The ancient Mediterranean was a multilingual place. Although a few languages were in common usage—Phoenician, Greek, Aramaic, Punic, and Latin, in different times and places—many other languages were spoken, including Iberian, Gaulish, Etruscan, Oscan, Hittite, Hebrew, Egyptian, and Numidian. Many people, especially in the great port cities like Carthage, Rhodes, and Alexandria, would have encountered numerous different languages in their daily lives. It is no surprise that this experience of a polyglot world was reflected in classical literature. The ways in which ancient writers represented multilingualism and language barriers offer some useful models for us as speculative fiction writers today.
Greece
Top Five Greek and Latin Poems that Read Like Teenage Facebook Updates
Woot! We made it! Hidden Youth has gotten funded! Thank you so much to everyone who contributed, spread the word, or expressed support over the past few weeks. I am so thrilled to be part of this anthology.
And now, as promised, I give you: The Top Five Greek and Latin Poems that Read Like Teenage Facebook Updates
5. #CRUSHINGSOHARDYOUCANTEVEN (Sappho, frag. 31)
He’s lucky as the gods,
any man who sits by you,
listening close to your
sweet voice
and lovely laugh. It just
makes my heart tremble in my chest.
When I glance at you, words
won’t come,
my tongue shatters, a thin
flame runs under my skin,
I can’t see,
my ears ring.
Sweat pours, I break out
trembling, I’m paler than a
flower. I could almost die.
But I can take it all…
4. #THATONEGUY (Horace, Satires 1.3.1-3)
The trouble with all these musical types is when you’re out with friends
and you beg them to sing, nothing will open their lips,
but when you don’t want them to sing they won’t shut up.
3. #DTMFA (Catullus, Poems 85)
I hate and I love. Maybe you wonder why I do this?
I don’t know, but I feel it happening and it’s torture.
2. #YOLO (Archilochus. Elegies frag. 232.8)
Aisimides, no one who listens to other people’s
criticisms ever gets to have a good time.
1. #BESTFRENEMIES (Martial, Epigrams 1.32)
I don’t like you, Sabidius, and I don’t know why.
All I know is: I don’t like you.
Announcements from your hosts.
New Ancient Mediterranean Database: Public Monuments in Roman Greece
A new project called Monuments of Roman Greece is under development at the University of Oxford. It covers about four centuries, c. 200 BCE – 200 CE, from when Rome began to expand into the Greek area of influence to the height of the Roman Empire, and will result in a series of articles plus a database.
From the project website:
“Under the Roman Empire the marketplaces, streets, gymnasia and theatres of the cities of Greece were full of monuments such as tombs, inscribed stelai and – most numerous of all – statues. There were statues of bronze and of marble, portraying gods, heroes, emperors, kings and local dignitaries. Some of these monuments had already stood for centuries; others were fairly recent. Arguably no urban culture in history, with the possible exception of Rome itself, has set up such vast numbers of monuments in its public spaces. The nearest modern analogy for the amount of cultural material on display in the Roman period polis would be the museum. Yet the analogy falls short – the settings where these monuments stood were not places designed primarily for the passive viewing of works of art, they were vibrant public spaces, alive with the tumult and commotion of the city. If we are to understand the society and culture of these cities it is vital that we understand the impact of public monuments on the people who moved about them in their daily lives.“
The work is carried out by Dr. C. P. Dickenson at the Faculty of Classics, with Prof. R. R. R. Smith as scientific adviser. Both the website and the database are still in progress. Also, it sounds like the final home of the database is not finalized at the time of this writing; however, a browsable version is currently up on the University of Oxford website.
Visit the Public Monuments in Roman Greece website for scope and instructions on searching plus more info, or read Dr. Dickenson’s blog for behind-the-scenes tidbits on the development work, among other things.
Image: Bronze statuette of a veiled and masked dancer, from the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, bequest of Walter C. Baker in 1971, accession number 1972.118.95, by Eppu Jensen (Greek; 3rd-2nd century BCE)
The Trouble With Primary Sources
Primary sources are great. They are essential. Without them, we would know vastly less about history than we do.
Because primary sources are so essential to our knowledge of history, it is easy to make the mistake of taking them too much at their word. Primary sources are like every other piece of writing: limited by the author’s perspective and subject to scrutiny and challenge. The trouble isn’t even just that primary sources can be wrong (although they can), but that the really interesting questions rarely have just one right answer. The answer we get from one primary source may be incomplete, even if it’s not wrong.
For example, suppose you’re writing a story about an ancient Greek who ran away from a battle. What would his fellow Greeks think of him? What would he think of himself? With a little research you might come across this fragment of a poem by Tyrtaeus:
Recommended Reading: Medea
One of the hallmarks of modern storytelling is toying with the conventions of a genre. Familiar stories get retold with surprising twists and the tropes that everyone can see coming are turned upside-down and inside-out. It’s not just a modern game, though. Older stories can be just as cunning with their twists. When I’m trying to think about how to do something different with a familiar tale, one of the examples I look back to is Euripides’ tragedy Medea.
Medea is one of the classics of ancient Greek theatre. There are plenty of good translations available and it’s not hard to get your hands on one. If you’re looking for an online edition, here are a few. I discussed the play before in comparison to Star Wars, so I won’t bore you with summarizing the whole plot again (check the link if you want a quick reminder). Rather, I want to talk about two interesting things Euripides does with the story.
The Misuses of Myth
Myths, legends, fairy tales, and other stories passed down through the generations are at the root of our storytelling tradition. They are the earliest stories in our literature and some of the first stories we learn as children. It is no wonder that we keep going back to mythology looking for deeper meanings. The drive to find hidden meaning in myth leads to some misguided interpretations. Two common mistakes are Freudian theory and the “forgotten history” theory.
Freudian slips
Freudian theory holds that myths are expressions of universal human drives which we have suppressed in the name of civilization. As the things that we cannot talk about openly come out in our stories, we can hold up mythology as a mirror to our own subconscious in order to see our hidden impulses better. Sigmund Freud’s attempts to explain the human psyche by reference to dreams, myths, and other supposed insights into the unconscious are at the root of this approach, but there are other classic exemplars, such as Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment, which applies the theory to the Grimms’ fairy tales. (Note that I am speaking of Freudian theory as a way of interpreting myth; I am not in any position to judge Freudianism as a psychological theory.)
Gift Exchange
Gift exchange is part of festive celebrations for many people in the modern world, including many traditions whose gift-giving season has just passed. In the pre-modern world, though, gift exchange was often a vital part of social, political, and economic life.
The essential principle of gift exchange is reciprocity. Giving someone a gift obliges them to return a gift of equal value. In the modern market economy in which every item can be assigned a monetary value, this is cause for anxiety (and comedy) over gift-giving, but in earlier societies value was measured in other ways. The value of a gift often depended on the prestige of the person giving it. Since gifts were reciprocal, they created a relationship, of which the gift acted as tangible proof. The modern taboo against asking the price of a gift (“Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth”) attempts to reinforce this kind of value in a monetized world.
Star Wars and the Classics, Part II: The Original Trilogy
Yesterday we looked at how classical literature offers interesting ways of looking at the Star Wars prequel movies. We continue today with the original movies.
Episode IV: A New Hope – Homer, the Odyssey, Books 14-22
Episode IV can be read, from a certain point of view, as an essay in heroism. In particular, we see three different kinds of heroes: the always-was-a-hero, the becoming-a-hero, and the choosing-to-be-a-hero.
Leia is the always-was. She is a hero from the beginning of the movie straight through to the end. We never see her stop being heroic, even when being rescued. She has been part of the rebellion literally since she was born and even the destruction her homeworld doesn’t stop her.
Luke is the becoming. He starts as just a farmboy who dreams of far-off adventure. When he discovers his true heritage he strives to live up to the legacy of his father Anakin the great Jedi. Much is expected of him and he does his best to be the hero that people like Obi-Wan and Leia need him to be.
Han is the choosing-to-be. He’s a smuggler and scoundrel who isn’t in it for the rebellion. He just wants to do a job and get paid. He could have just flown away from Yavin with his hold full of cash and nobody would have been surprised. Instead, he decides to come back and help Luke blow up the Death Star.
The same three kinds of heroes appear in the Odyssey. In Book 14, Odysseus has just made it safely home to Ithaca but is still in disguise, getting the lay of the land and figuring out how to deal with the suitors who have been gorging themselves in his hall. The next few books follow Odysseus as he gathers allies, makes plans, and finally confronts the suitors in the final battle in Book 22.
Odysseus is here the always-was. He is a veteran of the great war at Troy and a cunning warrior. He begins the epic as a hero and never falters. Nothing stops him in his determination to get home and reclaim his place as king. Books 14-22 show him as a steady, crafty commander, biding his time and waiting for the right moment to strike.
Odysseus’ son Telemachus is the becoming. As the epic begins, he is just entering manhood and starting to take his first tentative steps into his father’s old role. For Telemachus, the Odyssey is all about proving that he is a worthy son to a heroic father that he knows only through stories. In this stretch of the epic he finally meets his father and proves that he can live up to his example.
The choosing-to-be hero of the Odyssey is Eumaeus, swineherd to Odysseus’ house and one of the servants who remains loyal to Odysseus, even when his master has been gone for twenty years. The sensible thing for Eumaeus to do would have been to abandon Odysseus and suck up to the suitors, like many of the other servants do, to secure his place in the household when Penelope eventually marries one of them. Instead, he sticks by his old master and helps him take back his home.
Star Wars and the Classics, Part I: The Prequels
Star Wars takes many of its cues from mythology and classical history. Here’s some recommended reading if you want to see how themes from the classics found their way to a galaxy long ago and far, far away.
Episode I: The Phantom Menace – Homer, the Iliad, Book 1
I can still remember my feeling of anticipation when I first sat in the theatre to watch The Phantom Menace. We’d waited years to get the story of Anakin Skywalker’s fall from grace. We were going back in time to a more civilized age, a golden age of Jedi knights and the sophistication of the galactic republic.
The screen went dark. John Williams’s fanfare blasted from the speakers. The opening text began to scroll up from the bottom. This was everything we had been waiting for!
So what’s this crap about taxation of outlying trade routes? Huh? What is this, Accounting Wars?
The story began. We saw Jedi sitting in a conference room waiting for some cowardly bureaucrats to come and talk turkey. My heart sank in disappointment. (And we hadn’t even gotten to Jar-Jar Binks yet.)
It took many more years and several viewings of Episode I for me to appreciate what George Lucas was doing in this movie. There is a point here and it’s an important one: momentous events don’t start out looking momentous. Terrible things happen because no one is paying close enough attention to stop them when they’re small enough to be managed; only when they roll out of control do people realize what’s happening. Of course the fall of the galactic empire started because of a minor trade dispute and a lonely boy from a desert planet in the middle of nowhere. It could have started in any number of ways, but they all would have seemed just as trivial.
(Mind you, this doesn’t actually make Phantom Menace any better as a movie. It’s still plagued by terrible dialogue, wooden acting, and disturbing racial caricatures. But as a storytelling choice, it’s interesting.)
The classic mythic example of small causes leading to momentous and terrible events is the Trojan War. While pieces of the story are told in many different sources, there’s no single work that covers the entire war. Book 1 of the Iliad, however, puts us in the middle of the action to watch the last act of the war unfold. I’ve written about Book 1 of the Iliad here before, but it’s one of those texts that rewards going back to again and again.
As the Iliad opens, the Trojan war has already been going on for ten years. What we witness here is the conflict between two of the Greek captains, Achilles and Agamemnon. It begins when Agamemnon refuses to ransom a captive woman back to her father. By the end of the book, Achilles has withdrawn his forces from the fighting, which will swing the war in the Trojans’ favor, leading to the near defeat of the Greek forces, the death of Achilles’ friend Patroclus, and Achilles slaying the Trojan prince Hector in madness and grief. The death of Hector robbed the Trojans of their best warrior and sealed the fate of Troy. And it all flows from a dispute over the ransoming of a prisoner from an outlying village.
Fantasy Religions: Interacting With the Divine
In the previous installment in the fantasy religions series, we looked at how people following traditional religious customs often perceive the divine around them in physical, tangible forms. Today we turn to the question: how do you interact with such divine forces?
There’s an old joke that says a young man went to his priest one day and declared: “I’m an atheist! I don’t believe in god!” And the priest replied: “Do you think He cares?”
It’s a good joke, but in the doctrines of Christianity, as in the other modern monotheisms, Judaism and Islam, belief matters a great deal. Believing in a god and a certain set of ideas about that god and humanity’s relationship to him/her/it is what defines membership in the religions we are most familiar with in the modern west. Not that everyone is in lockstep about their beliefs: modern religions can have enormous debates about what to believe, but belief is still at the center.
In most traditional religions, belief is a non-issue. As we saw before, peoples following traditional religions see the divine presence in the physical world in a literal, not metaphysical way. To an ancient Gaul, Belenus was not just the god of the sun, the sun itself was Belenus. To say to an ancient Gaul: “I don’t believe in Belenus” would be like saying: “I don’t believe in the sun.” Their response would probably not be: “Do you think he cares?” but: “Well, what do you think is shining on you, idiot?” There were no professions of belief in traditional religions, no creeds or catechisms, no inquisitions or doctrinal schisms.
Co-Geeking 
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