Classics Salon!

[cahn]

So yeah, anyone who has been around this DW for more than a very little while has known that we had a salon in which we discussed Frederick the Great in particular and 18th-century Enlightenment figures in general.

But nooooow we are going to have a Classics salon!

My Classics background is, er, well, I guess my Classics history is pretty much on par with or somewhat worse than my general non-US historical background (read: I know almost nothing, with some random pockets of slight layman knowledge), and my Classics literary background is signficantly worse than my general literary background (no real reason, it's not like I had a vendetta against it or anything, I think I just didn't happen to have a good entry point). I've read the Odyssey last year and the Aeneid reasonably recently, and the Iliad not so reasonably recently (perhaps this will be the impetus for me to check out the Wilson translation), and Ted Hughes' translation of selected Metamorphoses.

Please feel free to tell me what books I really ought to be looking at next! (I believe there has been some discussion of Plutarch?) Feel free to wax eloquent about your favorite translations, whether it's something I've already read or not! Also please free to tell me any of your favorite Classics history you want, because I probably don't know it :)

(This is not supposed to be just for mildred_of_midgard and selenak, although of course I expect them to be prime contributors. I know that many of you, probably all of you, know a lot about Classics that I don't know, so please inform me! Tell me your favorite things! :D )

Comments

Classics salon

[mildred_of_midgard]

At last!

I wish I had about 10 times as much free time as I do, but I'm going to try anyway.

First of all, I just want to say that my main motivation for Classics salon is I want to write a paper about source criticism in history, and I specifically want to compare the sparsity of sources in ancient history with the abundance of sources in more modern history. I think Alexander the Great and Frederick the Great are a perfect pair to use as case studies, so I just need to brush up on my Alexander historiography.

cahn, as Selena explained in her journal, virtually nothing contemporary about Alexander survives from Alexander's day or even close to it. The main narrative sources are all hundreds of years later. Some of them could easily be the Nancy Goldstone of Alexander! And as we've seen, even the Tim Blanning of Fritz or the Barbara Stollberg-Rillinger of MT pass on claims we know aren't true.

So, selenak, what I'm looking for is a lot of methodologically dubious claims by historians and why we think they're dubious--both ancient historians and more modern historians.

In particular, there's one claim that I SWEAR I read in 2019 and now can't find. It's that Olympias and Alexander were probably not in on the Philip assassination, because the assassin (Pausanias) almost got away, and if he had escaped, he would have talked. If you come across this claim, Selena, PLEASE tell me. It's the perfect exemplar of a specific category of argumentation I'm trying to point out is flawed.

And I will try to have something useful to say soon!

Oh, recs. A couple quick ones:

Fiction: Jeanne Reames' Dancing with the Lion.

Nonfiction: Well, Jeanne Reames has a post here: https://www.tumblr.com/jeannereames/742984337387143168/hi-there-ive-really-enjoyed-your-blog-theres

Re: Classics salon

[selenak]

I will look out for that, but let me suggest a compare and contrast re: how historians handle it right here and now: the question of sexuality in either guy. We know the ups and downs of “no he wasn’t/yes he was!” For Fritz re: gayness, bi-ness or having a sex life at all instead of a broken penis” by now. The other day I came a cross a current tv tropes article insisting that there is not a single ancient source describing Alexander as gay, that the only source having him engaged in m/m action is the kissing of Bagoas and that’s by chatty Plutarch, and that for all we know, Alex/Hephaistion was totally platonic, OMG. Which in turn reminded me that when the AtG docudrama series on Netflix (which I haven’t watched) was released last year, there were instant complaints about him being depicted unambigeously making out with Hephaistion. And Oliver Stone, himself hardly an advocate of gay rights (see also: chummyness with Putin on the subject), caught a lot of flak for very mildly romantic scenes involving Alexander and Hephaistion as well as Alexander and Bagoas. And I do recall the state of North Macedon as well as Greece (or at least some representatives of same) insisting on the utter non-gayness of AtG on the occasion either work premiered with the same fervor even (some) later 20th century historians insist that the only contemporary who ever said Fritz was gay was slanderous Voltaire.

What I’m getting at: how about collecting some reactions through the centuries or even millennia in AtG’s case about who claimed what about their sex life and how that went into their image, and when it did and didn’t feature in the public perception of them?

Re: Classics salon

[mildred_of_midgard]

While this could be a very interesting and valuable paper, it would unfortunately have to be a very different paper from the one I'm writing. Much like with the source criticism section in the Peter bio, I'm actively staying away from clear cases of authorial bias, which has been extensively written on in historiography and which I don't have anything new to say about. I've got a very specific framework in mind for this article, for which I need specific types of methodological failures, many of which have come up in our Fritzian studies.

Blanning saying Katte was executed by axe, while Peter's mother says she's heard her son was executed by sword in England, and Wilhelmine putting a scaffold in her description of Katte's execution, are all excellent examples of a specific type of historical error that doesn't get discussed enough: having a mental "schema" of what a phenomenon (like an execution) looks like, and innocently, yet erroneously, supplying details from that schema into a specific instance of that phenomenon.

People saying that Fredersdorf was stationed in Küstrin, that Peter escaped Wesel because he was warned, that Fritz and Katte were arrested in Wesel, are examples of another type of error: story simplification.

Pausanias almost escaping: historians putting too much weight on claims of eyewitness testimony, of which there are plenty of easily refuted examples in Fritzian history.

I have specific things I want to say about these categories of methodological flaws, by drawing on the field of cognitive science, things I think are new or at least not often said in the domain of historiography. And that's what I'm goign to be on the lookout for when it comes to combing through Alexander sources.

The main thrust of the planned article is twofold:

1) Fritzian historiography, which has an abundance of contemporary sources that all contradict each other, shows us how unreliable many claims are. Just because those claims are uncontested in Alexandrian historiography doesn't mean we should blindly trust them. It just means we don't have enough contemporary written material to see the extent of contradictions that we see in a more abundantly attested period.

2) Cognitive science shows us patterns in the mistakes that Fritizan contemporaries made. We can apply those to look for types of uncontradicted claims in more poorly attested periods that we shouldn't put too much weight on.

I suspect this is a fairly original argument (very few people study multiple very different types of historical periods well enough to do source study, *and* add cognitive science on top of it), and I have a journal picked out and everything. I just need a good selection of examples from Alexander's life, and some confidence that I have a handle on Alexandrian source analysis (if I say something is uncontradicted, or fits a contemporary schema, I'd better have some reason for saying so).

This is rather an ambitious effort at rather a busy time of my life, so source analysis with you, if you're willing, will be invaluable!

Re: Classics salon - fiction

[cahn]

Ahahaha it's like you know me, I learn things through fiction! I have read the blog post and downloaded the fic sample :D I suppose I should read Mary Renault just out of general principles (I read The King Must Die as a -- teenager? young adult? and was blown away by it, but somehow never read anything else by her) and -- oh! there's a Judith Tarr set in the time of Alexander, which I have actually read but forgotten a lot about. Right, I will get on that too!

Re: Classics salon - fiction

[mildred_of_midgard]

Hah, yes, I thought Reames would be much better for you than Plutarch! (Let's be honest, *I* need scaffolding to read a lot of Plutarch. I've read the Lives at least twice, and retained very little about the figures that I didn't already know about from other sources.)

I did read a Judith Tarr about Alexander once, long ago. Chiefly what I remember about it is that there's an obviously (but not described as such) autistic savant girl/young woman, whom the narrative diagnoses as having no soul, and the "happy" ending is when the soul of a recently deceased Alexander possesses her and goes off in her body to engage in feats of glory as queen of the Amazons, thus finally giving her life meaning.

...Even 25 years ago I could see *some* of how problematic that was.

Mary Renault never worked for me, not in college and not a few years ago, but I'm definitely in a minority. You might like her!

If I find good nonfiction (I haven't read anything in the Reames post, which is why I linked to someone else's post) that I can rec you, I will. Mostly I think the things that have worked really well for me, with my specific tastes and background, probably wouldn't work for a beginner. I'll keep my eye out!

Re: Classics salon - fiction

[cahn]

*blinks* Wow, I... do not remember this at all! I literally have no memories of the book I read except a very vague memory of liking the POV character (who was not the one you were talking about, I'm pretty sure). It's possible that it was a different book, or on the other hand maybe this is why I own the Cleopatra book that is set in the same universe and not this one?? Well, I have access to it now so I shall report back.

I really liked the one Renault I read a long time ago, when I would not have picked up on what I understand from osmosis are tons of problematic things. Possibly I should have read her earlier in my life :)

Re: Classics salon - fiction

[zdenka]

I love Mary Renault! My favorite is The Mask of Apollo.

I also strongly recommend Lavinia by Ursula Le Guin (based on Lavinia in the Aeneid). I also enjoyed Colleen McCullough's late Republic ancient Rome series (though IMO she isn't as good when she gets up to Julius Caesar because he's her favorite and you can tell). :D

Oh! Also! If you would consider reading graphic novels and are okay with canon levels of sex/nudity/violence in drawn form, I strongly recommend Eric Shanower's series about the Trojan War. The first volume is A Thousand Ships. Your library may have it.

Re: Classics salon - fiction

[cahn]

Ohhhh I actually checked out Lavinia last... year? and read maybe a quarter of it, which I really enjoyed, and then I think I got busy and it was due back at the library! I need to check it back out and finish it :D

I shall read some Mary Renault, then! I get the feeling she's sort of a classic author, in the other sense of the word :)

Yes to graphic novels, and I will have to see -- like, I was about to write that yeah, I'm reasonably OK with sex/nudity/violence in drawn form, and then I remembered that canon levels of violence in the Iliad are A LOT. But my library does have it, I will check it out! Thank you!! :D :D

Re: Classics salon - fiction

[zdenka]

Excellent! :D

Mary Renault does have her issues. But I enjoy reading her ancient Greek books anyway! And she hits a lot of the dramatic highlights of mythology and history.

She also wrote some modern-set books but I haven't read them.

Re: Classics salon - fiction

[cahn]

I mean, don't all authors (especially ones from a hundred years ago) have their issues :) And like I said above, I remember really, really liking The King Must Die -- I probably should have read all of Renault then, but for some reason I wasn't in a place I could get any more of her books at the time?? Idk, it was a long time ago :)

Re: Classics salon - fiction

[selenak]

The King Must Die was my first Mary Renault novel as well. Her contemporary novels I didn’t read until about a decade ago when Narath did some great book club readings for both The Charioteer and Return to Night, and that was when I read a biography of Mary Renault as well (and wrote RPF fanfiction starring her and Alfred Hitchcock).

She does have her issues, which get more pronounced in both the historical and the contemporary novels the later in her life it gets (mother figures, female characters in general - her early novels have some good and more dimensional ones, but the later ones…), and (not just some ) elitism - but she writes really compelling, she’s incredibly good at creating characters both main and supporting and bringing them to life, and she is excellent at evoking a genuinely different time (based on the research available to her aat her time).

Re: Classics salon - fiction

[cahn]

Excellent! I shall get started on her historical novels, then, and maybe the contemporary ones later. Ah, right, yes, I read that fic and enjoyed it very much!

Alexander sources

[mildred_of_midgard]

[personal profile] cahn, as Selena explained in her journal, virtually nothing contemporary about Alexander survives from Alexander's day or even close to it. The main narrative sources are all hundreds of years later.

If you want a quick overview, see the first part of this blog post.