Classics and World Religions

Businessman Steve Forbes and Eckerd College classicist John Prevas have recently co-authored a book entitled Power Ambition Glory : The Stunning Parallels Between Great Leaders of the Ancient World and Today and the Lessons You Can Learn. The book examines the lives of classical figures such as Julius Caesar, Hannibal, Alexander the Great, Augustus, and others examining the parallels with modern leaders and the lessons to be learned from these leaders of the Greco-Roman world.

Forbes magazine also did a special report related to the book, including interviews with a number of individuals ranging from Rudy Giuliani to Teller (of Penn and Teller fame) in which the interviewees answer questions such as:

• If you could invite one classical figure to dinner, who would it be and why?
• Tell us about a time when lessons learned from the ancients contributed to your success.
• Greeks or Romans?

The special report also includes excerpts from the book.

Congratulations to Steven Kimbler, Evan Scherer, and Tyler von Moll, all three of whom tied for 40th place on the College Greek Exam for first-year students of Ancient Greek. Nationwide, a total of 311 brave Hellenists ventured to take the test–a very competitive subset of all those students who have begun the study of Greek this year in American universities. Congratulations to all ten O.U. students who took the exam–ἀριστεύετε, λύγκες!

You never can tell what you’ll run across in OhioLINK! Just today, in browsing through its directory, I discovered that OhioLINK’s Electronic Book Center has a couple of fundamental reference tools that I’d not known about: The Oxford Classical Dictionary and the Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium.

Since the publication of its first edition in 1949, the OCD has been a major source for brief information about Greco-Roman antiquity. The online version is the current third edition, revised, originally published in 2003.  The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium was published in print in 1991 and was the recipient of numerous awards and accolades at the time.

As always with titles in  OhioLINK’s Electronic Book Center, these two reference tools have restricted access. Off-campus users will need to log in and identify themselves as part of Ohio University before getting access to the entries.

Just added to the Libraries’ Infotree system, Documenta Catholica Omnia is a vast collection of primary source documents of interest to anyone studying Late Antiquity, the Middle Ages, or Church history. Quoting from the “About Us” page, “Documenta Catholica Omnia is the official site of the Cooperatorum Veritas Societas, a people’s Membership who have voluntarily and privately promised obedience to the Holy Father, in order to spread the official versions of each and every written document belonging to the Holy Christian Church, Catholic, Apostolic and Roman, in their original language and in faithful translations as well.”

Among the notable collections at this site are Migne’s Patrologia Latina and Patrologia Graeca, along with Du Cange’s Glossarium Mediae et Infimae Latinitatis, the Corpus Scriptorum Historiae Byzantinae, the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, and much else besides.

Venite Omnes ad Pizzam Comedendam: Come have pizza with Eta Sigma Phi!

Eta Sigma Phi would like to extend a membership invitation to any Classics scholar who has completed two quarters of either Greek or Latin with at least a B average. You don’t have to be a Classics major to join. Come learn more at an information pizza party, Tuesday March 10 and/or Wednesday March 11 5-7pm, in Ellis 213B. And even if you have not begun study of Greek or Latin but are interested in other areas of instruction in the Department of Classics and World Religions (classical archaeology, history, world religion), please come by and join the conversation.

How is the present economic turmoil affecting higher education’s commitment to the humanities and the liberal arts? Should students, educators and elected leaders rethink their commitment to the humanities? For the case to be made on both sides of the issue, read in yesterday’s New York Times “In Tough Times, the Humanities Must Justify Their Worth.”  Here’s an excerpt citing those who in the midst of the economic crisis are reaffirming the mission of the humanities:

Derek Bok, a former president of Harvard and the author of several books on higher education, argues, “The humanities has a lot to contribute to the preparation of students for their vocational lives.” He said he was referring not only to writing and analytical skills but also to the type of ethical issues raised by new technology like stem-cell research….

Anthony T. Kronman, a professor of law at Yale and the author of “Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life,” goes further. Summing up the benefits of exploring what’s called “a life worth living” in a consumable sound bite is not easy, Mr. Kronman said.But “the need for my older view of the humanities is, if anything, more urgent today,” he added, referring to the widespread indictment of greed, irresponsibility and fraud that led to the financial meltdown. In his view this is the time to re-examine “what we care about and what we value,” a problem the humanities “are extremely well-equipped to address.”

To Mr. Delbanco of Columbia, the person who has done the best job of articulating the benefits is President Obama. “He does something academic humanists have not been doing well in recent years,” he said of a president who invokes Shakespeare and Faulkner, Lincoln and W. E. B. Du Bois. “He makes people feel there is some kind of a common enterprise, that history, with its tragedies and travesties, belongs to all of us, that we have something in common as Americans.”

[The following post comes from LATINTEACH: A blog dedicated to the teaching and learning of Latin and the Classics.]

According to John Traupman’s Conversational Latin for Oral Proficiency (4th edition), this is how to wish someone a Merry Christmas in Latin: “Faustum ac felicem Christi natalem (tibi exopto)!” Of course, the Romans didn’t celebrate Christmas. They celebrated the ancient holiday Saturnalia, so according to The Bantam New College Latin & English Dictionary, Revised Edition (3rd edition, also written by Dr. Traupman) they would have wished each other “Io Saturnalia!” or “Hilara Saturnalia!” (See Mary Beard’s Five Things the Roman’s Did At Christmas to find out more about Saturnalia.)

Check out the Rosa Latina website for some holiday ideas! Latin teacher and author, Rose Williams, has an excellent selection of free teaching packets available there, including including Holidays for Latin Class.

Kentucky Educational Television Latin Distance Learning has some great activities for winter holiday celebrations, including The Nativity Story in Latin and suggestions for a Saturnalia party.

Visit the Minimus Etc. website to download some very creative materials, including Latin Christmas Carol song sheets, the Animals’ Carol, recipes, and several skits and plays that your students might enjoy performing.

Laura Gibbs’ Gaudium Mundo blog features an impressive selection of winter holiday songs - Christmas, Hanukkah and secular - in Latin.

Michael Myer has placed Cantica Adventus, a collection of religious and secular Latin lyrics on his school site.

Preces Latinae has a large selection of religious hymns in Latin for the entire liturgical year (In Temporibus Anni), including Advent (Tempus Adventus) and Christmas Time (Tempus Nativitatis). This collection includes familiar songs of praise, including Veni, Veni Emmanuel (”O Come, O Come Emmanuel”) and Adeste Fidelis (”O Come All Ye Faithful”) as well as many others.

I was reflecting last night on how strange a name can be, then I asked myself, what’s in a name? Here is what I discovered (yes, I know the exclamation mark ruins the palindrome, but I couldn’t help myself). –Jim Andrews

More fun with palindromes: here’s the last stanza of “Amor” by the Irish poet Oliver St. John Gogarty:

So when you next denounce the ways
And times and town where Caesar dwelt,
Before disparaging those days
Recall what Rome spelt backwards spelt.

τὰ κλείν’ αἰνίγματ’ ᾔδει…

On Oedipus and the Winkling of his Eye
A Classics and World Religions Colloquium
presented by
Efimia D. Karakantza
and
Menelaos Christopoulos
Wednesday, November 12, 4:00pm
Ellis Hall 212

Professors Karakantza and Christopoulos direct
The Center for the Study of Myth and Religion in Ancient Greece and Rome
In the Department of Philology
University of Patras (Greece)

Alden Library has just added another online resource, the Brill Dictionary of Religion. While the focus of this volume (which is really more of an encyclopedia than a dictionary) is on religion in the 21 century, there is a great deal of historical material, too. The entries are organized in six thematic fields:

1. the human being (body, life cycle, perception, sexuality, psyche, emotions, illness and health, death and dying)
2. the individual and the group (socialization, family and genealogy, everyday life, work, violence)
3. environment, society, culture (nature/environment, media, collective representations, identity, society, government, politics, the ‘other,’ law, economy, science, art, aesthetics)
4. elements of religious systems (religion and critique, ritual, communication, dynamics of groups, belief systems, theologies, myth and mythology, gods and goddesses, meaning and signification, morals and ethics)
5. history of religions (time, calendar, history, individual epochs, religious and philosophical traditions, forms of reception)
6. geography and territoriality of religion (place, migration, pilgrimage, heaven/sky, orientation, specific geographical regions and cities)

Because of licensing restrictions, the Brill Dictionary of Religion is available only to members of Ohio University, and can be accessed by following this link.