Prof Cartledge looks at why the Persians lost, why this was such a crucial battle for both sides, and why the 300 Spartans, as they waited for the Persians to attack, spent their time combing their long hair.

The 15-minute talks will be archived for a week at The Essay.

Greek and Latin Voices Return

After a few weeks off the Greek and Latin Voices series resumes on BBC Radio 3. This week features Euripedes:

Monday: Prof Christopher Pelling examines the life and work of Euripides, whose surviving tragedies fascinate theatre audiences today as much as in 5th century BC Athens.

Tuesday: Distinguished neuroscientist Prof Susan Greenfield explores her lifelong passion for Euripides' play The Bacchae, which she says still offers fresh insights into the workings of the human mind.

Wednesday: Classics professor Simon Goldhill explores how the work of Euripides is open to so many and such different interpretations, and also considers why in recent years his plays are the most frequently staged of all the Greek tragedies.

Thursday: Fiona Macintosh, Senior Research Fellow at the Archive for the Performance of Greek Drama at Oxford, explores the enduring popularity of Euripides through the centuries right up to the present day.

Listen at The Essay.

Odyssey: Mini

This made me laugh, but then I'm easily amused...

via rogueclassicism

Reminder: Greek and Latin Voices on BBC Radio 3

Don't miss your last chance to listen to Homer Week on BBC 3's new series, Greek and Latin Voices. The programs are only available online for a week, so make time this weekend to listen to the four 15-minute glimpses into the world of Homer. Monday's show looked at Homer's very human heros, and on Tuesday was presented a perspective on what Homer's work says about poets, perhaps including Homer himself. I particularly enjoyed Wednesday's episode, in which Oliver Taplin takes a literary view and looks at some of Homer's themes and devices. In the last program, poet Michael Longley brings Homer into the modern age through his own poetry. If you do listen to Monday's program, stay online to hear the great music that makes up the rest of the podcast.

Next week they turn to Latin literature and Horace. To see what else is coming up, see the Greek and Latin Voices schedule.

Crash Course in Classics on BBC Radio 3

BBC Radio 3 will soon be starting a new series of short programmes on the Greek and Roman classics:

Greek And Latin Voices, a new series within BBC Radio 3's The Essay, offers an accessible modern guide to some of the foundation texts of Western culture. Each week, the series focuses on the works of one of the major figures of Greek or Roman literature, philosophy, history and politics, including wide-ranging essays from contemporary novelists and poets, politicians and philosophers, as well as leading classical academics.

The 12-week series will be broadcast in six two-week sections. Each fortnight includes one week with a Greek focus and one week with a Latin focus; those featured over the series include Horace, Augustine, Tacitus, Thucydides, Euripides and Lucien.

The series is anchored by two classical authorities: Chris Pelling (Greek specialist and Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford) and Maria Wyke (Latin). Chris and Maria introduce the first essay in each sequence, offering listeners an opening insight into the life, times and work of the writer in focus. (more...)

The series starts with "Homer week" on December 10, and can be heard at The Essay.

via ARLT

Books and Bathrooms

The Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Society has made scores of articles, stretching back 40 years, available free online. I just had to share this tidbit from Archives, Libraries, and the Order of the Biblical Books by Menahem Haran.

During [the period of the Caesars], a vast number of private libraries also arose there, so much so that Seneca commented (De Tranquillitate Animi, IX, 5, 7) that books were no longer used for studying, only for decorating dining-halls. In every respectable home, he added, books became de rigeur, just like bathrooms.

And two thousand years later, the same kinds of people are buying the entire Loeb Classical Library, including 10 volumes of Seneca, to decorate their homes.

via awilum.com

Classics and the Loeb Classical Library

Here are some excerpts from an interview with Jeffrey Henderson, editor of the Loeb Classical Library, on the occasion of the launch of A Loeb Classical Library Reader. I thought he had some interesting things to say about the Loeb library and about the study of classics.

"The Loeb Library in the 1970s began to replace some of the older translations with modern ones that could be straight translations. And there's quite a lot of sexy, classical literature, explicit classical literature that needed to be replaced in the old editions and we've been doing that along the way, as we can. It always depends upon finding the right author for these things because not everybody is a good translator, and not everybody can do the Latin, or Greek text and the English translation at the same time. We don't split the tasks. It's always the same person that does both the Latin or Greek and the English. So, sometimes it takes decades to find the right person to do one of these."

...

"Yes. People don't know that the novel actually began among the Greeks, and we have half a dozen really good ones. They, again, are a genre that hasn't been translated, or it wasn't considered very important for classical literature for a long time. They were in the Renaissance when people imitated them to create picaresque novels and romances. But classical scholars sort of shied away from them as being trivial kinds of literature. I'm doing a volume of two of them; that'll be fun."

Gilgamesh: "Dated and Confusing"

One of the many horses I've fallen off this year is Gilgamesh, so in an attempt to inspire myself to get back on I took a turn through Technorati and found these two gems.

In the tradition of David Lassman, Aussie Tim Stearne decided to send the first tablet of the Epic of Gilgamesh to some publishers for consideration. His submission was universally rejected—one respondent called it "dated and confusing"—but he did get some helpful advice about the benefits of using a word processor instead of clay tablets.

And for your listening pleasure, here is an excerpt from Gilgamesh accompanied by a reconstruction of a Mesopotamian "Lyre of Ur." Totally cool or incredibly geeky—you decide!

video via Diario de Tepintzin

Daphne and Marcela

Today, while listening to Richard Strauss' opera Daphne and reading some explanation in my mythology text, I noticed some similarities between her and Marcela from Don Quixote. Daphne is (or was) such a well-known tale that it could have been the inspiration for Marcela. You decide:

Companion of Diana, [Daphne]'s joy was in the depths of the forests and the spoils of the chase; a headband kept her flowing hair in place. Many suitors courted her, while she cared not for love or marriage; a virgin she roamed the pathless woods. Her father often said, "My daughter, you owe me a son-in-law and grandchildren"; she, hating the marriage torch as if it were a disgrace, blushed and embraced her father saying, "Allow me, dearest father, always to be a virgin. Jupiter granted this to Diana." [Her father] Peneus granted her prayer; but Daphne's beauty allowed her not to be as she desired and her loveliness ran counter to her wish."

—Ovid, Metamorphoses