In the summer and fall of 2004, NewYork City witnessed an extraordi-nary “Aristophanes-event.” The-

ater-goers had the opportunity to seeprofessional performances of three come-dies by Aristophanes. The show withthe highest profile was the production ofFrogs by Lincoln Center Theater(LCT), which opened in July at theVivian Beaumont Theater. LCT’s Frogsclosed on October 10, but before it did,the National Theater of Greece broughttheir production of Lysistrata, fresh fromthe Summer Olympics in Athens, toCity Center for six performances begin-ning October 6. That same week sawthe Off-Off-Broadway premiere, at The-ater Three on West 43rd Street, of anadaptation of the rarely performedAcharnians (see Fig. 1), presented by anew troupe called Freshly SqueezedCreative Juices Theatre Company(FSCJTC).

The majority of critics in the NewYork press panned LCT’s Frogs, whichNathan Lane (who played Dionysus)adapted “even more freely” from analready free adaptation of the comedythat Stephen Sondheim and the lateBurt Shevelove created in 1974 (seeFig. 2). Yet poor notices did not keep itfrom being enthusiastically received byspectators. The large audience at theperformance I attended stood for anovation, and I understand that such ova-tions were common. Although I agreewith some of the critics’ complaints, Iam delighted that Lane, director SusanStroman, and the other members ofthe Frogs’ production team found away to make Aristophanic comedyappeal to a broad audience thatextends far beyond the academic circlesof classicists and theater historians.

To appreciate what may lie behindthe current surge in Aristophanes’ popu-larity, it is helpful to reflect on whythere has not been an abundance of pro-fessional productions of his comedies.We could list as causes their infamousobscenity, admittedly less of a problemtoday than in the past, and their “politi-cal incorrectness,” especially in jokesabout women and foreigners. Yet thechief impediment is undoubtedly thetopicality of the comedies. How doesone make jokes about Pericles andCleon intelligible, not to mention funny,

Boston’s Quincy Market:Classical Style and thePuritan Instinct by Charles Rowan Beye

In 1826, John Quincy, the mayor ofBoston, was proud to open a new market

on the waterfront, a building that he hadlabored three years to bring into being.Behind it stood Faneuil Hall, the marketthat Quincy Market, as it was soon called,was about to replace (see Fig. 3). In a citywhere streets were laid out in the most ran-dom fashion – as the tradition goes, follow-ing the old cow paths – Quincy planned anorderly arrangement of several straightroadways, running perpendicular to eachother, grid fashion, especially two broadstreets either side of the market building.Each of these two streets was bordered onits other side with a parallel row of build-ings, and to the west of the market, therewas a large open space fronting FaneuilHall. The ensemble resembled the classicalorganization of the ancient Athenian agoraor the Market of Trajan in Rome or what in1830 Charles Foster would erect in thecenter of Covent Garden, the piazza thatInigo Jones (1573-1652) had created forLondon. It was Jones who had brought theItalian Renaissance to England, after see-ing first hand the architecture of AndreaPalladio (1508-1580), whose masterpieces

“THE TIME IS THE PRESENT,THE PLACE IS ANCIENT GREECE”:THE (VERY) CONTEMPORARY COMEDY OF ARISTOPHANESby Elizabeth Scharffenberger

A publication of the American Philological Association Vol. 3 • Issue 2 • Fall 2004

The Library of Alexandria Reborn...4

Book Review: “Julius Caesar: A Beginner’s Guide”......................................5

Book Review: “Achilles: A Novel” ......6

Gladiatorial Games: Ancient Reality Shows? ................................................7

Birthplace of Empire: The Legacy of Actium................................8

Medea My Mind..............................................10

Natty Bumppo Quotes Horace.........10

A History of Alexander on the Big Screen.......................................12

Ancient Languages in Mel Gibson’s“The Passion of the Christ” ...............14

The “Oresteia” Project continues.....16

Audio Review: “Selections from Ovid Read in Classical latin” ...........18

“Troy” panel at the Annual Meetingof the American Philological Association in Boston..........................19

Guidelines for contributors........20

continued on page 2

Insi

de

®

continued on page 3

Fig. 1. Dicaeopolis (played by Liat Ron),on the right, conversing with Euripides(played by J. M. McDonough) in theFreshly Squeezed Creative JuicesTheatre Company production ofAristophanes’ Acharnians, 2004. Photo credit: Jonathan Slaff.

to audiences who have absolutely nobasis for appreciating them? Where isthe reward for staging a comedy thatmakes no one laugh? The exception hasbeen Lysistrata. Its representation of thedifferences between women’s andmen’s interests, though rooted in theparticular social arrangements of ancientAthens, meshes with stereotypes stillthriving in contemporary American cul-ture; it garners laughs easily and there-fore gets performed on a relatively regu-lar basis.

But current events are renderingAristophanes’ topicality less of animpediment. For better or worse, come-dies that question the purposes andbenefits of a war that has no clear endnor “exit-strategy” – and that satirizethe self-serving behavior of politicalleaders, the undue influence of “specialinterests” and “insiders,” the inefficien-cy and dysfunction of political institu-tions, the lack of accountability, the sti-fling of free speech, and the apathy andgullibility of the public – seem extreme-ly relevant these days to theater profes-sionals, even if the individual jokes areabout long-dead Athenians. Judging bythe applause, I would say that theyseem relevant to audiences, too.

Today, the political phenomena thatAristophanes addresses are objects ofconcern across ideological lines. Mostrecently, however, the ancient comedi-an has attracted keen interest fromthose who oppose the current Bushadministration’s post-9/11 policies. Thesuccess of The Lysistrata Project inMarch 2003 surely boosted the reputa-tion of Aristophanic comedy as a potentvehicle for protest. Although bothLCT’s Frogs and FSCJTC’s Acharnianswere in development by 2003, morerecent events in Iraq and elsewhereshaped the final visions of both produc-tions, which shared the goals of criticiz-ing the rush to war in Iraq and – withthe November 2004 elections approach-ing – of encouraging their audiences torise above apathy and complacency.

Modern plays, such as Tim Robbins’Embedded, might appear to have theadvantage over Acharnians and Frogsbecause audiences can instantly recog-nize the targets of their satire. ButAcharnians, in which a frustrated Athen-ian citizen named Dicaeopolis makes aprivate truce with the Spartans duringthe Peloponnesian War, and Frogs, inwhich the god Dionysus journeys to theunderworld and presides over a contest

of poetic skill with far-reaching politicaland cultural implications, perhaps gainsomething from their very antiquity.That Aristophanes is an ancient Athenianplaywright – the author of “classics”–grants contemporary stagings of hiscomedies an imprimatur of authoritythat is otherwise hard-won. Especiallyin a time when many are concernedabout “unpatriotic” criticisms of currentpolicies and practices, it is useful (andnatural) to seek out some traditionalauthority that legitimates criticism andprotest. Because they are “classics,”Aristophanes’ comedies give artistsauthorization to engage in politicalsatire, and audiences have permission tolisten. Moreover, his plays afford bothartists and audiences some valuablebreathing space because they offer whatare, by necessity, oblique, indirect per-spectives on our current events. Thetopicality of Acharnians and Frogs, andtheir setting in a long-gone era that mayresemble but is not identical to our own,are thus assets as much as liabilities.

Nonetheless, directors and actorsface challenges in helping their audi-ences feel at home with these ancientcomedies. To maximize laughs and alsoget their messages across, the produc-tion teams of both FSCJTC’s Acharniansand LCT’s Frogs took pains to generatea sense of contemporaneity by rework-

ing the texts and introducing markedlymodern elements into their presenta-tions; the desired effect in both produc-tions was to convey (and here I para-phrase the very first words of BurtShevelove’s script) that “the place” maybe “ancient Greece,” but “the time isthe present.” In itself, the laughter gen-erated by the introduction of anachro-nistic elements is a boon; if spectatorsstart chuckling because (for example)the protagonist of an ancient Greekcomedy enters holding a martini glass,they are primed to keep laughing duringthe rest of the show.

Music played a crucial role in givingboth productions an up-to-date feel.Songs by Stephen Sondheim, who sup-plemented his edgy, Stravinsky-inspiredscore of 1974 with several new numbersin a variety of contemporary styles, cre-ated a thoroughly modern musical land-scape for Frogs; Susan Stroman’s breath-taking dances gave the show the look ofthe latest Broadway blockbuster. InAcharnians, the Sex Pistols’ “God Savethe Queen” introduced Dicaeopolis’defiant stand on the Pnyx; Outkast’s“Hey Ya” marked the party atmosphereof the conclusion. Stage propertiesadded to the anachronistic fun. InAcharnians, the dyspeptic Dicaeopolisswilled Pepto-Bismol in the prologue;later on, the tragedian Euripides wasrolled out on a dolly, scribbling furiouslyon a yellow pad with a giant pencil. InFrogs, Dionysus and Xanthias firstappeared with the aforementioned mar-tini glasses in hand; the sartorially savvyHeracles had a closet full of lion skinsand clubs, and Charon lit up a joint onthe long journey across the Styx. In thesecond act of Frogs, Pluto’s glitzy under-world palace and leggy female atten-dants evoked a Las Vegas casino, com-plete with showgirls.

Although the strategies of LCT andFSCJTC for staging Aristophanes weresimilar, their approaches to reworking histexts differed. Adopting Douglass Park-er’s translation of Acharnians as the basisfor their script, FSCJTC’s Liat Ron andGregory Simmons strikingly transformedDicaeopolis into a woman, played byRon. The comedy thus became a storynot just of a citizen’s self-empowermentbut also of a woman’s rejection of theoutdated, counterproductive idealsupheld by the hyper-macho generalLamachus. Ron and Simmons excisedseveral scenes that could complicate

“THE TIME IS THE PRESENT, THE PLACE IS ANCIENT GREECE” continued from page 1

2

Fig. 2. Dionysus (played by NathanLane), on the left, conversing withHeracles (played by Burke Moses) in the Lincoln Center Theater production ofAristophanes’ Frogs, 2004. Photo credit:Paul Kolnik.

continued on page 17

built in the style of Greece and Rome arestill the glory of Italy’s Veneto region. In thelate eighteenth century, Boston, just thengetting its second wind as a major seaportof North America, was ready for thegrandeur only antiquity could provide.

Boston’s first European settlers were Puri-tans whose ideology and aesthetic werequite the opposite of Palladio, or his Eng-lish admirers like Jones, or Robert Adam,the seventeenth-century builder of so manygreat English country houses. The earliestBoston dwellings were made of wood, inform not much changed from medievalhousing in Europe, characteristically havinga larger second story that overhung thedownstairs entrance door. Since wood isflammable, almost all this early housingstock burned over time; those who trampthe Boston tourist’s “Freedom Trail” can seethe one surviving example, which is thehouse in which Paul Revere lived, in what isnowadays called the North End. As an indi-cation of the change that was coming,there stands adjacent to this wooden struc-ture a brick building, the so-called Pierce-Hitchborn house (1710, restored 1950),the windows of which are surmounted byshallow pediments, a feature associatedwith the architectural detailing of antiquity,hinting at the Palladian style that was thenfinally making its way to Boston.

In England, by choosing Palladian clas-sicism, Jones turned his back on the prevail-ing Baroque architecture of Europe, whichadvertised absolutism in monarchy andRoman Catholicism in religion. His St.Paul’s Church on the western side ofCovent Garden was a radically new designfor a church: a replica of a Greek temple.Alexander Parris may well have had thisbuilding in mind when he designed a tem-ple for St. Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral(1820) on Boston’s Tremont Street, a struc-ture with an elegant Ionic portico (overwhich a tympanum presides, its stoneblocks still waiting almost two hundredyears later for someone to carve the bas-relief). As has often been said, Inigo Jonescreated an architecture for the bourgeoisie.This English Palladian style – or morespecifically the architectural fashion that iscalled Georgian after the British monarchsof that name – made its way to New

England when the area of which Bostonwas the center became an English RoyalColony, the Anglican Church its establishedreligion. The style became predominantafter the American Revolution when thearistocracy had fled and the merchant classwas in the ascendancy.

Builders throughout the region couldlearn the Palladian manner by studying thewidely circulated work of James Gibbs, ABook of Architecture (1728). In Boston, thestyle was translated into reality by an auto-didact, Charles Bulfinch (1763-1844),whose legacy is still a significant feature ofthe city. His most beautiful building is per-haps the second Harrison Grey Otis houseon Mt. Vernon Street on Boston’s BeaconHill, his most important is the State Housethree blocks beyond it, and his most suc-cessful make-over is Faneuil Hall. The origi-nal structure was built in 1742 with moneysupplied by a wealthy citizen, PeterFaneuil, because he personally wanted theconvenience of a solid market building.Burned to the ground in 1761, and almostimmediately rebuilt, this edifice wasenlarged by Bulfinch in 1805 to three timesits original size. Faneuil Hall is consideredto be a fine example of what is called theFederal style. This term, like neo-classicism,or Greek revival, means pretty much whatyou want it to mean. In essence, it is anarchitecture that leans heavily on Greekand Roman structure and detail, self-con-sciously projecting an image of a new

nation that had revived an ancient systemof democracy. Bulfinch used classical ele-ments with exceeding grace, delicacy, andelegance, the treatment of the windows inFaneuil Hall being a case in point. HisMassachusetts State House building on Bea-con Hill, however, is sometimes consideredto be somewhat insubstantial when com-pared with Benjamin Latrobe’s use of simi-lar elements in the Capitol Building inWashington, D. C.

Alexander Parris (1780-1852) was theman whom Mayor Quincy engaged todraw up plans for the new market. Parris, afollower and assistant of Bulfinch, wasmore engineer than architect. His plan forQuincy Market is in every way a dramaticdemonstration of strength and stress, asbefits a person whose calling is to deter-mine the soundness of structure. Although atraditional English conception, his two-storybuilding was colossal in scale: 535 feetlong with an interior unobstructed first-floorcolonnade running 512 feet, 14 feet highwith a 12-foot wide center aisle. Sixty slen-der tapered wooden Doric columns linedeach side of this aisle, providing in thespace between and recessed slightly fromthe aisle places for the vendor’s stalls. Thecolumns housed a major innovation of Par-ris. Twenty four on each side were sheathsfor iron columns that rose from foundationsin the basement to support the wood trusses

Boston’s Quincy Market: Classical Style and the Puritan Instinct continued from page 1

continued on page 9

3

Fig. 3. The long building with the circular dome in the center of its length is QuincyHall. The almost-square-shaped building behind it is Faneuil Hall. Josiah Quincy, AMunicipal History of the Town and City of Boston During Two Centuries, Boston: Littleand Brown, 1852. Photograph courtesy of Jeffery Howe, Boston College.

Fabled for its treasures, the ancientLibrary of Alexandria died a longtime ago, but no one is quite sure

when. Created by the successors ofAlexander the Great in the third centuryB.C., the Library was fabled in antiquityfor owning a copy of every book in theworld. It was the center of intellectualand poetic activity for the Hellenisticworld and continues to exemplify formany the summit of ancient culturalachievement. But it was destroyed. Ifyou visit Egypt today, you will find thatthe likely suspects for the destruction ofthe Library include Julius Caesar andthe Christians, but elsewhere you willalso hear it said that Muslim invaders inthe early Middle Ages did the worstdamage. These suspects are too pre-dictable; pondering the matter from theperspective of a university provost, Isuspect that budget cuts, bad manage-ment, and the wearing passage of timeare far likelier candidates!

Whatever the reasons for its down-fall, the Library of Alexandria has nowbeen reborn. Rising dramatically on thewaterfront, a remarkably successful newbuilding now bears the name (see Fig.4). Opening in 2001 under the patron-age of the first lady of Egypt, SuzanneMubarak, the Library has an ambitiousand impressive director recruited fromthe World Bank, Ismail Serageldin, itsown Web site (http://www.bibalex.org),and a collection of only 250,000 printvolumes.

The building is nothing short of spec-tacular. Its terraces rise seven levels backand up from the waterfront, each open toa high translucent ceiling that fills thegrand space with light and air (see Fig.5). Outside, the building looks like a tilt-ed cylinder, marked over its granite sideswith characters from all the world’s writ-ing systems, ancient and modern.

In April 2004, as a scholar of ancientlibraries and practitioner of the moderncraft of electronic publishing, I had thegood fortune to be invited to visit thelibrary as part of a “brainstorming com-mittee” comprising computer scientists,librarians, and scholars, convened andchaired by Bill Wulf, himself a comput-er scientist with a long history of sup-porting the use of information technolo-gy in the humanities. A founder of theInstitute for Advanced Computing inthe Humanities at the University ofVirginia, Wulf now serves as President

of the National Academy of Engineer-ing and is a member of the Board ofTrustees of the Library of Alexandria.We spent two full days touring thelibrary and exploring its future.

For the classicist at this meeting,there were special thrills, of course. Themost acute moment of cultural clashcame when I sat at a computer andpulled up on the screen a Greek text ofCallimachus from the Perseus Web site,acutely conscious that I was doing sowithin a few hundred yards (and per-haps much less than that) of the site onwhich those lines were written in thethird century B.C.

Modern Alexandria is short onancient remains, but the setting of thecity is dramatic, beautiful, and evoca-tive. The modern city, neglected by theEgyptian government since Nasser andlong since bereft of the raffish glamorthat Cavafy and Durrell evoked for it intheir poetry and fiction, stretches outalong fifteen kilometers of magnificentMediterranean seafront that positivelypleads for development – with any luck,of a sensitive post-twentieth centuryform. (Indeed, one intended function ofthe Library is to be an anchor for urbanredevelopment.) What one realizesgradually on visiting Egypt is that theEgyptian tourist industry reflects a localpolitical ideology: pharaonic Egypt isthe real Egypt, while Greco-Roman andeven Muslim/Ottoman Egypt are mem-ories of a colonized and dominated pastand have not been put on display fortourists with anything like the vigor thatgives us the pyramids and Luxor.Alexandria, as a result, has been quiteleft off the beaten path, which is both amisfortune and an opportunity.

But what of the new Library ofAlexandria? What can become of it? Thecollection now in the building is tiny andhardly even a serious resource for thegeneral public. Hundreds of people floodinto the building at opening hours everyday, but they seem to be there as much touse the Internet-connected computers asto explore the print collections. The Netflourishes in Egypt, though connectionsto the outside world run slow to an Amer-ican’s taste, and we learned that gettingbetter bandwidth for the library was, forthe moment, prohibitively expensive as aresult of a regulated telecommunicationseconomy. I did some wandering in theopen stacks and found that the Greek

and Latin section was an odd mixture.There were complete or semi-completeruns of Loeb Classical Texts, texts fromthe German Teubner series, and theCambridge “green and yellow” texts ofancient authors, and then a few shelves ofa collection of gifts, finds, and oddities.The American Philological Associationhas donated a copy of the spectacular Bar-rington Atlas of the ancient world, but itwas not among the things I stumbled on.(To be quite fair, the “public” collectionin the new Bibliothèque Nationale inParis is very nearly as odd – they too hadbought a complete set of English Loebs,but no French Budé texts – interspersedwith a few randomly chosen contempo-rary works of very variable quality.)

Could there ever be a serious collec-tion of print literature in the building? Ithas room for at least four million titles.The challenges to building a collectionfrom scratch today are considerable:financial in the first place (it would takemany tens of millions of dollars andmany years to do it at all well), andaccess in the second place (many of thebooks we depend on in our greatlibraries are simply not in print and dif-ficult to obtain in print). For themoment, the center of attention hasbeen the development of electronicresources and the elaboration of theinstitution’s program of conferences andscholarly events. The week before ourvisit, an important forum of Arab schol-ars had issued a strong and interesting

THE LIBRARY OF ALEXANDRIA REBORN by James J. O’Donnell

4

Fig. 4. View of the esplanade frominside the new Library of Alexandriaand above, with the Mediterranean Seain the distance. Photo credit: James J.O’Donnell.

manifesto about the future of politicalfreedom in the Arab world; and as weleft, scientists from around the worldwere arriving for a biotechnology confer-ence. The history of Latin language andliterature as known and practiced inAlexandria was the subject of a recentFrench-convened session.

There are some interesting andunique electronic resources in theLibrary. Two home-grown products,http://www.cultnat.org and, particularly,http://www.eternalegypt.org are asimpressive as anything American insti-tutions produce and should be known toall teachers and students of Egyptianhistory and culture. At the same time,there is also a local mirror copy of the“Internet Archive” (http://www.archive.org), a project as promising andpuzzling there as it is here – but of nospecial local relevance in Alexandria, forthere is still much uncertainty about justwhat the function of the library will be.

The most interesting conversationswe had went well beyond the technolo-gies in which we were expert. To askwhere Alexandria is located might sug-gest a mission and identity for thelibrary – but is it Egyptian? Arab? Mus-lim? African? Mediterranean? Each ofthose words suggests a choice and set ofpossibilities. Could the Library mediateinformation about Egypt to the worldand about the world to Egypt? That iswhat it has implicitly begun to do, but Ithink all of us felt that to do only thatwould mean to fall short of the possibili-ties of the magical place and the magicalname. Could the Library become a

Antony Kamm. Julius Caesar: A Beginner’sGuide. Hodder & Stoughton, 2002. Pp.86, 2 charts, 5 maps. Now part of theseries Headway Guides for Beginners,Headway Books, Hodder & Stoughton.Paperback $9.99. ISBN 0-340-84456-6.

It is no easy thing to write for beginners,for real beginners start from different levels

of preparation and approach what is writtenfor different purposes. To select the complexcharacter of Julius Caesar and the complextimes in which he lived as a topic to be illu-minated in under a hundred pages is a boldventure indeed. On the whole, AntonyKamm succeeds quite well in balancing adesignedly superficial but provocative narra-tive with a striking amount of detail (pep-pered here and there with quotations fromAppian, Suetonius, Lucan, and Catullus) thatwill not only hold the attention of beginningstudents but perhaps encourage furtherexploration of one of Rome’s greatest histori-cal figures (see Fig. 6).

Kamm proceeds chronologically frombeginning to end (birth to death and after-math). He places Caesar’s youth within itsMarian and Cinnan context in swift strokesto bring us into the time of Sulla’s dictator-ship when Caesar defied Sulla’s order todivorce his wife Cornelia and barely sur-vived. We hear all this, a summary of Cae-sar’s education, and the colorful story of hiscapture by pirates within eight pages. Thehighlights of the Roman constitution and reli-gious practices, as well as the makeup of thearmy, occupy but few pages to bring us tothe beginning of Caesar’s active politicalcareer. The heart of the narrative follows thevarious military campaigns within the contextof Caesar’s political ambition and advance-ment, from service in Spain as propraetorthrough the civil war and his accession to thedictatorship. The strategic issues of the mili-tary campaigns are necessarily oversimpli-

fied. The conspiracy, assassination,and subsequent rise of Octavian com-plete the story, followed by an assess-ment of Caesar’s “achievements andlegacy.” On almost every page, side-bars provide “Key Facts” aboutRoman life, customs, or politics.

The first question must be, cui bono – whatsort of beginner would use this “beginner’sguide” to advantage? I tested this book on asmall class of fourteen college students; threeor four of them were classics majors, but mostwere just dabblers in and newcomers to theRoman world. In general, they all enjoyed thetwo sections I asked them to read: on Sullaand on the assassination. I found that I didnot much mind, in practical terms, that somedetails had been glossed over and someambiguous events rendered plain becausethe students did, in fact, learn enough to usethe material in the other contexts of the class(which was not a classics course), and thematerial was so clear and well written thatthey read it with ease and enthusiasm.

As a serious introduction to Caesar, how-ever, Julius Caesar: A Beginner’s Guide musteither be supplemented and corrected orused with caution because of the gaps in thediscussion and the compressed presentationof events. Kamm presents some doubtful talesas fact, dwells on Caesar’s alleged bi-sexual-ity (complete with splendidly saucy transla-tions of Suetonius and Catullus), condemnson one page while praising on another,whirls over the surface of the domestic eventsof the 50’s B.C. (Pompey, Clodius, Cicero),and concludes with a largely positive assess-ment of Caesar that seems strangely at oddswith the rather more mixed and sensationalpicture presented in the narrative. Through-out, he sacrifices nuance for immediacy.Without a doubt, he knows this and hasmade a choice for “popular” reading.

His suggestions for “Further Reading” areevery bit as idiosyncratic as the text itself:among only eleven reference works given,Meier’s biography is included but Gelzer’s isnot, and three fictional biographies (one ofthem about Alexander the Great) have paral-lel place with Meier’s biography and Everitt’snew study of Cicero. Finally, the book doesnothing to clarify (as often, so it seems to mewith books about Caesar) how the Caesarportrayed in this book could have simultane-ously inspired the extremes of loyalty andadmiration as well as vitriolic hatred andmistrust that the historical Caesar clearly didin Romans of equal intelligence.

James S. Ruebel (jruebel@bsu.edu) is Pro-fessor of Classics and Dean of the HonorsCollege at Ball State University in Indiana.

Book Review: Julius Caesar: A Beginner’s Guideby James S. Ruebel

Fig. 5. Interior of the new Library ofAlexandria. Photo credit: James J.O’Donnell.

5

continued on page 13

Fig. 6. Bust of Julius Caesar fromthe Vatican Museum, Rome.Image courtesy of the VRomaProject (http://www.vroma.org).

Elizabeth Cook. Achilles: A Novel. Picador,2001. Pp. 116. Paperback $11.00. ISBN0-312-31110-9.

For those seeking an antidote to therecent large-screen, popularizing epic

version of the Trojan War, you cannot domuch better than take up a copy of Eliza-beth Cook’s slender novel, Achilles. Cook’snovel is a perfect modern epyllion. It is intri-cately structured, allusive, and psychologi-cal. In evocative and poetic language,Cook takes us both back to Homer and for-ward to the “afterlife” of his poem to revealfor us the transcending power of literature.

The novel has a tripartite structure. Eachsection is divided into short chapters withtitles. This simple structure belies the intrica-cy of the novel’s narrative. Repeatedimages and the shifting of time and placeare continually sending us back to reinter-pret what we have read.

The first section, entitled “Two Rivers,”starts at the end. We first meet Achilles as ashade in the underworld summoned to speakwith Odysseus. Here in the underworld wealso meet some familiar characters: Patroclus,Agamemnon, and Iphigeneia. In deft, tellingstrokes Cook defines these characters fromAchilles’ point of view. The chapter ends withAchilles’ famous comment: “Don’t you knowthat it’s sweeter to be alive – in any shape orform – than lord of all these shadows?” (12)We are then taken back to the beginning ofAchilles’ story, to Peleus’ wild struggles tomate with Thetis and to Thetis’ horrifyingattempt to make Achilles immortal by dippinghim in the River Styx. Cook evocativelydepicts Achilles’ upbringing, his tutoring byChiron, his “girlhood” (particularly his rela-tionship with Deidamia, his first female lover),and his eagerness to fight.

Cook excels in capturing an event or acharacter with an image. In one sceneAchilles, chafing under his disguise, climbsa tall pine tree to see the Greek fleet amass-ing. In a later scene, a lonely Helen whis-pers to the Greek men inside the woodenhorse, mimicking the voices of their wives.It is the moment pregnant with its future out-come that stays with the reader.

The second half of “Two Rivers” is the mostHomeric part of the novel. No sooner do we

learn of Achilles’ choice of two destinies thanwe are plunged into his duel with Hector andthen into the charged and poignant scene ofhis surrender of Hector’s body to Priam. Thelast section of “Two Rivers” is Cook’s most sur-prising and psychologically insightful. In it,she shows us Achilles as a lonely figure cut offfrom life and love. Achilles goes after theAmazon Penthiseleia [sic], whose strengthand independence remind him of Iphigeneia.But his attraction to her and her resistance ulti-mately lead him to kill her violently. Cookdescribes Achilles as a man who seeks love,who tries, “to follow the brightness of one facebefore it is eaten by dark” (56) when he fol-lows Polyxena to his eventual death. Achilleshas lost everyone he loves and everyone whogives his life meaning. “Two Rivers” ends, asit began, with his death.

The second section of the novel, “Gone”

concerns the effects of Achilles’ death uponTroy and upon Thetis and Chiron. Throughher juxtaposition of Achilles’ wound withChiron’s, Cook contrasts Achilles’ mortalitywith Chiron’s immortality. For Achilles’mother and his teacher, the curse of immor-tality is to see the ones they love die. Thetisasks, “what is the point of immortality ifyour child does not share it?” (65)

In the final section, entitled “Relay,” Cooktakes us into the life of John Keats. She doesthis primarily through brief anecdotes, interi-or monologue, and quotations from his writ-ing. On first reading, I found this somewhatjarring since I was so immersed in that other,Homeric world. Yet, upon successive read-ings, I came to admire how gracefully andsuggestively the author has conveyed the actof translation. Cook links Homer, Chapman’stranslation of Homer, and Keats’ poetry. Thesymbol or talisman that Cook uses to link

these different times and places is a lock ofhair. Earlier in the novel, we witness Achillesshearing off a lock of his russet hair as anoffering to the dead Patroclus. The act prefig-ures Achilles’ own death by crushing Peleus’hope that it would be given to the riverSpercheus upon his son’s safe return fromTroy. Cook calls the offering “a forerunner,part of him, a hostage in the underworld”(50). The author then shows Keats’ literaryresponse to the gift of a lock of Milton’s hair.Even more symbolically, Keats discovers alock of russet hair among the falling autumnleaves while out walking. The lock becomesfor him a literal and figurative bookmark. Heplaces it in Cary’s translation of Dante’sDivine Comedy, the book he has with him,only to discover later that he has placed thelock in the passage where Dante seesAchilles in Hell among the lovers. Finally,Keats offers a lock of his own russet hair forAchilles, as a forerunner of his own impend-ing death. Deftly, Cook shows us how,through literature, human experience isshared and passed from generation to gen-eration like a baton in a relay.

In this novel, Cook ponders the meaningof our mortality. Our existence is corporeal;we live through our actions in the here andnow. One human body, like that of Achilles,may die and turn to dust, but the form of thehuman body continues to exist. Just as Keatssees the sameness of the locks of hair, hereflects on the similarity between his ownbody and that of a cadaver in a medicalamphitheater. The intricate structure of skele-ton, brain, and nerve is the same in each ofus. Keats takes comfort that within his bodya heart like that of Achilles still beats.

I highly recommend this imaginative re-telling of Achilles’ life to all with an interestin myth, literature, and the continuity of theclassics. It sends us back to Homer, yearn-ing to hear that poetry, that story again.And what could be better than that?

Roxanne Gentilcore (Gentilcore@com-cast.net) teaches classics at the University ofMassachusetts, Boston, where she is cur-rently developing and teaching an onlineLatin course. She received her Ph.D. in clas-sics from Boston University. Her researchinterests include the classical tradition andexile in Roman literature. She also writespoetry and poetry reviews for the League ofCanadian Poets.

6

Book Review: Achilles: A Novelby Roxanne Gentilcore

In this novel, Cook ponders the meaning of

our mortality.

Professor Margaret Imber was notexpecting a phone call from theLos Angeles Times, but when it

came, she was up to the challenge.“The reporter [Hilary E. MacGregor]

was looking for an angle on celebrityboxing,” Imber recalls via e-mail con-cerning the 2002 encounter with main-stream journalism. “Someone in thenewsroom said, ‘Hey, that sounds likegladiators.’ My name came up on anInternet search.”

MacGregor had browsed over to theon-line syllabus for Spectacles of Blood,a Roman civilization course on gladia-tors and Christian martyrs that Imberteaches at Bates College in Lewiston,Maine. An attractive photo of a gladia-tor’s helmet adorns the course home-page.

The national wire story featuredImber as a classicist who saw a definiteconnection between gladiatorial con-tests and the much-hyped 2002 fightbetween shamed skating championTonya Harding and Paula Jones, thewoman who in 1994 went several roundswith Bill Clinton over sexual harass-ment. Imber made the point that asindividuals who became celebritiesdespite their low socio-economic ori-gins, Harding and Jones paralleled glad-iators closely, making them perfectchoices for the modern arena.

Other experts in the story (includingancient historian Ian Worthington of theUniversity of Missouri) downplayed theconnection, but journalists regularlyassume it. Our wildly-popular realityshows are short on sword fights but longon psychological warfare, humiliation,and simulated executions. Are realityshows a new form of gladiatorial enter-tainment? To judge, we might leave themedia hype behind and take a freshlook at what classicists know about glad-iators – and about the ancient religiouscontext in which they fought.

Most of us know the gladiatorialgames as entertainment, pure and sim-ple. For the Romans, however, thegames also meant religion; the arena wassacred space. Religious ritual precededand accompanied death in the games, soelaborately that the Christian apologistTertullian (writing in the third centuryA.D.) prohibited the faithful from

attending on grounds they would beendorsing paganism. The code of thegladiators – to go into battle with theirwhole hearts committed – paralleled theRomans’ desire for a sacrificial animal togo willingly to the altar. Bloodshed anddeath, in this context, meant religiousduty fulfilled.

Not just anyone could be killed,however. Slaves, criminals, and otherundesirables (anyone who could be cat-egorized as subhuman) made up thepopulation of the earliest combatants.Under these circumstances, Romanscould claim that they did not practicehuman sacrifice.

Paradoxically, as the games and indi-vidual fighters developed a mass audi-ence, private citizens began to volunteerfor combat. In the first century A.D.,citizens in significant numbers werebecoming gladiators – with the resultthat the emperors Augustus andTiberius legislated to ban the practiceamong members of the senatorial andequestrian classes. Citizen gladiatorsgave up their rights and endured thesame uncertain, difficult life as theirslave counterparts – with public humili-ation for their decision in addition – forthe possibility of popular acclaim andmonetary gain.

Ancient writers such as the satiristJuvenal (A.D. 55-130?) criticized this sta-tus-lowering practice as shameful. Satire8 pans one Gracchus, a nobleman whofights in the arena bare-headed so thateveryone recognizes him. “Such a get-up condemns him,” sputters Juvenal.

But the criticism did not extend tothe games themselves. Respected writ-ers such as Cicero (106-43 B.C.) andPliny the Younger (A.D. 61-112) feltthat the fights toughened spectators,lessening their fear of death. Even thetender-hearted, those who could notbear to look, were regularly chastised fortheir perceived weakness. Pliny, in aspeech praising the Emperor Trajan,writes that games, in their best form,raise in spectators a desire to endurewounds and death for the empire “whenthey see even in the bodies of slavesand criminals the love of praise and thedesire for victory.” Thus, the gamesconditioned Romans to desensitizethemselves to the deaths of humanbeings for the good of the state.

Americanreality showsdiffer fromRoman gladia-torial games in atleast one significantrespect: they keep theircontestants alive. But similaritiesbetween the two forms of entertainmentencourage comparison and media specu-lation.

Survivor, television’s most-recogniza-ble reality show, offers an array of suf-fering. Contestants spend weeks in anelectronic arena, followed by an enor-mous virtual audience. Instead of copi-ous bloodshed, the show offers physicaland psychological discomfort, forcingplayers to live in primitive circum-stances, to hunt and gather for daily sus-tenance, and to compete in carrot-and-stick “challenges.”

The program also offers a kind ofdeath. In each episode, the contestantsscheme to pare their numbers by votingoff one of the competitors. After thevoting, the host of the show, Jeff Probst,ritually snuffs the designated one’s“torch of life,” a moment that bringshome to the TV audience exactly howSurvivor got its name.

The modern audience, too, resem-bles the ancient. We pick our heroesand villains as our fellow human beingssuffer for our entertainment. Some turnaway, but the genre encourages us tocategorize and objectify contestants, andenjoy their suffering.

So is it justified for the media toequate the Roman gladiatorial gameswith a show like Survivor? To be sure,these ancient and modern forms ofentertainment share affinities. But thereligious element in the ancient gamesdistances them from our modern realityshows.

When the Romans entered the arena,they entered a kind of separate world –a sacred precinct in which bloodshedwas a religious necessity and builder ofcharacter. Right relationship with thegods required sacrifice in order to ensurecontrol over otherwise uncontrollableforces. Death here, even potentially, offellow citizens, fulfilled this require-ment. When the spectacle was over, theRomans returned to their lives, with theunderstanding that, by following thegladiators’ example with their own self-less loyalty to Rome and to the emperor,they would be strengthening them-selves and the state.

In Survivor, the snuffing of the con-

GLADIATORIAL GAMES:ANCIENT REALITY SHOWS? by David Frauenfelder

7

The Classical Buzz

continued on page 19

Late in the afternoon on September1, 31 BC, Octavian, the man des-tined to become Augustus, looked

from his hillside camp toward the set-ting sun, studying the horizon. No ordi-nary man, Octavian was complex, driv-en, and focused on the struggle thatfaced him. How could he know that thefollowing day would witness a decisivechange in his fortunes and allow him tochart a new course for Rome that wouldalter the course of world history andmake him the first in a long line ofRoman emperors?

Inside the Ambracian Gulf, towardthe south and southeast, plumes ofsmoke rose skyward from scores ofsmoldering warships. Antony was send-ing Octavian a clear message by burninghis own surplus gear. That night, desert-ers arrived confirming what Octavianalready knew: Antony and Cleopatrawould try to escape the next morning.

Antony and Cleopatra. Just thenames exude sex and intrigue. Pairedwith Octavian, they are principal figuresin a clash of culture and power markingan important turning point in world his-tory – the birth of the Augustan Princi-pate, the first phase of what we popular-ly call the Roman Empire. Today, neara town called Preveza, visitors can stillsee evidence from these events thatchanged the course of history so longago.

In the first century B.C., Rome wasthe sole superpower of the Mediter-ranean basin. Her government was dom-inated by a number of powerful familieswho constituted a ruling class cooperat-ing under a set of rules we call theRoman Republic. For some years, theRepublic was wracked by strugglesbetween powerful generals that threat-ened, at times, to replace the oligarchywith the rule of a single, powerful man.Such was the nature of the strugglebetween Antony and Octavian. By 32B.C., Antony had identified himselfwith the Roman territories of the Eastand the Hellenistic successors ofAlexander the Great, cemented througha marriage alliance with Cleopatra VII ofEgypt. Octavian represented himself asthe protector of Italy, Roman culture,and the West. Because control of Romewas critically important to either man’sultimate success, Antony headed west-ward in 32 B.C. with an invasion force.

His goal: first Italy, then Rome. Octa-vian prepared his own force to blockAntony’s advance and crossed from Italyto Greece early in 31 B.C., as soon aswinter gave way to spring.

During the summer that followed,both sides faced off in the region of theAmbracian Gulf, south of Corfu. Theforces on each side were huge, number-ing in the hundreds of thousands. As thesummer progressed, Octavian’s generalAgrippa progressively disrupted theenemy’s supply lines. By late August,Antony had no other choice but retreat.The critical moment came on Septem-ber 2, when historians agree that Octa-vian successfully blocked Antony’sescape in a sea battle off Cape Actium, alow peninsula that covered the entranceto the Gulf. Only Cleopatra’s squadronof sixty ships and a few others got away.In less than a year, Octavian had trackedAntony and Cleopatra to Egypt, wherethey committed suicide and left himalone in power. In the years that fol-lowed, Octavian “restored the Repub-lic,” accepted the honorific nameAugustus, and reformed the state intowhat we call the Principate, or rule ofthe first man. Dio Cassius, a second cen-tury historian, was the first to state itboldly (51.1.1): “I do not mention thisdate [September 2] without reason . . .but because this was the first time Octa-vian alone held all the power of thestate in his hands.”

Dio further relates that Octavian cel-ebrated his victory off Actium by build-ing a memorial at his campsite adornedwith warship rams captured from theenemy fleet. He established a “VictoryCity” (Nikopolis) where his army hadbivouacked and collected into it thepopulations of the surrounding region.

Others tell us he dedicated at an ancientshrine of Apollo on Cape Actium a fullset of ten warships, one from each classor size in the enemy fleet. And finally,he re-established the quadrennial ath-letic festival in honor of Actian Apolloand transferred the site of the games toNikopolis.

These actions, plus the fact thatAugustus served as the city’s “founder,”reveal that he personally selectedNikopolis for greatness. His elaboratememorials marked the “birthplace” ofhis new regime, and the city he foundedserved to revitalize a region economical-ly drained and physically depopulatedby years of warfare and pirate raids.

Historians have long been troubledby the emphasis Augustus placed on hisActian victory as the pivotal event in hisrise to power. This is because no“objective” historical account survivesfrom this period; all the battle accountswere written well after the battle andexhibit clear traces of pro-Augustanbias. We suspect, moreover, that theseaccounts were also influenced to somedegree by the self-serving version of thevictor himself, now lost, but quotedmore than once in what survives. As aresult, skeptics will always question thedetails of the final naval battle. The“big picture,” however, is much clearer.Recent archaeological discoveries haveallowed us to advance our understand-ing of the ships that fought in the battle,the importance of the victory to Augus-tus, and the great success of his recon-struction efforts once victory wassecured – all important elements inunderstanding the legacy of Actium.

In 1995, Dr. Konstantinos Zachosand the Greek Archaeological Servicerenewed excavations at Octavian’scampsite overlooking Nikopolis. Theseexcavations have laid bare the remains

BIRTHPLACE OF EMPIRE: THE LEGACY OF ACTIUMby William M. Murray

8

Fig. 7. Augustus’ Naval Trophy atNikopolis from the Southeast. Photocredit: William M. Murray.

Fig. 8. Augustus’ Naval Trophy atNikopolis. View of the southern retain-ing wall showing sockets for the war-ship rams. Photo credit: William M.Murray.

of a large podium, reinforced with mass-es of concrete, supported by a longretaining wall of massive limestoneblocks (see Fig. 7). On the lower terracecreated by the retaining wall, one canstill see the complex sockets in thewall’s southern face where thirty-sixrostra, or warship rams, were displayedat ground level (see Fig. 8). One canalso make out some of the foot highwords from the long inscription thatonce crowned the display: . . . BELLOQUOD PRO RE PUBLICA GESSITIN HAC REGIONE . . . “in the warwhich he waged in this region on behalfof the Republic . . .” PACE PARTATERRA MARIQUE MARTI NEP-TUNOQUE CASTRA . . . [CON-SACRAVIT] . . . “after peace had beensecured on land and at sea . . . he [consecrated] his camp to Mars andNeptune.”

Atop the podium, a stoa enclosed thenorth, east, and west sides of a court-yard, its open side facing southwesttoward the sea and the battle zone. Thecourtyard also held two large statuebases and a long rectangular altar, origi-nally faced with marble slabs sculptedin high relief. Sometime in late antiqui-ty, these reliefs were systematically bro-ken into small fragments, more than21,000 of which were recovered duringthe course of the excavation. Sincesixth-century Nikopolis is well-knownfor its numerous Christian basilicas, wemight ascribe the destruction of thispagan shrine to the Christian communi-ty. Ironically, 1,129 broken pieces stilldisplay traces of their original decorationand give us hope that some day thepieces may be rejoined. Although thisprocess will take many years, prelimi-nary analysis reveals a number of differ-ent themes, including ships or navalaccessories (like rams, stern ornaments,and steering oars), an amazonomachy(?), armor, floral decoration, and a pro-cession with sacrificial animals. It islikely that the procession was part of ascene depicting the famous Actian tri-umph in Rome since five adjoining frag-ments were found in 2001 that clearlyshow Octavian in a triumphal chariot,accompanied by two children and fol-lowed by a group of togate senators.Astonishingly, one child bears theunmistakable features of Cleopatra asshe is depicted on coins and portraitstatues. Do we see here a reference toCleopatra Selene and her brotherAlexander Helios, the two children ofCleopatra and Antony?

Perhaps further analysis will answerthese and other questions, such as: How

holding the second story. The rest con-cealed iron tie-rods that were secured in thetruss above and went down through thecolonnade floor to attach to cross beams onthe underside of the aisle. This system ofsuspension obviated the need for giantmasonry supports in the cellar, thus openingup the space for further shops.

At each end of this market building is agiant portico with four columns hewn fromsolid pieces of Vermont granite surmountedby a pediment, undecorated except for anoculus at its center. The style is known asthe “Tuscan order,” that is, Doric columnswithout fluting beneath an entablaturedevoid of molding or other design. Thisplain style, which was not used at Rome, isfound in the remains of Etruscan buildings,hence the name. Palladio suggests that it issuitable for outbuildings on an estate, suchas the barn or stable area. Parris may wellhave had that in mind; certainly he was cre-ating a utilitarian space. But one couldargue that Quincy Market is in an aestheticand ideologic dialogue with its predecessorFaneuil Hall, that the new market buildingshows a stronger, more honest, immediateexpression of its function, that this was thenew revolutionary, American way. Itsresemblance to a temple is a more directexpression of ancient Greece and itsdemocracy.

Parris demonstrates the American instinctfor eclecticism when he balances the porti-co with a distinctly Roman feature, a greatoval dome in the center of the building’slength. It is a design feature to be found aswell in the Custom House built in lowerManhattan in 1833 (one wonders if itsarchitect was influenced by Parris). Theexemplar is the Pantheon of ancient Romewhose enormous circular interior is dominat-ed by its great dome in which an oculusprovides light to the space. As Greece cre-ated post-and-beam temple construction(originally wood, later stone), so theRomans made much use of the dome,based on their extensive experience withthe arch. Unlike the New York buildingwhere the view is open from the groundfloor up to the top of the dome, Parris madea continuous second-story floor in QuincyMarket, so that it was not until the twentieth-

century renovations of the building by BenThompson and Associates that the domewas opened up to the lower floor. Still thedome is another example of thearchitect/engineer’s invention. It was in facttwo domes separated by a small space oftwo feet, the inner suspended by laminatedwooden hangers that were lighter thanwood trusses. The space beneath was apavilion, one seventh of the total space ofthe building, its granite walls supporting aspecial eight-sided sectional wall risingabove the two long wings. An intricate sys-tem of laminated ribs together with thehangers brought the downward thrust of theinner dome back up into the outer domeand distributed its weight down through theoctagonal wall into the granite pavilionwalls.

Parris innovated still further in his use ofglass with the granite post and beam con-struction. Viewed from the side, the rhythmof giant granite blocks forming verticals thelength of the building separated by largeglass windows gives the effect of the peri-style temple, where the rhythm of the verti-cal columns is accentuated by the openspaces in between. The plain, severe,unadorned style of the granite exterior wasParris’ challenge to the extravagant Palladi-anism of Faneuil Hall, signaling in an inter-esting way a return to the instinct for puri-tanism that has identified the city of Bostonand its environs down into the twenty-firstcentury.

Quincy Hall was saved from the destruc-tion that has ravaged so much of our urbanbeauty in the name of progress when it wasrenewed and refurbished in the twentiethcentury. The story of its construction,decline, and rebirth is delightfully told by adescendant of Mayor Quincy, John Quincy,Jr., in Quincy’s Market: A Boston Landmark(2003).

Charles Rowan Beye (chuckbeye@comcast.net) is Distinguished Professor ofClassics Emeritus at Lehman College andthe Graduate School of the City Universityof New York and a contributing editor ofgreekworks.com. His most recent book isOdysseus: A Life (2004).

9

Boston’s Quincy Marketcontinued from page 3

continued on page 16

Arecent experience suggests thedegree to which the classics canleave their mark without our

knowing it. For years I had recalled withpleasure reading James Fenimore Coop-er’s The Deerslayer (1841) when I was inhigh school, and last summer I decidedto reread it. Cooper’s language was asflorid as I remembered, but I found it abit more manageable than I had as atenth-grader. In contrast, sensitivitieshoned by the intervening fifty years ren-dered me decidedly less comfortablewith Cooper’s treatment of nativeAmericans and women.

The most marked change in myresponse came, however, from an unex-pected source – the Latin poet Horace,who has been a constant companionsince my college years but whom I hadnot met when I first read Cooper’snovel. And it was Horace who sprangimmediately to mind when I read thefollowing passage, in which NattyBumppo, “the Deerslayer,” warns thelovely Judith, one of the two womeninvolved with him in many of thenovel’s key episodes, that beauty suchas hers is but transient:

Yes, good looks may be sarcumvented,and fairly outwitted, too. In order todo this you’ve only to remember thatthey melt like the snows, and, whenonce gone, they never come backag’in. The seasons come and go,Judith, and if we have winter, withstorms and frosts, and spring withchills and leafless trees, we have sum-mer with its sun and glorious skies,and fall with its fruits, and a garmentthrown over the forest, that no beautyof the town could rummage out of allthe shops in America. ’Arth is in anetarnal round, the goodness of God,bringing back the pleasant whenwe’ve had enough of the onpleasant.But it’s not so with good looks. Theyare lent for a short time in youth, to beused and not abused . . . (The Deerslayer,State University of New York Press,1986, 450)

What classicist could read thesewords and not think of Horace’s Odes4.7, “Diffugere Nives”?

immortalia ne speres, monet annus et almumquae rapit hora diem:

frigora mitescunt Zephyris, ver proterit aestasinteritura simul

pomifer Autumnus fruges effuderit, et moxbruma recurrit iners.

damna tamen celeres reparant caelestia lunae:nos ubi decidimus

quo pater Aeneas, quo Tullus dives et Ancus,pulvis et umbra sumus.

quis scit an adiciant hodiernae crastina summaetempora di superi?

(Horace, Odes 4.7.7-18)

The year, and the hour which snatch-es away the lovely day, warns that younot hope for eternal things. The frostssoften with the Zephyrs, summerwears away spring – summer itselfdestined to die as soon as fruit-bearingAutumn has poured forth its fruits,and soon lifeless winter returns. Themoons, however, recoup their celestiallosses; as for us, when we have fallenwhere father Aeneas, where wealthyTullus and Ancus have fallen, we aredust and shadow. Who knows whetherthe gods above will add tomorrow’stime to today’s sum?

The similarity piqued my curiosity,and a little rummaging in the libraryturned up Cooper’s account of his expe-rience with James L. Kingsley, his LatinProfessor at Yale:

I had been early and highly educatedfor a boy, so much so, as to be farbefore most of my classmates in latin[sic], and this enabled me to play – aboy of thirteen! – all the first year. Idare say Mr. Kingsley never suspectedme of knowing too much, but therecan be no great danger, now, in tellinghim the truth. So well was I groundedin the latin, that I scarce ever look’d atmy Horace or Tully until I was in hisfearful presence; and if he recollects,although he had a trick of trotting meabout the pages in order to get memired, he may remember that I gener-ally came off pretty well. (The Lettersand Journals of James Fenimore Cooper,Harvard University Press, 1960, vol.II, 99)

Recent research suggests that Ishould not have been surprised to findHorace lurking in Cooper’s novel. A fas-cinating article by Nanette C. Tamershows that in late eighteenth-centuryAmerica, when Cooper was growing up,Horace had long been a staple of boththe schools and the popular press –indeed, translations and imitations ofhim far outnumbered those of other clas-sical authors (“Sibi Imperiosus: Cooper’s

NATTY BUMPPO QUOTESHORACEby David H. Porter

Medea My Mindby Alison Traweek

And indeed nothing is better or nobler than this:when a man and a woman keep their house with

their mindsin perfect agreement; this brings many sorrows

to their enemies,many pleasures to their friends; they have the

best reputation.– Odyssey 6.182-5

He makes me catch my breath, the Poet,even after all these readings he trips me up.His honeyed words fill up my throatwhich grows heavy with the repetition of

these linesacross time. Euripides will put themin the mouth of Medeato a different use, a sinister distortionof this first, innocent meaning,and after her we all are guilty of saying it both ways at once.But when Odysseus says this to Nausikaa,says it for the first time, not knowingif she is a goddess or a nymphor just a simple woman, not sureif he will ever returnto the home he keeps in perfect agreementwith his wife, here the Poetmakes me catch my breath.I, too, want to keep my homein perfect agreement of mind. I, too, want

to bringsorrows to my enemies and pleasures to my friendssimply by loving. About lovinghe was never wrong, the Poet.The best loving is in well-matched minds.My mind, that wild foreigner, that beast,never sits still at her weaving,feels more at peace with a knife than with

a shuttle,prefers the chariot of the sunand the corpses of her childrento twenty years’ waiting. My mind,that wily sorceress, that witch,is always Medea.

Alison Traweek (traweek@mail.utexas.edu) has a B.A. from Columbia Universityin classics and creative writing and is cur-rently a graduate student in classics at theUniversity of Texas at Austin.

10

Horatian Ideal of Self-Governance in TheDeerslayer,” Papers of the 14th InternationalJames Fenimore Cooper Seminar and Con-ference, 2003). Dr. Tamer shows, in par-ticular, that Epode 2, with its focus onthe self-sufficiency of those who live inthe country, was a favorite text and thatwriters of the time frequently used otherHoratian passages to exemplify similarindependence. A 1744 newspaper, forinstance, printed a version of Odes 1.22in which “a young Gentleman in New-York” praised the man who, “Contemn-ing death, and ev’ry hideous form, /Out-braves the tempest, and derides thestorm, /Calm and compos’d.” Aroundthe same time, a poet writing in thePennsylvania Gazette teased from Odes2.10 a similar figure, “A Monarch in myrustic bower, /O’er whom even fortunehas no power.” Dr. Tamer convincinglyproposes that Cooper’s portrayal ofNatty Bumppo, a self-governed andhighly independent rustic, builds on thispopular Horatian paradigm, especially asit is elaborated in Satires 2.7.83-88 (sapi-ens, sibi qui imperiosus . . .: “the wise man,who is master of himself . . .”). Shepoints out also, though, that while mostwriters of the time used Horace almostas a commonplace book, culling passagesapt to their themes, Cooper read wholepoems and was alive to the startlingtwist Horace gives to the close of Epode2, or to the rich irony of poems like Odes1.22 and Satires 2.7. She further suggeststhat Cooper’s in-depth reading ofHorace is one reason his Natty Bumppois so much more complex than the “Hor-atian” figures evoked by most of hiscontemporaries.

Given all this, it is hard to believethat Cooper did not have Diffugere nivesin mind as he wrote Natty’s words toJudith. True, Horace’s warning is aboutthe passing of life, not the fading ofbeauty, but in other respects, theexcerpts cited are strikingly similar.Both take their cue from the passage ofthe seasons, give vivid descriptions oftheir swift progression, and conclude bycontrasting the seasonal cycle with thelinear nature of human life: the moonrepairs its losses, winter’s chill yields tospring breezes (cf. Natty’s “the good-ness of God, bringing back the pleasantwhen we’ve had enough of the onpleas-ant”), but good looks, and human life,pass away once and for all when wereach our winter. The similarities gowell beyond the parallelism of thought:Natty’s “fall with its fruits” is close to aliteral rendering of pomifer Autumnus; his“They are lent for a short time” echoesthe commercial language Horace uses of

both the moon’s “losses” and the sumof our days; and his warning that goodlooks “melt like the snows” recalls theopening line of Horace’s poem, Diffugerenives – “The snows have fled.”

When I returned to The Deerslayer, Ifound other significant resonances ofOdes 4.7. A striking passage in thenovel’s opening pages explicitly drawsthe contrast between human existenceon the one hand, the cycle of the seasonson the other: “Whatever may be thechanges produced by man, the eternalround of the seasons is unbroken” (16-17), with “eternal round of the seasons”closely foreshadowing Natty’s “’Arth isin an etarnal round.” At the end of thenovel, Natty and Chingachgook, hisnative-American friend, return after fif-teen years to Glimmerglass, the upstateNew York lake where the action of thenovel unfolds. Once again Coopersounds the same theme in describinghow the recurrent seasons – and espe-cially winter – have ravaged the lake-sur-rounded “castle” that had once been

their refuge: “The storms of winter hadlong since unroofed the house, anddecay had eaten into the logs . . . . [T]heseasons rioted in the place, as if in mock-ery at the attempt to exclude them. Thepalisades were rotting, as were the piles,and it was evident that a few more recur-rences of winter, a few more gales andtempests, would sweep all into the lake,and blot the building from the face ofthat magnificent solitude” (546; one sus-pects here a reminiscence also of thosepoems where Horace castigates land-lords who extend their dwellings outinto the waters – Odes 2.15.2-4, 2.18.20-22, 3.1.33-37, 3.24, 3-4; Epistles 1.1.83-5).

As this last Cooper passage suggests,the mortality of human creations – andof humans themselves – is a centraltheme of the The Deerslayer. Not only isthe novel dotted with tragic and brutaldeaths, but the fact of our mortality isnever out of mind – indeed, Natty him-self often muses on death and on thepossibility of afterlife. And the sense of

how much has passed, how many havedied, dominates the final visit to thelake and is underscored by the terse buteloquent reminder that Hist, Chingach-gook’s promised bride and the motiva-tion for his and Natty’s first journey toGlimmerglass, “already slumberedbeneath the pines of the Delawares . . .”(546). To all this, what could be moreappropriate than echoes of Horace’swarning that we not entertain immortalhopes (immortalia ne speres, 4.7.7), hisreminder that we are but dust and shad-ow (pulvis et umbra sumus, 4.7.16)?

As I thought back to my first readingof The Deerslayer, I realized that eventhough I had been unaware of its Horat-ian overtones, I had absorbed the ele-giac tone they help evoke. The sadnessthat colored my memories of the novelwent beyond the fact that so many peo-ple die or that the love Judith developsfor Natty comes to naught, with the twodeparting in separate directions at theend. It was rather that for all the hero-ism and moral courage Natty evinces inhis coming of age, I had been movedabove all by his loss of innocence, by hisrealization that he had left behind thesimplicities of youth. The response thebook had elicited was, in fact, quintes-sentially true to Diffugere nives, whichbegins as a celebration of spring’s arrivalbut leads inexorably to a very differenttheme – the warning that in the cycle ofhuman life, spring arrives but once.

In the same way, The Deerslayer cele-brates Natty’s arrival at maturity, butCooper tells his tale so as to suggest lessthe ripe flowering of Natty’s manhoodthan the loss of his youthful springtime.That The Deerslayer conveys this poignantmix of achievement and loss suggestshow fully Cooper had absorbed the com-plex cross-currents of Diffugere nives. Thatthis mix left its mark on my adolescentsensibilities and remained with me acrossthe decades without my knowingHorace’s role in its creation, suggestshow deeply the classical authors arewoven into the texture of our lives andhow profoundly they can affect us evenwhen we do not know they are there.

David H. Porter (ddodger@skidmore.edu), currently the Harry C. Payne VisitingProfessor of Liberal Arts at Williams Col-lege, has written extensively on Horace,including Horace’s Poetic Journey(1987). In a forthcoming article in Classicaland Modern Literature, he furtherexplores the echoes of Odes 4.7 in TheDeerslayer and discusses ways in whichthey enrich our reading of both this noveland Cooper’s whole Leather-Stocking series.

11

A recent experience suggests the degree to

which the classics can leave their mark without

our knowing it.

Oliver Stone’s Alexander arrived in the-aters on November 24, 2004 – one

of two big-budget films slated to deal withthe life and times of the conqueror. Theother, to be directed by Baz Luhrmann andproduced by Martin Scorsese, will notbegin shooting until 2005. And despiteLuhrman’s protests that his film will go for-ward, the general mood in Hollywoodseems to be “wait and see.” In addition tothese two high-profile Alexander projects, asmall, independent film about Alexander’syouth, Alexander the Great of Macedonia,produced by Ilya Salkind (known best forSuperman), was filmed and slated toappear this fall, but it is now simply listedas “coming soon” and may never appearat all.

The last attempt to put Alexander on thebig screen came almost fifty years ago, in1956, with MGM’s Alexander the Great,featuring a young Richard Burton in his firststarring role. Charlton Heston was initiallyoffered the role of Alexander but turned itdown, saying later, “Alexander is the easi-est kind of picture to make badly.” If Bur-ton’s Alexander is the best known, therehave been other celluloid Alexanders since.Nicolas Clay starred in a 1981 BBC docu-drama, The Search for Alexander theGreat. There was also a 1917 black-and-white silent Swedish film called Alexanderden store; an Indian political film Sikanderin 1941 with an Indian Alexander (Prithvi-raj Kapoor); and a black-and-white, never-sold pilot episode for a TV series calledAlexander the Great, starring a pre-Star-Trek William Shatner as Alexander and apre-Batman Adam West as Cleander(essentially Hephaistion). This pilot wasoriginally shot in 1964 but not seen until1968 as a TV special

The three-time Oscar-winning OliverStone (Midnight Express, Platoon, Born onthe Fourth of July) has been captivated byAlexander since his youth and produced aninitial Alexander script in the mid-1980’s,beginning serious movement forward onthe project in the early 1990’s. But therewere other competing proposals that fell bythe wayside. These included a ten-hourminiseries project for HBO, produced byMel Gibson, who (if rumor is to be

believed) may join instead the Luhrmannproduction in the role of Philip, Alexander’sfather. Christopher McQuarrie (The UsualSuspects) also proposed an Alexander proj-ect, which he reputedly sold to WarnerBrothers. Yet the next thing anyone knew,Martin Scorsese was involved, and Leonar-do DiCaprio had been tapped for Alexan-der (instead of McQuarrie’s choice of JudeLaw). Then Scorsese began to be associatedwith the Baz Luhrmann project, previouslyunder Dino de Laurentis, not ChristopherMcQuarrie. McQuarrie himself says he isprimarily a writer, not a director, yet theLuhrmann/Scorsese script is based on atrilogy by Italian novelist Valerio MassimoManfredi (Luhrmann’s original choice), notthe one penned by McQuarrie and PeterBuchman. Meanwhile, Warner Brothers ishandling Stone’s film. Confused? So wasanyone trying to keep track of the madshuffle, and exactly what happened is diffi-cult to know. Even Ridley Scott, the directorof Gladiator (2000), toyed with an Alexan-der project, proposing what might havebeen the wisest casting idea of all – a com-plete unknown for Alexander, to be sur-rounded by a supporting cast of namestars.

It was far from certain that Stone’sAlexander would ever make it to the boxoffice since it has been put on hold numer-ous times for one reason or another. For

instance, in November 1998, according tothe Athens News Agency, the Greek gov-ernment rescinded its earlier promise ofassistance in filming, and Culture MinisterEvangelos Venizelos said, “At the presenttime, it is not at all certain whether wewould find any grounds for cooperation, atleast on the script.” Apparently, amongother things, the Greeks were not thrilled byStone’s interest in portraying Alexander’shomoerotic affairs. Even earlier problemsincluded Stone’s initial choice ofscriptwriter, Gore Vidal, who turned himdown in no uncertain terms: “I’d neverwork for you. You distorted Kennedy, youdistorted Nixon, and you lack the one qual-ity a director needs most – talent” (quotedin Salon in 1996).

Alexander is, arguably, Stone’s mostambitious production to date and a long-time pet project. Certainly, the narrativedeparts from more conventional linearstorytelling, moving back and forth in timewith events linked thematically rather thanchronologically, as an aged Ptolemy(Anthony Hopkins) narrates certain eventsin Alexander’s life that he regards as partic-ularly pivotal. In the film’s official produc-tion notes, historical consultant Robin LaneFox says, “Cramming every incident ofAlexander’s extraordinary life into onefeature film would be quite literallyimpossible.”

Early rumors and an old quote fromStone himself suggested that (in the spirit ofhis other biopics) Stone would follow con-spiracy theories about the deaths of bothPhilip II and Alexander. In December2002, Stone told The Guardian, “I wasintrigued to discover that his famous father,Philip II, had been assassinated under mys-terious circumstances . . . .[and] In Alexan-der’s own untimely death at 33, we haveagain strong evidence of a conspiracy offamily clans.” Philip’s murder and Alexan-der’s final illness are topics over which his-torians themselves have disagreed, andquestions of conspiracy were present evenin antiquity. Although many Alexander spe-cialists believe the conqueror died of illnessand conspiracies do offer dramatic appeal,Stone, in the end, adopted a compromise.No clear conspiracy is ever laid out; it ismerely intimated as one possible cause forthe conqueror’s death, leaving viewers to

12

A History of Alexander on The Big Screenby Jeanne Reames-Zimmerman

Fig. 9. Colin Farrell rides in as the firstbig-screen Alexander in almost fiftyyears (Alexander, Warner Brothers,2004).

draw their own conclusions.The film’s accuracy of detail owes much

to Lane Fox, the film’s historical consultant.Examples of this accuracy include Alexan-der’s armor and helmet, modeled onancient descriptions and artwork; the pur-ple and gold cloak sported by Alexander,modeled on the cloak taken from Tomb II atVergina; and the blue-glazed recreation ofthe Ishtar Gate for Alexander’s entry intoBabylon. The military costuming is general-ly well done, and great attention has beengiven to recreating reality on several levels,from the dust and confusion of battle to thescars on Farrell’s body – the kind of detaileasily dropped in a Hollywood blockbusterbut one that suggests a respect for smallthings on the part of Stone. Lane Fox him-self told The Australian in July 2004, “Mycolleagues told me that for historians, Stonewas supposed to be like Satan . . . . Likethe poet John Milton, I have to say I quicklybecame very fond of Satan. Anyway, theclaim that Stone has no historical sense iscompletely untrue.”

Yet ahistorical choices were made.Some are for dramatic or pragmatic rea-sons. For instance, the horse used asBucephalus is a North Light Friesian, asmall draft horse, and enormous by thestandards of ancient Greek horses (see Fig.9). Nonetheless, Friesians are known fortheir showy trot, intelligence, and easynatures, and are, thus, popular in Holly-wood. Furthermore, several events inAlexander’s campaigns are conflated orsimplified; for example, two mutiniesbecome one, two conspiracies becomeone, and the Hydaspes and Malli battlesare combined. Such substitutions makesense even if the historian may recognizethe inaccuracies of them. Likewise, Stone’sdecision to have actors employ a variety ofaccents (Irish, English, Scottish, Welsh, andAlbanian for Olympias) was an attempt toconvey the ethnic variety in Alexander’sexpedition – a choice that some will callclever and some will call merely forced.

Other elements in the film are more diffi-cult to justify. For instance, and in contrastto Alexander’s helmet, the crown sportedby Angelina Jolie as Olympias in somescenes is anachronistic despite the fact wehave quite a few examples of women’s jew-elry and diadems from female graves in

mediator of high quality scholarly andscientific information to the whole ofthe Arab world? That has the look andfeel of a worthy ambition, but onehesitates to assume blithely that otherArab nations will accept Egypt’s leader-ship. Could it perform a similar functionfor Africa? Could it help us reconstruct anotion of Mediterranean community?These are essentially political choicesfor Egypt, choices that the Library cantry to influence and reflect but probablynot determine.

To think of what makes somelibraries great may help mark some ofthe paths forward that the Library canfollow. Libraries achieve real greatnessnot from their collections but from whathappens in them. Hermetically sealedcaves of books are not libraries, thoughthey have the potential to become such.The crowds of people fairly burstinginto the building (see Fig. 10) presentone opportunity: to find the way forthem to have the distinctive experienceof a great library and to practice thekind of reading such a collection fosters,reading that is critical, reflective, con-tentious, and productive. We do not yethave a model for how that kind ofbehavior can be produced in buildingsthat are not full of traditional print mate-rials.

The wider challenge and, at the sametime, opportunity is for the Library tobecome a cultural force in its own right,and there the conference programs andpolitical engagement are surely on the

right track. To use the name of theancient library is to remind one and allthat this is a place that was once verynearly the center of the Western civi-lized world. Though ancient Alexandriabegan as a colony, it became a metropo-lis in its own right. In a comparable way,this reborn library should hope tobecome a home for progressive and crit-ical intellectual activity in twenty-firstcentury Alexandria, for this is an institu-tion that now can be neither Westernnor Eastern, neither imperial nor colo-nial, but one that stands on its ownterms as a competitor and partner toother institutions promoting learningand inquiry around the world.

No American visits the Middle Eastthese days without thinking of the cul-tural conflicts and cultural risks of ourtime. But to see this new avatar of anold monument rising boldly from thesea, as it were, makes it possible tothink that there are some old strategiesthat can offer hope of illumination andunderstanding in our time.

James J. O’Donnell is Provost of George-town University and past president of theAmerican Philological Association. His nextbook, Augustine: A New Biography willbe published by HarperCollins in April2005. He welcomes comments and questionsat provost@georgetown.edu.

THE LIBRARY OF ALEXANDRIA REBORNcontinued from page 5

13continued on page 15

Fig 10. Patrons using the new Library ofAlexandria. Photo credit: James J.O’Donnell.

“It is as it was.” With these words,Pope John Paul II seemed toendorse the historical accuracy of

Mel Gibson’s controversial film The Pas-sion of the Christ (2004) – at least untilVatican officials later denied it. So thequestion of the film’s authenticity isapparently still open, to be debated bymore fallible authorities, including, ofcourse, archaeologists and classicalscholars. Unfortunately, many of the rel-evant questions cannot be decided. Ofthe physical setting of ancientJerusalem, practically nothing remains.In many ways, archaeologists are in amuch better position to judge the accu-racy of Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy (2004)since the material culture of the BronzeAge Aegean is better preserved thanthat of first century Judaea. It is alsoimportant to note that The Passion is areligious film first and foremost. Gibsonwas following the New Testamentrather than the Cambridge Ancient Historyas his guide. His Pontius Pilate, a flawedbut basically decent official, correspondsto the character in the gospels ratherthan the despot described by the Jewishhistorian Josephus. Concessions alsowere made in certain details of the cru-cifixion: Jesus carries the full crossrather than the crosspiece (patibulum),and his hands are pierced in the palmrather than the forearm because this istraditional iconography; Gibson evident-ly felt that to “correct” that traditionwould draw attention to itself and dis-turb the concentration of pious viewers,his true target audience. As an aestheticprinciple, this is debatable, but thepoint is that Gibson was not obsessedwith historical detail. This must be kept

in mind as we turn to what was ostensi-bly his most drastic artistic choice, theuse of Aramaic and Latin as the authen-tic languages of the time.

At first, most of the “buzz” about thefilm concerned this apparently crackpotdecision, especially since the initialrumor (perhaps a publicity ploy) wasthat Gibson did not plan to include sub-titles. The general feeling was that thewhole project was a self-indulgent exer-cise, well intended perhaps, butdoomed to failure. As the proceeds nowapproach a billion dollars, it seems theindustry pundits underestimated thegeneral public’s hunger for ancient lan-guages.

Not really, of course. The film is farmore visual than verbal, and Gibson(who wisely added subtitles) clearly didnot want the words to get in the way.This seems all the more astute com-pared with other biblical ventures onfilm – especially the made for TV speci-mens – where modern diction (by turnsponderous or slangy) and accent (Britishseems somehow more convincinglyancient) undermine our attempts totake the characters seriously. By con-trast, the use of Aramaic and Latin inGibson’s film very effectively adds tothe atmosphere of authenticity; it drawsus in instead of distracting us. But is itreally authentic?

I can say little about the Aramaic,other than what I have learned from mycolleague Fr. William Fulco, NEH Pro-fessor of Ancient Mediterranean Studiesat Loyola Marymount University, whotranslated the script and coached theactors on site. He insists that the overallgrammar and syntax of first-century Ara-maic are not problematic. Occasionallyvocabulary had to be substituted fromHebrew or Arabic, with the appropriatephonetic changes when the Aramaicterm was missing from the lexicon. Farmore troublesome is the question ofGreek, which is completely absent fromthe film. After all, the primary source,the New Testament, is written inGreek, not Aramaic, and there is nodoubt that Greek was more widely usedin the Roman East than Latin at thetime of Jesus. When I asked Gibsonabout this during a Q & A session at oneof the previews of the film, he replied,“I thought two dead languages wereenough” – an amusing answer, under-

scoring again that complete historicalaccuracy was not the ultimate value inthe director’s vision. The preference forLatin also might well be more personalthan scholarly: Gibson is a conservativeRoman Catholic who still attends theTridentine mass in Latin. But we shouldnot underestimate the use of Latin inJudaea: Pontius Pilate’s name is attestedin a Latin inscription found in CaesareaMaritima in 1961. More significantly,throughout the empire, Latin remainedthe language of the law courts and thearmy, precisely the two major contextswhere it occurs in the film. But it stillseems unlikely that Pilate and Jesuswould have conversed in Latin. To besure, it is dramatically effective whenJesus startles Pilate by replying in Latinto Pilate’s question in Aramaic (see Fig.11). But while Pilate may have pickedup enough Aramaic during his seven-year stint in Judaea, why would Jesus,from the obscure town of Nazareth, befluent in Latin when the high priestsfrom Jerusalem who indict him appar-ently know hardly a word? If, in fact, theconversation took place without transla-tors, Greek would undoubtedly havebeen the common tongue. Practicallyspeaking, that would indeed have placedan extra burden on the actors, as also onthe voice coach: how would the Greekbe pronounced? Would the koine be koy-NAY (as in Classical Greek) or kee-NEE(as in Modern Greek)? Probably closerto the latter, since there is certainly evi-dence of “itacism” – the shift of certainvowels and diphthongs towards an “ee”sound – by this time. Most of the impor-tant phonetic changes in Greek occurredroughly from the fourth century B.C. tothe first two or three centuries A.D., andwith respect to pronunciation, the lan-guage has remained remarkably stablefrom then on.

ANCIENT LANGUAGES IN MEL GIBSON’S THE PASSION OF THE CHRISTby Matthew Dillon

Fig. 11. Pontius Pilate (Hristo NaumovShopov), on the left, interviews Jesus(James Caviezel) in The Passion of theChrist (Icon Productions, 2004).

Coming in FutureIssues of AmphoraWhat’s New in Classical CookeryWhat Do Classics Librarians Do?Cats in RomeClassics and the U. S. PresidencyThe Site of the Augustan Legionary

Disaster in GermanyClassics and the Scripps-Howard

Spelling Bee

14

Macedonia. Even if those examples areearly Hellenistic, any would have beenmore authentic than what Jolie wears. Like-wise, the drape and cut of Macedoniancivilian clothing seems off despite the inputof Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, author ofAphrodite’s Tortoise: The Veiled Woman inAncient Greece (2004) and Women’sDress in the Ancient Greek World (2002);and there is an overabundance of unmiti-gated white although the Macedonianswere not particularly noted for undecorat-ed, unbordered clothing (much less forblindingly white cloth).

Yet one must admit that a story is anorganic whole that succeeds or fails basedon more fundamental criteria than the cut ofa costume. One ought not to miss the forestfor the trees, and if author Flannery O’Con-nor famously said, “Fiction is after truth,”nonetheless, historical films are not docu-mentaries. That may make their validitydubious for historical purists, but they arefiction, which has a different aim. Where isthe story in the history? The novelist (ordirector) will have to make choices aboutwhat to include, what not to include, andwhat to modify in order to render some-thing comprehensible to a modern audi-ence. That does not excuse laziness or fail-ure to do research. One should practice theart of getting it right, to paraphrase histori-an and published novelist Dr. Judith Tarr.

Nonetheless, capturing the period spiritis, in my own opinion, more critical thancreating detail-perfect sets. Otherwise, onehas only an elaborate costume drama. Thereal challenge of this genre is to allow char-acters to be properly historical withoutpushing them past a point with which mod-ern viewers can identify. I believe it is pre-cisely in how well an author/director/screenwriter blends the needs and goals ofthe story with attention to authentic detailthat creates the alchemy of good historicalfiction, either in print or on film. If Iapproached Oliver Stone’s Alexander withtrepidation, I came away pleasantly sur-prised. If not Lawrence of Arabia (andColin Farrell certainly is not Peter O’Toole),it is easily the best fictional portrayal ofAlexander produced to date on film.

Jeanne Reames-Zimmerman(jreameszimmerman@mail.unomaha.edu)studied Argead Macedonia under EugeneN. Borza at the Pennsylvania State Univer-sity and is now a member of the history fac-ulty at the University of Nebraska, Omaha.In addition to more scholarly pursuits, herhobbies include collecting fiction aboutAlexander the Great. For seven years, shehas maintained the Web site, BeyondRenault: Alexander the Great in Fiction(http://home.earthlink.net/~mathetria/BeyondRenault/beyondrenault.html). Shewould particularly like to acknowledge themembers of the Dreamworks SKG BulletinBoard for their assistance in locating stillsand other information.

In the absence of Greek, that ques-tion is unfortunately moot, but pronun-ciation is, of course, also an issue forLatin. Most classicists are dismayed tohear the ecclesiastical pronunciation inthe film, with its soft c’s and hard v’s.Linguistically this does seem rather toanticipate the Middle Ages by a fewcenturies although here, too, there issome wiggle room. The ancient schol-ars who addressed questions of pronun-ciation were invariably conservative inapproach, trying to standardize the“classical” pronunciation of the highlyeducated elite. What the Vulgar Latinof the street actually sounded like ismore difficult to say. In the film, thereis some effort made to distinguish twobroad levels of diction: the rough, collo-quial language of the soldiers (drawn inpart from barracks’ graffiti, according toFulco) contrasts with the cleaner, moreelegant style of Pilate and his wife, butthe pronunciation is largely the same.Probably that is anachronistic, but,again, even if scholars were to agree onthe matter, accuracy was not Gibson’sparamount concern. In addition, a prac-tical consideration came into play: mostof the Latin-speaking actors were Euro-pean, to whom the later ecclesiasticalpronunciation came naturally. As com-promises go, this seems acceptable tome – a venial sin at most. (Too badabout the Greek, though.)

Whatever the merits of the film as awhole, I give Mel Gibson high marks forhis recreation of the time and place ofthe Passion. Unlike most Hollywoodblockbusters, the physical surroundingsare understated; as background they cre-ate atmosphere without offense and arelikely to stand the test of time betterthan, say, the glaring Technicolor sets ofCecil B. De Mille’s The Ten Command-ments (1956). But most impressively andmost effectively, the courageous use ofancient languages creates the illusion ofreality. To expect more reality than illu-sion from film is to misunderstand themedium. Amidst the various groups whohave raised their voices to protest oneaspect or another of this controversialwork, classical scholars have the least tocomplain about.

Matthew Dillon (mdillon@lmu.edu) isprofessor and chair of the Department ofClassics and Archaeology at Loyola Mary-mount University in Los Angeles and cur-rently president of the Society for the OralReading of Greek and Latin Literature.

A History of Alexander on The Big Screencontinued from page 13

15

(ISSN 1542-2380) is publishedtwice a year by the American

Philological Association (APA). The APA, founded in1869 by “professors, friends, and patrons of linguisticscience,” is now the principal learned society inNorth America for the study of ancient Greek andRoman languages, literatures, and civilizations.While the majority of its members are university andcollege classics teachers, members also includescholars in other disciplines, primary and secondaryschool teachers, and interested lay people. The APAproduces several series of scholarly books and textsand the journal Transactions of the American Philologi-cal Association. An annual meeting is held each Janu-ary in conjunction with the Archaeological Instituteof America.

All of the APA’s programs are grounded in the rigorand high standards of traditional philology, with thestudy of ancient Greek and Latin at their core. Howev-er, the APA also aims to present a broad view of classi-cal culture and the ancient Mediterranean world to awide audience. In short, the APA seeks to preserve andtransmit the wisdom and values of classical culture andto find new meanings appropriate to the complex anduncertain world of the twenty-first century.

The APA’s activities serve one or more of theseoverarching goals:

• To ensure an adequate number of well-trained, inspirational classics teachers at all levels,kindergarten through graduate school;

• To give classics scholars and teachers the toolsthey need to preserve and extend their knowledge ofclassical civilization and to communicate that knowl-edge as widely as possible;

• To develop the necessary infrastructure toachieve these goals and to make the APA a model forother societies confronting similar challenges.

The APA welcomes everyone who shares thisvision to participate in and support its programs. AllAPA members receive Amphora automatically as abenefit of membership. Non-members who wish toreceive Amphora on a regular basis or who wish fur-ther information about the APA may write to TheAmerican Philological Association at 292 Logan Hall,University of Pennsylvania, 249 S. 36th Street,Philadelphia, PA 19104-6304, or at the e-mailaddress: apaclassics@sas.upenn.edu. The APA Website is at www.apaclassics.org.

Members are urged to pass this copy of Amphoraon to non-members and to request additional copiesof Amphora from the APA office.

®

soon after the battle did Augustus buildthis monument? What messages did hewish to portray through its design anddecoration? How much do the themesand motifs displayed here anticipatewhat we see years later on the Ara Pacisand other Augustan monuments and thusreveal how quickly and effectively thevictor began to promote his Actian victoryas the starting point for his new order?

The monument’s lower terrace pre-serves additional clues. Here, thirty-sixbronze warship rams once studded themonument’s facade. Although the ramsdisappeared long ago (one six kilo frag-ment has miraculously survived), deepcuttings remain that once held the backends of the weapons firmly fixed in thepodium’s retaining wall. Under the gen-eral direction of Dr. Zachos and with thehelp of Donald Sanders and the Insti-tute for the Visualization of History, weare trying to recreate one of the lost war-ship rams from traces preserved insidethe largest cutting. Using digital technol-ogy, we have made a three-dimensionalcomputer model of an authentic, butsmaller, warship ram found in 1980 offthe coast of Israel and are expanding this“virtual ram” so that it will slide into themonument’s largest socket. We hopeeventually to make a full-size displaypiece out of fiberglass or hard plasticfoam so that visitors to the site will beable to appreciate the scale of Antony’slargest weapon and imagine the offen-sive “punch” of ramming warships,whose designs quickly passed frommemory soon after the battle.

The most enduring element ofActium’s legacy can be found in theoverwhelming success of Augustus’ eco-nomic reconstruction following his vic-tory. What eventually confirmedActium’s importance as the start of anew age was not Augustus’ battleaccount (published between 25 and 22B.C.), or even the monuments he erect-ed to honor his victory, but rather hissuccess in providing stable government,peace, and prosperity during the genera-tion that followed. Tangible evidencefor this success can be seen everywherearound the monument’s hill in the ruinsof Nikopolis. For more than a decade,under the watchful eye of Dr. Zachos,the 12th Ephorate of Prehistoric andClassical Antiquities has conducted amethodical program of survey and exca-vation in and around the ancient city. As

the city slowly emerges from theground, an extensive number of signshelp the visitor understand what hasbeen found and how it relates to thecity’s growth and long prosperity.

Above Nikopolis, at Octavian’scampsite monument, you can physicallysurvey the full legacy of Actium (seeFig. 12). In the foreground lie the ruinsof the Actian trophy monument, builton the site where Augustus pitched hispersonal tent, slept, ate and, no doubt,laid his plans. In the middle ground,you can easily make out the Byzantinewalls of Nikopolis, still undulating like agreat stone snake through the country-side. And in the distance, beyond thepeninsula, you can see Lefkas islandand to its right, the battle zone where600 warships once stretched toward thehorizon. If any place can be dubbed the“Birthplace” of Empire, this is it – thissite, this city, this region.

William M. Murray (wmurray@mail.cas.usf.edu) is the Mary and Gus StathisProfessor of Greek History at the Universityof South Florida, where he has taught since1982. Murray's scholarly interests embraceall aspects of ancient seafaring, from shipsand sailing routes to trade and ancient har-bors, to naval warfare and weaponry. Hisresearch was featured in an hour-long docu-mentary (Antony and Cleopatra: Battle atActium) that first aired in September 2003on the Discovery Channel.

16

BIRTHPLACE OF EMPIRE: THE LEGACY OFACTIUMcontinued from page 9

The Oresteia ProjectContinuesby Andrew Earle Simpson

The Libation Bearers, part two of TheOresteia Project, a trilogy of one-act

operas on Aeschylus’ tragic cycle, receivedits concert workshop premiere at TheCatholic University of America in Washing-ton, D. C. on March 19 and 20, 2004.

Whereas the previous staged production ofAgamemnon, part one of the trilogy,involved dance, this concert performanceof The Libation Bearers allowed us to intro-duce a new element – film. Chicago-basedfilmmaker Nicholas Ferrario shot approxi-mately fifteen minutes of black-and-whitefilm sequences especially for this produc-tion (see Fig. 13). Projections of supertitlesof Sarah Brown Ferrario’s libretto withinthe performance space were joined by filmimages at dramatically powerful moments.Work on the final opera, The Furies, beganin fall 2004. Further information is avail-able on the opera Web site,http://music.cua.edu/libationbearers andin issue 2.2 (Fall 2003) of Amphora. Fig. 12. View of the site of Nikopolis

and the battle zone of Actium. Photocredit: William M. Murray.

Fig. 13. The grave of Agamemnon. Stillimage captured from the film shot toaccompany the performance of The LibationBearers. Photo credit: Nicholas Ferrario.

their interpretation of Acharnians; someauthenticity was thus sacrificed so as topresent a vision of Dicaeopolis’ personaljourney that could be intelligible (andinspirational) to a modern audience.Nonetheless, the impression that theproduction gave of Aristophanes’ rele-vance was not purely the consequence ofthe adaptors’ artifice. Two scenes in par-ticular – the prologue, in which the frus-trated, antacid-imbibing protagonistexposed the charade of “free speech” inthe Athenian assembly, and the con-frontation with the blustery Lamachus,who vainly vaunted that he was a “quali-fied patriot” while trying to bullyDicaeopolis into silence – spoke volumesabout why Aristophanes still has some-thing to tell us.

LCT’s Frogs was the product of aneven more aggressive approach toreworking Aristophanes. As BurtShevelove and Stephen Sondheim envi-sioned it in 1974, Dionysus’ mission toHades is spurred by his determinationto rescue humankind from its apathy.Contrasted with Dionysus is the care-free chorus of frogs whom the godmeets while traveling to the under-world; as one song explains, “The frogslike things the way they are. Earth iswell enough, they say.” Instead of seek-ing Euripides, this Dionysus wants toretrieve George Bernard Shaw “with allhis gravity of thought,” and the agonbetween Euripides and Aeschylus isaccordingly transformed into a briefcontest between the unsentimentalShaw and his nemesis, the poeticalWilliam Shakespeare. Realizing thatShaw, though witty, will not be heeded,Dionysus decides to return to the landof the living with Shakespeare; as heexplains to Pluto, “The theater needs apoet . . . . Someone to lift them out oftheir seats, to get them going . . .”

This is only one of many alterationsthat Shevelove and Sondheim introducedto eliminate allusions that might confusespectators and detract from the primarymessage of their Frogs: that we mustlearn to involve ourselves in the worldaround us, lest we all become “frogs.”This message itself – and the develop-ment of the frogs as symbols of compla-cency and carelessness – capitalizes on anidea that is at most indirectly expressedin the ancient text. The self-consciousconcern with the messages conveyed bydramatists and poets, on the other hand,

directly stems from Aristophanes. In his “even more free” adaptation of

the Shevelove-Sondheim script, Lanehas his Dionysus explain in the openingscene that he dreads frogs because theyhave “narrow little minds that matchtheir narrow little points of view” andare emblems of a “sick, sedentary uni-verse.” Not only are we at risk of turn-ing into frogs on our own, but the frogsactively seek to recruit us into theirranks, and in the long scene depictingthe journey across the Styx, the god isattacked by the amphibian chorus thatseeks to quash his world-saving mission.Lane’s jibes at the Bush administration(for example, complaints about leaderswhose “words fail them . . . even thesimplest words” and about “a war weshouldn’t be in,” and a joke about the“Big Bully Bush Frog that makes pre-emptive strikes and then forgets why itattacked in the first place”) lay bare thepolitical polemic underlying Dionysus’anxiety about a world that “is going tothe frogs.”

The political agenda that Laneadvanced by means of his embellish-ments to Shevelove and Sondheim’sadaptation of Frogs differs little fromwhat Ron and Simmons strove to con-vey in their version of Acharnians. Yet,because he added material to the script,Lane had the opportunity to be moreobvious in his development of thethemes that concerned him. On occa-sion, his choices led him to stray fromthe sophistication, nuance, and ironicself-awareness that constitute (in mymind) the essence of Aristophanic com-edy. For, if Aristophanes is one partMichael Moore, he is also another partJon Stewart on The Daily Show, mischie-vously challenging us to peek behindhis mask and contemplate his complici-ty in the very phenomena he critiques.Much as I enjoyed LCT’s Frogs, Iwould have been happier if it had tilteda little more in Stewart’s – and Aristo-phanes’– direction.

It would be naïve to suppose thatthese adaptations of Aristophanes wouldplay well in every part of the UnitedStates. Some Americans would doubt-less be put off by the criticisms ofGeorge W. Bush and the war in Iraqthat emerge from these particular pro-ductions. Yet contemporary revivals ofAristophanic comedy are not obliged toadvance such partisan agendas; the joy-

ously rambunctious yet politically pru-dent Lysistrata performed by theNational Theater of Greece, which wasdesigned to entertain an internationalaudience at the Olympics, demonstratesthe viability of more neutral interpreta-tions. In all events, I would like to seemore of Aristophanes’ boisterous andflamboyant brand of comedy in a the-ater near me – and you – soon. My hopeis that we classicists can help him findhis way to as many stages as possible.

Elizabeth Scharffenberger(es136@columbia.edu) currently teaches inthe Department of Classics at ColumbiaUniversity. Her research has focused onAristophanes and Euripides; among herrecent publications is “Aristophanes’ Thes-mophoriazousai and the Challenges ofComic Translation: The Case of WilliamArrowsmith’s Euripides Agonistes,” inAmerican Journal of Philology 123.3(Fall 2002), 429-463.

APA Speakers Bureau

The APA maintains a roster ofenthusiastic speakers who are

available to address a wide variety ofaudiences – civic groups, professionalsocieties, library and other readinggroups, middle schools and secondaryschools, junior and senior colleges,universities, and many other organiza-tions.

The Speakers Bureau can be foundby going to the APA Web site atwww.apaclassics.org and clicking onOutreach, listed on the left hand sideof the screen of the home page. UnderOutreach, you will find the SpeakersBureau. The Bureau lists e-mailaddresses of dozens of speakers aswell as descriptions of the talks theyare prepared to give. A glancethrough the topics described there willmake clear the breadth of presenta-tions that are available, from MedicalPractices in Pompeii and the RomanEmpire to Women’s Letters fromAncient Egypt.

“THE TIME IS THE PRESENT, THE PLACE IS ANCIENT GREECE”continued from page 2

17

Robert P. Sonkowsky. Selections from OvidRead in Classical Latin. Jeffrey Norton Publish-ers, Inc. (1-800-243-1234), 1999. 2-cassetterecording, with booklet containing completeLatin text of selections with facing Englishtranslation. Published as part of The LivingVoice of Greek and Latin, series ed. StephenG. Daitz. $39.95. ISBN 1-57970-047-0.

This lovely set of readings from Ovid’svarious works is a delightful and valu-

able addition to the important series editedby Stephen Daitz. Almost all of Ovid’sworks are represented, and an attempt ismade to include especially the more famousor often-read passages (although the ulti-mate arbiter seems to be whether or not apassage has interesting sound-play in it).Robert Sonkowsky has also contributed oralinterpretations of Catullus and Horace tothe series. He is a founding member of theSociety for the Oral Reading of Greek andLatin Literature (SORGLL – Web site athttp://www.rhapsodes.fll.vt.edu) and iswell known for his performances at theSociety’s annual open reading session eachyear at the meeting of the AmericanPhilological Association.

Sonkowsky’s style is pleasant, fluent,and meticulous at once, even striking the lis-tener as operatic at times. Sonkowsky, whoreads in a soothing, flexible baritone,adheres to the Restored Pronunciation asreconstructed by W. S. Allen in Vox Latina(2nd ed.,1978). Listeners familiar with theselected passages in Latin will enjoy pittingtheir own interpretations of scenes againstSonkowsky’s. Those less familiar with theLatin will enjoy sitting back and listening toa good story, in Latin, as read by a pro –dactylic hexameters and elegiacs per-formed comfortably and with panache. Alllisteners may well be surprised and tickledat the sound effects they are made awareof in Ovid as they listen attentively.

Sonkowsky is particularly good at charac-ter drawing during direct quotations. Listenfor impersonations of stern Apollo and playfulCupid, nicely contrasted in Metamorphoses1.486-87; desperate, out-of-breath Apolloresting on (running toward?) his laurels as hechases Daphne (lines 504 ff., especially 517-18: “Wait! Jupiter is my father! I know the

future and the past!”); Echo (a tour de force,Met. 3.380 ff., with a reprise introduced byOvid for ring-composition effect after the Nar-cissus story at 493 ff. – Echo and eheu arewell exploited here, as Ovid surely meantthem to be); enraged Pallas Athene (especial-ly Met. 6.185-87); numerous “prophet” and“witch” types (note the scratchy Bacchantvoice at Met. 11.7 and the effect of speakingfrom afar that Sonkowsky captures in Met.6.159-62); a Philomela who is heading intomelodrama, Met. 6.533-48; various “oldmen” (my favorite is Lelex, Met. 6.618 ff.).Apollo as the teacher’s teacher in Ars Amato-ria 2.497-508 is sketched as authoritative,while the humor of the situation is subtly hint-ed at in the acceleration of his commands(503-08).

One of the many delights of Sonkowsky’sreading is his ability to draw out the humorand drama in Ovid, even beyond characterdelineation. The narrator’s audible resigna-tion at Amores 1.1.27-30 is priceless, as isthe aural “shrug” at Ars Amatoria 2.509-10 ("Thus did Phoebus advise; when Phoe-bus advises, obey him!"), brought outthrough tones and pace that contrast withthe force and speed of the preceding “com-mands.” The narrator’s alternation betweenwhat he tells himself about his girl andwhat he knows, at Remedia Amoris 317-22, is extremely well timed. Hushed tonesare used effectively at Fasti 1.421-30 (noxerat . . ., an irreverent allusion to Vergil’sAeneid 4.522-31, where night falls about atormented Dido), and the braying of thedonkey in the following lines correspond-ingly breaks the hush humorously throughSonkowsky’s use of the sounds of Ovid’sverse: ecce rudens rauco... ore sonos (433-34). My favorite of the longer selections isSonkowsky’s energetic rendition of Amores1.6 (Ianitor. . .), with the alternately plead-ing, whining, and shouting refrain (temporanoctis eunt; excute poste seram!). Of theshorter pieces, note the gem-like fourfamous lines from Tristia 1.3 (p. 60), whichreally do sound as though the poet wereready to weep.

The recording will be especially usefulfor teachers wanting to help students tohear meaningful sound effects in Latin poetry:hissing s at Met. 6.482; the “wrenched”

sound of multiple elisions at 6.616-19; the“airiness” of 6.174-75; the emotive effectsof voice pitch, effectively used at Met.8.220-30; the “strolling” effect achieved atMet. 8.628 ff., due to calm, measured exe-cution of the lines; and even an occasionaldramatic “sung” line (Met. 11.26).Sonkowsky’s occasional use of a sort ofquavery “horror flick voice” (Met. 6.574 ff.springs to mind) sometimes shades intomelodrama, but generally he follows hisown precept, laid out in the introduction,that a reader should avoid campiness, con-scious or unconscious. On a more elemen-tary plane, Amores 1.1, for instance, givesa clear aural presentation for some “diffi-cult” sounds, for example, nasalized final -m, both elided and unelided, and nasal-ized -gn-. Students and teachers alike willbenefit from hearing how quantity, accent,tone, and velocity of delivery can intermin-gle in an artistic reading to produce emo-tion and drama – one can easily imagineSonkowsky as a Roman father, readingbest loved tales and poems to his littlechild, who listens rapt, seated on his lap.

The accompanying booklet, while it pro-vides a very useful Latin text (complete withlong marks and indications of elision), is lesshelpful on the English side, partly due to theuse of public domain translations (includingDryden, Pope, and their contemporaries).On occasion, a bit is missing (whether unin-tentionally, as with the four lines at the endof the Phaethon story, or because of somescruple of the translator, as in Met. 2.527-32, ignored presumably for decency’s sake).At other times, periphrasis makes it more dif-ficult than it need be to reference the Latinlines. If you are using an English translationas you listen, you may want to use a newerand less florid one for these sections (theoccasional translations by Sonkowsky him-self work just fine), preferably organized byline. I noticed only one technical sound diffi-culty: the volume on the tape sharplydecreases at Met. 2.60 and remains low forthe rest of that side. This is easily correctedby adjusting the volume, but perhaps futureeditions will correct the tape.

Sonkowsky offers a pleasant and belletris-tic four-page introduction, in which he strideseasily along in the company of Plato, Petrus

Audio Review: Selections from Ovid Read in Classical Latinby Jerise Fogel

18

19

Francius, W. S. Allen, Stanislawski, Stravinsky,and Samuel Johnson, to name but a few.While the introduction is brief and unavoid-ably idiosyncratic as an overview of theproblems and joys of reading ancient litera-ture aloud, Sonkowsky touches on a fewpoints that deserve more attention than theygenerally receive in the Latin classroom: 1)silent reading and “eye-philology” must besupplemented by reading aloud forcritical/scientific as well as personal or enter-tainment reasons; 2) certain rules (namelythose of Restored Pronunciation and ofprosody as analyzed by ancients and mod-erns) do exist and should be taken up with-out hesitation or argument; 3) emotion andits expression is to be honored, and all pseu-do-emotion ("campiness,” self-consciousmelodrama, “arm-waving and silliness") is tobe cast aside, as a sort of scholarly nervousgiggle, at best, and as destroying analysis ofand appreciation for poetic technique, atworst. Overall, Sonkowsky recognizes that“authentic” performance is a chimaera (hecalls it the “museum of authenticity”approach to performance); but he holds onto a certain positivist stance and finds thatthe existing evidence is enough to provide arational jumping-off point for serious artisticinterpretation. Such interpretation may alsoenlighten scholarship – but it freely and with-out blushing makes aesthetic choices that gobeyond the aims of scholarship.

It sometimes comes to the attention ofthose of us working as scholars and teach-ers of Greek and Latin that classics as a dis-cipline is neither an “art” nor a “science” –and most decidedly not a performing art(unless perhaps one wishes whimsically tocall conference papers actual, notmetaphorical, “performances"). Efforts suchas this series remind us that most of the sub-ject matter of our field nonetheless is a per-forming art and that our literary critical toolstherefore need to include a concrete under-standing of performance and its demands.

Jerise Fogel (fogel@marshall.edu) isAssociate Professor of Classics, MarshallUniversity, Huntington, WV. Her researchinterests include ancient Greek and Romanoratory and rhetorical theory, ancient drama,and queer studies. She has recently pub-lished "Cosmopolitanism and the Coloniz-ing Imagination in Ancient Rome" in Inter-texts, vol. 7.2 (Fall 2003), and is workingon a book on Cicero's imperialist arguments.

Troy Panel at the Annual Meeting of the AmericanPhilological Association in Bostonby Mary-Kay Gamel

Troy, a Hollywood blockbuster starringBrad Pitt as Achilles, was released by

Warner Brothers in May 2004 (see Fig.14). The film did not attract the hoped-forsummer audiences or much criticalpraise. Regardless of its accuracy orvalue, however, Troy will certainly affectthe way students and the public thinkabout the ancient Greek world. A recentarticle in the New York Times announcedthat the Iliad and the Odyssey are cur-rently outselling all other poetry books inBritain but remained uncertain whetherthe cause is Troy’s “thrilling narrative orBrad Pitt in a skirt.”

A panel on Troy (organized by Mary-Kay Gamel, University of California,Santa Cruz, and Robin Mitchell-Boyask,Temple University) will be presented at theannual meeting of the American Philologi-cal Association (on Saturday, January 8,2005, from 11:15 a.m. to 1:15 p.m.(place Back Bay B). Nick Lowe (Royal Holloway, University of London) will speak on “Writ-ing Troy,” Robin Mitchell-Boyask (Temple University) will speak on “Troy on Film,” AlisonFutrell (University of Arizona) will speak on “Troy the Film,” and Sandra Joshel (University ofWashington) will speak on “Projecting Troy.” We hope you will join the discussion!

testants’ torches approximates a tradi-tional religious ritual, but otherwise Sur-vivor simply asks the question, “Whatdo ordinary people do in an extraordi-nary situation?” Tertullian’s originalexhortation to avoid pagan practices has,in a way, taken hold here: the producersof Survivor leave little evidence ofancient religion in their modern games.They do not burden the action with cer-emony and ritual, nor do they separatethe contestants from us. They suggestthat the contestants are just like us (nocriticism attaches to their status as citi-zens), that their backstabbing and self-interested cooperation are somehowacceptable. Indeed, the idea of selfless-ness in Survivor is anathema. The showinstead tests the notion of the survivalof the fittest – twisting our strongly-heldethos that hard work and fair play pro-duce individual success.

In a nation that enshrines the equalityof human beings, the spectacle of realpeople being tricked, humiliated, andhurt for the sake of entertainment hascaused controversy. The producers ofSurvivor might consider the Romans’careful practice and signal more clearly totheir audience that their show is special,unusual, and not a model for everydaylife. The religious element of the gladia-torial contests actually circumscribed vio-lence – showing where and how it shouldtake place. Even in this most “bar-barous” of settings, the Romans imposedthe order for which – along with thegames – they are so well known.

David Frauenfelder (frauenfelder@ncssm.edu) teaches Latin and Greek at theNorth Carolina School of Science and Math-ematics. “The Classical Buzz” is a regularfeature in Amphora.

GLADIATORIAL GAMES: ANCIENT REALITYSHOWS? continued from page 7

Fig. 14. Brad Pitt as Achilles in Troy(Warner Brothers, 2004).

A Publication of theAmerican Philological

Association

Editor

Anne-Marie LewisYork Universityamlewis@yorku.ca

Editorial Board

Marty AbbottDirector of Education, American

Council on the Teaching of ForeignLanguages (ACTFL)

mabbott@actfl.org

Adam BlisteinExecutive Director, APA

blistein@sas.upenn.edu

Helene Foley Barnard College

hf45@columbia.edu

Mary-Kay GamelUniversity of California-Santa Cruz

mkgamel@ucsc.edu

Barbara GoldHamilton Collegebgold@hamilton.edu

Judith P. Hallett University of Maryland, College Park

jh10@umail.umd.edu jeph@umd.edu

Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow Brandeis University

aoko@brandeis.edu

Daniel Mendelsohndamendel@princeton.edu

Matthew S. Santirocco New York University

cyberdean@nyu.edu

Andrew Szegedy-Maszak Wesleyan University

aszegedymasz@wesleyan.edu

Susan Ford WiltshireVanderbilt University

susan.f.wiltshire@vanderbilt.edu

20

Sponsorship: Amphora, a publicationsponsored by the Committee on Out-reach of the American PhilologicalAssociation, is published twice a year,in the spring and fall.

Audience: Amphora is intended for awide audience that includes professionalclassicists, present and former classicsmajors, interested academics and pro-fessionals in other fields, high schoolteachers and students, administrators inthe field of education, community lead-ers, and anyone with a strong interest inand enthusiasm for the classical world.

Submissions: Amphora welcomes sub-missions from professional scholars andexperts on topics dealing with theworlds of ancient Greece and Rome(literature, language, mythology, history,culture, classical tradition, and the arts).Submissions should not only reflectsound scholarship but also have wideappeal to Amphora’s diverse outreachaudience. Contributors should be will-ing to work with the editor to arrive at amutually acceptable final manuscriptthat is appropriate to the intendedaudience and reflects the intention ofAmphora to convey the excitement ofclassical studies.

Suggested Length of Submissions:Articles (1200-1800 words), reviews(500-1000 words).

Anonymous Refereeing: Submissionswill be refereed anonymously.

Footnotes: Amphora is footnote free.Any pertinent references should beworked into the text of the submission.

Addresses for Submissions:Submissions (and enquiries) may besent either by mail to the postal addressbelow or electronically to the e-mailaddress below:

Dr. Anne-Marie LewisEditor: AmphoraProgram in Classical Studies262 Vanier College York UniversityToronto, ON M3J 1P3 CANADAamlewis@yorku.ca

American Philological Association292 Logan Hall, University of Pennsylvania249 S. 36th StreetPhiladelphia, PA 19104-6304E-mail: apaclassics@sas.upenn.eduWeb site: www.apaclassics.org

Copyright © 2004 by the American Philological Association

Non-Profit Org.U.S. Postage

PAIDPermit No. 2563Philadelphia, PA

GUIDELINES FORCONTRIBUTORS

®