Bread and Circuses: Highlights from the Gallo-Roman Museum in Lyon, part 2.

parturient (Dictionary.com)
Hibernian (Wordsmith)

Latinitweets:

adverb: itaque , indeclinable => and so, therefore bit.ly/IKAclf #Latin #Vocab #LatinVocab—
  (@LatinVocab) October 23, 2012

femina: woman: noun. Example sentence:Formam feminarum semper laudant.Translation:They always praise the beauty … bit.ly/UudhA3—
Latin Language (@latinlanguage) October 23, 2012

The concluding bit of an item in Slate:

[...] In his famous manifesto on architecture, the Roman writer Vitruvius propagated an error about the Acropolis caryatids: they depict, he claimed, the humiliated and enslaved matrons of Caryae, punished by fellow Greeks because of its treacherous defection to the Persians. But it is unlikely that the Athenians would have devoted such a monumental and sensitively placed statement to that remote event.

Furthermore, the entire power of the caryatids comes from our sense that the women’s subordination is not imposed but freely chosen. Spaced at a generous distance, they seem like confidently complete individuals who belong to a dedicated cohort. They are a sisterhood with one thing weighing on their minds — service to the gods. The air around them is transparent yet highly charged with religious feeling.

By one of those optical illusions for which the architects of the restored Acropolis were renowned, the two central statues (their knees in mirror-image reversal) seem to carry the brunt of the roof. Its rectangular corners fall over the weight- bearing but recessive legs of their outlying sisters. Hence the roof seems to float, as if the women were supporting it by thought alone. Their dignity shows how the Greeks honored their gods — not through genuflection or self-abuse but through assertions of human value and pride.

• via: Six Headstrong Women Confidently Raise Acropolis Roof

Some nice hype from UCincy on Susan Prince’s work with Antisthenes:

Are cynics and happiness mutually exclusive? For modern cynics, perhaps. But for the ancient Cynics, not necessarily.

Research by the University of Cincinnati’s Susan Prince shows that despite the historical perception of the ancient Cynics as harsh, street-corner prophets relentlessly condemning all passersby and decrying society’s lack of virtue, these Greek philosophers, indirectly descended from Socratic teaching, weren’t all doom and gloom. They actually might have espoused a shortcut to happiness.

“We don’t have good scholarship on the Cynics. They’re seen as misanthropes and as sloppy and dirty people who want to cut down the elite,” says Prince, UC assistant professor of classics, adding, “But there’s a positive strand that needs to be recovered, and I’m really going to punch that hard with my research.”

Prince was invited to present her new research paper, “Antisthenes and the Short Route to Happiness,” during the 13th annual Unisa Classics Colloquium hosted by the University of South Africa’s Department of Classics and World Languages from Oct. 25-27 in Pretoria. More than a dozen presentations from international scholars will address the conference theme of “Ancient Routes to Happiness.”

Much of Prince’s work focuses on the individual believed to be the primary influence on the Cynic movement, Antisthenes.

Antisthenes was a pupil of Socrates and occasional rival of Plato. In fact, while history occasionally paints Plato as a philosopher of unequaled wisdom, UC’s Prince says that through study of his texts, it’s more plausible that he developed his ideas through tight intellectual debates with his contemporaries, and Antisthenes was among them.

ANCIENT CYNICS’ RECIPE FOR HAPPINESS: AVOID AN EMPHASIS ON MATERIAL GOODS
Plato and Antisthenes shared many beliefs in common with all philosophers – rejection of wealth and luxury, and embracing the pursuit of wisdom and virtue. But Antisthenes’ methods set him apart from Plato. Whereas Plato founded his Academy for philosophical teaching and lengthy study, Antisthenes advocated a short but rigorous path toward virtue and happiness.

Antisthenes’ way was short in that he endorsed an abbreviated curriculum when compared to those of other schools of philosophy, which contended that the quick route was a road to nowhere. Antisthenes’ teachings skipped over the technical aspects of logic in order to concentrate on ethical literature, such as reading Homer.

And Antisthenes’ way was rigorous in that it required a drastic attitude change. To follow the path of the Cynic was to abandon many societal conventions and to live in accord with nature – no more fancy clothes, no more exquisite feasts and even no more roof over your head.

ANCIENT CYNICS’ LACK OF EMPHASIS ON MATERIAL GOODS LED TO MORE LEISURE TIME
Through this shortcut, Prince says Cynics were able to gain leisure time which could be put toward living the good life or what Antisthenes called “seeing the things worth seeing and hearing the things worth hearing.” And that’s how an ancient Cynic could exist in ethical bliss until the end of his days.

“You get to your happiness quickly and then you practice your happiness for the rest of your life,” Prince says.

In a modern context, there’s some irony in the notion of a cynic devoted to the pursuit of happiness, and Prince hopes her research can clear the air on Antisthenes, et al. In addition to her paper for the Unisa conference, she has a 600-page manuscript on Antisthenes scheduled to be published through the University of Michigan Press in 2013 or 2014. She wants to show that the negative connotation associated with “cynic” might be historically inaccurate and to provide a little redemption for centuries of misjudgment.

“I’m resisting the modern sense of ‘cynic,’” Prince says. “That just hits the mission on the head: To recover the ancient Cynics and show that you can’t just project straight backward. There’s a whole history there that has led us to our modern sense of the term ‘cynic,’ and that comes from the negative tradition.”

MORE BACKGROUND ON ANTISTHENES AND ANCIENT CYNICS
“Plato didn’t become great by himself,” says UC’s Prince. “Antisthenes was very important as one of the interlocutors who wasn’t always Plato’s enemy. Their relationship was more like a sibling rivalry.”

Rivalry or not, when looking into history’s rearview it seems as if Plato’s shadow has grown larger than it appeared, diminishing the contributions of others. Peter van Minnen, head of the Department of Classics in UC’s McMicken College of Arts & Sciences, thinks the Cynics have been under represented in the scope of Greek philosophers.

“Susan’s revised Greek text is explained in more detail than ever before,” van Minnen says. “Once it is published, all classicists will turn to it for Antisthenes. The Cynics are kind of neglected but ‘good to think with’ so we don’t take Plato and Aristotle as the only gospel in Greek philosophy.”

• via: Want the Shortest Path to the Good Life? Try Cynicism

posted with permission:

Aristotle Poetics: Editio maior of the Greek text with historical introduction and philological commentaries. By Leonardo Tarán and Dimitri Gutas. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2012. Pp. viii + 538. Hardcover, €162.00/US$226.00. ISBN 978-90-04-21740-9.

Reviewed by Andrew Ford, Princeton University

This editio maior of the Poetics gives a moderately different text from that in Rudolph Kassel’s widely used 1965 OCT (reprinted in D. W. Lucas’ 1968 commentary) together with a fuller apparatus and a vastly fuller picture of the work’s complex tradition. Tarán, author of numerous studies of Aristotle and the Greek philosophical tradition, has teamed up with Gutas, a specialist in medieval Arabic, so as to be able to give a thorough account, in the case of each variant, of the evidence of the four primary witnesses (i.e., witnesses that do not depend on any other extant source). These are assessed in Tarán’s “Prolegomena to the Edition of the Text” (pp. 129–58): the two oldest Greek MSS (A and B), the lost exemplar of William of Moerbeke’s 1278 Latin translation (Φ), and a Syro-Arabic transmission (Σ), known to us through a tenth-century Arabic translation and a tiny bit of its Syriac original. It has been known since the 19th century that the Syro-Arabic tradition can be right against the unanimous testimony of our Greco-Latin sources (e.g., 1447b16).

Tarán’s text and critical apparatus is accordingly accompanied by two commentaries: he provides extensive notes on the transmission of the text in the Greek and Latin sources (pp. 221–306) and Gutas a “Greco-Arabic Critical Apparatus and Commentary” (pp. 307–474) which patiently shows how the lost Greek hyparchtypes (plural: pp. 144–8) of Σ might be reconstructed. Gutas quotes and translates Arabic liberally and labors to make the bases of his judgment clear (e.g., noting when a given Greek word is regularly translated by an Arabic one). His substantial contributions must be evaluated by specialists in the relevant languages, but this reviewer can attest that a classicist will find here much that is new and significantly different from what can be extracted from Margoliouth or Tkatsch (e.g., pp. 334–6 on the mangled names Epicharmus and Phormis at 1449b6) or from Kassel’s report of them (e.g., pp. 331–3, 351–2).

Tarán acknowledges Kassel’s reports of the Greek MSS as “the most complete and accurate so far” but has additional material (and a few corrections) to add. He is more consistent in reporting B (which is deteriorating alarmingly: pp. 154–5), lest readers infer from Kassel’s silence that it supports A when it doesn’t. He also lets us know when the Latin or Arabic translations cannot contribute to a question with the sigla [Φ] and [Σ]. Among recentiores, Parisinus 2038 is given special attention: not a simple offshoot of B as Lobel and Kassel thought, but reflecting both A and B (pp. 149–50), its right readings in agreement with the Syro-Ar. tradition (e.g., 1454b25) deserve mention as conjectures collected by Andronicos Callistos that importantly influenced the Aldine edition (pp. 44–7).

Tarán rightly esteems Kassel’s edition (pp. 152–5), and often follows him in the conjectures he accepts, though he will use Σ to support a different text (e.g., 1454b37) and is more likely to cite Bywater’s conjectures and commentary (pronounced “the best so far,” p. 66). Modern emendations that are not adopted are not recorded in the apparatus, though they may be discussed in the commentary. On the other hand, Tarán does register, with the note “ci.,” conjectures of scholars of the 15th and 16th centuries when they were subsequently confirmed by better knowledge of the primary witnesses (pp. 58, 156). He admits two emendations of his own: at 1455b22, he plausibly suggests Aristotle wrote ἀναγνωρίσας εἰς τινὰς (i.e., εἴς τινας) to say Odysseus “made himself known to some people” upon his return; at 1449b10, to express the idea that tragedy and epic both use metrical speech, his μετὰ μέτρου καὶ λόγου is closer to the (confused) paradosis, but the instrumental dative in Kassel’s μετὰ μέτρου λόγῳ fits better with Aristotle’s usual way of referring to the media of imitation (e.g., 1449b25).

The most obvious improvement of his text over Kassel’s is in the discussion of the “nameless art” at 1447a28-b9 (pp. 226–31, 312–4). Bernays’ insertion of “nameless” (confirmed by Σ) is kept in the singular, and getting rid of Lobel’s emendations allows a correct appreciation of Aristotle’s complex division of mimetic arts (cf. CP 105 [2010] 222–4). In another substantial difference from Kassel, Aristotle no longer says at 1455a32-3 that “poetry is the art of a man of genius or [ἢ] one with a touch of madness” (tr. Hutton); Tarán inserts μᾶλλον from Σ (as Gudeman had) to say poetry requires genius rather than madness, pointing out that the (Platonic) idea of poetic inspiration is absent from the Poetics.

Tarán may be called conservative insofar as he resists emendations that might smooth out the text but are not necessary (e.g., 1447b14). On the whole, he is sparing with brackets and obeli, even though he is able to show that his archetype Ω (= Kassel’s Λ) was imperfect and interpolated (pp. 148–9) and that readers’ notes crept into the text at times (e.g., 1450b9–10, 15). Where Kassel has brackets or obeli, Tarán may read through (e.g., 1450a17–20), repunctuate (1450a1-2) or emend (1452a35); he is content to retain a phrase that is “not necessary but not illogical” (p. 258 on 1451b32). The overall impression is of a treatise that is occasionally rather loose in syntax (e.g., staying with the nominative participle at 1449a9) and train of thought (keeping the otiose melos at 1449b29), but also one that is less shot through with interpolations and glosses than one sees in Kassel (to say nothing of Gerald Else).

Two general essays open the volume: Tarán’s “History of the Text of the Poetics” lays down his editorial principles and tracks the history of the text and its editions from Aristotle’s library to the present. Gutas’ “The Poetics in Syriac and Arabic Translations” shows this tradition to be far more complicated than Kassel’s stemma (p. xii of his edition) may lead one to suppose (contrast p. 110). These lengthy chapters may go beyond what is strictly necessary for an edition, but they provide a wealth of fine-grained information about how pre- and early-modern scribes and scholars worked.

Although Tarán’s commentary focuses on the evidence for the text and not on explicating Aristotle’s theory (we are referred to a forthcoming work on the question of whether catharsis should be understood as involving moral learning, for example: p. 58), the commentary inevitably deals with interpretative issues, often illuminatingly (e.g., on 1447a22, 1449b3). His exegesis of poetry’s two natural causes (1448b4–19), however, raises objections. For Tarán, these are: “1) our congenital power to imitate since childhood and to learn from these first imitations; 2) the fact that all men rejoice in seeing imitations” (p. 239). He comments on the first cause that Aristotle offers no argument to support his claim, but this is because Tarán conflates the actual cause—imitating is natural to us—with one of the signs pointing to its truth: the fact that we get our first lessons through imitation shows that imitating is instinctive, not something learned. So to gloss this cause as “our instinct to imitate and thus to learn” goes well beyond Aristotle and will be weak support for attempts to convert tragic pleasure into moral learning (cf. p. 240).

Because the Poetics has so many passages in which a great deal hangs on the choice between variants, it is impossible to do justice to an edition in limited space and short time. But there is no doubt that this is a work all scholars of the Poetics will want at hand and all research libraries must have. An obligatory port of call for textual questions, it provides a fresh approach to numerous passages and offers all students of the Poetics a treasury of information about the reception—eastern and western—of that profound work. Helpful indices of Greek words, names, subjects, and of Greek, Latin, Arabic and Syriac manuscripts conclude the book.

It’s that time of year again for the school-set to set reed to tablet and start writing a bit of ancient fiction in the manner of Caroline Lawrence with the goal of winning the coveted Golden Sponge Stick! Details at CL’s Roman Mysteries blog:

• Golden Sponge-Stick Comp 2012!

A much-quoted phrase (begetter of more than 20,000 Google results).

hinc illae lacrimae.

Hence those tears.

I’ve just come across something that looks weird.  When I open Google mail in IE9, and hit Alt+Space to minimize it, I find that the menu bar has been interfered with, and the close, minimize and restore options are not there.  Do the same on any other site and it’s fine.  Do the same in Chrome, on Google mail, and it’s fine.

I can only suppose that Google’s developers, knowing that busy people use keyboard shortcuts, have decided deliberately to harass Internet Explorer users by disabling it, to try to force them to use Chrome.  Nasty.

There’s probably some way you can override this, but a Google search brought up nothing.

Does this just happen to me?

Joe Weaks has created another Lord of the Rings Romney meme photo, as you can see. Last time it was Sauromney, this time it is Aragormney!

Genetic data indicate that, approximately 45 to 60 kya, a very rapid population expansion occurred outside of Africa, and spread in all directions across the Eurasian continents, eventually populating the entire world.

However, current evidence indicates that this near-modern population did not persist in the Near East and was subsequently replaced by Neanderthals during the following glacial period, with little evidence of temporal overlap (5, 6). It is not until at least 50,000 y ago that evidence of behaviorally modern humans occurs in the archaeological record in the Near East.

Resequencing studies have estimated the ancestral effective population size at 12,800 to 14,400, with a 5- to 10-fold bottleneck beginning approximately 65,000 to 50,000 y ago (although see ref. 15 for a bottleneck to only 450 individuals). It is generally assumed that the bottleneck occurred as a small group(s) with an effective population size of only approximately 1,000 to 2,500 individuals moved from the African continent into the Near East.

1. The publication of the Neandertal and Denisovan genomes have killed off any notion that the human tree blossomed in a vacuum, unperturbed by the other denizens of the Homo forest. 
2. Recalibration of the human autosomal mutation rate have revealed deep autosomal divergences within our species. These can be consistent with either (i) a recent expansion followed by admixture with divergent lineages, or (ii) old population structure within the species accompanied by cultural flow of behavioral modernity. I tend to support a mix of these ideas. What cannot have happened, however, is the model of a recent, simultaneous expansion responsible for both the spread of modern humans and behavioral modernity. 
3. While the ~60ka Out-of-Africans remain elusive, archaeologists have made steady progress in uncovering real links between Africa and Eurasia prior to 100ka. The Mousterian-using Mt. Carmel members of our species can no longer be discounted as the Out-of-Africa that failed, because they are now accompanied by Nubian Complex and Jebel Faya Arabians at around the same time.

As my post yesterday mentioned, I am going to present a paper in the final panel at this spring’s Dumbarton Oaks Spring Symposium on Byzantine Survey Archaeology. The symposium is an exciting one and will hopefully initiate an important conversation about the role of survey archaeology (and perhaps even contemporary archaeological practice) in the study of Byzantium more broadly. 

I’ve been asked to speak specifically about diachronic approaches in survey archaeology. Since I’ve spent most of the last 15 years working on various diachronic survey projects which have at least hoped to include a substantial Byzantine chronological component, this seemed like a reasonable request. Over the last week or so, however, I’ve been struggling with how to think about the place of Byzantine survey archaeology in a diachronic context. As my abstract below points out, the Byzantine period is often grouped in a larger “post-ancient” category or associate with medieval and post-medieval periods particularly in Greece. This periodization strategy compels those of us interested in the Byzantium to reflect quite explicitly on the relationship between the Byzantine period and periods more close in time to the present day. Not only does this relationship encourage a reading of Byzantium that problematizes the tension between the remote and exotic and the familiar and mundane, but it also tempts us to consider the archaeological processes that create continuity or discontinuity in the archaeological landscape. In effect, it locates our archaeological sensibilities at the intersection of landscapes as historically imagined places and spaces of constant change.

Speaking of change…

Here’s the first draft of my abstract.

Dumbarton Oaks Spring Symposium
Byzantine Survey Archaeology: Reflections and Approaches

Looking across Chronological Barriers
William R. Caraher, University of North Dakota 

In some circles, it remains common to group Byzantine archaeology in Greece in the broad category of post-antique archaeology or to place it in synthetic works alongside discussions of medieval and post-medieval material culture. This periodization scheme reflects not only long-standing privileging of the Classical and Ancient (and the grouping of other periods as either pre or post this central age), but also coincides with perceptions developed in the field. Byzantine architecture, ceramics, social institutions, and even literary forms extend well beyond chronological periods defined by the political entity known as the Byzantine Empire. This has largely coincided with the tendency of diachronic survey to avoid rigid boundaries that locate artifact, architecture, and landscapes within a single post-ancient period. As result, scholars drawn to research questions more narrowly defined by the fields of Byzantine archaeology or Byzantine Studies have consistently found themselves pushed into dialogue with landscapes that conform to different economic, political, and, perhaps, settlement frameworks. The tensions between different chronological and periodization regimes provides an opportunity to problematize Byzantine archaeology in ways that shed light on formation processes, narrative strategies embedded within the landscape, and practical issues of continuity and discontinuity in place and space. By adopting perspectives and practices that push us to look across chronological barriers, Byzantine archaeology moves to a future endowed with significant methodological and interpretive sophistication.

Reading the first pages of the tractate on Shabbat over the last weeks, I was struck by the way this emphasis on Torah study allows the rabbis to sacralize what is, on its face, often a strictly intellectual, logical, even mathematical kind of thinking. When we communicate with God in prayer, we tend to focus on emotions. We feel elevated by thinking about our love for God and his for us, or we declare our devotion or repentance. All of this is encouraged by the emotive language of the prayer service.

The opening pages of Shabbat, however, could not be more rigorously logical. In Shabbat 2a, the Mishnah presents us with a situation in which a householder is standing inside the boundary of his house, while a poor man is facing him while standing in the street, in the public domain. Say that the men transfer an object from one domain to the other, from the private zone to the public or vice versa—something that is legally prohibited on Shabbat. Which one is culpable for breaking for the law?

The Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered near the site of Qumran, south of Jericho in the years 1947-1956 were dubbed "the academic scandal of the 20th century" because of the long delay in publication. Over the last 20 years or so, however, they have been fully published, except for occasional scraps that continue to come to light. Ever since their discovery, they have aroused passions on a scale that is extraordinary for an academic subject. Now that those passions have cooled, the time is ripe to ask what we have really learned from this remarkable discovery.

[...]

An assessment of the nasal floor configurations of the available and sufficiently intact, archaic Homo maxillae from eastern Eurasia shows them to have a prevalence of the bi-level pattern similar to that seen in the western Eurasian Neanderthals.

A  feature of Eurasian Homo skulls has been a bi-level nasal floor, although present in most Pleistocene and recent human samples, reaches its highest frequency among the western Eurasian Neanderthals and has been considered a feature distinctive of them. Early modern humans, in contrast, tend to feature a level (or sloping) nasal floor.

“Sufficiently intact maxillae are rare among eastern Eurasian Pleistocene humans, but several fossils provide nasal floor configurations”, said WU Xiujie of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology  (IVPP), first author of the new study recently published in Anthropological Science, “Of the four observable eastern Eurasian archaic Homo maxillae, three have the bi-level pattern and the fourth is scored as bi-level/sloping. It therefore appears that bi-level nasal floors were common among Pleistocene archaic humans, and a high frequency of them is not distinctive of the Neanderthals”.

The dominance of bi-level and sloping nasal floors among the earlier, eastern Eurasian archaic human specimens could reflect unusual sampling of archaic populations possessing similar distributions of level and sloping configurations as seen in recent modern humans.

However, the taphonomic probability of exclusively recovering specimens with inferiorly displaced nasal floors from populations characterized by a preponderance of level configurations is small and statistically unlikely.

“If these eastern Eurasian archaic specimens are in fact representative of populations principally characterized by depressed nasal floors, then the dominance of the bi-level (and sloping) nasal floors in eastern Eurasian archaic humans would parallel that present in the (much larger) sample of Neandertals”, said co-author Scott Maddux, Department of Pathology and Anatomical Sciences, University of Missouri, Columbia.

The configurations of these eastern archaic maxillae, however, need not imply close affinities to the western Eurasian Neanderthals.

For example, several features of the nasomaxillary region have been shown to scale allometrically with overall facial size, both in recent humans and across Homo. A

Accordingly, the prevalence of depressed nasal floors in these two archaic Eurasian samples may simply be related to by both populations possessing similarly sized (large) faces, as nasal floor morphology is correlated with several measures of facial size across Homo, especially facial height and width.

“The relationships between nasal floor morphology and other aspects of facial size and shape remain uncertain, and they are difficult to evaluate with the available and incomplete eastern Eurasian remains. However, these results are sufficient to question whether a high frequency of the bi-level pattern is a distinctive Neanderthal feature and to query the phylogenetic and functional significance of this configuration”, said Erik Trinkaus, Department of Anthropology, Washington University, St Louis.

Thus, it appears reasonable to suggest that the prevalence of bi-level nasal floors in archaic eastern Eurasian humans existed in conjunction with relatively large facial dimensions. Moreover, the Chinese Middle Pleistocene specimen from Jinnuishan, which was not available for inclusion in this study, possesses both a relatively intact midface and nasal floor (Wu, 1988). Thus, future evaluation of the nasal floor in this fossil specimen may shed further light on the relationship between nasal floor morphology and facial size.

Source: Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology / Anthropological Science

More Information

• Wu X, Maddux S, Pan L, Trinkaus E 2012 Nasal floor variation among eastern Eurasian Pleistocene Homo. Anthropol Sci, 2012  Full article
• Fabrice Demeter, Laura L. Shackelford, Anne-Marie Bacon, Philippe Duringer, Kira Westaway, Thongsa Sayavongkhamdy, José Braga, Phonephanh Sichanthongtip, Phimmasaeng Khamdalavong, Jean-Luc Ponche, Hong Wang, Craig Lundstrom, Elise Patole-Edoumba, and Anne-Marie Karpoff.2012  Anatomically modern human in Southeast Asia (Laos) by 46 ka. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, August 20, 2012 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1208104109  Full Article
•  Curnoe D, Xueping J, Herries AIR, Kanning B, Taçon PSC, et al. 2012 Human Remains from the Pleistocene-Holocene Transition of Southwest China Suggest a Complex Evolutionary History for East Asians. PLoS ONE 7(3): e31918. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0031918  Full Article
• Robert G Franciscus, 2003, Internal nasal floor configuration in Homo with special reference to the evolution of Neandertal facial form, Journal of Human Evolution Volume 44, Issue 6, June 2003, Pages 701–729  Full Article

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