hawkwing_lb | though this ship is out to sea I'm content to lie peacefully

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though this ship is out to sea I'm content to lie peacefully

You will be fascinated to hear, no doubt, that I ran 2.5 miles in 27:30 tonight (for certain values of running, at least) and then proceeded to jujutsu, where I acquired many, many bruises.

Not fascinated? Oh, well. Neither am I, really. I'm much more fascinated by the prospect of actually finishing Lysias On the Murder of Eratosthenes, which I might manage in another two days work or so. I mean, my translation is far from perfect? But it is occasionally comprehensible, and with frequent recourse to the dictionary, I can figure out what the hell is going on here.

One of the things that's interesting to me is how Euphilites, the speaker - or rather, Lysias, writing for Euphilites, the defendant - picks and chooses from the law. The law permits the killing of an adulterer; Lysias wants to imply that it commands so.

The other thing which is rather fascinating is the focus and assumptions of Athenian law. A man who, entering another man's house, commits adultery by persuasion, is guilty of a greater crime - or so says Lysias - than one who commits adultery by forcible rape. Persuasion, it seems, constitutes a greater threat to the integrity of the oikos - and so to male-lineage inheritance, the right to citizenship, deme and phratry membership etc - than force. The Athenian concern with inheritance and citizenship is also in evidence in Demosthenes' Against Neaira, among other places. It's a reminder that completely assumptions may apply in a different time and place.

By modern lights, it's seriously screwed up. Women! Not really people!

...No, wait. "Women are people too" is still a radical position to take, in many quarters.

Wrote some fiction today. Not very good fiction, but hey. I have to fit it in around Ancient and Modern Greek. Don't talk to me about my thesis. I'm hoping it'll write itself while I'm not looking. Please let it write itself?

They tell me that taking a couple of days off is occasionally healthy, so I'm trying that. For certain values of off that include Greek, and fretting.

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Yesterday's Greek class covered the "seduction: much worse than rape!" section of that speech, and discussion during and after class was...interesting. (Also interesting, though somewhat briefly mentioned: that the rape of a woman was considered worth twice as much of a penalty as that of a free man or child.)

Tomorrow we get to "Well, if you can't kill adulterers, but you can kill thieves you catch in your house, thieves will start claiming they were there to sleep with your wife!", which is sort of hilarious in its own special way.

Hmm. I thought the diplen ten blaben part referred to double damages for a free/citizen as opposed to unfree/non-citizen - the Lamb translation supports this point, tho' I do not specialise, so am open to correction.

You hear, sirs, how it directs that, if anyone forcibly debauches a free adult or child, he shall be liable to double[1] damages; while if he so debauches a woman, in one of the cases where it is permitted to kill him, he is subject to the same rule. Thus the lawgiver, sirs, considered that those who use force deserve a less penalty than those who use persuasion; for the latter he condemned to death, whereas for the former he doubled the damages,

[1] i.e., double the amount laid down for violating a slave.

Oh, yes. I read that bit yesterday. "See, oh men! Thieves will claim to be adulterers, and be sure of getting off scot-free!"

Ah! I wrangled quite a bit with that section, and I thought--as I did indeed mispeak earlier--that it was 'double damages for free man/child, but death if it's for women'. Since part of the point being made is that sex with someone else's wife is a special case. But honestly, it's hard for me to be sure, given we don't have the text of the excerpted law.

*fist-shakes at unhelpful ancient manuscripts*

Mostly, I'm just hoping that section doesn't get put on the test.

As I understand it, it is permitted to kill an adulterer caught in the act, and Lysias is making a play off the meanings of keleuo - "exhort," "urge," "command," etc but sometimes "propose" - to make it seem more regular to do so.

But one rather assumes that the reason this action is being brought against Euphiletes in the first place is because the interpretation of "death to adulterers by force!" is an interpretation much more honoured in the breach than in the observance. If nothing else, because of the polluting nature of violent death, and the undesirability of longrunning feuds within the citizen body.

(I should dig up the bits in Against Neaira and Against Timarchos to refresh my memory of Athenian family/citizenship law... in my copious spare time.)

Really, Euphiletes is a bit of a murdering jerk. Even his defence speech hints at premeditation and entrapment, I kind of think.

Speaking of wrangling - 1.38 gives me such godawful trouble. Participles! Gentives! An even more confusing word order than usual...

Not that I'm bitter, or anything.

Oh, Euphelites totally comes across as having basically set up entrapment, much as he protests otherwise. While he claims he wasn't quite willing to believe everything without Proof, the fact that, having arranged to get proof, he killed the guy, kinda shows he had that in mind all along. Not to mention the bit where he recounts giving a little speech about The Law before actually killing the guy, which does not really work well with the whole 'heat of the moment' thing. (Which is admittedly more a US law than Greek law aspect, as I understand it.)

And trying to translate perfect active participles drives me batty.

Oh, yes. "I'm not killing you, the law's killing you. With MY HANDS."

Though considering the murder itself is never described, one is moved to wonder whether Euphilites did him in quick or slow.

Yeah, there's a curious amount of talking around the actual killing part. Possibly because it was horrible, and he doesn't really feel it helps his defense any to get into that.

However, my favorite bit of the speech, comedy-wise, comes from the editorial note when an ellipses is put in because something was probably missing. Because I love the implications of it actually being written as is without that expected omission. "After that, four or five days passed. As I will now demonstrate with the GREATEST PROOF."

...what's weirder to me than anything else, though? Realizing, as I go through this speech, that a lot of the weirder and less practical vocab my textbook gave me must have been aimed at this specific speech, since it's so often vocab coming up in the speech that I wouldn't expect to be all that useful for general reading. (I mean, the very first vocab list that book gave us included the stone/vote word. It is not easy to write a sample sentence with that vocab, I tell you.)

Yes. I will demonstrate with Mighty Proofs that this time passed!... er, yeah. The what there now?

The vote/stones thing comes up everywhere, though. It's in more than one Aristophanes play, as far as I recall (I read them in translation, and there is a good bit of voting. Especially in Wasps and Women at the Thesmophoria, I think?), and presumably most of the other lawcourt speeches. And if I remember right, there is voting in Plutarch and the historians...

They cast their votes! For JUSTICE! and whatnot all the damn time. Democracy! It's what's for dinner!

Voting for DEMOCRACY! (For a small and privileged subset of the people actually living in the city at the time, but I suppose it was revolutionary as a concept anyway.)

And I suppose it's fair enough that the vocab does come up a lot in the expected reading. But it was sort of funny to go from one Greek textbook that was giving me little narrative paragraphs about a farmer and his family, and thus had a lot of words like "plow" and "field" and "dinner" and "boulder", and then move to a textbook that was going, "I know what vocab you'll find useful: vote! defend oneself from an accusation! juror! commit perjury! injustice! prosecute!"

Citizen men, and men with sufficient time on their hands to be able to attend the assemblies. Ain't it great?

Prosecute the ones doing wrong!

Somewhere there's the anecdote about the men not believing the traveller when he was shown Athens on a map, because he couldn't see any lawcourts. I wish I could remember where.

I've had some interesting discussion in ancient language classes when someone will point out how gloriously kind and forgiving and longing-for-peace Julius Caesar was, and get a bit irked when I go "Yeah, if you weren't a non-Roman he was brutally slaughtering or enslaving!" While I think it's interesting when someone is especially virtuous for their context, I would prefer those be presented with full context, and not as if a bunch of ancient men with very culturally-defined values were somehow models of virtue for modern folks to follow.

I thought the "It can't be Athens, there are no lawsuits going on down there!" was from The Clouds? But I'm working on fuzzy memory of my professor mentioning that joke in class, since I haven't read the play myself.

Or a Roman he disagreed with. There was the whole marching on Rome thing, after all... (Not that, say, Marius or Sulla hadn't already led the way there.)

Once you start thinking about context and consequences, you can't really accept much at face value ever again, I don't think. Every single thing that's written down has an agenda or three - which is a cool puzzle when it's an academic question, and rather daunting when it's a matter that happens to be important still.

Yeah, I can't remember, and I'm disinclined to go trawling through Aristophanes to double-check. It's still a funny joke, though.

Yeah, my Latin prof for years 1 & 2--who I love dearly, don't get me wrong--was a big fan of Julius Caesar, and tended to talk about how it was absolutely necessary for him to do (insert any action that involves a lot of people dying) every time because of other wicked people driving him to it, or the need to defend the republic, or what not. And...well. I entirely buy that this can have appeared that way in context? But our friend Historical Context also points out that a Giant Powerful Roman Empire was not necessarily in the best interest of a lot of the people it was ruling (though it certainly was for some), and one really does wonder about the "I had to do this to avoid being put unfairly on trial... therefore, I will start another civil war!" decision as a morally justified action.

Yes indeed.

(Also, Caesar would have been quite fairly put on trial. Since the whole reason he got his proconsular status extended in the first place was to avoid being tried for his previous irregularities.)

Giant Powerful Roman Empire... yes. Some of the Egyptian material concerning the tax burden is enlightening.

On the other hand, until the fourth century (and later in the east) it did sustain a larger semi-urbanised middle class and greater degree of social mobility than was seen in Europe again until the Early Modern period, so who I am to judge outcomes, really?

It didn't even necessarily suck too much to be a woman, since if you were in a position to avail of the right legal status, you could even own and control your own property. Shocking! Also why I am rather more fondly disposed towards the Romans in general than the Greeks, but "sucked less" =//= "had a good time".

Yesssss. And this is why I want to take a proper class on Roman history! (I am tempted to audit one next semester, but that would put me at two language classes plus two audited classes, and I suspect that's a bad balance.) Because all I have to go on is what my professors talked about in class, which was often interesting, but biased in its own way. Plus reading a bunch of translated Roman historians, because they're fun.

...actually, if you have any good books to recommend on Roman history--ones that do in-depth discussion of one smaller period or aspect would be more interesting than ones doing a lot of dry overview, so long as they're not too Pop Culture Luridness--I'd really appreciate that. I flail a bit when trying to grapple with the history section in the library, and I've given up on trying to find good written-for-the-casual-reader books on Roman history since that horrible incident with the Catullus biography.

It's sort of entertaining to me, in a sad way, that I've had someone reading my fiction discuss how my protagonists are clearly living in an Evil Empire. Because I basically took the Roman empire, filed some serial numbers off, and then went through a multi-century period of progress that made it a lot less oppressive than the actual Roman Republic. Which still gets held up as a shining example of Moral Virtue In Dark Times by some historians. (I mean, it clearly had a lot of benefits, but...nuance, people! Nuance and complexity and context!)

Mmf. That depends on what sort of period/area you're interested in, and what you're looking for in terms of general interest vs. in depth discussion. And how much dryness you're willing to tolerate.

For an overview of the Roman empire round about the first century CE, Martin Goodman's Rome and Jerusalem is useful from a cultural perspective, because it does the compare and contrast thing. I may have blogged it here in 2010, I think. Goodman also has a book in the Routledge Roman history series which is quite good - better than the others in the same series, at least by me.

David Mattingly, An Imperial Possession: Britain in the Roman empire is very good on Roman Britain, though can tend to dryness in places; Mattingly also has a book on North Africa - called Tripolitania - which does similar. He's been involved, so I'm told, in excavations in southern Libya and the Libyan desert survey, so he knows his stuff. You'll probably only find Tripolitania through a university library, though.

For an introduction to Roman Egypt, try Parsons' City of the Sharp-nosed Fishes, which is essentially based off the Oxyrhynchus papyri. For the Eastern Desert and its archaeology, read The Red Land - or dip in and out of it, at least. It's very archaeologically oriented, but there's some interesting stuff there. In addition to interesting anecdotes about getting jeeps stuck in the desert... There are also some various intro collections of papyri, which can be fun - they'll be in the biblio in the Parsons book, though, I think. And I do recommend the Parsons book, since it's a good, vivid read.

There are various biographies of the emperors, of course, most of which I haven't read because they mainly recapitulate the Roman historians/literature etc, with extra bits of archaeology and inscription and some analysis. The most recent Marcus Aurelius is supposed to be good. Likewise Birley's Septimius Severus - I can't remember if I ever read much of it, because Roman History is a long time ago. (Birley also did a Hadrian - he seems to be the biography guy. There's also a recent biography of Claudius by Barbara Levick which struck me as dry but tolerable. But I was reading it before an exam.)

If I were at home, where I have a box full of undergrad notes and reading lists, or if I had better idea of where your interests lie, I could go on further.

But seriously? Give me a period or topic, and I'll look out some titles for you. My education on these matters was, I am told, reasonably comprehensive...

And re: fiction and evil empires: well, yes. Rome is pretty much the model Evil Empire, no?

It had a bunch of good things, like roads! Aqueducts! Semi-decent plumbing! The Second Sophistic floruit of letters!

A legal system where theoretically if you were a citizen you were entitled to a fair hearing and exempt from judicial torture. Although this was much more honoured in the breach under the empire, what with all the informers and the agentes in rebus. (But unless you were wealthy or connected, you didn't really need to worry about the informers. No profit in it!)

On the other hand, slavery. Oppression. Military exactions - which get complained about in the papyri all the time, as the soldiers basically exceed their authority and steal shit and beat people up. And in practice, you needed pull and influence to get anywhere at all.

Sometimes it strikes me as not really all that different from today, just with worse medical care, more slavery, a lot more "This is for your own good, unruly slave!" more restrictive social norms, and more options for getting horribly dead...

I meant free::unfree as opposed to woman::man.

Also, I cannot brain right now, so please excuse lack of ability to make anything resembling sense.

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though this ship is out to sea I'm content to lie peacefully

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