Reviewing Cleopatra

Two contrasting reviews of Cleopatra and Rome by Diana E E Kleiner can be found on the Bryn Mawr site here (that's the thorough one) and in the Independent here (that's the pop one with references to ther BBC's Rome TV serial and to bad hair days.)

Just thought you'd like to know. I'm not sure that Cleopatra's self-promotion and her image in Roman minds are directly relevant to the syllabus. And we wouldn't want to teach anything that isn't strictly on the exam syllabus, would we?

I found these reviews by following a couple of Explorator links.

An interesting thought about those marbles

'The Parthenon sculptures which Elgin brought back have been in the British Museum far longer than Greece has existed as a country.'

This quotation from Dorothy King is to be found in a review of her book The Elgin Marbles in The Observer today. I can't claim credit for finding it; it was Explorator doing his usual Sunday service for Classicists and others.

The book looks useful for teaching Greek sculpture. The reviewer, David Smith, calls the style 'breezy and informal' and writes:

The main narrative is a winding history of the Parthenon and the outcrop on which it sits, the Acropolis in Athens. Ploughing through nearly 2,500 years of Persians, Romans, Christians, Byzantines, Ottomans, Anglo-French and Anglo-Greek squabbles is exhausting work. King is equally unstinting in her 60-page description and interpretation of the Parthenon's metopes, pediments and frieze.

The book is published by Hutchinson at £18.99 and has 352 pages.

Nick Lowe is worth reading on Greek myths (and Nigel Spivey)

A review in the Times is the excuse for Nick Lowe to do a fine hatchet-job on Robert Graves as a Classicist in general, and in particular on The Greek Myths.

Nick tells us that much of Graves' 'scholarly' material in The Greek Myths is cribbed, or invented.

The year of Graves’s commission from Penguin saw the first editions of two mid-century European classics, Grimal’s
Dictionnaire and The Gods of the Greeks by C. Kerényi. It is entirely symptomatic, however, that Graves made no discernible use of any of these, instead lifting his impressive-looking source references straight, and unchecked, from his Mallorca copy of William Smith’s 1844 Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology. He could have plagiarized worse, as the mythological entries were mostly the work of the great expatriate philologist and historian Leonhardt Schmitz, a key figure in the transmission of German classical scholarship to Victorian Britain. But to credit Graves with any inkling of this would be far too generous to his grasp of his classical sources.

If you enjoy scholarly knockabout, you will like this:

The barmy etymologies that enliven Graves’s index of names are the product of nothing more than amateur self-amusement with a Greek lexicon; and nuttier still are the astounding pseudo-scholarly interpretative commentaries on each section, which historicize everything in terms of Graves’s personal mythology of the White Goddess, under which nasty patriarchal Dorians displace matriarchal Pelasgians worshipping Graves’s triple goddess, and commemorate it all in dying-god rituals which encode the truth Da Vinci-style for scholarly cryptographers to decipher. Unlike the narrative portions, none of this stuff is even cosmetically source-referenced – for good reason, as Graves has made it up from whole cloth.

Oh, I nearly forgot – this is all in a review of Nicholas Spivey's new retelling of Greek myths called 'Songs on Bronze'. Nick Lowe likes it:

Where Graves masked fiction under the rhetoric of scholarship, Spivey’s bold professional fight-back, openly billed as “the first major retelling of Greek mythology in half a century”, cloaks his own scholarship in the rhetoric of fiction. Songs on Bronze: The Greek myths made real is a novelistic presentation of selected Greek myths that most closely recalls the vividly told young-adult versions of Leon Garfield and Edward Blishen from the 1970s.

The whole review is worth reading here.

Thanks to David Meadows in Explorator for the link.

Why study English when you can learn Greek?

Something to print out in large type and stick on your classroom wall. It's from a piece on Ithaca by Hillel Halkin.

Several years ago I made a list of the things I most wanted to do before I died. One of them was learning Greek to read The Odyssey in the language Homer wrote it in. Poetry, not just as language heightened, but as language transformed, its particles fused into rare new elements, begins with Homer. The winedark sea! The rosyfingered dawn! No book has lovelier phrasing. How could I have been so foolish in college as to major in English, which I needed no instruction to read, when I could have been studying Greek?