Cut These Words Into My Stone - Wolfe

Courageous Timocritus, this is his grave.

War spares the coward, not the brave.

Greek epigrams give us a view into the lives and thoughts of individuals – who may or may not have been writing for an audience.  Clearly, when we read Thucydides, Plato or Aristophanes, we are participating in a one way didactic exchange.  One is a singer of the great events – at least how he saw them, the next is engaged in a teleological discourse that we view from over the shoulder of history, the latter was turning his jaundiced eye on the cultural decay around him.  The audience may have been physically present or somewhat removed – but all three put their ideas into the world with the expectation that more than a handful of individuals would receive it.  There may be admonition or a bearing of witness in their work, but there is always a take away.  If I were to write a note in a guestbook at a wedding, set up a memorial plaque in a relatives honor, or leave some graffiti expressing my views on such and such, and this may be anachronistic, I would be doing so in the context of a limited receivership.  A random passerby, a handful of interested parties, God.  It is this impulse which I believe the elegiac epigrams, lovingly assembled by Michael Wolfe, allow us to glimpse.

I am not going to be discussing the organizational structure of Cut These Words Into My Stone, other than to say it is logically arranged with each chapter beginning with an essay to provide context and background to the following epigrams.  The text is bi-lingual with each English translation followed by the Greek.

It is rare that one reads a book on the ancient world, published in the last 30 years, without being reminded of the deeply innate misogyny in Ancient Greek culture.  I don’t care to argue the reality or mention the ubiquitous nature of those structures, but the needed recognition of that reality has become rather dogmatic and monumental.  Simply put: it’s complicated.  Recent scholarship has highlighted instances of female power in certain social contexts; mystery religions, priesthoods, and a central role within the oikos.  I doubt a thete prior to the advent of the Athenian navy would have found himself more advantaged than the wife, daughter or slave of an aristocratic household.

It’s complicated.  The epigram that I believe rewards being read and considered from multiple angles is as follows:

I, Callicrateia, bore twenty-nine children.

Not one son or daughter died before me.

I lived to be a hundred and five and

Never set a shaking hand upon a cane.

If this was written at her behest before her death, then it is much deserved boasting of her strength and good fortune.  If it was composed or commissioned by family after her passing then it shows an appreciation for an aspect of her life beyond what anyone would call prodigious fertility and skill in seeing children into adulthood – at a time when that was a very unsure thing.  The last line: Never set a shaking hand upon a cane.  An appreciation for the quality of life that Callicrateia lived up until the end.  It is apparent that she was more than an old crone sitting with her distaff, unnoticed, the years of child-rearing far behind her.  Could this be a woman with a role, with respect- whose family had affection for her?  This is jarring when juxtaposed with the writing of someone like Keuls.

Epigram for a man 3^rd-2^nd century B.C.E:

Stranger, Don’t Mourn me.  Pass by this tomb.

Even dead, I have nothing worth lamenting.

I enjoyed one woman, who grew old with me.

 

Cut These Words Into My Stone: Ancient Greek Epitaphs

Translated by Michael Wolfe

178 pages

The John Hopkins Univesity Press, 2013

ISBN 978-1-4214-0803-3

Memory And The Mediterranean - Braudel

Fernand Braudel  (1901-1985) hardly needs me to rhapsodize his bona-fides.  If you have never had the pleasure of reading his work, delivered through the skill of his long time translator Sian Reynolds, then Memory and The Mediterranean would be a good starting point.  Braudel was a French scholar primarily concerned with markets, the rise of international capitalism and especially the 15^th – 19^th centuries.  References within the text of Memory will make clear his connection to the Annales School.  Braudel has a very conversational tone in his writing.  His insights are unfailingly sharp, his openness to speculation (and identifying it as such) is refreshing.  If there was ever an area of study with more  labyrinthine relationships than the historical confines of the Mediterranean, I cannot think of it.  His speculation provides a prism for what did happen – making the reader consider if it was inevitable or not.  He presents the Mediterranean as more than the littoral zones.  It is a whole and particulars, nodes of progress and backwardness, an ellipsis that is at once sharply divided east and west - as well as porous.  He presents it as an entity, physical and cultural that has its headwaters in the deep past, its roots to the points of the compass and as a grand stage which successive cultures move across, blending into or bleeding-out one another.

This is all quite remarkable when considering that Memory was originally intended as a part of an entire series, his work along-side that of others.  Seen in a vacuum, the quality of the work is illuminated.  When the project was cancelled the manuscripts apparently sat around for a number of decades, only being edited and published in French in 1998, the English translation coming in 2001.

The book is divided into 8 chapters.  Chapter one is almost an extension of the wonderful preamble in the form of a poem by Christopher Logue.  It asks the reader to see the Mediterranean.  On the scale of geologic time all the events that the book covers take place in the last seconds of the clock.  The narrative progresses from the physical environs, the furtive first voyages; on the margins? Island hopping? Boldly going?  The Upper Sea washing the blood from Sargon’s weapons.  The bridge between Egypt and Mesopotamia, with the Levant as middleman.  The megalithic culture(s) that spread the voluptuous female idols across the basin, into Central and Northern Europe.  All of the great cultures are covered; the Minoans, Phoenicians, Etruscans, the foundation of Carthage,  the spread of Greek culture – that pushed individuals and communities further apart physically, but created a cultural koine that would unite great swaths of the Mediterranean for the next dozen centuries.  The coming of Rome is covered in a way I found very attractive.  The end of the Republic is given a very brief span, while the foundational struggles of the 3^rd century BCE and transformation after the 2^nd and 3^rd centuries CE are given ample room to breathe (as much as a fast pased narrative of this type will allow).  The contrast between the Greeks contributions to philosophy to those of Rome is striking.  Braudel makes the case that Rome really only differentiated itself in its material science and architecture, co-opting much else from Etruscans, Latins and Magna Graecia .  His treatment of Roman law, which we in the west inherited, is brief but satisfying.  The text ends with a note by the editor reminding the reader that this was meant to segue into another authors work.  They could have finished the book in a less abrupt manner but I respect them for not doing so.  They didn’t need to put any words in Braudel’s mouth.

 

Memory And The Mediterranean

Fernand Braudel

Translated by Sian Reynolds

Edited by Roselyne De Ayala & Paule Braudel

365 pages

Published by Alfred A. Knopf 2001

ISBN: 0-375-40426-0



Histoires Grecques - Sartre

This is a significant book.  Another reviewer described it as pointillism.  Signac, Seurat, Sartre.

Sartre's Histoires Grecques marks him, in my opinion, as a master of the aforementioned style, at least as it pertains to Mediterranean civilization. I  unequivocally and enthusiastically recommend Histoires to anyone who wants a "feel" for Greek History; its variety, depth, geographic and temporal expanse, adventure, tragedy, heights and even humbleness in some instances.  His book is not a history of Pericles, Alcibiades, or Alexander.  Its about the milieu that the great names moved across, influencing and being shaped by in turn.

The book is broken down into 43 chapters that are roughly chronological. Chapters 1 - 8 are vignettes of life and changes during what we call the Archaic period of Greece.  The topics range from colonization and tyranny, to the experience of mercenaries with chapter 8 setting the stage for the Ionian revolt and the fireworks of the decade 490-79. 

Chapters 9 - 17 are concerned with the particulars (in the most literal sense) of the Classical age of Greece; women, metics, imperialism, slavery, trade, what it means to be a citizen and who is excluded from that.  In the decades after the Kings Peace, before Alexander marched East, what role did commerce and "Greekness" play in Syria, the Levant and Arabia?

18 - 33 The corpse of Alexander's empire is partitioned.  Its skin is a veneer over much older civilizations.  Poleis still exist, and new ones come into being,  but as time progresses the relationship between the individual and state changes. 

Chapters 34-43 address the coming of Rome and the eventual rise of Christianity.

Sartre is an expert on the Greco-Roman East.  This book, beyond the first chapters is very East facing. There are a couple chapters that deal with Jewishness in a Hellenistic context. I found these to be fascinating.  The final chapter "on remaining Pagan in a Christian world" is a good foot to end on.

Again,  you owe it to yourself to read this book if you profess interest in the Greeks.

Histores Grecgues: Snapshots From Antiquity
Maurice Sartre
Translated by Catherine Porter
422 pages
Revealing Antiquity 17, G.W. Bowersock, General Editor
Belknap/Harvard 2009
ISBN-13: 978-0-674-03212-5

First Things

Hello!  This is the first of what I hope will be many posts that will allow me to air and organize my thoughts in the form of reviews of past and current scholarly and popular publications on Antiquity.

No One Sea. The Mediterranean. Mare Nostrum. Et Nemo Est Mare?

There are dozens of books on the classical civilizations of the Mediterranean basin and Near East published every year.  The reviews here will be of works that address topics as varied as ethnography, military history, art, archeology, gender studies, modern reception of classical sources and popular narrative histories. In short something for everyone.

I am not a historian or a writer.  The only Latin I have had was nearly 17 years ago.  But I had some wonderful Greek a couple nights back.  So it should be safe to say that this blog is aimed at those who are like me and want to learn about the ancient world - and to be steered towards those authors who can facilitate your private study. 

Thanks for reading this far.  I plan to update the blog at least once a week. Feedback is most welcome.