Appetitive: Final Marathon 2500 Lecture

The final lecture of the Marathon 2500 Series is coming up on Wednesday. It's a free online lecture by the wonderful Paul Cartledge. The whole series is great and it is up online if you want to listen to the previous lectures.

Spirited: Back to Basics

I have been going back to basics with my Greek pronunciation. My rolled "r"s are getting better (slowly) and my pitch accents are getting a little better, although I still sound like an idiot. In order to help my understanding of pitch accents, I have been going back over the accentuation rules in Hansen and Quinn and doing the accent drills. Needless to say my accents are rusty, but getting better. Hopefully it will help my Greek prose composition once I go to grad school.

While doing this, I am listening to the Robert Strassler lecture from Marathon 2500, which I missed due to an unfortunate scheduling mishap.

Reasoning: Sports and War Review

The most recent lecture on Marathon 2500 was Thomas Scanlon's lecture "Sports and War." You can listen to the lecture by clicking on the link at the bottom of that post or you can download the lecture by right clicking on the link and (if you have firefox) clicking "Save Link As" and then saving the file.

I have to admit, I was not particularly excited about this lecture. Although my thesis adviser, Messalla, did most of his work in sports, my interested only extended to the odes of Pindar and references to sports in Plato's discussion of education. I decided I would listen to the lecture anyway and I was pleasantly surprised with the lecture and enjoyed the Q&A thoroughly.

The lecture spoke much about the different races from which the Phidippides/Philippides might have originated. That was pretty interesting. He also mentions that athletic training for war is highly overstated (with the exception of training in Sparta), which was something that I did not know and certainly goes against the ideas transmitted in Plato [1].

My favorite moments were a few tidbits I didn't know in the Q&A. First, I had no idea that there were races that included women. Scanlon revealed in the Q&A that there was a race for Hera that happened directly before the Olympics that was specifically for women. I also had no idea that, as there were small dramatic competitions which happened all year and offered cash to actors to come and perform, there were also small sports competitions all year that offered cash prizes. This is a striking contrast to the Olympics which only offered a laurel crown, although, as Scanlon pointed out, the home city of the winning athlete would often give him lifetime room and board for free. The lecture is good, but the Q&A has some really fabulous kernels of information and Scalon provides a short bibliography for future reading.

Endnotes

1. Plato obviously models some of his political philosophy on Sparta, although I think the case is overstated by many scholars.

Reasoning/Spirited: Publishing and the Internet

I found this article on Twitter. I thought it was especially interesting for classicists/grad students. Apparently some publishers get really jumpy about publishing books from dissertations that appear online in digital form. Others seem to feel that this means that there is already a market for the product. I wonder whether publishers will end up moving digital information backward by forcing students not to share their work if they want to be considered publishable.

I read over 80 lines of Μήδεια today and I am exhausted (how will I ever survive grad school?) so I am not going to finish my addendum to the comments on "Μήδεια and Rhetoric" tonight. However, they should appear in a semi-coherent form in the next few days along with some addenda to "Μήδεια and the 'Royal We'," some thoughts on Isocrates, Parmenides, and a review of the most recent Marathon 2500 talk.

Appetitive: Marathon 2500 Lectures

More Marathon 2500 lectures are coming up. I signed up to listen to the final three. The next one is Thomas Scanlon on "War and Sports" (sign up here). I am most excited about Robert Strassler's lecture on Herodotus (May 10th) because he is the editor of the wonderful Landmark Herodotus and Landmark Thucydides. Reviews will be posted after the lectures.

Appetitive: Herodotus and Ancient Temples

So I checked my twitter this morning and reaffirmed my reason for having a twitter (no matter how stupid Cerinthus and his parents think it is).

First, I happened upon (through Marathon 2500's twitter) an online version of Herodotus with facing Greek on sacred-texts.com. Unlike the Perseus version, this does not have a built in dictionary, but it is a clean format for browsing the English and Greek.

Second, I came upon a Huffington Post slideshow of Ancient Greek and Roman temples in Europe and the Middle East. The pictures are not fabulous (many of Cerinthus' pictures are better), but they show a number of temples in France and the Middle East that I had not seen before.

Acropolis, from Cerinthus' photos

This is not Cerinthus' best photo, but I thought I would include something of the pictures that he took and there are a few thousand of them so I thought I would just pick one I liked. More on Plato coming soon.

Reasoning: Reading Euclid

When I was at the Indo-Eurpean Studies conference, I talked to a PhD candidate from Berkeley about new translations of the Ancient Greek mathematicians. We discussed how difficult it is to translate the old mathematicians because they did not have the technical vocabulary now available, but they show some remarkable things in their writings. Since I toyed for a while writing my thesis on one of the Greek mathematicians, I was quite excited about this topic. According to the person I spoke with, however, a lot of the translations are extremely problematic.

On the other hand, reading ancient math is still fascinating. In my number theory class, we read a number of Euclid's proofs [1]. Now, Reading Odyssey, the group that puts on Marathon 2500, is doing a Euclid group. It's free if you have never joined a Reading Odyssey project before. I have been toying with the idea of joining...

I will be posting about the conference and Horace poems in the next few days.

Endnotes

1. We read one of the proofs on talk-like-a-pirate-day and Cerinthus' sister read it in a pirate voice. It was hilarious. This is the same class in which the pineapple incident took place.

Reasoning: "A Soldier's Life"

I attended (i.e. listened to) the Victory Hanson lecture, "A Soldier's Life" from the Marathon 2500 conference yesteday. It was short (only half an hour or so, plus about 45 minutes of Q&A), but it was enjoyable.

Even in the short time, Hanson discussed the differences between the life of an Athenian and a Persian soldier around the time of the Battle of Marathon. He explained that on the Athenian side, hoplites were farmers who were usually fighting side-by-side with friends and neighbors. Although traditionally scholars thought of Athenians as having shields above the mantelpiece and taking them to fight in a moment, but the shield and the armor was so heavy that they must have had some kind of training practice, even if it was not to the degree that the Spartans trained. Furthermore,battles only lasted about an hour because that's how long it would take for everyone to be exhausted. This may sound strange, because the people they were fighting were not existential enemies (i.e. they did not need to kill all the opposing people) all they had to do was win on the battlefield.

The Persian soldiers were quite different. Unlike the Greeks, they were not fighting in a uniform battle formation and all had different types of armor. Most of them were mercenary-type armies from all over the Persian empire and they often did not speak the same language (see Herodotus 7.61-7.80). Furthermore, they were held together primarily by the fear of the horrible things done to them rather than the Greeks united in fighting for their homeland; Hanson gave the example from Herodotus 7.39). Furthermore, unlike the Greeks, the Persians were looking for death-counts (existential battle) rather than simply to win on the battlefield [1].

According to Hanson, the crucial difference between the two armies was that the Greeks were a unit. Although they had skirmishes among themselves, they had the same gods, similar political structure, similar constitutional rights, and the same language. So even though the Persians had vastly superior numbers, the Greeks managed to defeat them.

However, Hanson says that this was the battle in which certain leaders realized that although they managed to defeat the Persians, the hoplite strategy was not always going to work. He explains that the Persians came on their own terms, in ships, and had much more versatility than the Greeks. Themistocles realized this and changed the way that the Athenians did battle.

One funny moment happened about 5-10 minutes into the lecture, Hanson mentioned that he thought his battery might be having trouble, and a minute later entirely cut off. It was pretty funny. However, he managed quickly to get back online.

You can listen to the lecture on the Marathon 2500 site.

One last thing that I found interesting was Hanson's explanation of the difference between the hoplite battle strategy. The Athenians ran faster, chanted louder, and were slightly more disorganized, while the Spartans marched more deliberately, shined their armor and combed their hair to make the enemy nervous, and shouted less loudly to make sure they could stay in perfect formation.

Endnotes

1. However, these generalizations are problematic because almost all of the evidence comes from the Greek accounts of the Persians, since we do not have any literature, but just imperial inscriptions, from Persia.

Reasoning: Online Greek History Lecture Tomorrow

In case anyone is interested, there is an online lecture being given by Victor Hanson tomorrow entitled "A Soldier's Life." The lecture is part of the Marathon 2500 series which I mentioned in a previous blogpost and will take place online.

Register for free at eventbrite for the lecture and listen to it online. It begins at 10am PST/1pm EST. The lecture is 90 minutes including a question-and-answer session in which a listener can email their questions to the conference.

Reasoning: Marathon 2500

The Marathon 2500 project celebrates the 2500 year anniversary of the Battle of Marathon. I found this though AWOL this morning. The Project is providing a series of live online lectures (i.e. webinars), for which one can register for free, and ask questions via email.

Paul Cartledge, a wonderful Greek History scholar who specializes in the Spartan history among other things, gives the first lecture. You can download the first lecture here, and supposedly you can download the podcast, although I cannot figure out how (if someone figures it out, please comment and let me know). The only problem with the lecture is that the sound quality is very poor. However, the successive lectures have a significantly better sound quality. The slideshow that accompanied Cartledge's lecture can be found here.

The second lecture is by Peter Krentz and can be found here. I was only able to download it via the RealPlayer extension for Firefox, but there are probably other ways to do this. The website claims that you can download it directly off the site. I know he had a slideshow, but I am not sure how to access it. If anyone figures it out, please comment.

The third lecture will take place on November 10th. It will be given by Victor Hanson and it is entitled "A Soldier's Life." Registration is free and you can listen to the event live and send in questions.

The group has also put together a Herodotus reading group (in English) using the Landmark Herodotus. Robert Strassler, the editor and compiler of the Landmark Series, will also lecture on May 10, 2011.