From the Historia Augusta, on the two Maximini, IX
“In order to hide his low birth, he had everyone who knew about it killed—not a few of them were friends who had often given him much because of his pitiable poverty. And there was never a crueler animal on the earth, placing all in his strength as if he could not be killed. Finally, when he believed that he was nearly immortal because of the magnitude of his body and bravery, there was a certain actor whom they report recited some Greek lines when he was present in the theater which had this Latin translation:
Even he who cannot be killed by one is killed by many
The elephant is large and he is killed.
The lion is brave and he is killed
The tiger is brave and he is killed.
Beware the many if you do not fear the one.
And these words were recited while the emperor was there. But when he asked his friends what the little clown had said, they claimed he was singing some old lines written against mean men. And, since he was Thracian and barbarian, he believed this.”
IX. nam ignobilitatis tegendae causa omnes conscios generis sui interemit, nonnullos etiam amicos, qui ei saepe misericordiae paupertatis causa pleraque donaverant. neque enim fuit crudelius animal in terris, omnia sic in viribus suis ponens quasi non posset occidi. denique cum immortalem se prope crederet ob magnitudinem corporis virtutisque, mimus quidam in theatro praesente illo dicitur versus Graecos dixisse, quorum haec erat Latina sententia:
“Et qui ab uno non potest occidi, a multis occiditur.
elephans grandis est et occiditur,
leo fortis est et occiditur,
tigris fortis est et occiditur;
cave multos, si singulos non times.”
et haec imperatore ipso praesente iam dicta sunt. sed cum interrogaret amicos, quid mimicus scurra dixisset, dictum est ei quod antiquos versus cantaret contra homines asperos scriptos; et ille, ut erat Thrax et barbarus, credidit.
I am big. Really big. Everyone is saying that, not me. I mean, look how big I am.
“If you were sick, you would break from personal affairs and neglect your work responsibilities—you would not care enough for an client to work on his case during a brief respite from illness. No, you would work with all your mind to free yourself from sickness as soon as possible.
What then? Won’t you do the same thing now? Dismiss all obstacles and dedicate yourself to a healthy mind. No one who is distracted can achieve this. Philosophy rules her own realm: she makes the time and does not accept appointments. She is not a random assignment but a regular obligation. She is master: she is here and commands.
Alexander, to a certain state who promised him half of their possessions and lands, said “I came into Asia not with the plan of me taking what you offered but for you to have whatever I left behind.” In the same way, philosophy says to all other affairs: “I am not going to accept the time you don’t need, but you may have the time I don’t take.”
Si aeger esses, curam intermisisses rei familiaris et forensia tibi negotia excidissent nec quemquam tanti putares cui advocatus in remissione descenderes; toto animo id ageres ut quam primum morbo liberareris. Quid ergo? non et nunc idem facies? omnia impedimenta dimitte et vaca bonae menti: nemo ad illam pervenit occupatus. Exercet philosophia regnum suum; dat tempus, non accipit; non est res subsiciva; ordinaria est, domina est, adest et iubet. [10] Alexander cuidam civitati partem agrorum et dimidium rerum omnium promittenti ‘eo’ inquit ‘proposito in Asiam veni, ut non id acciperem quod dedissetis, sed ut id haberetis quod reliquissem’. Idem philosophia rebus omnibus: ‘non sum hoc tempus acceptura quod vobis superfuerit, sed id vos habebitis quod ipsa reiecero’.
“Whenever some people hear these words—that it is right to be consistent, that the moral person is free by nature and never compelled, while everything else may be hindered, forced, enslaved, subjected to others—they imagine that it is right that they maintain every judgment they have made without compromising at all.
But the first issue is that the judgment should be a good one. For, if I wish to maintain the state of my body, it should be when it is healthy, well-exercised. If you show me that you have the tone of a crazy person and brag about it, I will say ‘Dude, look for a therapist. This is not health, but sickness.’ “
“I’d be happy if I could ask you what kinds of books you like to read the most? Is it the works of Plato or Antisthenes, Archilochus or Hipponax? Or do you look down on these books because you prefer the orators?
Tell me, have you read Aeschines’ speech Against Timarchus? Or, do you know all those things and comprehend each of them but instead dip into Aristophanes and Eupolis? Have you even read The Baptai, the whole play? Did nothing in it change you and were you not embarrassed once you recognized what it was about? Someone might, in fact, be especially amazed at what kind of a spirit you have when you touch your books or what your hands are like when you unroll them.
When do you read? During the daytime? No one has seen you doing that! Is it at night then? Do you do it after you have given out orders to these guys or before? But in the name of Kotuos, don’t dare to do this kind of thing any more. Give up the books and pay attention to only your own affairs”
For all of the gaps in our records of ancient literature, one could hardly say that didactic advice is underrepresented among the old Greeks and Romans. The ancient fondness for disquisitions on Learning, Its Greatness & How Achieved could be likened to the English fondness for the school novel. Surely, the process of achieving the first rudiments of learning was not pleasant in any case (consider Juvenal’s et nos ergo manum ferulae subduximus), but that learning, once acquired, serves as a launching point both for fond recollection and for proselytizing about its value and the proper method of attaining it. Before everyone was a critic, everyone was an educator.
This fondness for educational theorizing was inherited, like so much of ancient culture, by the various humanists of the Renaissance, many of whom selectively excerpted all of the choicest tags about learning, reading, wisdom, et cetera from a range of ancient sources to expound their own curriculum. Most of this could make for inspiring reading if one were already sold on the idea of a classical canon and its attendant collection of proprieties and ideals, but to the uninitiated observer, it might all seem like little more than a preposterous reactionary stance from those who ought to have known better. Indeed, it is hard not to notice that most of the ‘civilizing’ study of the Renaissance was directed at intentionally maintaining a social order among classes, and giving the upper crust the advantage of access to what was “most human” and liberal. Fundamentally antidemocratic though it was, it at least had the advantage that it recommended reading a couple of interesting texts.
Educational theorizing has continued apace into our own time, yet it has paradoxically become even more insidiously antidemocratic than it was when courtiers were writing recommendations to their wealthy pupils. While education now ostensibly lies open to all, the structure of American public schooling guarantees that the rich still have access to far more learning opportunities than the poor. The lack of public investment in our schools has led to a rapid and largely unprotested corporatization of the entire educational project. Moreover, it is considered hopelessly reactionary to suggest that perhaps students should have access to more than narrowly technical training. As a consequence, the ability to intentionally pursue a course of study in the arts and humanities has been made once again the special privilege of a wealthy elite. Following what could be a collapse in a large sector of the American university system as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and its absurd mismanagement, it is hard not to worry that a university program in art, literature, history, etc. will become even more inaccessible to those who live in economically or socially precarious positions.
It may be that the broader project of the humanities will have to continue underfunded (or wholly unfunded) and without firm institutional support. In a sense, this will simply return us to the status quo before the apparently golden age of educational democratization which both expanded and collapsed in the 20th century. If such becomes the case, we will be in need of even more advocacy for the importance of broad (and broadly accessible) education in the humanistic tradition.
Scott Newstock’s book How to Think Like Shakespeareis in some ways misleadingly named. It is not really a book about Shakespeare. Indeed, it is a bit of a genre-bender. Part humanist manifesto, part commonplace book, it combines erudition and accessibility in an inviting package that is a joy to read. The book does not tell us anything new – and that’s the point. Much of the technocratic theory which drives education today is geared toward making students into corporate citizens, rather than citizens in the more traditional sense of members of a community.
As an educator at a public high school, I return to campus every fall with an acute sense of dread about what new educational fiction our school district has invested in for the new year. Invariably, there is new corporate jargon and a new set of boardroom-approved acronyms (already mastered so thoroughly by the school administrators by the time that you first hear it that you wonder whether you have missed something), and some new program conveniently aligned with a tech company’s latest eduscheme. Yes, every year, the school board, technology companies, and private consulting firms all contrive to make teaching more miserable than it was the year before, and each time the district invests tens of thousands of dollars on a conference introducing faculty to some new proprietary method or approach, you can be sure that even less of your time than ever will be spent on actually teaching.
To return to the point: the book does not feature any new or startling theories. Rather, it traces a string of thought and education which is less like a zip-line than like Ariadne’s thread. Thinking Like Shakespeare is more freighted with quotations than a Renaissance educational manual (it may even rival Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy), but they are all calculated to inspire the reader with an eagerness both to deepen and widen their reading through the whole range of intellectual endeavor from antiquity to the present.
While the book is titled Thinking Like Shakespeare, the bard himself serves as something more like an exemplar or organizational principle than a subject of the book. Newstock has incorporated the ancient sources which we (and Shakespeare) draw on so heavily, but the tangled thread is followed from antiquity through Elizabethan and early Stuart England, doubles back on itself slightly to consider Erasmus and Montaigne, and then loops and coils to incorporate Antonio Gramsci, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, John Ruskin, etc etc.
The whole project is illuminated by the quotation of that famous Terentian tag which has always been far more powerful when taken wholly out of context: Homo sum, nihil humani alienum a me puto. That is to say, Thinking Like Shakespeare does not tell you to reach for your quill pen and start making your way through North’s Plutarch. Rather, it is an encouragement to nourish the mind on the wonderfully wide and diverse cultural world of books, art, and music which give our lives richness, while shunning the corporatized mediocrity which Google Classroom or the Gates Foundation would impose upon us. Professor Newstock’s book is, indeed, a call for us to become intellectual omnivores, and goes some way to stimulate this appetite.
[Note: If you have a book which you would like to see reviewed in these humble digital pages, please drop us a line.]
“Hey Philosophy, this was especially striking to me: if people saw someone doing something wicked or improper, or just gross, there wasn’t anyone who didn’t blame Philosophy herself and then Chrysippos or Plato or Pythagoras or whatever name you gave to that person who started all the mistakes and whose arguments were being imitated.
People make terribly unfair judgments about you who have been dead for so long thanks to this guy living his life so badly! He can’t be compared to you because you’re not alive. But you were not there and they all saw him clearly pursuing terrible and unholy habits with the result that you were caught in the open with him and got wrapped up in the same slander!”
“But I am saying nothing new. And I have never stopped saying these things at different times and in previous arguments. And I am really going to try to demonstrate to you the kind of cause which I have been on about. I am going back to those things everyone knows and I am starting from them.
Once I have proposed that that there is a thing called the beautiful on its own and also the good and the big and all the rest of the things, if you grant these to me and concede that they exist, I hope to show the cause from these things and to prove that the soul is immortal.
Look at the things that follow from these assumptions if it occurs to you as it does to me. For it seems to me that if any other thing is beautiful apart from beauty itself it is not because some other single type of beauty exists more than because it has a share of that initial beauty?”
Plutarch, The Cleverness of Animals Moralia 961 a-b
“And here is the argument of Strato the Natural Philosopher demonstrating that it is not possible to sense anything at all without the power of thought. It is true that we may travel over letters with our sight and words fall on our ears which escape us since we are paying attention to other things. But later the mind returns, changes, and pursues each of the details which were overlooked. And this is what the saying means “the mind sees and the mind hears, but the rest is deaf and blind.” And so experiences which impact the eyes or ears do not yield understanding unless thought is present.
This is why Kleomenes the king, when a performance was applauded at a symposium and he was asked whether it seemed fine to him, he said that others should think about it, since he was worrying about the Peloponnese. From this it is necessary that all creatures who have perception also have understanding, if we are able to perceive through understanding.”
N.B. More than a generation of learners have grown up with accessing and manipulating texts online with Perseus or the TLG. Now there is something that provides us with new tools and the contents of both: the Scaife viewer. I am happy to have a short guest post from Leonard Muellner, Emeritus Professor at Brandeis University, my first Greek teacher, and the one who introduced me to digital classics way back before Y2k
The Scaife Viewer, https://scaife.perseus.org, is an interface for the next version of the Perseus Digital Library. Here are some distinctive aspects of this new tool for reading and research:
1) The majority of the texts visible through Scaife are in Ancient Greek and Latin, but there are also texts in Persian, Chinese, Hebrew, and, as time goes on, other classical languages. All of the primary texts in the corpus are open and freely available in a variety of formats for the general public. There is a list of the several sources with links for downloading here: https://scaife.perseus.org/about/. Among the links is the ongoing First1KGreek Project, https://opengreekandlatin.github.io/First1KGreek/, which is intended to complete and supplement the Greek texts available from the current version of Perseus for the first thousand years of Greek from Homer to the Third Century CE, though it also includes later texts that are standard research tools for classics (like the Suda or Stobaeus). The plan is to complete this particular corpus by June, 2021.
2) The project aims to provide multiple editions of primary texts, multiple translations of primary texts into the same or different languages, and searchable apparatus critici of texts when copyright law allows. All of the texts in Greek and Latin have been tagged as to their parts of speech and forms, and several have also been treebanked, in other words, have embedded in them the results of morpho-syntactic analysis. As a result of this data, it will be possible to align translations, word-for-word, with the texts, so that anyone can survey what are the various ways of translating a specific word in a primary source, or what any given word in a translation goes back to in the original. All of these features are in various stages of development — some are, others are not yet available but will start to become so.
3) The Scaife viewer has two parts, a reading environment (Browse Library, on the home page, screen shot above), and a search environment (Text Search, on the home page. In the reading environment, users can call up translations alongside primary sources (“add parallel version” in screen shot, top of middle pane), and the software automatically generates word lists with vocabulary for the primary source on display in Greek as well as morphological and lexical information for any word in Greek or Latin (in Highlight mode, just click on the word). For Homeric texts, there is access to the New Alexandria commentaries (lower right pane in screen shot)— more is forthcoming in this space. Readers can also search within a given text, with lemmatized search — in other words, search for all the forms of a given word given its base form — available at the moment only for Ancient Greek. Any passage being read can be exported as a text file or with its XML markup (whole texts can be downloaded from the list of repositories given above under #1).
4) The search environment (screen shot above) of the Scaife Viewer is sophisticated: users can search for a group of words (by putting double quotes around them), combinations of words (“and” or “or” searches), partial word searches whose initial letters are known (with the rest indicated by *), and so forth. For Greek, lemmatized searches, for example, for phrases or combinations of words, can return helpful results. The interface allows for elasticity in the search terms as well, on a scale of 1-10; they can turn up thematic as well as dictional associations that you might not anticipate.
5) The Scaife viewer is an interface to a corpus that is in ongoing development, but also, the viewer itself is in ongoing development. In other words, neither of these is complete, and there are bugs in the software. The teams sponsoring the development of both projects, a consortium of institutions in the USA and Europe, is also developing tools and manuals for participation in the development of the corpus of texts by people everywhere. Another consequence of the incompleteness of the corpus and the software is that there are significant gaps in coverage and functionality, but many common texts and some exceptionally helpful functions are already for the public to use. Please give it a try.
Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination (Art and Neurosis):
The Philoctetes story, which has so established itself among us as explaining the source of the artist’s power, is not really an explanatory myth at all; it is a moral myth having reference to our proper behavior in the circumstances of the universal accident. In its juxtaposition of the wound and the bow, it tells us that we must be aware that weakness does not preclude strength nor strength weakness. It is therefore not irrelevant to the artist, but when we use it we will do well to keep in mind the other myths of the arts, recalling what Pan and Dionysius suggest of the relation of art to physiology and superabundance, remembering that to Apollo were attributed the bow and the lyre, two strengths together, and that he was given the lyre by its inventor, the baby Hermes — that miraculous infant who, the day he was born, left his cradle to do mischief: and the first thing he met with was a tortoise, which he greeted politely before scooping it from its shell, and, thought and deed being one with him, he contrived the instrument to which he sang “the glorious tale of his own begetting.” These were gods, and very early ones, but their myths tell us something about the nature and source of it even in our grim, late human present.
Euripides, Orestes 288-293 (see the full text in the Scaife Viewer)
“I think that my father, if I had gazed in is eyes
And asked him if I should kill my mother,
Would have touched my chin over and over
Not to plunge my sword into my mother’s neck,
Because he was not about return to life
And I would be miserable suffering tortures like these.”
.jpg){kind=link}
