The version of Tartuffe that we read today is not the original. The original was, for reasons we are left to imagine and with the precise sort of irony that the universe likes to play in these matters, censored. I chose to read the Virginia Scott translation. It strives to preserve the sing-song rhyming couplets of the original (the Harvard Classics translation does not for reasons I cannot imagine). It is not a terribly complex story, but its greatness rests in its simplicity and clarity.

The story is of one Orgon who brings into his home a man who claims and attempts to parade the deepest of piety. Everyone sees through this except for Orgon and his mother. Tartuffe (who does not appear on stage until the third act) connives to marry Orgon’s daughter, to attempt to commit adultery with Orgon’s wife, and ultimately to usurp Orgon’s estate, fortune, and standing.

As I said, these are universal themes which translate seamlessly to our time. Orgon is now the person who sold everything before Harold Camping’s end time date or the well meaning shut-in sending their general assistance check to Benny Hinn. Just as in the days of Moliere, the media loves Tartuffe because religious hypocrisy makes us feel better about our own shortcomings. I would add my own two cents that genuine Christian values do not make for obedient consumers and so the media flaunts every scrap of religious hypocrisy they can muster to undermine any quest for meaning outside of said media.

There are a few bits that do not translate quite so well. The deus ex machina is, in this case, a rex ex machina and in an increasingly libertarian and anti-monarchist west, it is difficult to imagine this playing anything but ironic today. Molière ends the piece in one great genuflection towards the throne which I found to be charming if a bit archaic and utilitarian from a man whose previous version of the play had been censored by that very same king.

When the sack of money inevitably falls from the sky onto my head or the wealthy distant relative with no heirs dies, and I found the Chico Classical Theater Company, Tartuffe is on my short list of shows I would direct as soon as possible. I think the value is in the quality of the play, but is also in the opportunity for reflection. We laugh at the lead characters, but, hopefully, we also look at Orgon and Tartuffe and look in our own hearts to see where we are behaving just like them.

If you have two people speaking, you can have them disagree (and then have one of them “win” the dialogue) or you can have them agree (and build the case together.) Here is an example:

Eclogue by a Five-barred Gate

by Louis MacNeice

Well, I dreamt it was a hot day, the territorials
Were out on melting asphalt under the howitzers,
The brass music bounced on the houses. Come
I heard cry as it were a water-nymph, come and fulfil me
And I sped floating, my feet plashing in the tops of the wheat
But my eyes were blind,
I found her with my hands lying on the drying hay,
Wet heat in the deeps of the hay, as my hand delved,
And I possessed her, gross and good like the hay,
And she went and my eyes regained sight and the sky was full of ladders
Angels ascending and descending with a shine like mackerel—
Now I come to tell it it sounds nonsense.

The form is still occasionally employed (notably by the FAR underrated Louis MacNeice), but for the most part has fallen into disfavor in modern times. I understood the why of this viscerally while trying to write one. First of all, it felt extremely preachy. Second, and likewise, it seemed forced to me to write about ideas in this manner.

I chose to have a dialogue.

For my subject matter, I chose a topic which is one of my go-to rants: the subject of anti-intellectualism in modern America. I have recently joined the social media platform of Tumblr and, in the process of following people, have learned that there is a television series either currently running or in recent memory dealing, if I understand correctly, with the character of Hannibal Lecter before the events of The Silence of the Lambs, back when he was still actively eating people.

It reminded me of something I have felt for some time, that Hannibal Lecter is an anti-intellectual meme in our culture. He is a highly intelligent and cultured man and one of the most evil beasties stomping on the terra. Someone usually counters that they know many intelligent people who like Hannibal Lecter, but that proves nothing. No one is better at self-loathing than smart people. Someone may also counter with some anti-hero clap-trap. I won’t deny many of American entertainment’s current reprogramming agendas, like the humiliation of human dignity. More than one reprogramming agenda can be at work within the same meme.

This inevitably reminds me of a related rant, which is that I also believe that 1980s and 1990s sit-com character Frasier Crane is also an anti-intellectual meme in our society. He is an intelligent and cultured man who is a buffoon set up for our mockery. We see him as pompous and identify, instead, with his working class father or working class bar-mates. In both cases we are taught as a culture to denigrate and feel better than people who are trying to better themselves while subconsciously reinforcing repulsion towards bettering ourselves (thereby remaining more pliant television viewers which is equal to more obedient consumers).

But now I am giving away the content of the poem.

So, here are the two doctors self-deconstructing in my eclogue.

Eclogue on Anti-Intellectualism

by Paul Mathers

Frasier

I thank you for accepting my invitation

To speak with me here on my radio station.

Perhaps today together we can fix

The problem: that either one of us exists.

Hannibal

Now sit us down and share from this decanter

And we’ll work out this issue through our banter,

How bettering one’s self’s presented as too daunting

by entertainment’s game of Three Card Monte.

Frasier

The medium is what the medium sells.

It’s the answer to what, why, and how it tells.

And so we are paid handsomely to show

that low is high and, also, high is low.

Hannibal

The argument is merely dietary.

High culture does not make virtue plenary

And aspirations can tend towards the gall.

Our world fears heights. The gutter’s a short fall.

Frasier

Buffoonery or evil is the predicate.

Intellectual minstrel shows to validate

Watching anti-intellectual medleys.

Snobbery’s specter replaces Sloth in 7 Deadlies.

Hannibal

If each man’s improvement he sought to see

Of himself and his neighbor, then could he

no longer be the advertiser’s cog

and exit the arena where dog eats dog.

Frasier

Instead of letting others rule your head

Get thee to a library instead.

Hannibal

You are, of your soul’s helm, the only giver.

Beware of captains who would eat your liver.

“And this title simply must be in the series. Everyone must read this.”

“But, Dr. Eliot, then this volume will only be around 300 pages. It will look odd on the shelf and Gatsby wont want to buy it and cut all the pages.”

“Ah. Well, I’m sure I can scrape together a few more short pieces by x.”

This has happened more than twice in this series. Although, in the case of Carlyle, I didn’t mind it so much.

The Inaugural Address was a hoot! Carlyle was appointed Rector at the University of Edinburgh late in life. The only official duty of the position was to give an Inaugural Address. Granted it was 1836 when people may have been less jaded, and granted it was a group of young people who genuinely wanted to be there, and granted he worked the crowd (“Edinburgh crowds are the best crowds! Hey, anyone here like John Knox and Oliver Cromwell? Give it up for the Puritans, Scots!” Not actual quotes, but also not terribly inaccurate paraphrases of some bits), but still this was a crowd that I genuinely would have like to have been a part of.

Here is an actual excerpt from the speech:

“There is such a thing as a man endeavoring to persuade himself, and endeavoring to persuade others, that he knows things, when he does not know more than the outside skin of them; and yet he goes flourishing about with them [Hear, hear, and a laugh]. There is also a process called cramming, in some Universities [A laugh]- that is, getting-up such points of things as the examiner is likely to put questions about. Avoid all that, as entirely unworthy of an honorable mind. Be modest, and humble, and assiduous in your attention to what your teachers tell you, who are profoundly interested in trying to bring you forward the right way, so far as they have been able to understand it.”

It goes on and on like that. I have to restrain myself from quoting more. It would not be difficult to find yourself wanting to quote the whole thing. Not only was Carlyle that charismatic (note the cheers and laughs at moments that might not elicit more than a smirk in the aforementioned jaded present day), but the speech is that packed with wisdom. It was a delight to read, something I will read again, and something I would highly recommend to young people.

Needless to say, I did not find this to be the filler material.

When I began his piece on Sir Walter Scott, I thought, “Wait a minute. Is this a book review? For a book that we have not been called upon to read?”

Yes and no. Also, even the portion to which the answer is “yes” serves a higher function. Carlyle speaks to those who criticize the “warts and all” school of biography. He defends this version of the telling of a life of a heroic figure by suggesting that it adds rather than demerits their heroic standing in that it humanizes. Therefore, it is a more efficacious way of elevating the human spirit, by suggesting the attainability of greatness. I would agree with him entirely with one small caveat. There is a difference between a “warts and all” biography and a “taking them down a notch” biography. I suspect that the latter had not yet been invented in Carlyle’s day or, at least, if they were, were only circulated in humbler circles.

Carlyle then goes on to give a sort of digest of the Life of Scott. It is engaging, but also just as human as his build up might suggest. We read a passage about the young Scott’s drinking parties. We hear of his visits with the prince and their gift of story-telling. We hear of how Scott handles fame, with vigor in output, tolerance with the deluge of guests, and more than a jot of foolishness in regards to his finances.

Carlyle takes a break at this point to turn his critique to the man’s oeuvre. He notes that his work, while ripping good reading in his time and wildly popular, lacks the enduring quality of speaking to the human experience. He says that Scott wrote people from the inside out rather than the outside in and thereby never reach their heart. There is nothing instructive to life, virtue, religion, or consolation in this cold universe. In an unnerving moment, Carlyle speculates that few people will be reading him two centuries hence (which is roughly right now) and that Scott will become a museum piece, something that people liked 200 years ago (I thought of some of our own highly popular novelists of the day).

He ends with a disconsolate excerpt from Scott’s journal on the death of his wife. This serves to thrust the point home in a heart-breakingly, almost monstrous way, of the potential here versus the execution. Scott’s private words of grief echo one of my deepest fears. Scott’s public works of publication… I’m not sure I’ll ever get around to reading in my lifetime.

As far as filler material goes, this was the best of the series thus far. I greatly enjoyed Carlyle although I still wonder why he is here and The Iliad or Candide or countless other works of great value did not make the cut. But such, I suppose, is the shifting nature of opinion over time.

]]> http://ticklemebrahms.wordpress.com/2013/05/19/inaugural-address-and-sir-walter-scott-by-thomas-carlyle/feed/ 0 ticklemebrahms Image http://ticklemebrahms.wordpress.com/2013/05/16/lets-all-write-couplets/ http://ticklemebrahms.wordpress.com/2013/05/16/lets-all-write-couplets/#comments Thu, 16 May 2013 04:53:46 +0000 Paul Mathers http://ticklemebrahms.wordpress.com/?p=1980 ]]> On first glance this might seem like a chapter on beef in a text about stew. You can have stew without beef, but an awful lot of stew contains beef, and beef by itself is not stew.

Couplets on their own can be poems. They have a similar austere and compact feel that one gets from haiku. As for finding examples, I fairly stumble over them. Here’s a couplet from Coleridge:

“Work without hope draws nectar in a sieve,

And hope without an object cannot live.”

Here’s a possibly familiar folk song:

And so forth. A lot of songs are made of couplets.

Padgett points out different types of couplets. A closed couplet may simply be a thought encapsulated within the rhyme:

“I think that I shall never see

A poem lovely as a tree.”

While open couplets are ones that rhyme while the thought continues:

“And ever against eating cares

Lap me in soft Lydian airs

Married to immortal verse

Such as the meeting soul may pierce

In notes with many a winding bout

Of linked sweetness long drawn out.”

That’s Joyce Kilmer and John Milton respectively. This latter technique is called enjambment. It prevents the rhyme from sounding too sing-songy. You can also have sentence breaks in the middle of a line. This is called a caesura, presumably because you are stabbing the rhyme scheme repeatedly in the back. We will return to employing the couplet often as we continue through the poetic forms. For now, I thought I would jot down a few of my own.

Simply writing couplets is a bit like writing haiku. You end up with these little slice of life pieces:

“I shall not leave my wifi’s grasp

‘Til I have closed up all my apps.”

 

“Though I’m not one to claim to be a specially deft cerebrator,

I must insist, to make Reds choice, employ a wine aerator!”

 

“Just write the script, sawbones, on paper, tissue, or papyrus!

Anything to help me lick this dratted rhinovirus!”

You could go on like that indefinitely (and become a successful recording artist no doubt). But I also need to attempt one of these enjambments.

“I take a daily luncheon walk upon a nature trail

An invigorating diversion and one that never fails

to delight me, save for one consistent undercurrent of dread:

On average, about once a year, a bird poops on my head.”

True story. As you can see, I did not take this form particularly seriously, but that’s because I took this to be more of an exercise than an actual viable poetic form. Much like how one might, when called upon to translate from English into Latin, choose to translate Lady Gaga lyrics for giggles (“Roma, Roma-ma!”)

I think I’ve done enough damage here tonight. Next time: the Eclogue.

I found Carlyle to be an infinitely more engaging read. His passion is evident. He has the fire of a mystic in his rhetorical style.

Characteristics was an essay which originally appeared in The Edinburgh Review in 1831. It deals with an “illness” of society in his time, that of a hyper-active self-consciousness (that this remains one of Carlyle’s best known works is a testimony to the unfortunately also enduring quality of that societal illness).

He writes that the unconscious is a sign of health and consciousness is a sign of disease (a century before Jung even!) and then makes the case that human society, specifically politics, has a similar principle. In fact, he seems to view society as an organism, reminding me very much of the Collective Unconscious.

He also devotes a large portion to the dichotomy of the secular versus the religious in the (then) recent manifestations of Materialism and Spiritualism, respectively taught by Hope and Schlegel. He seems to suggest that both extremes having been so recently plumbed, it remains for a synthesis to emerge. Again, this could have been written this week. Although his synthesis would seem to suggest a “burning out” of skepticism and a renewal of faith. What sort of faith he would condone is not made clear by this essay.

I don’t have much more to say about the piece (it was a short piece) except to say that one of my initial reactions was astonishment that this man was such close friends with Mill. Their writing is so vastly different. I should think it’s a testimony to each of the men’s character that they could co-exist and, in fact, foster a friendship with such glaring differences.

Why? Well, let’s start with the obvious and work our way down. Here is the first sentence of his section on applications for his thoughts on liberty:

“The principles asserted in these pages must be more generally admitted as the basis for discussion of details, before a consistent application of them to all the various departments of government and morals can be attempted with any prospect of advantage.”

If I told you I just read 300+ pages that read just like that, you wouldn’t exactly run out and buy a copy for your summer beach reading, now would you? Mill throws NO rhetorical bones to the reader. No anecdotes, certainly no jokes, no personality. I’ve read more gripping writing from economists.

Then there are the problems with what he says. One of the major problems that I spotted immediately, I later found is one of the major criticisms of this work. He does not define what he means by “harm.” The context is his arguments about personal liberty. He says, in essence (boiling out his circumlocution), that a person ought to be free to do whatever they like so long as it doesn’t harm anyone else. On the surface this may sound reasonable, but what does he mean by “harm”? Does it harm me if homeless people camp on the curb outside of my house and smoke crack? Does it harm a child to have an alcoholic father? Does pornography harm anyone? I know what my own society seems to want to say, but that is part of the problem I have with this concept. I live in a town where “dressing up” seems to mean wearing a t-shirt that you’ve bought within the past 3 years.

You see, I live in a world very much like the one that John Stuart Mill is describing and I see the problems with it. He spends a great deal of time talking about the virtues of eccentricity, claiming that it fosters genius within a culture. I understand that he was writing in England in the days of Victoria, but I live in modern America where everyone thinks they are a special snowflake whose every word and gesture should be applauded. Nobody wants to contribute. Everyone wants to consume. Everyone thinks they are a king and, as a result, you can set your watch by the economic crashes.

Mill has those moments that utterly disgust me when Liberalism circles back around to Libertarianism. Like when the government distrusting hippies become the same kind of anti-vaccination conspiracy theorists whose fears are just as much going to kill us all as the rabid right-wing fringe nuts who fall for that same nonsense. Or when your pot-smoking nephew starts reading InfoWars and spews his internet education all over your dinner table. Or when Arlo Guthrie endorses Ron Paul. Perhaps hope is the worst demon, but I feel a little hope for humankind die within me when these things happen. And when Mill started writing about Free Trade, I groaned out loud.

There are also some concepts I agreed with in part. He has a section on education in which he stresses the importance of the government seeing to an educated population in so much as they need to make certain that said population is educated and NOT that they ought to be in charge of what is taught. The matter of education ought to be left to the institutes of learning, not to the governing body or any other interest. He even goes so far as to suggest that a child of a certain age ought to be tested to see if they can read and if they can’t the parents should be fined! I have mixed feelings about that, but I do agree that a population well educated on all socio-economic levels is crucial to a civilization. Unfortunately today we also encounter a problem that Mill was innocent of any way of foreseeing: that of education becoming nothing but learning to pass the tests. But I suppose that would fall under the heading of how poorly it goes when a government meddles in the matter of the education.

And, finally, there is our disagreement over religion. Mill at least teaches religious tolerance, and we can meet on that level. He doesn’t have much use for the corrective forces which religion contribute to a society, but at least he allows them to exist and so, under his system, they would contribute anyway in spite of his minimizing credit for their contributions. But there is another modern problem which Mill did not foresee (although he might have done well to look at an historical problem like John Knox). There are those in contemporary Christianity called Reconstructionists who would seek to establish the Law of Moses as the law of the United States, along with other obnoxious ideas. I have known people like this and subsequently disassociated myself from them. They are a large and growing group. Suppose they grew to 51% of the people who voted on election day. This would not be good for vast portions of our population… probably including me!

I have major problems with Utilitarianism. It would seek to say that the promotion of happiness is good and the promotion of sadness is bad (or “evil.” For an atheist, Mill sure throws that word around a lot). The problem is in our definitions. Whose happiness? How do we measure this happiness? There is also the problem of human dignity.

Let’s say a person is 70 years old, beloved, with a large family who they have worked their long life to provide for. Let’s say the population shifts dramatically to the point where there are a lot of elderly and, frankly, not enough young people to support the elderly. Let’s say that the elderly person never wanted to be a burden on their family. Let’s say that it is also becoming increasingly hard to find organs for transplant operations and that a vote is coming up for voluntary euthanasia. I see how Mill’s worldview might interpret solutions for this problem:

I actually personally feel that we are not far from this in a society where doctors want to maximize the amount of money they make, drug companies want to maximize their profits, as do insurance companies, and this unholy trinity are given influence over the health decisions of individuals. Not that I think there is any kind of conspiracy. Rather I think that the appeal to the baser elements of human nature (namely avarice) in matters of life and death are a recipe for atrocity. When society decides that a person is a burden, pity the person when society also gets to decide their worth. Unfortunately, I think that Mill’s worldview is currently winning.

I think my major problem with Mill is a question of the dignity of human life. I think his philosophy leads to a low view of that dignity.

I do think it was worthwhile to wrestle with his ideas, to find them fallacious and to understand why. That having been said, I hope to never read another word written by the man so long as I live.

The 5th Century ended with the “Sicilian Expedition” (or, more accurately, “invasion”). In 415 BCE, the Athenians attacked Sicily. Egesta quarreled with Silenus. Silenus petitioned Carthage for aid and Egesta petitioned Athens for aid. That settled, Athens moved on to Sicily. Thucydides was livid and caustic about this campaign. He told the Athenians that they didn’t know what they were doing.

Indeed. Niceas, a general, you might remember, whose name is on The Peace of Niceas, was against the invasion. He said in front of the assembly that Alcibiades only wants glory for himself. “Give up this mad dream for conquest.” Alcibiades spoke for the invasion and, as a result, may be the person most responsible for the downfall of Athens (sorry to give away the ending so early). He said that the Sicilians were a motley rabble and would be easily overtaken. “It is the nature of an empire to expand.” Which is the polar opposite sentiment of what Pericles exhorted the Athenians to do. Thucydides said, “all alike, young and old, fell in love with the idea.”

They appointed three generals. Niceas didn’t want to go, but they sent him anyway. Also Alcibiades and some other guy who is never mentioned again.

There were these sacred statues of Hermes which, just before the expedition, were found to be mutilated and defaced. Alcibiades was accused. He was also accused of performing a parody of the Eleusinian Mysteries. We don’t know if he did, but we do see the swaying opinion of Alcibiades even before anyone sets foot in a boat.

They send a huge armada of 134 warships, 130 support ships, and some 25,000 men. As they are crossing the Ionian Sea, Alcibiades gets word that Athens is sending along ships behind them with the orders to arrest him. He flees to Sparta. The fleet arrives in Syracuse and has some success. Meanwhile, Alcibiades gives intelligence to the Spartans on how to attack Athens at Dekelia (a place of great Athenian land traffic, perfect for harassing the Athenians).

In Sicily, the Athenians want to build a wall. The Spartans send generals to fortify Syracuse with a counter-wall. Niceas sends a letter home to Athens. “The ships are rotting, the slaves are deserting, I have a kidney disease.” Athens sends reinforcements (one imagines Niceas groans, having hoped for a withdrawal). They lose lose lose. They get stuck in a pestilential swamp. The superstitious Niceas refuses to move during a lunar eclipse. He listens to the soothsayers who tell him that they need to go through purification after the eclipse. And I had this sad and lonely image of all of these men in a swamp at night, losing their battle, placing all of their hope on magical thinking while Syracuse sets up a wall of ships around them at sea, completely boxing them in. They are decisively defeated. Niceas flees over land with his troops. They are parched and famished when they reach a river. They trample one another to get to the water. The Syracusans rain arrows down on them. Niceas is killed and the Athenians are enslaved.

We took a narrative break to look at foreigners in Athens. Between 480 BCE and 432 BCE, the population of Athenian citizens was relatively low (due to the change in rules for becoming a citizen). But the population of foreigners (or “Metics”) almost doubles and the population of slaves almost triples in that same period. Greeks did not think in terms of what we would know as Economics, but rather in terms of “oikonomos” or The Household. The Greeks were very ambivalent about work. The Greek word for work can be translated as “work” or “pain.” It was viewed as essential but regrettable. The god of labor, Hephystus, was the only god in the pantheon who was lame. He was the only disabled god.

So there is a lot of slave and foreign labor employed by the Greeks. The Metic (from “met oikos” or “one who has changed their home”) was a resident foreigner. They paid a special tax and had to have an Athenian citizen sponsor them. They had to serve in the military when called. They also could not intermarry. But the money was excellent, so the metics came to Athens. There were resident foreigners everywhere else in the Greek world except, you guessed it, in Sparta.

Lysias was a famous orator associated with the Athenian elite. He was a wealthy metic who provided great benefits to the state and was beloved, but he was never granted citizenship. Citizenship was highly guarded.

The metics were important to Athens, but not nearly so important as slaves. Chattel slaves are people who are owned by another person as a piece of property. Chattel slaves came from war (as we’ve seen) and from markets, very much in the same way as the British/American slave trade of yore (not so much like the modus operandi of our current slave trade). There were no slave revolts and no slave consciousness largely due to the wide scattering of ethnicity. Slaves worked in agriculture, workshops, the dangerous jobs of mines and quarries, and in households.

They were also tutors (known as “child leaders” which in Greek was the word “paedagogo” from which get the word pedagogue). Slaves would be subject to horrible abuse up to, but not to cross, the line of murder. In some houses they were esteemed while in others they would be brutalized. They were only permitted to give testimony in court under torture because it was thought that they would lie otherwise. A freed slave could become a metic. A famous case was that of Pasion, who was bought by bankers, found to be an honest and hard worker, was freed and given control of the bank, and finally actually granted citizenship. This was, as the professor said, a “one-off.” This was not a thing that happened, as far we can tell, in any other case.

When Niceas was fleeing he said that “surely the gods are satisfied and the Athenians should have hope.” There is that hope of Pandora again, possibly the worst thing to be unleashed on humankind. Like the Melians, they are clinging to hope and superstition. Herodotus would love the come-uppance factor of this. There was a revolt among the allies. “Why did we invade Sicily? It’s a debacle!” Despite their loss, they keep fighting for 8 years.

Alcibiades occasioned distrust in the Spartans (there is some evidence that he tried to seduce the king’s wife) and fled to Persia.

My notes have a bunch of dates spat out on them with exposition on the events afterwards, so forgive the confused chronology of the next few paragraphs. In 413 BCE, the Sicilian Expedition ends. In 411/10 BCE, there is an Oligarch Revolution in Athens in which the oligarchs call for a “return to the ancestral constitution” (reminded me of our own Right’s “founding fathers” rhetoric). In 408/7 BCE, Alcibiades returns to Athens. In 405 BCE, there is the battle of Aeogospotami. Lysander is in charge of the Spartan forces. In 404 BCE, there is a seize and surrender of Athens. In 404/3, there is the reign of the “Thirty Tyrants.” In 403 BCE, democracy is restored and general amnesty granted.

In 410 BCE, the history of Thucydides ends, suggesting that he probably died.

In 412 BCE is the treaty of Miletus. The Spartans sell out the Ionians for Persian money. The war shifts to the north-east for grain and timber. The Spartans finally build a fleet and are immediately defeated at sea. After the battle, a Spartan general wrote a letter home, “Ships gone. Command killed. Starving. At a loss.”

The Athenians decline to accept surrender. Alcibiades is formally cleared of charges and given the position of commander-in-chief. Under his command there is a reversal of fortune at sea (while he isn’t even there) and public opinion shifts back against him. He flees again and never returns.

There was a battle in 406 BCE at sea between Athens and Sparta. The wind after the battle prevented the gathering of the wounded and dead. The Athenians were tried as a group (which was illegal). 6 generals were put to death for not gathering the dead and wounded. Socrates happened to be the overseer that day and cast the only vote against the trial.

There was a battle at Aegospotami in which the Athenian fleet was highly vulnerable. Alcibiades happened to live on the villa overlooking the harbor and actually came down to warn the Athenians. They ignored his warning and 160 out of their 180 ships were destroyed.This was, essentially, the end of the war. Xenophon said, “a howl went up the port and engulfed the entire city.”

Athens surrendered in 404 BCE. Corinth and Thebes wanted Athens to be razed and the population killed, dispersed, and enslaved. Sparta resisted (and whatever Sparta wants, Sparta gets). The walls of Athens were torn down to the sound of flutes.Their fleet was reduced to 12. Sparta ruled the former allies. The “30 Tyrants” ruled in 404 BCE. It quickly became a bloodbath. Socrates was, at one point, ordered to arrest a wealthy metic. He refused to and went home. A resistance to the 30 rallied and they were overthrown. This was when the general amnesty was declared.

In 401 BCE, the final play of Sophocles is written, Oedipus at Colonus, which harkens back to the Athens of old and in which Oedipus is given sanctuary. This is, essentially, where our story ends even though we still have two more lectures to go.

We begin our sum up with a view of Greek history as a whole: a tension between rationalism and reaction. The Greeks did not have a priestly caste, holy books, or omniscient deities. Worship was available to anyone.

In the 5th century, Athens was a magnet for intellectuals. Anaxagoras was from Asia Minor and had a very early precursor to atomic theory (trees being made up of tiny, sub-microscopic trees). He taught that “nous” or “the mind” set all matter whirling. The sun, moon, and so forth were superheated stones set fire by the vortex of this whirling. He was prosecuted for impiety.

And now we arrive at Socrates. He was born around 469 BCE. He lived the complete life of an Athenian citizen. He served on the Boulē. He left no writings of his own, but is recorded by Plato and Xenophon, and, in a denigrating parody, also by Aristophanes. His father was a stone mason and his mother was a midwife. He conversed and discussed around Athens and drew in students. He is said to have had an odd appearance:

Alcibiades said he “looks like a satyr.” Yet he attracted the gilded youth of Athens as his students. The oracle at Delphi told one of them that there was none wiser than Socrates. Socrates set out to disprove this. He went and talked to people all over Athens and concluded that he probably was the wisest because everyone else thought they knew something. He thought he was the wisest because “I know that I know nothing.”

The Socratic method is a series of direct and focused questions about justice, piety, and other big ideas. He never offered a positive response. He simply left his interlocutors realizing that they didn’t know what they were talking about.

In 399 BCE, he is put on trial on charges of “corrupting youth and atheism.” There are no prosecutors, no judge, just a jury. They vote against him. The penalty is death. He suggested a different penalty of “a lifetime maintenance at the state’s expense.” In essence, he is convicted for stinging the Athenians out of complacency. This was partly political. Despite the post-war amnesty, democracy was so fragile after the war that it could not suffer a gadfly. It is suggested that some of his teaching may have been interpreted as anti-democratic. If he had not existed at that particular time… but it’s difficult for us to play “what ifs” like that.

In the immediate aftermath of the conflict, there are some systemic changes. There is no longer the system of citizen-soldiers. The hoplite ideal is over. Loyalties go to whoever can pay the soldiers. War can now be anywhere and at anytime.

Politically, the polis is fatigued. There are now, instead, large confederations. Neighboring polises merge. Corinth and Argos form into Corinthargos. There are economic, cultural and religious, as well as military benefits to this shift.

There was also the rise of charismatic leaders. Jason comes from Thessaly and unites the Thessalian barons in the 370s. For a time, Thessaly becomes a major power. Jason is assassinated and there was no provision for a successor, so in the early 350s, there is a power shift to Macedon. In 359, King Philip II welded the Macedonians into a first rate force. You will probably have heard of his son, Alexander. Philip hires Aristotle to tutor Alexander. Philip is assassinated. Alexander succeeds and conquers Persia and points eastward to the borders of India.

But, all of that is another story and only mentioned in conclusion here, as are some of the contemporaries of the period we have studied in other parts of the world, contemporaries like Confucius and Gautama Buddha.

We study the Greeks because they still influence us. One of the major ways is in democracy. They also allow us the thought exercise of putting together fragments in an attempt to see a harmonious whole. Shelley said that the Greeks are “a reality, not a promise.”

The professor closed the class with the encouragment to:

“Keep thinking with the Greeks.”

I anticipate that I shall for the remainder of my life, and would encourage all of you to do likewise.

]]> http://ticklemebrahms.wordpress.com/2013/05/04/the-ancient-greeks-reflections-on-a-course-week-7/feed/ 0 ticklemebrahms Image Image Image Image http://ticklemebrahms.wordpress.com/2013/04/27/the-ancient-greeks-reflections-on-a-course-week-6/ http://ticklemebrahms.wordpress.com/2013/04/27/the-ancient-greeks-reflections-on-a-course-week-6/#comments Sat, 27 Apr 2013 19:52:07 +0000 Paul Mathers http://ticklemebrahms.wordpress.com/?p=2127 ]]>

Socrates saves Alcibiades from certain moral peril!

We know of three things that happened mid-400s BCE. In 451 BCE, the Athenians tightened citizenship requirements. Previously you needed to have an Athenian father. Now you needed an Athenian father and a mother who was the daughter of a citizen. Why? We don’t really know. Possibly there was a massive influx of foreigners. Anyway, the effect is that the number of citizens stays stable and actually drops during the coming war.

In 445 BCE, Athens and Sparta sign a 30 year peace treaty.

In 442/1 BCE, Athens sides with the Ionians when the polis of Miletus gets in a fight with the island of Samos. Athens sends 60 ships and the Samians are defeated. The Samians are hit with a mild penalty (they have to contribute cash instead of ships now).

Thucydides was the historian of this period. He was born around 460 BCE. He caught and survived the plague of Athens (more on that later). He was a general in the North Aegean. His family had gold mines. He was defeated by the Spartan general Brasidas and exiled for 20 years, after which he returned to Athens and died somewhere around 400 BCE. We are going to get a lot of this week’s information from him, so we might do well to take a look at his influences. He was influenced by the Sophists, who were travelling rhetoric teachers who taught students to question received ideas. Protagoras and Gorgias were great influences on him (relativism and “man is the measure of all things”). Also Hippocratic medicine (medicine now featuring science, rationalism, and empirical evidence!) which taught that health depends on balancing forces within. Also, of course, Herodotus.The two historians are so much of a type that someone made this bizarre bust of them:Thucydides is writing in a tradition now although he says that his is contemporary and non-mythic, unlike Herodotus. He focused his history tightly on the war and, as a result, you do not have religion, women, culture, or any of the other richness of life that you have with Herodotus. You do, however, have a more concise history of the war. He attempts to make his speeches accurate. On the rare occasions that he appears in the narrative, he writes in the 3rd person.

The fox has many tricks. The hedgehog only has one trick. But it’s a good one. This is how the professor introduced Athens and Sparta in this period. Athens is the fox and Sparta is sort of rolled up in a little ball. Thucydides says that there are 3 causes for the war:

1) There was a conflict between Corinth and Corcyra (one of their colonies). Athens sided with Corcyra (which, oddly enough, is pronounced exactly like the website on which I am taking this class).

2) a Corinthian colony is ordered by Athens to tear down its wall. The colony appealed to Corinth for help.

3) Megara gets involved on the Corinthian side and so Athens hits Megara with “The Megarian Decree,” which is essentially a hefty embargo.

And so Corinth is the catalyst for the breakdown of the 30 years peace. At the congress at Sparta, a Corinthian made a speech of appeal in which he said, “Athens is always on the move. Sparta is tucked in upon itself, but now is the time to act.”

And the king of Sparta replied, “Hey, it’s worked for us for centuries.” Sparta is reluctantly drawn in. And so the Greek world sides off into Spartans or Athenians. In 431 BCE, the war breaks out. This is, by the way since I just noticed I haven’t named it, the Peloponnesian War. Here’s an important map:

Those thick black lines you see are walls. Who was inside those walls? The Athenians. Wasn’t it crowded? You bet! Was there a plague? There certainly was.

Pericles drew everyone into the walls and thought, “As long as we have our fleet out there, we’ll be fine.” People were not happy about having to leave their demes for the inside of the long wall. This marks a new type of war. Gone were the hoplite lines battling against one another. There were now fleets and walls and all sorts of new facets of life during wartime. At the end of the first year of the war, Pericles gave a speech for the fallen. He urges the Athenians to maintain their way of life:

“We throw open our city to the world, and never by alien acts exclude foreigners from any opportunity of learning or observing, although the eyes of an enemy may occasionally profit by our liberality; trusting less in system and policy than to the native spirit of our citizens; while in education, where our rivals from their very cradles by a painful discipline seek after manliness, at Athens we live exactly as we please, and yet are just as ready to encounter every legitimate danger… you must yourselves realize the power of Athens, and feed your eyes upon her from day to day, till love of her fills your hearts.”

The plague probably came by ship. It spread like a brush-fire. As was so often the case, people are further disturbed by the seeming randomness of the plague. As I mentioned, Thucydides caught it and was one of the few lucky enough to recover. 1/3rd of the population died. Law collapsed. People stricken with the plague threw themselves into wells. People threw the bodies of their dead onto other people’s funeral pyres (highly disrespectiful). People blamed Pericles. He was not elected general. Then he died of the plague. A rather grim end for such a pivotal figure in our narrative.

Thucydides extolls Pericles’ insight, foresight, and devotion. It’s important to note that this may have a lot to do with how much Thucydides HATES his successor. Cleon was a new kind of politician. He went to the people. He also marks the beginning of a rise of a political class. Aristophanes said that he stunk because his family owned a tannery. Thucydides called him “the most violent and persuasive citizen.” He is remembered for all of history as filthy, low, cowardly, and greedy.

Some dates: 429 BCE= the death of Pericles.

428/7 BCE= a revolt on Mytilene. The Athenians crush the revolt with the ultimate penalty, death to all adult males, all women and children sold into slavery. There is a debate between Cleon and Diodotus (the latter of whom takes the side of maintaining Mytilene). Diodotus wins and fast rowers are dispatched to try to prevent the wholesale slaughter. They arrive with the news of the winner of the debate just in time to save the adult males of Mytilene.

In 425 BCE= Cleon’s victory at Pylos/Sphacteria. Cleon was on a mission in the South in Pylos. They are trapped by a Spartan force. Cleon boasts “I will take care of the Spartans.” He goes. There is an aleatory brush-fire which diminishes Sparta’s capacity to hold the battlefield and Cleon wins the day. But while Cleon is campaigning in the South, the Spartans are campaigning in the North where:

In 424 BCE= Thucydides’ loss to Brasidas. Brasidas was also a new kind of general. He led a force of Spartans, mercenaries, and, if you can believe it, Helots. This does reveal a manpower shortage. He wins against Thucydides. Cleon exiles Thucydides. Cleon goes to meet Brasidas in battle.

In 422 BCE= Cleon dies in battle against Brasidas. Brasidas also dies in the battle.

In 421= The Peace of Nicias. The terms of peace are that it is to last for 50 years. Disputes are to be settled by arbitration. The Athenians are overjoyed with the peace. “Down with my shield! Let it be covered with cobwebs!”

We took a break at this point to discuss comedy. Much like the tragedies, we also have few surviving comedies (about 11 out of 400) and all of the surviving ones were penned by Aristophanes. Unlike tragedies, comic poets made up their own plots. The plots often centered on common people. The formula was that the comic hero gets a great idea, implements it, overcomes opposition, and then enjoys the fruits of his idea. We read The Acharnians in which Dicaeopolis, a common citizen of Athens, decides to make a private peace with Sparta.

Comedy was wildly inventive and lacked some of the constraint of solemn tragedy. There could (and would) be violence on stage as well as unfettered obscenity. They would also break the Fourth Wall. They would, in the course of the show, talk about people who would be in the audience for the performance. To be singled out for ridicule was also sort of a point of honor (you’d “made it” if you were worthy of notice for ridicule).

After the Peace of Nicias, there were factions on both sides who wanted the war to continue. It is said that there were not really two Peloponnesian Wars, but rather one war with a pause in the middle of it. Two Spartan Ephors tried to get Corinth to ally with Thebes against Athens. Alcibiades (another name we’ll hear more about) persuaded Elis and Mantinea to ally against Sparta. The Spartans won and Alcibiades was almost ostracized. Instead, the last ostracism took place. Hyperbolus (his actual name) was ostracized instead. It was said, “Hyperbolus deserved the ostracism, but Ostracism did not deserve Hyperbolus.” Meaning he wasn’t important enough to be ostracized and, as a result, the institution of ostracism crumbled.

In 416 BCE, the Athenians go to Melos and demand that they join their confederacy. Melos, an Athenian settlement, had remained neutral up to this point. Alcibiades was probably responsible for what followed, The Melian Dialogue. This was likely a fiction as the dialogue was in public. The Athenians give Melos as choice: become tribute paying members of our confederacy or be destroyed.

“The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”

A bleak but true assessment of the human situation I think.

Melos’ continued neutrality was a threat to Athens. As we see in the myth of Pandora, hope might be, in some ways, the worst thing unleashed on humankind. Hope is extravagant and people like Melos cannot afford her. Athens says, “If you were in our position, you would do the same thing.” The Melians resist. Athens brings her fleet and kills almost all of the adult males (a few flee successfully) and sells the women and children into slavery. They resettle Melos with 500 Athenians.

Behold, the strikingly handsome Alcibiades!

Let’s talk about the Symposium. The word means “drinking together” and there is a reason for that. The Symposium was not as we might imagine today. It was not like a modern “Symposium on Economic Development Whatnot.” Citizens (adult males) would recline on couches. There was a mixing bowl called a “krater” in the center of the room filled with a mixture of water and wine (to symbolize the mixture of business and pleasure taking place). There would be food, drinking games, music, conversation, poetry readings, and sex. Some of the images on the vases… I wonder if some museums don’t have parental guidance ratings. My favorite image shown was this vase of a master who has overindulged in the drinking portion and his slave holds his hair back as the master is about to, as we used to say in college, bark at the ants. He’s going to call Uncle Ralph up on the Greek pottery. He’s going to do the Athenian yodel:

From the National Museum of Denmark no less.

There was also the image from a vase of men at the Symposium flirting with one another. This is an aspect of Greek culture that we had not covered yet. Homosexuality was an elite practice. An older man (“the lover”) would be with a younger man (“the beloved”). There were rules of protocol in these relationships. The older would never use force. The beloved would not ask for gifts. (I couldn’t help but think of the trial of Oscar Wilde at this point, especially the part where Wilde invoked this ancient tradition. Lord Alfred Douglas did not adhere to this rule for the beloved.) It is important to note that these men also had wives and families. There was not the hetero/homosexual divide that we have in our culture.

We ended with more about Alcibiades. He was another blue-blood, a nephew of Pericles. He was beautiful, brilliant, and unscrupulous (again, Lord Alfred Douglas came to mind). In 416 BCE, he won the Olympic chariot race. The public had enormous fascination with this man. He was a bit of a superstar. He was a friend of Socrates. At one point he attempted to seduce Socrates, but Socrates declined any form of physical love (as we learn most of what we know of Socrates from Plato, this is where the term “Platonic” comes from). Alcibiades played a central role in the invasion of Sicily which we will cover in next week’s exciting conclusion to this series (the final class being on my personal favorite figure in all of antiquity. Here’s a hint: he is mentioned in this very paragraph!)

It is architectural sketches of the places mentioned in the title. The book itself is a work of art.

And, yes, I wore a Hawaiian shirt on my birthday. Because it was my birthday.

On Sunday afternoon, we went to hear members of the North State Symphony and members of various choral groups perform Vivaldi’s Gloria (as well as other choral pieces in similar veins). It was held at the First Lutheran Church in Chico. I’d never been in the building before and it had the usual Lutheran attention to architecture and pipe organs.

Here is what I saw if I looked directly upward from my seat.

The artists entered and I put my camera phone away. The piece was breathtaking.

On Monday, I received a package of a third present from my mother. Divers and sundry teas from Teavana! Two of Earl Grey Créme, My Morning Maté, something called Golden Monkey, Capital of Heaven Keemun, and Youthberry Wild Orange Blossom Blend with Rock Sugar Sample.

I’ve been drinking My Morning Maté all week.

It is not that I disliked the book by any means. It is not even that I actively disliked John Stuart Mill. I need to make a distinction between “to dislike” and “to not like.” But I also need to express that one can like and not like a book at the same time. One can agree with an author on some points and strongly disagree with him on others. One can be interested in what an author is saying and in no way be moved by it.

This was roughly my experience with John Stuart Mill’s Autobiography.

Dr. Eliot explained the placement of the book in this series by drawing particular attention to Mill’s philosophy of education. Eliot takes care to establish that this is not a brag book (which, after reading it, I am not sure I buy. For example, Mill says at one point about reading The Wealth of Nations and discovering the logical flaws in Mr. Smith’s ideas. But he doesn’t tell us what they are, which strikes me as being a show-off smarty-pants) but rather a way of using his own superior education as a model for young people. It is, indeed, rigorous and, indeed, enviable. The first third of the book is primarily things that his father made him read or allowed him to read and his reactions to them. This serves as a sort of autobiography of ideas. This was my favorite part of the book.

Mill’s relationship with his father struck me as a bit cold and distant, although Mill seems to be entirely unaware of this. This brings me to the coldness of the book. Any emotional reaction I had to this book I was entirely responsible for. To put it another way, so often I find that I prefer to read the ancient or at least historical voices because I like building the bridge of time and being able to interact with people long gone, to see that they aren’t really dead in that meme sort of way, that the human experience has not really changed from the earliest of writings to the most modern. Mill was a rare instance where I felt as if the author barred that gate for me.

So now we need to talk about Mill’s Utilitarianism and atheism. Mill’s father was close friends with Jeremy Bentham and instrumental, as it were, in the cohesion of Utilitarianism into a philosophical school. Mill’s father was also an atheist. Both seemed to transfer completely to Mill. While Mill and I would feel the same about slavery or women’s suffrage, we would have very different reasons for feeling that way. Mill would feel that way because his philosophy states that the highest good is that which produces pleasure. I would feel that way because my beliefs state that humans are made in the image of God and ought to be treated with dignity and reverence for life.

This, of course, matters. It doesn’t just matter that people agree with you. It matters why they agree with you. Someone can find their way to the same conclusion on a matter by entirely different means, means which are abhorrent. However, I would also state that this is a valuable thought exercise. One thing I did not feel was that reading this was in any way a waste of time. It forced me to think through why I feel the way I do about certain things.

Next up is Mill’s essay on Liberty with I am already creatively disagreeing with. More soon.