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

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!