Classics Salon!
Dec. 3rd, 2025 09:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cahnSo 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 formildred_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 )
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 )
Classics salon
Date: 2025-12-03 08:26 pm (UTC)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.
So,
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
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Date: 2025-12-03 11:40 pm (UTC)With regard to dubious claims by historians, the debates over the historicity of various New Testament figures and events are a good place to look. I think the methods of the Jesus Seminar (now quite dated, but still) were utterly insufficient to answer the questions they were asking, for example.
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Date: 2025-12-04 09:24 am (UTC)Re: Plutarch, here I must admit I never until now read more than excerpts, usually quoted in more modern biographies, and definitely not the biographies in the way he wrote them i.e. pairing up a Roman and a Greek guy (of course they’re always men) for compare and contrast. Given that Mildred wants to write an “Alexander and Fritz” as a modern variation of that principle, it might be interesting to check out some of those pairings in the original, rather than just one or the other.
Re: Classics salon
Date: 2025-12-04 09:42 am (UTC)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 - fiction
Date: 2025-12-04 05:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-12-04 05:46 pm (UTC)Uhhhhh in my head Church Latin is classics too :P Close enough! (As I think I've told you, I've sung church Latin, does that count :P )
Oh I remember reading about the Jesus Seminar in Time magazine as a kid! Though I don't remember anything about it except that it was a Big Deal at the time. I read the Wikipedia article and wow, that was a wild ride. They voted on whether stuff was historically attested??
Since
Josephus and Plutarch
Date: 2025-12-04 05:52 pm (UTC)Also up for Plutarch, though if we do any of that, I think I might need a lot of historical scaffolding :P (Although I am with the right crowd for that! :D ) Part of the allure of Josephus, of course, is that Feuchtwanger already gave me that scaffolding :D
Let's talk more about this in January! I'm aware that your darth real life doesn't stop then, but hey, you reading at a darth RL speed might be... well, maybe it's only a single order of magnitude higher than my reading at normal RL speed :)
Re: Classics salon
Date: 2025-12-04 07:36 pm (UTC)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
Date: 2025-12-04 09:52 pm (UTC)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!
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Date: 2025-12-04 11:48 pm (UTC)Re: Classics salon - fiction
Date: 2025-12-05 03:44 am (UTC)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.
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Date: 2025-12-05 04:00 am (UTC)I mentioned my favorite fiction above, but I think you should read some ancient Greek tragedies! They're very operatic and I think you would like them.
In chronological order, the surviving tragedies are by: Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. They each have a different style and how they deal with myth and the gods is different.
Sophocles is my personal favorite, but they're all good. The Oedipus Cycle would be a very classic place to start? Or maybe Sophocles' Ajax, since you've just read the Odyssey and it features Iliad-Odyssey characters. I also love Euripides' The Bacchae -- it gives me chills. Euripides' The Trojan Women is a heartbreaking play about what happens to the women and children after the fall of Troy.
As for translations, I anti-rec Lattimore. I find his translations flat and unpoetic and boring. :P Some Classicists like him because he sticks close to the original Greek (at the expense of making the English sound good in my opinion), but I think that's not very helpful when you don't know ancient Greek and are relatively new to reading the Classics.
I can probably dig up some positive recs if you let me know where you want to start. :D
Oh, and maybe Suetonius if you want to read about the early Roman emperors? He's kinda the gossip tabloid of the ancient world. :D Not always reliable, but entertaining.
Speaking of not always reliable but entertaining: Herodotus! :D I'm actually quite fond of him. And every once in a while you get something like gold-digging giant ants.
Also also, if you're not familiar with Berlioz's opera Les Troyens: the music is great and it sticks close to the Aeneid.
Re: Classics salon - fiction
Date: 2025-12-05 04:21 am (UTC)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
Date: 2025-12-05 04:26 am (UTC)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
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Date: 2025-12-05 04:33 am (UTC)Ohhhhh I actually saw The Trojan Women... decades ago now... put on by a Classics department in Greek (we had translations of course), and I remember it being just stunning.
But okay, let's see, maybe let's go with the Oedipus cycle to start, do you know any good translations? And ha, I am glad you also do not like Lattimore (who I tried out and who put me off the Odyssey for a while).
Ahhhh I have seen Suetonius and Herodotus name-dropped, excellent!
I have seen Les Troyens around but I have not listened or watched it at all! Right, I will have to rectify that!
The probability I get to any of this before Yuletide is over is dim but I am really hoping to at that point! Thank you!!
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Date: 2025-12-05 04:34 am (UTC)Re: Classics salon - fiction
Date: 2025-12-05 04:36 am (UTC)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.
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Date: 2025-12-05 05:21 am (UTC)One is the complete plays of Sophocles, translated by Sir Richard Claverhouse Jebb, edited by Moses Hadas. The other is the Oedipus Cycle, translated by Dudley Fitts and Robert Fitzgerald.
Haha, no, not a Lattimore fan! The Classics department at my college kept trying to push his translations on us, and I Did Not Like them!
I should mention, in case you're not aware: it was a convention of ancient Greek tragedy that characters could not die on stage. So it's very common for a dramatic death scene or other catastrophe to take place offstage, and then you get a messenger who comes onstage to tell the audience about it. :)
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Date: 2025-12-05 05:24 am (UTC)Re: Classics salon - fiction
Date: 2025-12-05 06:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-12-05 06:10 pm (UTC)Ha, I did not know that was a convention, thank you for mentioning that!
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Date: 2025-12-05 06:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-12-05 06:42 pm (UTC)So, hi, my father was one of the leading scholars on ancient Greek theatre, specifically how you stage the thing, and I grew up learning a lot by osmosis. (Because my legal last name is the same as his, it's not something I explicitly link in public, for the obvious online reasons...)
But, whenever I'm talking about Greek theatre to people, there are a couple of points I always want to point out.
1) In an ancient Greek amphitheatre (of any size, but it's true even up to the huge ones like the Theatre of Dionysus in Athens), sound quality with a speaker who can project their voice is vastly better than visual detail. (Especially if you adjust for things like 'no one in this audience has glasses or magnifying lenses of any kind.)
So the texts of the plays include things like "Hark! Here comes Oedipus, he has put his eyes out."
Partly because you don't want to do that on the stage, but also because the people more than 15 or 20 rows back are getting very little visual detail. Big broad gestures, whatever is super bright and obvious on the mask and costume, not much else.
(My father did stagings of various plays using 24" tall cloth and plaster marionettes. What you get in your average university lecture hall / stage with those is about the same level of detail you get with actors in an amphitheatre, in terms of the visuals, the sound, and the balance of info.)
2) This means that translations designed for a modern stage really have to do some editing, or they're super reptitive. The audience can see Antigone! And the expression on her face and what she's doing with her fingers and how she's standing. You don't need to tell us all of that.
3) I am very partial to my father's translations for a bunch of reasons, but he died in 1990, and he argued (and I agree) that you really need to retranslate every 10-20 years.
Not for the 'which current Hollywood actress do we compare Helen of Troy to" (ugh, please don't, it's not helpful) or more obvious slang reasons but because the rhythm of language shifts over time, how we structure things and put emphasis. There's obviously a range of that, but it means that a translation from the 50s, even if it's close to the original, is going to sound clunky to the modern ear, and especially in performance.
4) I am a huge fan of Euripides, for his ability to set up a story and about halfway through flip everything you thought you knew sideways, but it's not like we have a vast surviving number of plays, they're all interesting in their own way.
(Though I do recommend throwing a comedy in there for contrast. Lysistrata gets regular revivals, and is super bawdy, especially if you find a translation that balances that translation well. In the Greek, a lot of the bawdiness comes out of puns rather than just crudeness, though there's blatant stuff too.)
Re: Classics salon - fiction
Date: 2025-12-05 06:43 pm (UTC)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).
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Date: 2025-12-05 06:58 pm (UTC)Speaking of Graves, I was assigned to read part of his autobiography in college for some history course. There was one bit I found unintentionally funny, when he talked about his inability to master Ancient Greek -mi verbs (a particularly difficult group of verbs) and how it led to his not being able to get into the school he wanted and so he went to a different school and terrible things happened. I was at the time struggling with -mi verbs myself, so I took this passage to my classmates and I was like, "Look, this is how not being able to learn -mi verbs ruined Robert Graves' life!!!" And it felt a little better to know that even Robert Graves struggled with the monstrosity that is -mi verbs. :)