By: John Priest,
on 9/19/2016
Among the world’s most widely studied thinkers, Aristotle established systematic logic and helped to progress scientific investigation in fields as diverse as biology and political theory. But how much do you really know about this ancient philosopher?
The post How well do you know Aristotle? [quiz] appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Cassandra Gill,
on 9/5/2016
It’s back-to-school time again – time for getting back into the swing of things and adapting to busy schedules. Summer vacation is over, and it’s back to structured days of homework and exam prep. These rigid fall schedules have probably been the norm for you ever since you were in kindergarten.
The post How much do you know about ancient Greek education? appeared first on OUPblog.
By: John Priest,
on 9/4/2016
Among the world’s most widely studied thinkers, Aristotle established systematic logic and helped to progress scientific investigation in fields as diverse as biology and political theory. His thought became dominant during the medieval period in both the Islamic and the Christian worlds, and has continued to play an important role in fields such as philosophical psychology, aesthetics, and rhetoric.
The post Philosopher of the month: Aristotle appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Eleanor Jackson,
on 4/14/2016
“You Greeks are children”. That’s what an Egyptian priest is supposed to have said to a visiting Greek in the 6th century BC. And in a sense he was right. We think of Ancient Greece as, well, “ancient”, and it is now known to go back to Mycenaean culture of the second half of the 2nd millennium BC. But Egyptian civilisation is much earlier than that: in the mid 2nd millennium BC it was at its height (the “New Kingdom”), but its origins go right into the 3rd millennium BC or even earlier.
The post Ancient Greek and Egyptian interactions appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Kim Behrens,
on 3/31/2016
Some four decades ago the late Sir Moses Finley, then Professor of Ancient History at Cambridge University, published a powerful series of lectures entitled Democracy Ancient and Modern (1973, republished in an augmented second edition, 1985). He himself had personally suffered the atrocious deficit of democracy that afflicted his native United States in the 1950s, forcing him into permanent exile, but my chief reason for citing his book here, apart from out of continuing intellectual respect, is that its title could equally well have been Democracy Ancient Versus Modern.
The post And the lot fell on… sortition in Ancient Greek democratic theory & practice appeared first on OUPblog.
By: DanP,
on 3/23/2016
One might think of classicists as the most tradition-bound of humanist scholars, but in fact they were the earliest and most enthusiastic adopters of computing and digital technology in the humanities. Today even classicists who do not work on digital projects use digital projects as tools every day. One reason for this is the large, but defined corpus of classical texts at the field’s core.
The post Classics in the digital age appeared first on OUPblog.
By: John Priest,
on 3/14/2016
Every year, millions of people visit California in search of beaches, hiking, celebrity sightings, and more. In the map below, Peter J. Holliday shows us his version of California, focusing on the rich history of classically inspired art and architecture in Southern California. Enjoy the stories of grand landmarks such as Hearst Castle, Pasadena City […]
The post A guide to Southern California for classical art enthusiasts [interactive map] appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Samantha Zimbler,
on 3/2/2016
The so-called “Getty Hexameters” represent an unusual set of early Greek ‘magical’ incantations (epoidai) found engraved on a small, fragmentary tablet of folded lead. The rare verses provide an exciting new window into the early practice and use of written magic and incantatory spells in the Greek polis of the 5th century BCE.
The post Early Greek incantations from Selinous appeared first on OUPblog.
By: John Priest,
on 2/27/2016
The OUP Philosophy team have selected Plato (c. 429–c. 347 BC) as their February Philosopher of the Month. After his death in 347 BC, educators at the Academy continued teaching Plato’s works into the Roman era. Today he is perhaps the most widely studied philosopher of all time.
The post How well do you know Plato? [quiz] appeared first on OUPblog.
By: John Priest,
on 2/7/2016
The OUP Philosophy team have selected Plato (c. 429–c.347 BC) as their February Philosopher of the Month. The best known and most widely studied of all the ancient Greek philosophers, Plato laid the groundwork for Western philosophy and Christian theology. Plato was most likely born in Athens, to Ariston and Perictione, a noble, politically active family.
The post Philosopher of the month: Plato appeared first on OUPblog.
By: KatherineS,
on 2/5/2016
Most people have a good idea what it is to have a Stoical attitude to life, but what it means to have an Epicurean attitude is not so obvious. When attempting to decipher the true nature of Epicureanism it is first necessary to dispel the impression that fine dining is its central theme.
The post Epicureanism: eat, drink, and be merry? appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Samantha Zimbler,
on 2/3/2016
Imagine how the world appeared to the ancient Greeks and Romans: there were no aerial photographs (or photographs of any sort), maps were limited and inaccurate, and travel was only by foot, beast of burden, or ship. Traveling more than a few miles from home meant entering an unfamiliar and perhaps dangerous world.
The post Geography in the ancient world appeared first on OUPblog.
By: DanP,
on 1/27/2016
Greek gods and goddesses have been a part of cultural history since ancient times, but how much do you really know about them? You can learn more about these figures from Greek mythology by reading the lesser known facts below and by visiting the newly launched Oxford Classical Dictionary online.
The post Ten things you may not have known about Greek gods and goddesses appeared first on OUPblog.
Iphigenia in Tauris by Euripides was first performed in 414 BCE. Euripides and the Greeks considered it a tragedy even though these days literary folk like to argue otherwise. But no one dies! There is no blood and keening, no eye gouging! It kind of has a happy ending! What ancient Greeks considered a tragedy is quite different from our modern day definition and it seems completely pointless and silly to waste ink arguing over how to classify this play. But I guess scholars need something to do and it is harmless in the scheme of things.
If you recall your Greek stories, Iphigenia is the daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra. Agamemnon sacrificed her in order bring the winds that would get the Greek fleet to Troy where the dastardly Paris had absconded with Helen, his brother’s wife. That’s Agamemnon’s brother, Menelaus, not Paris’s brother, Hector. Clytemnestra killed Agamemnon on his victorious return from Troy ten years later in part as revenge for him murdering her daughter. Orestes, Cly and Agie’s son, eventually shows up and kills his mother and her new husband in revenge for his father’s murder. As punishment for the matricide, the Furies are set loose on Orestes. Well and so.
Iphigenia, however, according to some, was not actually sacrificed. At the last moment Artemis saved her by substituting a pig/lamb/calf (take your pick) and whisked Iphigenia away to her Temple among the Taurians somewhere on the Black Sea (there was never an actual country called Tauris yet the people were called Taurians but I can’t for the life of me find out what their country was called, if it was even real so if you know, please enlighten me). Euripides chooses to go with this version of the story. Obvs.
So for all these years Iphigenia has been the High Priestess in the Temple of Artemis among the Taurians who think that human sacrifice is a pretty awesome thing. They especially like to capture strangers who are driven to shore by the freak tides and dangerous waters around their country and offer them up to Artemis. In spite of the excitement sacrificing humans must be, especially when you yourself were at one time supposed to be a human sacrifice, Iphigenia seems rather bored. She spends quite a lot of time missing Greece and wishing she could go home (she has apparently forgiven her father for his attempted sacrifice of her). If she knew all that had been going on, she might change her mind, but she doesn’t because no one from Greece has set foot on Taurian shores in all the years Iphigenia has been there.
Until now.
Two young Greeks land their boat on the shore and then hide it and themselves because they don’t know how friendly these barbarians are. On a side note, when you come across anything in ancient Greek stories that talk about barbarians, it usually isn’t referring to specific barbarians (like Conan for instance or even Cohen and Nijel the Destroyer for that matter), but to anyone who is not Greek. The Greeks thought very highly of themselves and if you were not Greek, you were a barbarian which goes a long way towards explaining quite a lot of ancient Greek history.
Anywho, these stealthy Greeks had been sent by Artemis to “recover” something from the Temple, an icon made of wood. They are none other than Orestes and his best bud Pylades. Even though he is on this mission for Artemis he is still also being chased by the Furies. Since Artemis knows that Iphigenia is at this temple and she and Orestes are siblings, one can’t help but think this an elaborate ruse to get them to meet. The pair of icon thieves are captured by Taurian guards even before they get to reconnoiter because Orestes has a crazy Furies moment and starts yelling and waving his arms about on the beach in front of everyone. So much for stealthy.
The Taurians are delighted to have prime Greek humans to sacrifice. They are brought before Iphigenia. No, she does not recognize Orestes because he was just a boy when he was fostered out elsewhere for his own protection. Before getting to the sacrificing bit, Iphigenia starts pumping them for information about what’s been going on in Greece all these years. She realizes pretty soon that these two are actually from her hometown and the more questions she asks, the more evasive Orestes gets. He has no idea he’s talking to his sister. Round and round they go.
Finally in desperation, Iphigenia strikes a deal. She’ll only sacrifice one of them if the other one will carry a message back home for her, letting the family know she is actually alive and hoping that maybe someone will come for her. This bargaining is all carried out without once mentioning family names. But the men agree and then the pair proceed to argue over who is going to be the one sacrificed. Orestes thinks being killed would be pretty okay, it would, after all, rid him of the Furies. Pylades, says no, I love you too much, let me be killed so I can die happy knowing you are still alive even if the Furies are chasing you. After many declarations of love and bickering over whose life is worthier, Orestes gives in and Pylades is thrilled that he gets to die for him.
Since Iphigenia doesn’t know how to read or write, she has to tell Orestes the message for her family at which point Orestes and Pylades gawp at her because they realize who she is. Orestes reveals himself as her brother but Iphigenia makes him prove it which he does by telling her something only a family member would know. Happy reunion scene ensues followed by a what-do-we-do-now conference since Iphigenia is supposed to kill them.
But they work it out as only the children of Agamemnon can. All three escape from Tauris and Orestes and Pylades even get the icon they came for. The king is about to send his navy after the three but Athena appears and tells him that it wouldn’t be prudent. The king knows which side his bread is buttered on, calls off his men, and places a help wanted ad in the local paper for a new High Priestess for the Temple. Meanwhile, Orestes, Pylades and Iphigenia sail off into the sunset.
You can see why scholars are into arguing how to classify this play. It’s also not the most exciting or interesting Euripides play ever. There is lots of longing for home from both Iphigenia and Orestes, and how that homesickness can really drag on a person. The play sets up a scenario where you could really dig into the psychology of longing and exile and the meaning of home, but this being a Greek tragedy, it only flits around the edges, psychology not having been invented yet.
One more thing, it’s really hard to type “Pylades” over and over and not “Pilates.” I’ve never done Pilates but I am sure there are plenty of people in the world who have and wouldn’t mind seeing Pilates sacrificed in the Temple of Artemis. But then that would be an entirely different story.
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By: Eleanor Jackson,
on 12/22/2015
2015 has seen a special landmark in cultural history: the 2500th anniversary of the official ‘birth’ of comedy. It was in the spring of 486 BC that Athens first included plays called comedies (literally, ‘revel-songs’) in the programme of its Great Dionysia festival. Although semi-improvised comic performances had a long prehistory in the folk culture of Athens, it was only from 486 that comedy became, alongside tragedy (which had an older place in Athenian festivals), one of the two defining archetypes of theatre
The post Did comedy kill Socrates? appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Eleanor Jackson,
on 12/11/2015
In the week I first read the Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things — the long lost poem of Percy Bysshe Shelley — the tune on loop in my head was that of a less distant protest song, Masters of War. In 1963, unable to bear the escalating loss of American youth in Vietnam, the 22-year-old Bob Dylan sang out against those faceless profiteers of war.
The post The freewheeling Percy Shelley appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Eleanor Jackson,
on 11/4/2015
What have the Romans ever done for us? Ancient Rome is well known for its contribution to the modern world in areas such as sanitation, aqueducts, and roads, but the extent to which it has shaped modern thinking about sexual identity is not nearly so widely recognized.
The post What have the Romans ever done for us? LGBT identities and ancient Rome appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Alistair Shand,
on 10/5/2015
How do large-scale societies achieve cooperation? Since Thomas Hobbes’ famous work, Leviathan (1651), social scientific treatments of the problem of cooperation have assumed that living together without killing one another requires an act of depersonalization in the form of a transfer of individual powers to an all-powerful central government.
The post Legal order: lessons from ancient Athens appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Eleanor Jackson,
on 6/11/2015
The British Museum’s current blockbuster show, Defining Beauty: the Body in Ancient Greek Art, amasses a remarkable collection of classical sculpture focusing on the human body. The most intriguing part of the show for me was the second room, “Body colour,” which displays plaster casts of several Greek sculptures brightly painted in green, blue, yellow, red and pink. The press has not known what to make of “Body colour.” It has been met with surprise, sneers, or been entirely ignored in otherwise glowing reviews.
The post Redefining beauty in the suburbs of Victorian London appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Aaron Oppenheim,
on 4/9/2015
In a recent survey, 87% of UK graduates with first or second class degrees saw freelancing as highly attractive. 85% believe freelancing will become the norm. In the US, as reported in Forbes in August 2013, 60% of millennials stay less than three years in a job and 45% would prefer more flexibility to more pay.
The post A great precedent for freelancing appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Aaron Oppenheim,
on 4/6/2015
One of the most important and unremarked effects of the revolution in information technology is not to do with information services at all. It is the transformation of manufacturing. After a period of two or three hundred years in which manufacturing consolidated into larger and larger enterprises, technology is restoring opportunities for the lone craftsman making things at home.
The post We should celebrate the decline of large scale manufacturing appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Connie Ngo,
on 11/26/2014
For over 2,000 years the civilizations of ancient Greece and Rome have captivated our collective imagination and provided inspiration for many aspects of our lives, from culture, literature, drama, cinema, and television to society, education, and politics. With over 700 entries on everything and anything related to the classical world in the Oxford Companion to Classical Civilization, we created an A-Z list of facts you should know about the time period.
Alexander the Great: He believed himself the descendent of Heracles, Perseus, and Zeus. By 331 he had begun to represent himself as the direct son of Zeus, with dual paternity comparable to that of Heracles.
Baths: Public baths, often located near the forum (civic centre), were a normal part of Roman towns in Italy by the 1st century BC, and seem to have existed at Rome even earlier. Bathing occupied a central position in the social life of the day.
Christianity: By the end of the 4th century, Christianity had largely triumphed over its religious competition, although a pagan Hellenic tradition would continue to flourish in the Greek world and rural and local cults also persisted.
Democracy: Political rights were restricted to adult male Athenians. Women, foreigners, and slaves were excluded. An Athenian came of age at 18 when he became a member of his father’s deme and was enrolled in the deme’s roster, but as epheboi, most young Athenians were liable for military service for two years, before at the age of 20, they could be enrolled in the roster of citizen who had access to the assembly. Full political rights were obtained at 30 when a citizen was allowed to present himself as candidate at the annual sortation of magistrate and jurors.
Education, Greek: Greek ideas of education, whether theoretical or practical, encompassed upbringing and cultural training in the widest sense, not merely school and formal education. The poets were regarded as the educators of their society.
Food and drink: The Ancient diet was based on cereals, legumes, oil, and wine. Meat was a luxury for most people.
Gems: Precious stones were valued in antiquity as possessing magical and medicinal virtues, as ornaments, and as seals when engraved with a device.
Hephaestus was the Greek god of fire, of blacksmiths, and of artisans.
Ivory plaques at all classical periods decorated furniture and were used for the flesh parts of cult statues and for temple doors.
Juno was an old and important Italian goddess and one of the chief deities of Rome. Her name derives from the same root as iuventas (youth), but her original nature remains obscure.
Kinship in antiquity constituted a network of social relationship constructed through marriage and legitimate filiation, and usually included non-kin — especially slaves.
Libraries: The Great Roman libraries provided reading-rooms, one for Greek and one for Latin with books in niches around the walls. Books would generally be stored in cupboards which might be numbered for reference.
Marriage in the ancient world was a matter of personal law, and therefore a full Roman marriage could exist only if both parties were Roman citizen or had the right to contract marriage, either by grant to a group or individually.
Narrative: An interest in the theory of narrative is already apparent in Aristotle, whose Poetics may be considered the first treatise of narratology.
Ostracism in Athenian society the 5th century BC was a method of banishing a citizen for ten years. It is often hard to tell why a particular man was ostracized. Sometimes the Athenians seem to have ostracized a man to express their rejection of a policy for which he stood for.
Plato of Athens descended from wealthy and influential Athenian families on both sides. He rejected marriage and the family duty of producing citizen sons; he founded a philosophical school, the Academy; and he published written philosophical works.
Quintilian, a Roman rhetorician, advised that children start learning Greek before Latin. The Roman Empire was bilingual at the official, and multilingual at the individual and non-official, level.
Ritual: The central rite of Greek and Roman religion is animal sacrifice. It was understood as a gift to the gods.
Samaritans, the inhabitants of Samaria saw themselves as the direct descendants of the northern Israelite tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh, left behind by the Assyrians in 722 BC.
Toga: The toga was the principal garment of the free-born Roman male. As a result of Roman conquest the toga spread to some extent into the Roman western provinces, but in the east it never replaced the Greek rectangular mantle.
Urbanization: During the 5th, 4th, and 3rd centuries, urban forms spread to mainland northern Greece, both to the seaboard under the direct influence of southern cities, and inland in Macedonia, Thessaly, and even Epirus, in association with the greater political unification of those territories.
Venus: From the 3rd century BC, Venus was the patron of all persuasive seductions, between gods and mortals, and between men and women.
Wine was the everyday drink of all classes in Greece and Rome. It was also a key component of one of the central social institutions of the élite, the dinner and drinking party. On such occasions large quantities of wine were drunk, but it was invariably heavily diluted with water. It was considered a mark of uncivilized peoples, untouched by Classical culture, that they drank wine neat with supposed disastrous effects on their mental and physical health.
Xanthus was called the largest city in Lycia (southern Asia Minor). The city was known to Homer, and Herodotus described its capitulation to Persia in the famous siege of 545 BC.
Zeus, the Indo-European god of the bright sky, is transformed in Greece into Zeus the weather god, whose paramount and specific place of worship is a mountain top.
Featured image: Colosseum in Rome, Italy — April 2007 by Diliff. CC-BY-SA-2.5 via Wikimedia Commons.
The post The Classical world from A to Z appeared first on OUPblog.
What an amazing play is Medea by Euripides. I read an edition from 2006 translated by the poet Michael Collier and the Greek scholar Georgia Machemer. Machemer also wrote a fantastic introduction. Of all the introductions to all the Greek plays I’ve read over the last several years, this one is hands down the best. What was so good about it? It provided context for the play without trotting out all the usual tired historical droning that usually makes its way into these kinds of introductions. The context provided was specific to this play itself and what was going on in Athens during the time it was produced, what the audience would have known and expected, how they would have probably reacted when their expectations were challenged, and what they would have known and how they would have felt about Euripides himself.
For instance, even though the songs Euripides wrote for his choruses were popular and sung all over town, the playwright and plays themselves often unsettled audiences. Euripides was schooled by the Sophists who were foreigners to Athens, had unnerving theories about the nature of things and could deftly argue either side of an issue. They stirred things up. Euripides didn’t let them down.
Medea opens with Medea’s nurse coming on stage. Today we would think nothing of this, but then, this was shocking. Not only was it a woman giving the opening monologue of the play but a servant who was an old slave of a “barbarian” princess. When you expect a highborn man or a god to walk out for the opening monologue, this move is quite astonishing and right off sets you reeling.
And then the play itself. A woman carries it and not just any woman. Medea is a priestess of Hecate, she has immense knowledge of the healing arts as well as potions that kill. She is from a foreign country. And she speaks throughout with the rhetorical skill of a man, scheming, tricking, deceiving to save her own honor instead of submitting to the will of her husband like a good and proper wife should. After seeing this play the men in the audience, and the audience would have been almost all men, would have been shaking in their sandals for fear of the power that a woman might wield. I could also hope that some of them left the theatre with a bit more respect for their wives but that might be hoping too much.
This play would have resonated with Athenians on a different level too. Athens had recently passed a law that said foreign-born wives could not be citizens nor could any of their offspring. This law effectively disinherited any children born from such a marriage. As a result, many men divorced their wives and married Greek ones instead. So when Jason leaves Medea for the daughter of King Creon, the men of Athens watching this play got an extra dose of discomfort.
There is an interesting note in the text of my edition of the play that says a good many scholars believe Euripides invented Medea killing her children, that prior to this play, the story did not include their deaths. So why did she have to kill them? Medea needed to destroy Jason for his betrayal and the best way to destroy him is to destroy his whole family. Thus Medea kills Jason’s new wife with poisoned gifts and Creon in rushing to her aid is also poisoned by he deadly robes. The children could not be left alive as heirs nor after killing the king and his daughter could Medea leave the children alive to likely be killed my an angry mob. So she does the deed. She almost couldn’t. Can you blame her? The gods do not punish her for killing her children because her act was honorable vengeance against a man who betrayed both her and the gods who had given him Medea to help him escape with the Golden Fleece.
Medea gets to exit in a golden sun chariot with the corpses of her children after she curses Jason. And we all known Jason dies a sad and ruined man, killed when his famous ship, the Argo, falls on his head while he is beneath it repairing its keel.
Medea, of course, has some marvelous speeches in this play. One of my favorite passages happens when she is talking to the chorus who are all women:
But I’ve been talking as if our lives
are the same. They’re not. You are Corinthians
with ancestral homes, childhood friends,
while I, stripped of that already,
am now even more exposed by Jason’s cruelties.
Remember how I came here, a war bride,
plundered from my country, an orphan?
Now who’s obligated to shelter me? Not you,
I know. As you watch my plans for justice unfold,
keep them secret, that’s all I ask. I’ve never felt
this threatened nor fearless: men win their battles
on the field but women are ruthless when the bed
becomes the battleground. We’ve lain
in our own blood before…and have survived.
In the face of Medea, Jason comes off sounding like a greedy, petulant boy whining about how Medea isn’t being reasonable in accepting the crumbs he is reluctantly offering so he looks like a good man and doesn’t feel guilty. Why he is so surprised that this powerful woman throws it all back in his face and calls him on his betrayal is the real surprise.
The sad thing though in the end, in spite of Medea triumphing over Jason and being carried away to Athens in a chariot of the sun (he’s a relative), she has lost everything too. She will have protection in Athens, but she has no home, no friends, no children. She wins by losing and that is the biggest tragedy of all.
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When I was offered a chance by the publisher to read The Antigone Poems it was too intriguing to pass by. Originally written in the 1970s by Marie Slaight with charcoal drawings by Terrence Tasker, it was never published. Until now. The publisher, Altaire, has created a lovely book. The pages are cut slightly wider than the average book and the paper is thick and creamy and beautifully sets off the drawings and the often short spare poems that come one to a page and only on the right-hand side.
The poems are described as a retelling of the Antigone story, but they don’t actually retell the story; one can’t read them and compare them to Sophocles’ play, for instance. Nor can one read them and pick out, here is Antigone distressed over Creon’s edict denying her brother, Polynices, burial. Or here is Antigone standing up to Creon. What the poems do amount to is more of an interior emotional landscape that includes passion, anger, love, despair, and a range of other emotions that we can imagine Antigone would have felt.
Because the poems do not directly correlate to the story, a reader doesn’t necessarily have to know it in order to enjoy them. But of course it helps and adds to the pleasure. In case you don’t remember Antigone, she is one of two daughters of Oedipus and Jocasta. When Oedipus discovered his fate and left the city, his two sons, Eteocles and Polynices, decided to take turns ruling Thebes. Eteocles got to go first and when his year was up he refused to allow Polynices his turn. So Polynices brought an army against Thebes and both brothers end up dead. Creon, brother of Jocasta, becomes ruler. He decides that Polynices was in the wrong and forbids him burial. Antigone cannot abide by this decision since it is more than an insult but goes against divine law. So she sneaks outside the gates and buries her brother. And gets caught. This being Greek tragedy, Antigone and several others are dead by the end of the story.
So how does this story play out in the interior landscape of these poems? The poems are short and spare and visually striking centered in the middle of the big pages of the book. It adds a feeling of the power that Antigone was up against when she defies Creon and how small and alone she was. The book begins with a poem that reminds me of epic Greek poetry and how they open with an invocation to the gods (The Iliad begins “Sing, Goddess”):
And sing
My bitter praises
To nails
And flint
And flesh
The poems are filled with language and images of flames and pain and destruction:
Potency.
The potency is shattering.
Only the night
Holds jasmine.
Where is my tongue?If this perfume doesn’t burst
It will twist into venom.
And there is betrayal too in one especially heart-wrenching frantic prose poem, longer than any poem in the book and written in a kind of stream-of-consciousness:
I feel betrayed- by what- no words- I only try so as to fill the gap-
whirling’s fast, stronger now- I need someone to hold me- so I can
hold it- my hurting proves nothing, only that he has the power to pain- I don’t give a damn- too much, all wrong, foolish, false- jesus- where is courage- I need it- eagles flying- no one will ever know- I don’t want it, can’t hold it- closer- to abandon- to core- I want home…
As you may have noticed from a few of the quotes, there is also much here about voice and speaking and words and being able to use them or not. I especially liked the several poems that focus just on words like this one that begins:
This voice
is afraid to speak.Afraid
Of the brutal metal
Of its words.
And later when there are no words:
Let the silence reverberate.
Let the silence break this wall.
The charcoal drawings sprinkled through the pages are mostly of faces drawn in such a way that they are evocative of masks, which is appropriate given the actors in Greek tragedy work masks. The facial expressions are stern and the eyes are often left blank, not filled in. It is terrifying in a way but also offers an invitation, pick up this mask and look through someone else’s eyes.
I don’t know why this book was never published until now. It seems a shame that is has gone so long without being known. But I am glad it is published now and I hope these powerful poems find their way into many hands.
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By: Julia Callaway,
on 5/27/2014
Alexander the Great (356-323 BCE), King of Macedonia, ruled an empire that stretched from Greece in the west to India in the east and as far south as Egypt. The Macedonian Empire he forged was the largest in antiquity until the Roman, but unlike the Romans, Alexander established his vast empire in a mere decade. As well as fighting epic battles against enemies that far outnumbered him in Persia and India, and unrelenting guerrilla warfare in Afghanistan, this charismatic king, who was worshiped as a god by some subjects and only 32 when he died, brought Greek civilization to the East, opening up East to West as never before and making the Greeks realize they belonged to a far larger world than just the Mediterranean.
Yet Alexander could not have succeeded if it hadn’t been for his often overlooked father, Philip II (r. 359-336), who transformed Macedonia from a disunited and backward kingdom on the periphery of the Greek world into a stable military and economic powerhouse and conquered Greece. Alexander was the master builder of the Macedonian empire, but Philip was certainly its architect. The reigns of these charismatic kings were remarkable ones, not only for their time but also for what — two millennia later — they can tell us today. For example, Alexander had to deal with a large, multi-cultural subject population, which sheds light on contemporary events in culturally similar regions of the world and can inform makers of modern strategy.
Ian Worthington is Curators’ Professor of History and Adjunct Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Missouri. He is the author of numerous books about ancient Greece, including Demosthenes of Athens and the Fall of Classical Greece and By the Spear: Philip II, Alexander the Great, and the Rise and Fall of the Macedonian Empire.
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Images: 1. From By the Spear: Philip II, Alexander the Great, and the Rise and Fall of the Macedonian Empire. Used with permission. 2. Bust of Alexander the Great at Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek by Yair Haklai. CC-BY-SA-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons. 3. Map of Greece from By the Spear: Philip II, Alexander the Great, and the Rise and Fall of the Macedonian Empire. Used with permission. 4. Macedonian phalanx by F. Mitchell, Department of History, United States Military Academy. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons. 5. Aristotle Altemps Inv8575 by Jastrow. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons. 6. Alexander Mosaic by Magrippa. CC-BY-SA-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons. 7. The Death of Alexander the Great after the painting by Karl von Piloty (1886). Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.
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