Blood from a Stone or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Historical Fiction

I like to read; I like to read fiction and non-fiction...  But what about historical fiction?  How much is real, "real" and just plain made up?  These are tricky questions but a good author will do his or her due diligence and, if you're lucky, tell you about it.

I was a the library a couple days ago and came across Ben Kane's Spartacus: Rebellion.  Ok, it's a novel but so what?  I am not averse to using the odd fiction in class (Saturnalia, See Delphi and Die, etc.) to educational effect but...  It's a case by case kind of thing.  In the case of this book, Kane kindly included a glossary and lengthy author's note. He includes details which are both helpful to suss out what he has embellished versus what is established fact, e.g.

It was my decision to describe the young Julius Caesar as one of Crassus' officers, bu the suggestion is not unreasonable.  He served as one of the twenty-four military tribunes in either 72 or 71 BC, and there is no mention of him going overseas, which means that he could well have been posted within Italy.  Given the slave rebellion that was raging at that time, it's likely in that case that he could have served in Crassus' army. (p. 432-433)

More to the point, his glossary is  simple and informative, even to someone who isn't reading the book.  Among the data I have yet to confirm or deny is that "The gladius was worn on the right, except by centurions and other senior officers who wore it on the left." (p. 443).  Some of his other facts check out, so...  One wonders where this information might have come from.

Quickly Robin, to the internet!  The Wikipedia entry says (basically) the same thing, buuut does give a citation: page 256 of A Dictionary of Classical Antiquities by Oskar Seyffert.  But hark!  Said codex hath been puteth unto thine interwebs by AncientLibrary.com.  According to Seyffert, the reason for this sinister behavior was that the officers did not have a shield to carry.  But while he often cites where specific information comes from in other entries, he does not give us any source for this...  And I begin to suspect the double-edged gladius of 'received wisdom.'  :\

At what point does the preponderance of logic and expert pontifications overrule the absence of hard sources?  Or do you just dig more?

Text citations:

• Kane, Ben. Spartacus: Rebellion. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2013.
  

Hell or High Water: Surviving Tibet's Tsangpo River by Peter Heller

Yeesh, I have got to stop reading books about the Himalayas, they're packed with Classical references and items of niftyness to a Latin teacher.

Take, for example, Hell or High Water. Picked it up for the rip-roar-white-water adventure and then the guy had to go and make me THINK! How dare he. I mean, sure, I expect the odd reference to Scylla and Charybdis (p. 132) and then to Leda (p. 176), specifically, a (really freaking disturbing) poem by Yeats. But then, he has the following:

Modern-day adventurers do much of what they do in creation of story. The tales pour out at the fire; they are savored and added to.  One man's episode becomes part of another's repertoire, and the stories multiply and intertwine.  It seemed like a wonderful, archaic way to love.  Who lives like that anymore?  Hollywood subsumes more and more of that part our consciousness and lures us into the grey smog of routine, of consuming and producing, of a mass-produced narrative.  We need adventurers to create new and vibrant stories.  It's the blood of our humanity...   
He died to save us from a humdrum life... (p. 187-188)

Rag and Bone

I read weird books.  Picked up Rag and Bone, a book about relics, by Peter Manseau the other day and in the introduction, he makes an interesting point:

"Later, when I thought back on this first image of my daughter through the dark glass [ultrasound], I was surprised as anyone would have been that it called to mind Saint Anthony and all the other pieces of saints I had seen.  Prhaps it was a renewed interest in all that is implied by the word miracle; or perhaps it was the experience of seeing the component parts of a human being in a state of existence that was somewhere in between, not fully in this world and not fully out of it.  People are drawn to relics, I realized, because they make explicit what we all know in our bones: that our bodies tell stories; that the transformation offered by faith is not just about, as the Gospels put it, the "word made flesh," but the flesh made word.  Behind the glass of every reliquary is a life story told in still frame.  That was what I saw on the ultrasound screen as well.  What we were, what we will become, all there behind the glass." (pgs. 15-16)

Interesting.  What do you think about his idea?  Are stories, in our bones?

How close is history?

I got a bit of a shock last night from a book.  I was reading The Old Ways by Robert Macfarlane and he mentioned that the aurochs, one of the last extant megafaunae from the Ice Age, was still kicking around Britain well into the Bronze Age.

Nooo...  Surely not.  I mean, aurochs went out with mastodons, cave bears, giant elk and the rest.  Right?

Wrong.  In fact, not only are aurochs mentioned in Caesar's Gallic Wars! He uses the Latin word urus, but they are there and he describes them as being a little smaller than an elephant (by elephant, he means the smaller African forest elephant rather than the larger savannah variety).  Wow...

Ok, but aurochs' horns were prized for hunting and drinking horns, to say nothing of their desirability as an object of a hunt or venatio (animal fight) and it's reasonable to assume then that Spanish bull fights came out of this.  So, along with the European lion this must be one of those extinctions which Classical Mediterranean culture ushered along.  Right?

Um.  No.  They were still kicking around Eastern Europe as late as the thirteenth century and the last known died in 1627.

Wow...  So, let's kick into some genealogical math here.  My father was born in 1941.  For our purposes here, let us assume that my grandparents were about thirty to mid-thirties.  Follow this line of thinking back and you'll come out (roughly) with the number twelve.  Twelve generations, twelve people between myself and someone who could have seen, touched, heard (smelt?!) and been in the presence of a creature which is commonly classified as "prehistoric."  I dunno.  Twelve people back seems pretty historical, almost contemporary, to me. 

How close is your history?

Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson

I read this review of Anne Carson's Red Doc and, lo, it was mythic...  But, alas, a sequel.  So I requested the first book, Autobiography of Red from the library.  Now, it's not for everyone and there are some implications within it which I must state are not classroom-appropriate, but I have been very pleased so far.

One thing, in particular, that has struck me is how Carson introduces the book; she spends some pages talking about her source material, Stesichoros, a Greco-Sicilian poet born c. 650.  What interested me most was how he revolutionized the use of adjectives:

What is an adjective?  Nouns name the world.  Verbs activate the names.  Adjectives come from somewhere else.  The word adjective (epitheton in Greek) is itself an adjective meaning "placed on top," "added," "appended," "imported," "foreign."  Adjectives seem fairly innocent additions but look again.  These small imported mechanisms are in charge of attaching everything in the world to its place in particularity... 

In the world of Homeric epic, for example, being is stable and particularity is set fast in tradition.  When Homor mentions blood, blood is black.  When women appear, women are neat-ankled or glancing.  Poseidon always has the blue eyebrows of Poseidon.  Gods' laughter is unquenchable.  Human knees are quick.  The sea unwearying.  Death is bad.  Cowards livers are white.  Homer's epithets are fixed diction with which Homer fastens every substance in the world to its aptest attribute and holds them in place for epic consumption...

So into the still surface of this code Stesichoros was born...  Stesichoros released being.  All the substances in the world went floating up.  Suddenly there was nothing to interfere with horses being hollow hooved.  Or a river being root silver.  Or a child being bruiseless.  Or hell as deep as the sin is high.  Or Herakles ordeal strong.  Or a planet middle night stuck.  Or an insomniac outside the joy.  Or killings cream black.

Total.  Language.  Love.  Overload.  :)

Alif the Unseen by G. Willow Wilson

 I am so into this book right now; I would read it to my SOAR class but...  The selective, but effective, use of profanity prevents that.  Still, students of any language (especially an old one) would do well to remember the following exchange between the titular character, Alif, an American academic and a jinn named Vikram:

"... How do you translate ذرة in your English interpretation [of the Quran]?"
"Atom," [she] said.
"You do not find that strange considering atoms were unknown in the sixth century?"
[She] chewed her lip.  "I never thought of that," she said.  "You're right.  There's no way atom is the original meaning of the word."
"Ah."  Vikram held up two fingers in a sign of benediction.  He looked, Alif thought, like some sort of demonic caricature of a saint.  "But it is.  In the twentieth century, atom became the original meaning of ذرة, because an atom was the tiniest object known to man.  Then man split the atom.  Today, the original meaning might be hadron.  But why stop there?  Tomorrow, it might be quark.  In a hundred years, some vanishingly small object so foreign to the human mind that only Adam remembers its name.  Each of those will be the original meaning of ذرة."
Alif snorted.  "That's impossible. ذرة must refer to some fundamental thing.  It's attached to an object. 
"Yes it is.  The smallest indivisible particle.  That is the meaning packaged in the world.  No part of it lifts out--it does not mean smallest, nor indivisible, nor particle, but all those things at once.  Thus, in man's infancy, ذرة was a grain of sand.  Then an atom.  And so on.  Man's knowledge of the universe may grow, but ذرة does not change."
...
"I don't understand," said Alif.  "What does this have to do with The Thousand and One Days?  It's not a holy book.  Not even to the jinn.  It's a bunch of fairy tales with double meanings that we can't figure out."
"How dense and literal it is..."
"Your mother's dense," Alif said wearily.
"My mother was an errant crest of sea foam.  But that's neither here nor there.  Stories are words, Alif, and words, like ذرة, sometimes represent much grander things..."

G. Willow, Wilson. Alif the Unseen. New York: Grove Press, 2012. 207-208.  

What really interests me is how I am reading this two years after this article by Rober Krulwich tickled my fancy in a similar way.  Krulwich tells a story of the (not-quite-yet-Buddha) prince Siddhartha contesting for his bride-to-be.  One challenge in these contests is a mathematical problem: how many Xs in a yojana (~10 kilometers) where X is the smallest possible unit imaginable.  And he's not far wrong!  He estimates the approximate size of a carbon atom. 

The moral of the stories?  Just because someone lived a thousand, two thousand or more millennia ago does not de facto make them a moron. 

That, or the Buddha was a jinn, but that's mixing mythologies.  ;)

The Last Unicorn's contribution to the myth class

So, I need to chase down this quote in the 'real' book, but I have to wait for it from the library...  Instead, this is my transcription from the graphic novel; words from a brigand who is offended that the wizard knows stories about Robin Hood, but not himself:

"Robin Hood's a classic example of the heroic folk figures synthesized out of need... John Henry is another.  Men have to have heroes, but no man can ever be as big as the need, and so a legend grows around a grain of truth, like a pearl... Robin Hood is the fable and I am the reality.  No ballads will accumulate  around my name unless I write them myself; no children will read of my adventures in their school books and play at me after school.  I mean, you can't leave epic events to the people.  They get everything wrong."

Of course, though he speaks about Robin Hood, the same could be said for many heroes.  ;)

Old stories and a question

I was goofing around, finding fun tid-bits for the myth class I may be teaching in the Fall, and I remembered a line by one of my favorite authors, Terry Pratchett: "But it was much earlier even than that when most people forgot that the very oldest stories are, sooner or later, about blood." Comes from the opening page of his book Hogfather, a send-up of Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, etc. I do love satire.

But here's the rub, how do I teach that? Right now, I'm in the middle of a great book, The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break by NC native son Steven Sherrill. It's good, although dense, and not a book I could recommend to a student... Under eighteen. It has sexuality, cursing and a slew of check-marks that would get an "R" rating slapped on the movie.

... But how is that any different from teaching Saturn lying in wait for Uranus and dismembering him? Or Jupiter's cavalcade of conquests (read: rapes)? I mean, I'm not about to throw out decorum or good taste here, but where is the line? For this blog, for me as a teacher? I am curious what you all think. I am especially interested in parental input, since (after all), it's your children's minds I'm corrupting.

Citation:

Terry Pratchett, Hogfather, New York: HarperTorch, 1996, p. 1.

The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt

I heard about this one on the radio some months ago, but only just got around to it.  Even though Greenblatt's focus is on the Renascence humanist and bibliophile, Poggio Bracciolino, it is Bracciolino's discovery of the first-century BCE On the Nature of Things by Lucretius is the drive.

I really, really liked Greenblatt's reading and analysis of Epicurean, Stoic and Humanist philosophy within the context of their respective ages but...  Wow.  Is he ever biased.  He only grudgingly admits that Scholasticism (the intellectual driving force of the early to high Middle Ages) might (just maybe) have had something to do with the preservation of this great poem...  And, more to the point, he seems to delight in bashing on imperial and medieval Christians whenever he gets the chance.  


Ok, he's a prof at Harvard and his previous book was on Shakespeare, so I know he's going to favor the Ren/Ref ex post facto mentality...  But still.  There was something about reading this that set my intellectual tummy turning, both as a Latin teacher and former medievalist.  


That said, I want to read it again and mine it like the good little curiosity monster that I am.  ;)  

New label--"no-escape"

Ok.  I'm reading a book on the GOBI DESERT, right?  There should be nothing in here related to Rome, Western Europe or even the Indo-European language group (aside from the odd mention of the Silk Road), right?!  It's the middle of Outer Mongolia.

Alas.  King Midas.

The last chapter of John Man's Gobi: Tracking the Desert opens with the story behind a road named, "the Road of the King with the Ass' Ears" and as he starts telling it...  I'm thinking, hang on a sec.  Take out the daughter of the barber and swap in the reeds for the field-mice and it's one of the Midas myths.  Man does not state outright if the myth was a Turkish original grafted onto the Greek or if it was a story which migrated from west to east along the Silk Road but...  Yeesh!  There really is no escape, is there?

Warrior of Rome series by Harry Sidebottom

Well, you can tell by his (horridly unfortunate) name that he's British.  I grabbed the third book in this series, The Caspian Gates, by accident today at the library, but based on the opening chapter alone (to say nothing of his copious maps, chronology and glossary), I'm putting this one down in favor of starting from the beginning with Fire in the East.

The guy knows from Rome too; he isn't just a talented writer whose fiction happens to be historical...  He's an Oxford classics prof who happens to write fiction.  His website is here, and I am kinda geeked about these books.  Ever since I tried, and failed, to get into Jim Butcher's Codex Alera series last summer, I have been hankering for a little more machismo from my Roman fiction.  Especially after the slew of female-first-person books I've been reading of late (Pilate's Wife, Cleopatra's Daughter and I promise that I will try to read Cleopatra's Moon before the summer's out), I think that I'm looking forward to a little rock'em-sock'em action.  ;)

Warrior Queens by Antonia Fraser

I picked this up because I felt the ladies weren't getting their due in my classroom.  Honestly, how many women have we talked about aside from Cleopatra and whaserhame, you know, Catullus' on-again-off-again girlfriend.  Yea...  Then, I find this book which starts with the warrior queen of the Iceni, Boudica, who led a mostly sucessful revolt againt the Romans in 60 CE and she (Fraser) uses Boudica as a foil to illuminate other great queens of history, about half of which could be relevent to a Latin class.  

So, that's almost two-thirds relevance for a fairly short book, awesome!  Right?  Um...  Not so much.  :\  Fraser is a good historian, but she's also British and writing for an educated British audience of the early 80's.  It's dense!  Like, atomic weight of lead.  It's a good book, just not (I fear) for a high school classroom.

Alas.  Earwax.

There's no escape...

I went by the library and picked up some books and, oh look!  There's a new Batman graphic novel on the new shelf.  DontmindifIdo...  Little summer escapist reading never hurt any...

Oh.

Spoiler warning

Summer reading

Ok...  Staring down a fairly light summer-reading list.  Right now I've got Warrior Queens by Fraser (candidate for inclusion in Latin 3 Enemies of Rome sequence), May's Pilate's Wife which I am assured by my wife and Ms. Chiu is worth my while...  Aaand not much else.  Ideas?  Any classics of Classics I've missed this year?

The dull things I do and the cool stuff I find

So, I finally put down the grading this evening and picked up a library book, The Fourth Part of the World by Toby Lester; it's about the...  Well, not discovery of the New World, but rather how it was understood at the time.  It centers around the so-called 'America's Birth Certificate,' a 1507 map which delineated the New World as NOT a hitherto unknown part of Asia AND called them "America" after Vespucci.

But that's not the fun thing.  The fun thing I want to share is the quote from the back of the book by P.J. O'Rourke who is (I think) a darned good wit.  He blurbs, "What distinguishes civilized people from barbarians?  It's the map of the world they have in their minds.  A barbarian's map marks the spot of just a few things: herds of sheep to steal, convenience stores to rob, political opponents to condemn on talk radio or the internet.  A civilized person tries to see the world as whole."

Anne's allusion

So, my wife loves...  Wait, no.  More emphasis: LOVES Anne Lamott's writing.  She scored a copy of Lamott's latest, Some Assembly Required: A journal of my son's first son, and insisted I read it.  Ok, fine.  She loves me, least I can do is read a book, right?  It's actually pretty good and I share the following with you as a cute bit, clever allusion and example of something you might bring in for extra credit (properly cited, of course).

"I told Sam about when he was three months old, and Pammy came over at night to support me in letting him learn to cry himself to sleep.  His stomach was big enough to hold enough milk for eight hours, but he had developed the habit of waking up every four hours to nurse and check in with me on stuff he might have missed while sleeping.

The baby book said put him down, pat his back, and not pick him up, no matter how piteous he sounded.  I was committed to letting him cry it out, for however long it took, and I made Pammy promise to help me keep my butt on the couch, like Ulysses strapped to the mast.

I lasted close to six minutes, then did crack under the strain and picked him up.  Ulysses had an unfair advantage over me: the mast, and wax in his ears."  Lamott, Anne, and Sam Lamott. Some Assembly Required: A journal of my son's first son. New York: Riverhead Books, 2012.

Spring Break (light) reading

Let me kick off with the graphic novel tie-in to the 2011 flop Immortals.  Picked it up in the library yesterday thinking, 'eh, maybe it'll have some decent writing to go with the near-dozen different artists. Mmm...  No.  A sampling from the first story: (Zeus before Kronos) "Father!  You have much to answer for.  But I haven't come seeing answers.  I'm here for your blood!"

Oh bother.  Still, they had some nice touches which showed someone did some research (even if a lot of it got pitched): Persephone wanting to be with Hades, Cerberus is a normal dog which only appears to be monstrous on account of the twisted nature of the Underworld, Hercules is the only one able to openly defy Zeus without (major) repercussions, etc.  

Makes me wonder where on the spectrum the movie falls.  Are we in Percy Jackson territory or are we closer to a Hercules?

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

I just finished this and, well, am torn.  On the one hand, Miller has some really cool ideas on how to re-imagine the Trojan War from the perspective of Patroclus, Achilles' brother-in-arms...  Or something.  And it's the or something part where I get iffy; Miller has done her research and there are many good details about Ancient Greece but...  A lot of anachronism too.  And it feels wedged in.

Still, if nothing else she does Odysseus justice; here's a passage towards the end of the book whre Odysseus is talking to Achilles' son, Pyrrhus, who is arguing that Patroclus should not be given an honorable burial:

"Patroclus was no commoner.  He was born a prince and exiled.  He served bravely in our army, and many men admired him.  He killed Sarpedon, second only to Hector."
"In my father's armor.  With my father's fame.  He has none of his own."
Odysseus inclined his head.  "True.  But fame is a strange thing.  Some men gain glory after they die, while others fade.  What is admired in one generation is abhorred in another."  He spread his broad hands.  "We cannot say who will survive the holocaust of memory.  Who knows?" He smiles.  "Perhaps one day even I will be famous.  Perhaps more famous than you."
"I doubt it."
Odysseus shrugs.  We cannot say.  We are men only, a breif flare of the torch.  Those who come may raise us or lower us as they please..."  (Miller, Song of Achilles, 363-364)

Some books

Ah, summer.  Booksbooksbooks. 

Just finished Throne of Fire by Rick 'I write books' Riordan.  Yea, ok, it's not technicaly in my perview, but when you've got a middle-school-teacher-wife who tells you that there is a Roman ghost in it named 'Claudius Iratus' (aka Mad Claude), one must.  Better than Red Pyramid, that is for sure, but still not Lightning Thief or Last Olympian.  Still, an enjoyable diversion.

Come to think of it, all three books on the coffee table are Egyptian.  Ah!  The audiobook on my iPod is too!  Cleopatra by Schiff is so far pretty darn good.  It will fit in well to the Latin 3 curriculum next year (what? you honestly think any of us stop working?).

Must read!

So, after listening to this interview, I need to read this book.  The trade in ancient art does raise a lot of very tough questions though...  Do art and artifacts need to stay in situ?  Or are they better spread around the world, the better to share the greater cultural heritage?  More to the point, who owns them?  Who can own them?

Anyway, I liked the excerpt on the interview's website and I'm a sucker for a good heist story...  Still, I just got a massive stack of book from the library.  So, I guess when I'm done with The Poison King: the life and legend of Mithradate, Spartacus War, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World and Last Call: the rise and fall of Prohibition, I'll have the time. 

What?  The Romans drank.  ;)