Do I wake or sleep?

 So Wednesday I was assisting a coach in a class of 2-3 year olds. This coach is older, from Italy, and we have some awesome discussions. And he knows I’m a huge history nerd. So he was teaching the kids, and as the lesson progressed we ended up with a floor of big cones with smaller cones on top of them, and he wants the kids to knock them down. So he says “thees is lahk Rome and…”—looks questioningly at me—“…the Phoenicians?” I laughed and said “the Carthaginians, actually, although they spoke Phoenician.” So then I start getting into it and I’m encouraging the kids to “sack Carthage, we have to sack Carthage! Make sure they never invade our peninsula again!” Now I’m trying to figure out how I can come up with a lesson that incorporates Roman history—I have two kids (not even related!) in my Saturday class of 4-5 years olds whose names are Cassius and Livia and I love to call her Empress. My Saturday classes are outdoors and there’s a slope nearby—I can possibly recreate Hannibal’s passage through the Alps. The sack of soccer balls could be the elephants…

So we had our history final Tuesday.

The exam was the same format as the midterm, only with two essays to write instead of one. We had four questions from which to choose:

( The Exam Questions )

I was part of a study group and the guy who'd organized it randomly assigned us different essays--just for the purpose of studying, we certainly weren't bound to this. I was assigned questions 3 & 4. I banged out three--I actually came up with seven different factors, just to give the other students many reasons to consider--and posted it to our Google docs group. (We also had fifteen identifications--terms we were going to have to define/identify for the exam--that I uploaded.) I was rather proud of one of those reasons--I said that one factor was Christianity's sacred texts, which we hadn't actually discussed at all in class, but when I was composing the outline, it occurred to me that not every religion has sacred texts. Certainly paganism didn't. I did a little research on other Mediterranean basin religions in Antiquity and found out there were only 3-4 other religions that had sacred texts, and none of them were explicitly evangelical. I whipped off an email to my professor:

I've been working on that essay question number 3 and came up with an interesting idea that I don't think we covered in class. I think the fact that Christianity has sacred texts is another factor in its success--it's much easier to propagate and reinforce information (the Word) when you can write it down and pass it along. The other Mediterranean basin religions with sacred texts (as far as I can find out) were ones that were not explicitly evangelistic, like Judaism, Manichaeism and Zoroastrianism. I think it's the intersection of Christianity's evangelism and their sacred texts that helped them explode eventually.

Am I completely off-track here? I realize that many of Christianity's early adherents might not have been able to read (hence reducing the effectiveness of the gospel as a tool for evangelization), and it wasn't until it had been firmly established as the state religion that they established the biblical canon and started translating the Bible into other religions. But surely before that time, during the early church, evangelists used the sacred writings as part of their outreach--did Paul preach the written gospel or did he improvise?

He responded:

Dear Clara,

your idea is absolutely not off-track. There are several studies arguing about the decisive role played by the written word, and hence interpretation, that is theology, in the rise of Christianity. Paul: remember that Paul wrote his letters before the evangelists wrote the Gospels. The Gospels are later and take into account Paul's letters. Moreover, Paul wasn't an apostle and never met Christ in person. Thus, Paul's letters are based on an oral tradition and the Gospel on orality and Paul's letters.

Eeeh! So I worked that into my argument.

Then I studied the last question. I wrote a quick outline for it but as I was composing the outline, I realized that question would be a little difficult to answer, by memory, with sources (remember, the difficult thing--the REALLY difficult thing--about this format is that we have to not only write an essay, we have to cite original sources--from memory). With this kind of format, linear is better for me, it's much easier to remember a linear argument than a convoluted, circular one. And no matter how you choose to answer no. 4, all those factors influenced each other. Example, one economic factor was the debasement of the currency--but this wasn't an isolated phenomenon, it influenced--strongly--how the legions acted...which then influenced the imperial succession. The 3rd century was basically a precursor to the Fall of Rome in the 5th century and like any event where things are falling apart, they all feed into each other and social entropy takes over and...

Basically the 3rd century was a hot mess, yo.

So I decided I would rather concentrate on no. 2 and emailed our study group leader, who was fine with that. This was a more complicated question than no. 3 (albeit still linear) so my outline was longer. It boiled down to:

( Long Boring Outline on How the Roman Empire Held Together )

I committed this to memory (as well as my other outline) and basically spent two days muttering under my breath every chance I got. Got to the final on Tuesday was pacing around, still muttering--my TA saw me and made a "you're going to be FINE" gesture and mouthed that. We had nearly three hours to do the exam but the other TA said it shouldn't take nearly that long. I clocked out at about 3:30 (2.5 hours) after 3 blue books and one aching hand. I did this exaggerated walk up to drop off my blue books and one of the TAs said "we were taking bets on how many you would fill up." I gave him a long-suffering look and gimped off to treat myself to some Pinkberry. GOD, that stuff is good!

Have to register for next semester now!

(originally dated April 27)

Yay! I finished it almost a week early--not because I'm such a goody-goody (as IF, in college I took great pride in writing papers the night before that got A's :) but because the professor suggested we do so and with a class this big, if I hand it in with everyone else, I won't know my grade until JULY. (Which might be appropriate, since Gaius WAS born in the month named after him. )

However, graceful speech was but one literary weapon Caesar deployed in his calculated campaign for domination—he was as fluent a writer as a speaker and his two Commentarii, with their combination of elegance and brevity, are still held up as models of military composition. In these Caesar eschews the more flowery language of the funeral or the Senate hall, and instead writes in a much more appropriately martial tone—businesslike, brief, unemotional. And yet for all that, the Commentarii served as effective tools of propaganda, intended to justify his expensive campaigns and subtly position himself as a leader to the people. “Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres” (Book I) begins his Commentarii de Bello Gallico and with this engaging opening Caesar invites the audience—his peers in the Senate and the Roman populace—to follow him as he plunders Gaul and conquers the Celtic and Germanic barbarian tribes…all for the greater glory of Rome, of course. Throughout the Commentarii, and notwithstanding Caesar’s use of the third person narrative, he is selling himself in a very personal way to the reader, sprinkling his text with anecdotes of Caesar’s mercy, charm and most important, his military invincibility. Caesar was well-aware that the infantry was the heart and soul of Roman glory. Latin’s straightforward construction, with its structural terseness and lack of articles, lends itself very well to the purposeful efficiency of the Comentarii—-Caesar’s ending to the Commentarii de Bello Civili is a simple “Haec initia belli Alexandrini fuerunt.” (Book III) Caesar’s writing style in these two works highlights another verbal characteristic—-his instinctive grasp of the impact of conciseness. Caesar’s epigrams are famous in every language, the most well-known being, when asked about his Pontic campaign, his laconic response “Veni, vidi, vici.” (Suetonius, 37) Plutarch tells us of another example; upon being warned by one of his captains that the Senate would not extend Caesar’s term in Gaul, Caesar “clapped his hand on the hilt of his sword and said, ‘But this shall.’” (28) As any soldier knows, brevity is the soul not just of wit, but of might.

Sometimes I think my professor is a little taken aback at my interest in military matters--the wars themselves are not that interesting, but military technique and strategy is because they never change. What worked thousands of years ago can work now, because all armies are composed of infantry (soldiers who march), cavalry (mounted soldiers), artillery (launched missiles), etc. and they still study brilliant battle tactics today, like Hannibal's double-envelopment (pincer) attack at the Battle of Cannhae. In fact I believe I remember that Stormin' Norman used the pincer plan in Desert Storm but the Wikipedia article doesn't indicate that, so I could be wrong. And Joshua Chamberlain, a Union commander at Gettysburg, used another classical battle tactic at Little Round Top (I think it was from the Spartans)--he was a classic professor at Bowdoin so of course he knew it! I just love that something someone did thousands of years ago still works, still fits, still is applicable and relevant. History never changes because people never change.

Busy weekend, well tomorrow anyway. Ken Scudder has hooked me up with his Oberlin (?--I think, a college anyway) softball group and they play every week through the summer, starting tomorrow. Yay! Very, very excited about that.

I also have to catch up on my reading for class--I slacked off a bit last weekend and have some original sources through which to plow, plus I have to start work on my essay. We have a 4-5 page essay due at the end of the month--the professor offered a list of possible topics, but I chose my own: Julius Caesar, Rock Star. Okay, not exactly that but the gist is: Julius Caesar was the first public figure to succeed not just on merit but because he specifically knew how to sell himself via his coolly laconic dispatches from the Gallic Wars--this coincided with the development of "personality-driven" writing, like Cicero's letters, which later culminated in the invention of a new literary genre, the biography, by Suetonius and Plutarch. But as I told my Mom, Julius Caesar was the first rock star. Just imagine him striding into Pontus, kicking ass and taking names, and as he walks out, he's surrounded by the papparazzi who are all taking pictures and shouting questions at him. He looks coolly back at them and says with a slight shrug "Veni. Vedi. Vici." Adjusting his cloak he then makes his way toward the shuttle waiting to take him back to Rome as a swarm of groupies follow in his wake. "Gaius! Gaius! Oh, he's so dreamy!" As I said to my Mom, "Laconicism is hottt."

So anyway, gotta get started on that. Read and write, read and write. While still finding time to think about the 10-minute play I'm directing for Duncan.

I've been doing a lot of reading ahead in class, as well as outside reading, and downloading family trees and whatnot, all in an effort to keep all the material straight. The textbook, while interesting and readable, isn't much more than a flying runthrough--understandably, since it's covering over 1000 years. But, as an example, its coverage of Julius Caesar doesn't even mention Cleopatra and all salaciousness aside, his relationship with her was very indicative of how thoroughly effed up the Ptolemaic administration of Egypt was. We had a real rousing discussion section today and this came up--one of the guys in my discussion section, a guy named Scott who's something of an expert in Egypt, was talking about why Rome didn't annex Egypt until much later and he said "because the political situation was such a mess there, it wasn't worth it." I interjected "as Julius Caesar found out!" He was almost killed there. Ptolemaic politics were so sterotypically female and feminine--someone was always getting poisoned or plotted against behind their back. Shakespeare's characterization of Egypt as female was obviously because of Cleopatra but even without that, the characterization is apt.

Columbia has a cool interface with students called Courseworks--you log on and go to your classes, and you can access slide shows and also post online discussions. This is something I posted in response to the book, Harris's War and Imperialism, that we discussed today:

On p. 41, Harris asks: "...whether or not the social ethos I have been describing was created by circumstances external to the Roman state, or whether Rome's distinctive behavior towards foreign states resulted from the social ethos." And that's the big question, isn't it? He starts from 327 BC (in the middle of the Samnite Wars) and ends in 70 BC, after Rome has convincingly conquered all of the Mediterranean. And he makes a strong case for Rome's inherent bellicosity, the militarism that saturated Roman mores and culture. But it's worth looking at how this may have developed, and I can't help but see a watershed moment in the 1st and 2nd Punic Wars, especially the latter. As much war as Rome may have pursued during the 5th and 4th centuries [i.e., with the Samnites, Etruscans, Sabines, and other peoples of the Italian peninsula], these were essentially defensive, a kind of macro-Darwinism, "dominate or be dominated" that perhaps was driven by the Celts' and Samnites' aggressive policies toward them (the latter finally reaching its natural conclusion when Sulla [general-turned-dictator during the chaos of the 1st century BC who basically upended the Roman constitution by marching on Rome--sound familiar?--wiping out most of the Senate and putting in his lackies instead] eradicated them in 83 BC, with Strabo [contemporary writer] remarking "he knew from experience that no Roman would be able to live as long as the Samnites existed").

We first have a change in perspective, a war that is essentially expansionist, with the first Carthaginian War. Though this war was in its execution more or less unremarkable (with the exception of Rome's development of its first navy), the 2nd Punic War must have tested the Romans severely. Not only was the casualty rate extremely high, but the war was fought right there on the peninsula, and some of their allies were even turning against them. There seems to be such an incredibly personal feel to the Hannibalic War, exemplified by the Romans' awareness of the all-conquering opposing general, Hannibal himself, whom even the Alps couldn't keep out. And yet for all that, the Romans came out of that war with their appetite for war seemingly enhanced, rather than subdued. It is after 201 that Rome engages in what are essentially a series of police actions, wars to maintain the balance of power in the eastern Mediterranean, conflicts that are the antithesis of defensive, necessary wars. Does this indicate that the pursuit of war was an integral, ingrained feature of Roman culture? Or was the 2nd Punic War the crucible that forged these characteristics permanently in the Roman ethos?

This is something I find I'm pondering more and more--how Rome's initial capacity for war developed into an essential part of its identity, by which its citizens derived their sense of self. I want to examine the development from citizen/soldiers fighting defensive wars of necessity ---> citizen/soldiers fighting wars of conquest for the greater glory of Rome and their own gain ---> de facto professional soldiers whose main loyalty is to their commander (and then only because that commander will get them the goods). My instinct, as I say above, is that something changed in the Roman psyche during the crucible of the 2nd Punic War. I think there was a unique quality to that war that could've either broken them completely or further refined them--as it happens, it was the latter. Something I brought up in class today was the poverty of Rome's culture until Hellenization in the 2nd century--until then, Rome had no theater, no epic poetry, little literature of any kind in fact and no music that survived. This was a culture that had refined itself to one main purpose--war. And yet there was something more to their culture--the Romans were constitutional geniuses, they did improve on the concept of the polis, they topped the Greek world in that respect. And they were not Sparta--Sparta was an extreme example of a society devoted to war. Rome wasn't that extreme, and interestingly, in the mid-2nd century, the national appetite for war apparently started to wane.

Busy week. Lots of running around. I'm preparing for the Mardi Gras party Tuesday and Lori did the sweetest thing, she paid for the order I'd placed for the hurricane mix, the Zatarain's and Tony Chachere gumbos and red beans and rice, and the geaux cups. She paid for the whole order, and originally we were just going to split it--so sweet! She saved me much $$$ which is great because I really can't afford the party this year (starving student and all) but it's a tradition that I have to keep up!

So this weekend I will be shopping (mostly for King Cake supplies and sausage to put in the red beans and rice, and yeah and lots of rum for the hurricanes), cleaning the apartment, and STUDYING. Those Romans did QUITE a bit--it is not that easy keeping track of all their exploits. THREE Punic Wars and FOUR Macedonian Wars--and the Macedonian Wars started during the Punic Wars! Guys, can't you just get along? If the Cullens and the Quileute wolves can make a treaty, so can you.

Since we're getting narratives from several different sources (the three textbooks--one didactic textbook, and two with all original sources), plus our heavily-accented professor, plus our TA discussions, plus the powerpoint slides that I print out, I have a lot of notes and paperwork to put together. I've found it's immensely helpful to synthesize all of this into one master timeline. Not only is it easier to read, just the fact of creating it forces me to think clearly and linearly about the subject. I also do outside research--the professor and the textbook are not always terribly clear so it helps to get the information from another angle. For instance, a lot of these place names have several different names in different languages. When Hamilcar Barcid (father of Hannibal) went to Spain in the financially disastrous wake of the 1st Punic War, there were three main cities that he either founded or dealt with, and one is called Gades/Gadeira, etc. I came across several different variations on this name--on a hunch, and knowing that Cadiz is one of the oldest cities on the subcontinent (I know Cadiz well since our ship went there), I looked up Cadiz and found that its Phoenician name was Gadir, and that its Attic Greek name was Gádeira. Bingo! I just like to know the context, it helps me understand everything else that much better.

Hannibal is pretty cool. Elephants marching across the Alps! But I then I think about the elephants dying in battle and I get sad. Did you know that after the Battle of Lake Tresimeno, a notoriously bloody battle, "in the surroundings...there are further areas which retain a particular meaning, including Ossaia ('Charnel House, Place of Bones'), Sepoltaglia ('Place of Burial'), Caporosso ('Cape red'), Piegaro ('Subdued Place'), Pugnano ('Place of battles'), and Pian di Marte ('Field of Mars')"?

I gotta say now, as in 21st century (at least the first ten years), is a GOOD time in which to become interested in classical history. Thanks to Gladiator, the sword-and-sandal genre has been revived, and I've been able to add tons of such movies and TV shows to my Netflix queue. In addition to

*Gladiator (which has the added bonus of being actually good with Russell Crowe having won Best Actor and crazy-ass Joaquin Phoenix being nominated for Supporting Actor), there's also

*the HBO series Rome of which I've only seen a few eps but which looks extremely promising;

*Troy which wasn't well-reviewed and doesn't actually have much to do with Rome except that one Roman tradition was that Aeneas, a Trojan prince who escaped from the city, later founded Rome. But notwithstanding I really liked Troy--I liked everyone in it, even Orlando Bloom who actually made Paris likeable. I also respected how they made Helen thoughtful and intelligent. And the eye-candy was off the hook! Eric Bana as Hector and Brad Pitt and His Abs as Achilles--rowr!

*Helen of Troy, a mini-series that aired in 2003. I watched it then on TV, and then watched the DVD about 6-7 months ago. This teleplay covers a lot more ground than Troy did because it's not based on The Iliad (heck, even Troy covered more ground than The Iliad, which only covers the last few weeks of the Trojan War)--Helen of Troy is, naturally, about Helen and it starts with her abduction by Theseus, and ends with the aftermath of the War. An odd cast--an English model as Helen who gives a game, energetic performance but her inexperience shows. And she's a little too toothily British to really pass for the face that launched a thousand ships. The guy who plays Menelaus is quite good and makes him very sympathetic, and the woman who plays Cassandra is AWESOME. When she sees Paris again for the first time in years, she has this LOOK on her face and she whispers to him in amazement you should be dead. Good stuff. The guy who plays Odysseus is good, too (they always seem to get good Odyssei, Sean Bean was also great in Troy). The weirdest bit of casting is Stellan Skarsgård as....Theseus? Stellan Skarsgård is a fine character actor but well past his prime physically and really completely miscast as Theseus the Strapping Hero of Greek myth.

But then the big guns come in--John Rhys-Davies as Priam. He's terrific. And the best is Rufus Sewell as Agamemnon--God, he is fantastic, absolutely riveting through the whole piece. His best scene is when he sacrifices Iphigeneia--this complete psychopath actually loves his daughter but the course is SET, the Achaean army is determined to sail, and if he has to make sacrifices to ensure positive winds, then that's what he's going to do. It's a fantastic scene, you see this adorable giggling girl being walked up to the altar by two soldiers, then you see the knife come down as her scarf is dangling over the edge of the altar and Agamemnon's sick, determined expression--then the winds start blowing. Just great. Another really good scene is when the Horse is revealed for the first time--you see it from this little boy's point of view, the camera sweeps and this enormous horse is looming over him, with this weird exotic music playing. And when they're dragging in the horse, the sun is setting in the background as the music is ratcheting up the tension and it's just a perfectly constructed scene. Trojans, this is Atë writ large--it arrived on your doorstep and you broke your own city gates to force it in. No wonder this story has lasted the ages.

*A side note--I've talked about this before but the city of Troy actually existed, roughly where Homer says it did (remember, The Iliad was first written down about 700 BC). They've done archaeological research on it, and there have been many different...uh, iterations, I guess you could say, of the city on that site. So they number them, and Troy VII is the one that was there in about the 12th or 11th century BC, when the Trojan War is said to have happened. There is no historical evidence that the characters, Helen, Paris, Hector, etc., actually existed, but they do know that the city was leveled by a war. And they know that Troy VI was leveled by an earthquake. Often, as stories are handed down, the narratives get conflated, and one explanation for the Trojan Horse is that the storytellers conflated the destructions of the two versions of the city. This is the theory--there was a myth of an enormous horse that was delivered to the city in the context of the war and caused its destruction. How did the mythmakers decide upon a horse? Because horses are a symbol of Poseidon (the whitecaps are the manes)--and in the eastern Mediterranean, earthquakes come from the sea. Isn't that fascinating?

Ahen. Back to sword-and-sandal movies. Another one is this new TV series, Spartacus which got an hilariously snarky review in the Washington Post. Ain't nothing not to like in sweaty Roman men beating the crap out of each other.

...It is estimated that only about five percent of all the compositions of ancient writers actually survives.

Oh, MAN. Five percent. Unbelievable. We are missing out on so much. Why did that stupid fire have to burn down the Alexandrian library, why? Just imagine what else is out there, that we know about because other writers have referred to it, but don't actually have? I feel sick. I feel like Thomasina, the loss of such knowledge literally sickens me.

Can you just imagine how amazing it would be to discover the literary, Greek or Roman equivalent of the Dead Sea Scrolls?

Me walking over the Tiber River--I'd just visited the Isola Taberna, the tiny island in the middle of the river. I'm enjoying some gelato--I had gelato almost every day. OH MY GOD SO GOOD. Between the amazing coffee--it is FANTASTIC here--and the gelato, I honestly don't know what I'm going to do. I've never had such good stuff.



The Pantheon, looking up into the oculum. This is the best-preserved Roman structure and has been used continuously since its erection.



THIS--was my entrance into Venice. From the vaporetto on the Grand Canal.



This is the entrance into Venice from the Lagoon. This was shot from the top of the campanile--the bell tower in the middle of the Piazza San Marco.



This was shot from the top of the Basilica San Marco--that pillar is matched by one to the right (behind my head). From those two pillars were hanged criminals, and to this day superstitious Venetians will not walk between them. (I didn't either, of course!)



The Piazza San Marco at night, in the rain.

I'm on the third leg of my journey and am now in Naples, staying with my brother and his family for 5 days. I arrived last night and had a lovely dinner with Stuart and Karine, although William and Annika (niece and nephew) were asleep so I didn't get to see them. Just chillaxin' con la gatta today until la famiglia get home--it's been a whirlwind past 5 days.



Rome was incredible. It is truly the Eternal City--sexy, beautiful, fashionable coffee-drinking people against the backdrop of old, old history. Oh, I gorged myself with history, I walked all over the city looking at old, old things. So wonderful, so many things to see. I've decided that Italy, like Japan, must rewrite their constitution so they can never again engage in war, because we can't risk these treasures again, we literally dodged a bullet during World War II. The Forum is--well, again, incredible. I was actually LOOKING at ground where Julius Caesar walked, and spoke. JULIUS CAESAR. He was there, he stood there. And Marc Anthony--they were there, they stood there. The Temple of Saturn, an old Roman apartment, the Teatro di Marcellus--people from long ago, millennia ago, lived in these spaces, they worked and argued and kissed their children there. They were just like us. Their voices can still be heard--they were just like us.

Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold...



I visited John Keats's grave again, in the Old Protestant Cemetery. (The last time I was in Rome, I also went there.) I discovered that there's a Keats-Shelley museum in Rome, right by the Spanish steps--it's the house where Keats died, so I squeezed in what I thought would be a quick visit before I caught the train to Venice. It's a 4-story building and the museum is on the third story--it consists of a main room with an overview of the younger British Romantic poets (Byron, Keats, Shelley and several others), another room that focuses on Keats's life, and the room where he lived, and died. This last room is an overwhelming experience--I walked in and looked around, and started crying. It's pretty powerful. I did my senior honors project in college on Keats--the very name of this journal is the last line of my favorite poem of his, "Ode to a Nightingale." Fled is that music--Do I wake or sleep? His poetry is just sublime, and I consider him a personal secular saint of mine. To stand where he stood, to see what he saw out of those windows, to breathe the air he breathed and to sense his presence in that little room...it's overwhelming.

His epitaph, which he wrote, is "Here Lies One Whose Name Was Writ in Water." Both times I've been there, I thought "No. Never." His writings will last the ages. Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird...