“They say, moreover, that there are others who believe even more inhumanely—a topic which I briefly mentioned a little before—that friendships ought to be sought to provide defense and help and not out of good will or emotion. They also believe, then, that those who have the least strength of character and limited physical strength, seek friendships for this reason especially. This is why that women seek the defense of friendships more than men do, why the poor seek it more than the rich, why the downtrodden look for it more than those thought lucky.
Famous wisdom! How they seem to rob the universe of the sun when they take friendship out of life, when the gods themselves have not granted us any better or more pleasing than this! What is this security of theirs worth?”
Alios autem dicere aiunt multo etiam inhumanius, quem locum breviter paulo ante perstrinxi, praesidi adiumentique causa, non benevolentiae neque caritatis amicitias esse expetendas; itaque ut quisque minimum firmitatis haberet minimumque virium, ita amicitias appetere maxime : ex eo fieri ut mulierculae magis amicitiarum praesidia quaerant quam viri, et inopes quam opulenti, et calamitosi quam ei qui putentur beati, O praeclaram sapientiam! Solem enim e mundo tollere videntur ei, qui amicitiam e vita tollunt, qua nihil a dis immortalibus melius habemus, nihil iucundius. Quae est enim ista securitas?
“I am often amazed that when men first summoned the great gatherings and established athletic contests they believed the accomplishments of the body to be worth great gifts, but for those who have toiled in private for the public good and who have prepared their minds so they may help others, they have apportioned no honor even though it is right to plan for this. If athletes were to double their strength, it would be nothing more to the rest of us; but when one man advises well, all men who are willing to share his insight can benefit.”
The contrast between the effect of a wise-advisor and an Olympic champion is also invoked by Socrates:
Plato, Apology 36
“What is right to give to a poor man who has done good work and needs the time to advise you? Athenian men, there is nothing more appropriate than feeding this sort of man at the public expense, more rightly than if one of you has achieved a victory on horseback or chariot races in the Olympian games. The first makes you seem to be fortunate, while I do it for real. He lacks no resources, but I do. If I must be honored justly for my worth, I merit this, meals at the public expense.”
“He said that the vine bears three grapes: pleasure, inebriation, and disgust. He said that he was surprised how among the Greeks experts competed and amateurs judged them. When he asked how someone could avoid being a drunk, he said “if you keep the shame of drunks before you.” He also used to say that he was surprised how the Greeks make laws against arrogance when they honor athletes for hitting each other. When he learned that a ship’s side was four-fingers thick, he said that the sailors were only that far from death.
Xenophon Memorabilia, 3.5.14
“I think that just as certain Athletes lose ground to their opponents after they have won with too much ease, so too the Athenians have become worse because they stopped caring for themselves.”
“The ultimate fate has now befallen the republic. Let us – chief citizens of all lands and peoples – make like the noble gladiators, who submit to death with honor, so that we can die with dignity rather than live as slaves with ignominy.
Nothing is more detestable than disgrace, nothing more shameful than slavery. We have been born for glory and freedom – let us either hold on to these things or die with dignity. We have disguised too long what we think, but now it is out in the open. Everyone now reveals what they think and what they wish on either side. There are a few impious citizens opposed to the multitude of the right minded, but in light of the dearness of the republic, they are too many. The immortal gods have given to the republic the incredible power and fortune of repressing them.”
fatum extremum rei publicae venit, quod gladiatores nobiles faciunt, ut honeste decumbant, faciamus nos principes orbis terrarum gentiumque omnium, ut cum dignitate potius cadamus quam cum ignominia serviamus.
Nihil est detestabilius dedecore, nihil foedius servitute. Ad decus et ad libertatem nati sumus; aut haec teneamus aut cum dignitate moriamur. Nimium diu teximus, quid sentiremus; nunc iam apertum est; omnes patefaciunt, in utramque partem quid sentiant, quid velint. Sunt impii cives, sed pro caritate rei publicae nimium multi, contra multitudinem bene sentientium admodum pauci; quorum opprimendorum di immortales incredibilem rei publicae potestatem et fortunam dederunt.
“I must own, I should as soon expect to find the prosodia in a comb, as poetry in a medal. Before I endeavour to convince you of it, says Philander, I must confess to you that this science has its visionaries, as well as all others. There are several, for example, that will find a mystery in every tooth of Neptune’s trident, and are amazed at the wisdom of the ancients, that represented a thunder-bolt with three forks, since, they will tell you, nothing could have better explained its triple quality of piercing, burning, and melting. I have seen a long discourse on the figure and nature of horn, to show it was impossible to have found out a fitter emblem for plenty than the cornucopiae. These are a sort of authors who scorn to take up with appearances, and fancy an interpretation vulgar when it is natural. What could have been more proper to show the beauty and friendship of the three Graces, than to represent them naked, and knit together in a kind of dance? It is thus they always appear in ancient sculpture, whether on medals or in marble, as I doubt not but Horace alludes to designs of this nature, when he describes them after the same manner :
Gratia, Junctis nuda sororibus :
Segnesque nodum solvere Gratiae.
The sister Graces hand in hand
Conjoined by love’s eternal band.
Several of your medallists will be here again astonished at the wisdom of the ancients, that knew how to couch such excellent precepts of morality under visible objects. The nature of gratitude, they will tell you, is better illustrated by this single device, than by Seneca’s whole book de Beneficiis.”
“A poor man named Skadasos used to live in Leuktra (which is a village in the land of the Thespians). He had two daughters who were named Hippo and Milêtia or, as some say, Thenô and Euksippê. Skedasos was a good man and solicitous of strangers, even though he did not have much. When two Spartan youths came to him, he welcomed them happily. Although they were lusting after the maidens, they were hindered from bold action by the good character of the father. On the next day, they went to Delphi. The same road laid before them.
So, after they got an oracle from the god about which they were in need, they returned homeward again, traveling through Boiotia and returning to the home of Skedasos. But he did not happen to be in Leuktra at the time. Still, the daughters welcomed the strangers in the family’s usual manner. But when the youths found them alone, they raped the girls. When they noticed that the girls were taking the offense pretty badly, they killed them and rid themselves of the burden by throwing the bodies in a well.
When Skedasos returned and did not see his daughters, he discovered that everything else he left behind was safe. He was at a loss over the affair until a certain dog kept pawing at him and often ran up to him and from him back to the well. From this he figured it out, and he raised his daughters’ corpses up from the well. Once he learned from his neighbors that they had seen those Spartans on the previous day and returning again on the next one, he attributed the deed to them because they were constantly praising the girls on the earlier day and counting as blessed the men they would marry.
He went to Sparta in order to take his case to the Ephors. When he was near Argos, because night overtook him, he stayed in an inn. There was another old man in the same inn who was from the city of Oreus in the region of Hestiaia. After Skedasos heard him groaning and cursing the Spartans, he asked him what evil he had suffered at their hands. He explained that he was a Spartan subject and that after Aristodemos was sent to Oreus as a governor, he proved himself to be very cruel and lawless.
He explained, “He lusted after my son. When he couldn’t persuade him, he attempted to rape him and abduct him from the wrestling school. Because the teacher was preventing him and there were many young men helping, Aristodemos retreated out of necessity. But on the following day, he outfitted a trireme, kidnapped the boy and sailed to the opposite shore where he was trying to rape the boy. He killed him because he was fighting back. After returned, he threw a dinner party.” The old man continued, “Once I learned of what happened and took care of the body, I went to Sparta and met with the Ephors. But they showed this no concern.”
Hearing these things, Skedasos lost heart because he was imagining that the Spartans would ignore his case as well. But he did explain his own misfortune to the stranger in turn. The man was advising him not to meet with the Ephors but just to return to Boiotia and build a tomb for his daughters. Skedasos, nevertheless, was not persuaded, but he went to Sparta to meet with the Ephors. When they did not pay attention, he went to the kings and then went up and wept before each of the citizens. When he gained nothing else, he was rushing through the city raising his hands to the sun. Then he was striking his fists on the ground and calling on the Furies. Finally, he killed himself.”
Note: this is a guest post and possible first of many from the amazing Deborah Beck.
“Whenever I hear a man discoursing on virtue, or on some other form of wisdom, who is a true man and worthy of the words he says, I am hugely delighted, admiring at the same time both the speaker and how the things being said are fitting and harmonious with each other.”
Several years ago, I taught an advanced undergraduate Greek class on Homer’s Odyssey. Many of my students were vociferously indignant about the poor quality, as writing, of much of the scholarship that I asked them to read. I was unable to disagree with them, as I often feel much the same way. I suspect most professional Classicists do, whether or not they are willing to admit it. Reading Sophocles, or Livy, or Galen, or Ovid, is usually more fun than reading our colleagues’ views on these authors. The rare exceptions to the generally disappointing quality of academic writing as prose can be easily identified by the lively enthusiasm with which a book reviewer comments on the writing style of a new publication.
The summation of the BMCR review of Mimetic Contagion, by the late Robert Germany (Oxford 2016), is the exception that proves the rule: “This impeccably produced book is unpretentiously erudite; as the saying goes, much more than the sum of its (very many, ancient and modern) parts, impressively documented and arranged: literary-philological analysis and performance criticism, art-historical and anthropological inquiry, sociocultural and intellectual history. Germany regularly deploys critical theory pedagogically judiciously, painlessly introducing uninitiated readers to Benjamin, Foucault, Frazer, Gell, and Irigaray, to name some. Ultimately, Germany’s sophisticated and dense analysis, masterfully delivered in clear, serene prose is a pleasure to read.”
How often do we encounter such praise of academic writing? Not often at all. My students’ annoyance about this was a wake-up call. Why, I wondered, do we put up with so much academic writing that is so lackluster as English prose? And what can be done about it?
Sententiae Antiquae is one answer. It has tens of thousands of enthusiastic readers in large part because it helps us to explore learned matters, and complex and challenging topics, by writing about them with engaging clarity and vigor. A post on Sententiae Antiquae always sounds like a real person speaking. This is a key reason that SA has been so successful in fostering substantive conversations about difficult issues in both Classical literature and current affairs. The writing styles of SA’s contributors put out a welcome mat for anyone interested in the subject under discussion. In fact, SA models for readers that writing style is important, because writing style makes an idea both more enjoyable and more persuasive to its audiences.
An ongoing complaint about the academy in recent decades, and about the Humanities in particular, is that our scholarship has become so specialized that no one outside of a small group of experts can understand it. Specialization in and of itself, in my view, is not the main problem. This way of framing the issue creates a false dichotomy between erudition and accessibility. It allows scholars to wiggle out of the problem by making the issue one of too little knowledge on the part of someone else, instead of taking responsibility for asking necessary questions about what “erudition” should look like. At a time when many Classicists are eager for ways to bring more people into our field, a meaningful yardstick for measuring erudition is the ability to create conversations about specialized ideas in which both the learned and the not-as-learned can participate with enjoyment.
This does not mean that scholarly writing needs to be “dumbed down” in order to be appealing to a wider audience. Nor am I suggesting that everyone now writing scholarly monographs for Oxford and Cambridge should instead write general interest books. My beef is not with scholarly writing and argument per se, but with the default understanding of what constitutes good scholarly writing. In my view, the clotted and wearisome “Academic-ese” writing style that we too often equate with erudition can also be seen as laziness. It’s hard to present a scholarly argument in a clear and straightforward way that can be understood by anyone familiar with the ancient evidence. It’s much easier to write the kind of “insider baseball” footnotes that remind knowledgeable readers of scholarship they have already read, while leaving everyone else frustrated and confused. It’s easier to dismiss calls for scholarship that any devoted reader of Homer can enjoy than it is to try to write such scholarship. But this is something that scholars should be thinking about, because “more accessible scholarly writing” is one answer to the question, “how can we make our field more welcoming to more different kinds of people?”
Learning to write in a more user-friendly way is an ongoing project. Whenever I am working on a new publication, I now ask myself whether those former students of mine would be aggrieved if they were asked to read my piece. If the answer is yes, I’ve done it wrong and I should try again. If you’re not sure if you’re one of Those Writers, who are writing in Academic-ese rather than English, ask yourself some questions. How many multisyllabic Latinate abstractions have you used? Can you read one of your paragraphs aloud without stumbling or running out of breath? How many subordinate clauses does your typical sentence have? Ask a non-teacher to read your latest paper, and invite them to be brutally honest with you about the style. Then listen carefully to their answer. My students have made me a better writer, in ways that all of us would do well to think about.
Bohun Psalter and Hours, England, second half of the 14th century. Cow reading (@BLMedieval, Egerton 3277)
“The ancients thought that it was their duty to the dead to do these things in the spectacles, and afterward they tempered it with a slightly more humane atrocity. For once, since it was believed that the spirits of the dead could be propitiated with human blood, they would purchase captives or slaves of a lower station and sacrifice them during the funeral rites. Later, it seemed fitting to shade over this impiety with pleasure. And so on the set day of the funeral sacrifices they would kill those whom they had prepared using the arms with which they had been then and thus educated only so that they could learn to die. Thus did the Romans take the sting out of death by resorting to murder.”
officium autem mortuis hoc spectaculo facere se veteres arbitrabantur, posteaquam illud humaniore atrocitate temperaverunt. nam olim, quoniam animas defunctorum humano sanguine propitiari creditum erat, captivos vel mali status servos mercati in exequiis immolabant. postea placuit impietatem voluptate adumbrare. itaque quos paraverant, armis quibus tunc et qualiter poterant eruditos, tantum ut occidi discerent, mox edicto die inferiarum apud tumulos erogabant. ita mortem homicidiis consolabantur.
“What of your righteous art of lawmaking which has uncovered great things for human beings? I think this yields, or already has yielded for along time, to the women at the tripod. People travel to Delphi and inquire about the laws of their state. And then they make their laws in accordance with the utterance that comes from the Pythia (as they have since the time of Lykourgos, one whom it is necessary to bring up before many for the sake of argument).
They say, in fact, that he did not make any law for the Spartans without divine assent. But, it was not since Lykourgos the best of the Greeks did not make the laws that the god acquired the belief of making the laws, but because Lykourgos who was the best of the Greeks gave testimony that the words of the Pythia who knew nothing on her own prevailed. She provided answers as seemed best to the god and the god received the reputation for the laws from the Pythia in turn.”
“There are two kinds of weasels: one is wild and the two differ in size. The Greeks call this one ictis. The gall of both is useful against asps, but poisonous to others. The other weasel, however, wanders in our homes and, as Cicero explains, moves its young on a daily basis and changes its nest, chasing snakes. Its meat, preserved in salt is given in a weight of one denarius and mixed in three cyathi of liquid to those who have been bitten. Otherwise, its stomach is stuffed with coriander and, once dried, drunk with wine. A weasel kitten is even better for this than the weasel itself.”
XVI. Mustelarum duo genera, alterum silvestre; distant magnitudine, Graeci vocant ictidas. harum fel contra aspidas dicitur efficax, cetero venenum. haec autem quae in domibus nostris oberrat et catulos suos, ut auctor est Cicero, cottidie transfert mutatque sedem, serpentes persequitur. ex ea inveterata sale denarii pondus in cyathis tribus datur percussis aut ventriculus coriandro fartus inveteratusque et in vino potus, et catulus mustelae etiam efficacius.
“Simylos the lyre player murdered his neighbors
Playing all night long. But not Origines:
Nature made him deaf and thus
Gave him a longer life instead of hearing.”
