> Look, it's really very, very simple: did the Romans "simply" rechristen Zeus Iuppiter, Ceres Demeter, etc., upon their Greek conquest and infatuation, or had they not Iuppiter & co. already, who had been long-worshipped with just those names?
Look, it's really very, very simple. Your question has been answered again and again, and you've gotten plenty of citations--as you asked for--as to where you can get further details.
Did the Romans "simply" rechristen Zeus Iuppiter, Ceres Demeter, etc., upon their Greek conquest and infatuation? Yes.
Had they not Iuppiter & co. already, who had been long-worshipped with just those names? Yes.
You see, the answers to those two questions are not mutually exclusive. The first is talking about mythology. The second is not. You can have religion and deities without mythology.
Of course, the reality is more complex and less clear, but if you insist on a simplistic response, it is this: The Romans had no mythology until they adopted the Greek myths, but they did worship deities. When they did adopt the Greek myths, they simply substituted the names of deities they already worshiped for the names of the Greek deities.
Re: Mythology:The Greco-Roman Connection
I was addressing the fact that the poster did not explicitly address that question. Now thankfully, others have. However, he wanted to make sure that I understood the background involved, and I've been trying to sort of reassure him, more or less, that I do have a good enough inkling of most of it all to suffice for purposes of that very specific question.
The only cites I've receieved were Dumezil and the Oxford...what's "plenty"?? I'm not asking for cites of original source material, mind you. I very specifically requested cites of scholars' published works of "recent vintage".
> The first is talking about mythology. The second is not. You can have religion and deities without mythology.
(I'd like to note that Streng's "Ways of Being Religious" defines religions such that I understand what you mean about religions without deities -- as per Streng, from Buddhism to political activism to technophilia!)
Now this is an insight -- and thus you see that I've not been wasting time here, apparently asking the same question over and over, for your reply just now is novel to this thread.
Score another one for the Socratic method of investigation and
education!
Fine, if you want to split hairs finer than what I'm attempting -- and semantic ones at that! (A la Socrates: no man willingly does evil, but those who do, commit it in ignorance; likewise, maybe no disagreement is over the facts, but over the semantics involved.) --
let's have a go at it:
You say that the first question addresses the gods in their "mythological" aspect, and that the second pertains to their "religious" (in the sense of "ritual") aspect.
Hmm.
Hmmmmm....
I would venture that I understand you by "religion", but by "mythology" I am not sure.
Are you cognizant of the distinction between "literature" and "mythology"? It is an artificial one, often over-lapping and tangled up -- but still useful at times. E.g., "Beowulf" is Anglo-Saxon mythology (well, actually, it's likely a retelling of folklore, like the faery tales from the Brothers Grimm or the Arthurian romances),
but "'Beowulf' by John Garner" isn't -- it's "literature" (apologies to those who find Gardner a bore).
I believe you may be falling into the same error my English professor did -- that by "mythology", you mean both "Beowulf" the Danish ballad and "Beowulf" the novel. Thus, under Mr. Stonehouse's charitable
reading of her, she had in mind what ought to be more explicitly, and properly, called "literature" when she claimed that the Romans renamed the Greek gods (yes, in that sense, the Romans "translated" the gods'
names just as they did any other Greek word into Latin).
> Of course, the reality is more complex and less clear, but if you insist on a simplistic response, it is this: The Romans had no mythology until they adopted the Greek myths, but they did worship deities. When they did adopt the Greek myths, they simply substituted the names of deities they already worshiped for the names of the Greek deities.
Eureka -- I do believe semantics lay at the very heart of all this!
See, this is why one's got to plug away at a question, even if to the nuisance of one's elders (whether in age or in authority): the point of my question about the Romans rechristening the Greek gods was not whether they DREW ANALOGIES between their gods and the Greeks, the way the pagan Irish took easily to the Christian Trinity by referring to their own indigenous Indo-European Tripartite Godhead...no, the drive, if you will, of my question was whether the Romans didn't already recognize Iupiter as Iupiter, etc., before their Greek conquest....
Hmmph!
LOL -- excuse you, but it is indeed a very simple question!
Let me put it this way, then...
Critique this understanding: the Romans worshipped a sky god called Iuppiter. They worshipped a god called Mars, one called Vesta, another Minerva, still another Ceres, etc. Upon their Greek conquest, they analyzed the Greek myths and were able to draw easy, if not always exact, parallels between their own mythic/religious understanding and that of the Greeks.
Critique this understanding: the Romans worshipped gods and goddesses before their Greek conquest, but they were so impressed with Hellenic culture upon their conquest, they adopted the Greek pantheon, only rechristening the gods and goddesses with Roman names.
Re: Mythology:The Greco-Roman Connection
> The only cites I've receieved were Dumezil and the Oxford...what's "plenty"?? I'm not asking for cites of original source material, mind you. I very specifically requested cites of scholars' published works of "recent vintage".
I think you may have missed some messages. In any case, Dumézil is probably both more recent and more relevant than anything I cited. Those two references are certainly "plenty" all by themselves.
>(I'd like to note that Streng's "Ways of Being Religious" defines religions such that I understand what you mean about religions without deities -- as per Streng, from Buddhism to political activism to technophilia!)
I said nothing about religions without deities. I now fully understand your professors frustration with you.
> Are you cognizant of the distinction between "literature" and "mythology"? It is an artificial one, often over-lapping and tangled up -- but still useful at times. E.g., "Beowulf" is Anglo-Saxon mythology (well, actually, it's likely a retelling of folklore, like the faery tales from the Brothers Grimm or the Arthurian romances), but "'Beowulf' by John Garner" isn't -- it's "literature" (apologies to those who find Gardner a bore). I believe you may be falling into the same error my English professor did -- that by "mythology", you mean both "Beowulf" the Danish ballad and "Beowulf" the novel. Thus, under Mr. Stonehouse's charitable reading of her, she had in mind what ought to be more explicitly, and properly, called "literature" when she claimed that the Romans renamed the Greek gods (yes, in that sense, the Romans "translated" the gods' names just as they did any other Greek word into Latin).
Yes, yes. Of course there is a difference, however fine, between "pure" myth and myth captured in literature. That doesn't change the fact that religion doesn't require myth or literature.
> Critique this understanding: the Romans worshipped a sky god called Iuppiter. They worshipped a god called Mars, one called Vesta, another Minerva, still another Ceres, etc. Upon their Greek conquest, they analyzed the Greek myths and were able to draw easy, if not always exact, parallels between their own mythic/religious understanding and that of the Greeks.
Strike the word "mythic" from that, and it agrees with my understanding of the matter. (Although, I haven't read Dumézil.)
> Critique this understanding: the Romans worshipped gods and goddesses before their Greek conquest, but they were so impressed with Hellenic culture upon their conquest, they adopted the Greek pantheon, only rechristening the gods and goddesses with Roman names.
I don't think this is true at all. While they may have adopted Greek mythology wholesale and nearly unchanged, their own conception of the deities and their worship of them retained much of the Roman character.
That certainly seems the case with the non-Greek Isis and Mythras. (See an earlier post I made for cites about those.)
Re: Mythology:The Greco-Roman Connection
> I think you may have missed some messages.
Well, aside from two new ones since your post, I don't seem to see any others under googlegroups.
> In any case, Dumézil is probably both more recent and more relevant than anything I cited. Those two references are certainly "plenty" all by themselves.
Well, yes, I'd agree too, but, as I'd reported (and even quoted from my professor's e-mail message to me), she at first thought I was just pulling some pet theory out of my rear end, so I came here to solicit cites (I figured that was most expedient). When I presented her that initial Dumezil citation, she brushed it aside as being just one "single source" for my views! Anyway, in the intervening days it became clear that she's not even interested in this question, seeing how it's "common knowledge" that she's correct...what excites her is that I've got the audacity to contradict her, for which presumption she's trying to get me dropped from her course!
> I said nothing about religions without deities. I now fully understand your professors frustration with you.
I didn't say you did. However, I think I may reasonably reserve the right to an aside every now and then, marked off by parentheses. Since you remarked that religions and deities are possible without an attendant mythology, I had communicated my appreciation of that possibility by reference to my understanding that there are even religions without deities. I think it was clear that I was following up with a nod of sorts.
But I still don't fully understand your frustration with me. What are you trying to say, exactly, "Go away"?? I mean, there's always something called "discretion", which you choose by not clicking on anything I post. But if you reply, I assume you to be of good faith and good will, and hence I will reply in earnest myself. Now you will see from your own words below that we actually have no disagreement where this academic question is concerned....
> Yes, yes. Of course there is a difference, however fine, between "pure" myth and myth captured in literature. That doesn't change the fact that religion doesn't require myth or literature.
No, it doesn't, I just wanted to ascertain whether you were cognizant of the distinction, however imperfect or even impossible in some contexts. Because it was my contention there that we're stumbling on semantics as much as anything else. Hence my "Beowulf" example. That you didn't reply to it makes me wonder whether you realize its central import here between you and me. You make the most helpful distinction between "religion" and "mythology", and I'm taking you up on the challenge of hair-splitting, as I affectionately termed it, by following up with a distinction of my own, between "pure mythology" and "literature having something to do with mythology". That you recognize the distinction suggests that you should have recognized my question as reflecting a concern with "pure mythology" ("Beowulf" the Old English ballad), and not "literature having something to do with mythology" ("Beowful" the modern novel). Thus, your observation rather misses the point of my question.
> Strike the word "mythic" from that, and it agrees with my understanding of the matter. (Although, I haven't read Dumézil.)
Fine! Well, LOL and behold, that's what I've been trying to communicate all along! The truth, however multifaceted, is indeed simple in its unity! If you will, go through my posts and see if that isn't just what I've insisted from the beginning! I apologize that the question is inherently ambiguous (what's "mythology"? What's "adoption"? Is that any different than "adaptation"?? Etc.), but I don't suppose anyone with similar curiosity could have helped that.
> I don't think this is true at all. While they may have adopted Greek mythology wholesale and nearly unchanged, their own conception of the deities and their worship of them retained much of the Roman character.
Attaboy! Now that's what my professor has given to understand, such that, I note again, a fellow student attempted to support her by pointing out that Roman art is just a copy of Greek art, so it's no surprise their gods should be copies of Greek gods! Again, the question itself is rather ambiguous, and I appreciate everyone's concern that I understand how rather complex the matter may be, depending on exactly what's meant by all those words like "mythology" and "copy"...but I don't know if anyone else could have phrased it better semantically.
Now I've been lurking for quite some time on these NGs, and so I was already familiar with the POVs of regulars like yourself. Hence, I was quite surprised that you took umbrage to me...whatever animosity animates you is rather the same spirit, I suspect, which animates my professor, having nothing to do with the question immediately at hand...style over substance even among the intellectuals...there really is no hope!
> That certainly seems the case with the non-Greek Isis and Mythras. (See an earlier post I made for cites about those.)
Re: Mythology:The Greco-Roman Connection
"[...] I understand what you mean about religions without deities [...]"
I apologize for misinterpreting those words as meaning that you thought I said something about religions without deities.
> I think it was clear that I was following up with a nod of sorts.
Well, based on the "religions without deities" thing and that nothing else in your post seemed to reflect that you'd gotten my point, not only was it not a clear "nod of sorts", but it seemed you had missed my point entirely.
> But I still don't fully understand your frustration with me. What are you trying to say, exactly, "Go away"??
I'm not trying to say, "Go away". I would just ignore you instead.
I am trying to say, "Your question has been answered, but you don't seem to realize it." Your question has been answered, not "diplomatically", but straightforwardly. My frustration stems from the fact that you seem to be blind to the answers you've been given either because they don't fit the boxes you expect them to or because you'll only accept an answer that agrees with the answer you've already developed. But (and now I'll be diplomatic) that's just my impression.
> No, it doesn't, I just wanted to ascertain whether you were cognizant of the distinction, however imperfect or even impossible in some contexts. Because it was my contention there that we're stumbling on semantics as much as anything else. Hence my "Beowulf" example. That you didn't reply to it makes me wonder whether you realize its central import here between you and me. You make the most helpful distinction between "religion" and "mythology", and I'm taking you up on the challenge of hair-splitting, as I affectionately termed it, by following up with a distinction of my own, between "pure mythology" and "literature having something to do with mythology". That you recognize the distinction suggests that you should have recognized my question as reflecting a concern with "pure mythology" ("Beowulf" the Old English ballad), and not "literature having something to do with mythology" ("Beowful" the modern novel). Thus, your observation rather misses the point of my question.
My observation is that the difference between mythology and literature is moot in this discussion. We have precious little evidence that the Romans had myths--whether written or not--about their deities before they started adopted foreign myths. Indeed, there is evidence that they didn't anthropomorphize their deities and thus may not have had any native myths--whether written or not--about their deities.
I reject your contention that I'm confusing literature and myth, because I'm only talking about myth, not literature.
> Fine! Well, LOL and behold, that's what I've been trying to communicate all along! The truth, however multifaceted, is indeed simple in its unity! If you will, go through my posts and see if that isn't just what I've insisted from the beginning! I apologize that the question is inherently ambiguous (what's "mythology"? What's "adoption"? Is that any different than "adaptation"?? Etc.), but I don't suppose anyone with similar curiosity could have helped that.
Many of your messages have implied that you believed that if the Romans worshiped Jupiter and company before adopting Greek mythology that they would also have had native myths about those deities.
When you contend that the Romans worshiped Jupiter before adopting the Greek myths, I will agree with you.
When you contend that the Romans had myths about Jupiter before adopting the Greek myths, I will say, "I'm not convinced."
> Now I've been lurking for quite some time on these NGs, and so I was already familiar with the POVs of regulars like yourself. Hence, I was quite surprised that you took umbrage to me...whatever animosity animates you is rather the same spirit, I suspect, which animates my professor, having nothing to do with the question immediately at hand...style over substance even among the intellectuals...there really is no hope!
I typically give people the benefit of the doubt, and doubly so on usenet. (Though, in my younger days, that probably wasn't true.) I get frustrated when someone seems to have missed or distorted one of my points to the degree reflected in the quote about "religion without deities". I'm probably guilty of the same thing myself, though. I apologize if I've been less than polite.
> Yes, I will, sounds like an interesting example!
One of the important things to understanding the classical Romans, I believe, is to understand that they were something of a religious melting pot. They freely borrowed whatever they liked, and they typically gave it--in practice if not in literature--a distinctive Roman flavor.
Re: Mythology:The Greco-Roman Connection
> I apologize for misinterpreting those words as meaning that you thought I said something about religions without deities.
LOL
That a typo by me excites an epiphany of sympathy within you for my professor suggests extraordinary clairvoyance!
No, my apologies, for misquoting you and thus throwing you off. You wrote that religion and deities can exist without mythology. I meant to demonstrate my understanding of your statement by further noting that there are even religions without deities (and therefore, yes, why not religions and deities without mythology, as you point out).
> Well, based on the "religions without deities" thing and that nothing else in your post seemed to reflect that you'd gotten my point, not only was it not a clear "nod of sorts", but it seemed you had missed my point entirely.
Well, I had intended a nod of affirmation, but actually I was nodding off at the keyboard!
> I'm not trying to say, "Go away". I would just ignore you instead.
Okay, then, just wondering, since I really didn't suspect that we have a disagreement on the actual facts.
> I am trying to say, "Your question has been answered, but you don't seem to realize it." Your question has been answered, not "diplomatically", but straightforwardly.
Then I guess I did not find the answers "straightforward" enough...again, recall the genesis of this thread, that I had a disagreement with the English prof over an assertion or two of hers regarding the nature of Roman deities and their mythologies. I just had to get answers which "fit" as closely as possible to the "structure" of her assertions...just trying to keep it simple (an endeavor as noble as it may seem suspect when confronted with esoterica compounded by complexity).
> My frustration stems from the fact that you seem to be blind to the answers you've been given either because they don't fit the boxes you expect them to or because you'll only accept an answer that agrees with the answer you've already developed. But (and now I'll be diplomatic) that's just my impression.
No, you must understand, a response does not constitute an answer per se...I must have a "tidy" response, for all the complexities and historical and semantic uncertainties involved, because I must keep in mind my potential audience -- namely, my professor. She clearly believes the matter a simple one, so it wouldn't do to "play Socrates" any further and get all complicated with her, so I need a "tidy" answer. To that end, I have since my initial post rephrased my question in true-or-false terms, something which it seems I should have done in the very beginning, but which I did not do because I did want a "more comprehensive" understanding for myself.
If you will review the thread, you should notice that I spent more time pleading with respondents like yourself to offer a more "straightforward" answer (in the sense of "tidy" or "wieldy", as outlined above) than I did thanking those who replied, as requested, with citations and summaries thereof. I really do not think the topic has dragged on due to any resistance on my part.
> My observation is that the difference between mythology and literature is moot in this discussion. We have precious little evidence that the Romans had myths--whether written or not--about their deities before they started adopted foreign myths. Indeed, there is evidence that they didn't anthropomorphize their deities and thus may not have had any native myths--whether written or not--about their deities.
Do you really, literally mean that we have "little evidence", or do you more properly mean "no evidence at all"? If the former, then that's all the evidence necessary that the Romans had a mythology prior to the Greeks, however simplistic by comparison. That there's just one shred of evidence, as long as it's "clear enough" to claim the title of "evidence", means that the Romans had a mythology.
If you actually mean the latter, then I believe I could still argue that it's simply implausible to expect deities so revered and feared as to cause ritual obeisance to be without some attendant "explanation" or "background" or "story" such as would constitute a mythology, however primitive -- but I won't...I could, but I won't, and would concede you this point, while wondering if authors such as Dumezil and Morford & Lenardon are wrong on this point....
> I reject your contention that I'm confusing literature and myth, because I'm only talking about myth, not literature.
Okay, just wondering, because others here have raised the possibility that she had in mind the Hellenistically-founded achievements of Latin literature, seeing how she made her comments in a Literary Theory course.
> Many of your messages have implied that you believed that if the Romans worshiped Jupiter and company before adopting Greek mythology that they would also have had native myths about those deities.
Yes, you're right, I did think that, for it seems only natural that at some point someone should have had some "gossip" (that is, "legends" and such folklore constituting a body of "myth") on deities held in such importance, as evidenced by the observance of rituals, even to the point of no longer remembering their origins or significance...it's not logically implied (implication in the symbolic logic sense of "necessity"), I agree, but it does seem a most likely possibility nonetheless.
Again, I would concede the point made by your distinction between a religion with myth and one without, if and only if indeed we have no evidence at all (as opposed to some scant ones, where the mere existence of one would prove my contention) that the Romans originally had a mythology of their own involving Jupiter, Mars, etc.
> When you contend that the Romans worshiped Jupiter before adopting the Greek myths, I will agree with you.
Yes, that continues to be my belief.
> When you contend that the Romans had myths about Jupiter before adopting the Greek myths, I will say, "I'm not convinced."
Okay, understanding where you're coming from, I see how you say what you do there. Do you not believe, then, Dumezil and such others as had been cited when they make that very claim?
> I typically give people the benefit of the doubt, and doubly so on usenet. (Though, in my younger days, that probably wasn't true.) I get frustrated when someone seems to have missed or distorted one of my points to the degree reflected in the quote about "religion without deities". I'm probably guilty of the same thing myself, though. I apologize if I've been less than polite.
No, not at all, that you invest time in a response at all demonstrates some sort of concern. For all the frustration you may share with my professor, you have given more time and attention.
> One of the important things to understanding the classical Romans, I believe, is to understand that they were something of a religious melting pot. They freely borrowed whatever they liked, and they typically gave it--in practice if not in literature--a distinctive Roman flavor.
Yes, I did understand this, it is a fact which informs the common opinion that the Romans therefore had no native gods, which is what I had taken issue with from the beginning. Mythology surrounding these gods, as opposed to these gods and the religion surrounding them, also came under investigation due to their sometimes over-lapping provinces.
On that note, I wish to thank you once again for your correspondence. Most unwittingly I may have taxed your patience most sorely, but my treasury of knowledge has certainly increased -- thank you for your time.
Edwin Menes
Unregistered User
(1/2/04 7:15 am) Reply
Re: Mythology:The Greco-Roman Connection
' . . . the common opinion that the Romans had no native gods . . .,' you wrote. Did you mistype 'gods' for 'myth'? I've never heard of anyone saying that they had no native gods, and if THAT's what the prof is saying, she can be easily demolished. (And I'll help.)
If, on the other hand, it's a matter of myth, the abundance of responses to your initial question should indicate that there is no tidy answer.
As for Dumezil, his theories have not fared well in the last 20 years. His real interest was the social structure of the original Indo-European speaking population. His body of work reminds me of 'The Golden Bough'. All the evidence fits the theory.
Any definition of myth I've ever seen insists that a myth is first of all a story. Off the top of my head I can't give you a provably native Roman story, but I can give a (probably) native Roman belief that contradicts the Greek equivalent. Cronus was the father of Zeus. His ultimate end (story in Hesiod) was confinement in Tartarus. The Roman 'equivalent' was Saturn. Saturn was the tutelary deity of Italy during the Golden Age. Here it's pretty plainly Greek myth that later 'adjusted' by having the Titans eventually freed and Cronus going west.
Have you directly talked to anyone in Classics at Hunter? The only name I know there is Tamara Greene, but I know nothing more about her--nor her politics. A lot of the back-and-forthness of this exchange, especially the various subtleties people were trying to get across (not always successfully in my case), might have been taken care of in a
couple hours' conversation.
What else? 'Instructor' at most colleges means no doctorate and probably not tenure-track. She is (or should be) subject to frequent evaluation. I've never heard of a teacher being able to ban a student from a class without a lengthy process involving both the dept. chair and the college dean (or their deputies). The only successful instances I know of were matters of the threat of physical harm. Unless you're 6-6 and leer every time you say 'myth' (I mean that as a joke), I doubt you have anything to worry about. As for her taking it out on you with the final course grade, surely there is a procedure for appeal of a grade.
Next, I wish you hadn't posted her name. The law of libel as it applies to internet communications is a gray area, and court decisions have gone both ways. But if she ever considers herself to have been harmed professionally and can trace ANY of that harm to your post, you might add some color to the gray. I hope noone has undertaken to find her e-mail address and write to her directly. After all, we have only your side of things.
Finally, I have to say that I consider literary theory to be one of the bigger scams in contemporary academe (with very few exceptions). Semiotics is a version of New Criticism. New Historicism is old Philology. Foucault has an obsession few people share. And so on. My prejudices were with you from the beginning, but your writing made you appear to be such a smart ass that I couldn't help trying to spank it.
Re: Mythology:The Greco-Roman Connection
> ' . . . the common opinion that the Romans had no native gods . . .,' you wrote. Did you mistype 'gods' for 'myth'? I've never heard of anyone saying that they had no native gods, and if THAT's what the prof is saying, she can be easily demolished. (And I'll help.)
Okay, at the risk of further opprobrium, let me give a full chronology:
1. The course on Literary Theory really began with that class on the history of literary development in the West, meant to provide a background or context to our studies this semester.
2. She remarked of the Romans something along the lines of that their gods and myths were based on Greek gods and myths.
3. I raised my hand, she recognized my right to speak, I said something along the lines of how that's a "common misconception" (that particular phrase I do recall) that the Romans simply copied the Greeks with regards to their gods and myths.
4. She responded that it's "common knowledge" that that's the case, that the Romans copied the Greeks, saying something along the lines of how the Romans were consciously modeling themselves on Greek culture, citing the Aeneid in particular.
5. Another student chimed in to note that even Roman statues were copies of Greek ones. Still another spoke to try to reconcile our two views.
(Later on, during a survey of the Middle Ages, a student asked whether the Roman Empire and the Holy Roman Empire were "the same" [that's a quote]. She informed him that it was, that it was "the same". I remember this answer in particular not only because it was so brief, but because the student himself asked her again, as if
double-checking.)
6. I then asked on these NGs which was really the case, or which was more the case. I e-mailed her my informal findings.
7. Far from being impressed, she was quite upset, feeling like I'm telling her her job when I suggested (and not "demanded") that she note for the class if her opinions change as a result of those citations.
8. She replies via e-mail, telling me she doesn't care about cites, that scholars can disagree, it wasn't important to our course, what's my point, it's not my "function" as a student to "pick apart" a professor's lectures anyway, hey wait a minute you're not even a registered English major and I only over-tallied you because you told me you were (I meant to declare but had not actually done so) and "don't forget that I admitted you" in the first place, if you want to stay in the course you better answer correctly....
Save for my own occasions of venting here, that's how the situation remains.
Yeah, we're both being pig-headed about our own rectitude, as you'd wrote...but somehow that seems to be besides the point...whatever personal pride may be at stake, the issues still remain whether I have a right to openly disagree, whether she has a right to kick me out -- and of course, whether those Romans renamed Greek gods and goddesses and so on and so forth ad infinitum....
> If, on the other hand, it's a matter of myth, the abundance of responses to your initial question should indicate that there is no tidy answer.
If that there is no tidy answer reflects a level of controversy to the matter, then it cannot be "common knowledge" in the sense she's obviously applying the expression -- true, proven, widely agreed-upon.
> As for Dumezil, his theories have not fared well in the last 20 years. His real interest was the social structure of the original Indo-European speaking population. His body of work reminds me of 'The Golden Bough'. All the evidence fits the theory.
Well! This is news to me! Wow, you know, I did inquire of Hunter's Classics Department about Dumezil's reputation...but I received no particular answer to that particular question...I really can't help but shake my head -- if I "keep it simple" I'm accused of glossing over things, if I don't I'm being litigious about things...golly...but
I probably got on her nerves, too!
> Any definition of myth I've ever seen insists that a myth is first of all a story.
Sure thing -- but "folklore" is not quite the same as "literature", and it has been suggested that she may have meant by "Roman myth" "Roman literature", seeing how it was a literary criticsim course. I was speaking about "myth" in its more "primitive" and "original" state, as opposed to a polished retelling.
> Off the top of my head I can't give you a provably native Roman story, but I can give a (probably) native Roman belief that contradicts the Greek equivalent. Cronus was the father of Zeus. His ultimate end (story in Hesiod) was confinement in Tartarus. The Roman 'equivalent' was Saturn. Saturn was the tutelary deity of Italy during the Golden Age. Here it's pretty plainly Greek myth that later 'adjusted' by having the Titans eventually freed and Cronus going west.
Yes, these matters are indeed complex, with no clear record oftentimes of their genesis and development...but precisely because it is so complex, I felt obliged to note that there's more than one understanding....
> Have you directly talked to anyone in Classics at Hunter? The only name I know there is Tamara Greene, but I know nothing more about her--nor her politics. A lot of the back-and-forthness of this exchange, especially the various subtleties people were trying to get across (not always successfully in my case), might have been taken care of in a couple hours' conversation.
Yes, actually, she has indeed been my contact, the one whom I'd consulted -- her specialties include ancient history, and Roman and Greek religion! However, I had thought an e-mail correspondence would be best, as it affords the option of allowing one to respond at one's leisure, and as it allows one to first proof-read one's response, etc. However, after two exchanges, I'm afraid I've "overwhelmed" her as well...I've heard nothing more, and I don't expect to call upon her in person.
> What else? 'Instructor' at most colleges means no doctorate and probably not tenure-track.
That's true, she's "just" a grad student herself.
> She is (or should be) subject to frequent evaluation. I've never heard of a teacher being able to ban a student from a class without a lengthy process involving both the dept. chair and the college dean (or their deputies).
She told me in private conversation that she was going to arrange a meeting between us and the dep't. chair "if this keeps up" (not a quote that, but faithful to her remarks, I say). By e-mail, I have the rather less-explicit statement "you need to think really hard
about why you wanted to be in this class, and, if you want to stay in the class, you need to have a very good answer...".
> The only successful instances I know of were matters of the threat of physical harm. Unless you're 6-6 and leer every time you say 'myth' (I mean that as a joke), I doubt you have anything to worry about. As for her taking it out on you with the final course grade, surely there is a procedure for appeal of a grade.
Well, believe it or not, I actually seem to be back in her good graces, by all outward appearances. I made three points about "The Great Gatsby" during class, with two of which she agreed...the third point was yet another contradiction of something she'd said (she believes a case could be made for a "Judeo-Christian reading" of sorts of that book, based on equating Gatsby with the Christ [due to passages where he's referred to as "the Son of God", etc.]), but I took extra care to show the proper deference ("I THINK [emphasizing that this isn't supposed to be the Gospel Truth] one MIGHT [intimating that someone else could, but not I] suggest POSSIBLY [as opposed to "state definitely" with authority and confidence] that..." such an analysis is stretching things, grasping at straws -- sometimes a cigar is just a cigar and all that), and she seemed to have picked up on my newfound humility by also carefully choosing her words in noting her disagreement of my disagreement.
But, we shall see!
> Next, I wish you hadn't posted her name. The law of libel as it applies to internet communications is a gray area, and court decisions have gone both ways. But if she ever considers herself to have been harmed professionally and can trace ANY of that harm to your post, you might add some color to the gray. I hope noone has undertaken to find her e-mail address and write to her directly. After all, we have only your side of things.
Yes, I had the same misgivings, and I plead guilty to a moment's indiscretion animated by anger of my own.
But as long as I don't misrepresent her, I should be fine by the law (and therein lies this Catch-22 dilemma: if I don't reveal enough of the situation, I could be accused of distortion, but if I do, I may be violating her privacy -- and of course, this isn't just a matter about Greco-Roman connections, there's some subtext involved...who knows, maybe being a single mom feminist, she naturally takes umbrage at a male student who contradicts her in-class, and, who knows, maybe it is as she alleges that I just "have a problem with authority", so the frightful combination of that and whatever else is operating has lead to this comedy...so you see why I say this is great material for a
novel!).
Besides, that a lot of this took place in public, in school (a lot except the e-mail correspondence), might help me should I need any legal defense.
Fact: we had a disagreement over the Greco-Roman connection.
Fact: I came here to ascertain the validity of our two positions.
Fact: I posted her name and excerpts from our e-mail correspondence, as the occasion arose (in response to these threads), upon her threat.
I was initially afraid to name her, and had allowed that to so do would indeed make it as personal as she seemed to have been taking it, but when she threatened to have me dropped from her course, I got angry myself and thought that if this matter snowballs further, why not post her name, because it will be public enough when I call the ACLU to allege censorship!
Well, at least I have, as I say, learned a lot about this topic! And if she is indeed alerted to these usenet threads (she seems pretty Net-savvy, actually -- part of the course requirements is to regularly post to a forum on a members-only server of the college), maybe she will learn what I've been trying to communicate to her about our original contention!
Sorry if I sound cavalier -- for I do agree with your misgivings over this one spot -- but the die's been cast, the Rubicon crossed, etc.
> Finally, I have to say that I consider literary theory to be one of the bigger scams in contemporary academe (with very few exceptions).
LOL! That is indeed the common complaint against it, even among (especially among?) writers. This is my first real, "academically rigorous" introduction to it, but I get the sense that its practioners are just like my professor -- friendly, liberal, but dogmatic.
> Semiotics is a version of New Criticism. New Historicism is old Philology. Foucault has an obsession few people share. And so on. My prejudices were with you from the beginning,
Truth to tell, I actually find literary theory interesting -- we all have philosophies or world-views which inform our perceptions, and literary theory is just an examination of narrative through certain select lenses.
Anyway, thank you very much for your short criticism of, uh, Criticism...I will definitely keep all that in mind as I learn these theories this semester -- I will be viewing these theories, which are ways of viewing literature, with your views in mind!
> but your writing made you appear to be such a smart ass that I couldn't help trying to spank it.
Yes, I understand that -- the conceit is that free debate is freely countenanced, but the expectation is that disagreement must be suggested in a most humble, humble manner. I'm sure she thought I was being a smart-ass -- and in my follow-up e-mail to her after that class (since I had not the opportunity to chat afterward), I'd noted very explicitly that "I was in no way trying to be that smart-Aleck in every course who hijacks the class with some digression or other...", imploring her to "forgive me if I spoke -- and continue to speak -- out of turn", explaining that "my only wish remains to simply note current thinking on these matters...really, I did have the interests of the Academy as a place of discourse and learning at heart" -- but ultimately, smart-ass or not, if "scholarship" is a real value and not mere convention, the way to address disagreement isn't to threaten expulsion, go into a student's records, tell the student it's not the student's "function" to "pick apart" the professor's lecture, etc.
Frankly, I'm sick of that conceit, that one has to affect humility in a disagreement. I find false modesty much more condescending, and if someone cannot see the merits of a controversy simply on account of the style in which it's presented, then they are blind to the substance of the debate, and likely would not have been an honest partner for any investigation anyway.
For your reference, I much prefer the British parliamentary debates over that simultaneously timid and repressive sort found in our Congress. A gentleman always says what he means, and means what he says. If I believe in it, then I will offer it as God's own truth. If there be disagreement, let us investigate, a la Socrates. I am not ashamed of any ignorance on my part, for we all have gaps in our knowledge, but I would be ashamed of remaining in it.
Re: Mythology:The Greco-Roman Connection
> Are you cognizant of the distinction between "literature" and "mythology"? It is an artificial one, often over-lapping and tangled up -- but still useful at times. E.g., "Beowulf" is Anglo-Saxon mythology (well, actually, it's likely a retelling of folklore, like
the faery tales from the Brothers Grimm or the Arthurian romances), but "'Beowulf' by John Garner" isn't -- it's "literature" (apologies to those who find Gardner a bore). I believe you may be falling into the same error my English professor did -- that by "mythology", you mean both "Beowulf" the Danish ballad and "Beowulf" the novel. Thus, under Mr. Stonehouse's charitable reading of her, she had in mind what ought to be more explicitly, and properly, called "literature" when she claimed that the Romans renamed the Greek gods (yes, in that sense, the Romans "translated" the gods' names just as they did any other Greek word into Latin).
I want to compare what you wrote above to your description of the incident that set off these threads.
> 1. The course on Literary Theory really began with that class on the history of literary development in the West, meant to provide a background or context to our studies this semester.
2. She remarked of the Romans something along the lines of that their gods and myths were based on Greek gods and myths.
3. I raised my hand, she recognized my right to speak, I said something along the lines of how that's a "common misconception" (that particular phrase I do recall) that the Romans simply copied the Greeks with regards to their gods and myths.
4. She responded that it's "common knowledge" that that's the case, that the Romans copied the Greeks, saying something along the lines of how the Romans were consciously modeling themselves on Greek culture, | citing the Aeneid in particular.
Based on *your report* of what she said, we have
a) Roman "gods and myths were based on Greek gods and myths"
The consensus of people on this newsgroup who are better informed than I has been that for gods, this varies; for myths, it's nearly 100% true.
b) "Romans were consciously modeling themselves on Greek culture", particularly in the -Aeneid-.
This is almost self-evident from the record of Roman civilisation, and you do not contest it.
So I'm pretty unclear on exactly what it is that you object to about what she said. Seems to me there are three different ways to look at this, very roughly:
1) Literature. Was Roman literature based on Greek? Yes, hands down, beyond a doubt, period, end of discussion. Frankly, I don't know what source you could find that *didn't* confirm this. Several of the oldest surviving or known Roman literary works were *written* in Greek; several others were translations *from* Greek. So it's a good thing that you're not interested in literature, though odd, for someone taking a class in (I repeat) literary theory.
2) Mythology. Were Roman stories about the gods based on Greek? Here things get awkward. Essentially all our Roman stories about the gods come from literary sources, and are therefore suspect of Greek influence *as literature*. We don't, far as I've heard, know about stories that nurses and grannies told children, or that priests recited at holy rituals, or anything like that. We don't even have anything equivalent to Pausanias's (*literary*) record of what various Greek locals had to say about their local gods and heroes. What we do have of mythology that in any sense can be called Roman is overwhelmingly Greek. I know of no single source that is entirely Roman and not Greek in origin; others here may know of one, but may not (I'd have thought they'd have named one by now, otherwise).
3) Religion. Here, obviously, the Romans were largely independent. Doubtless there were various forms of Greek influence (e.g. the import of Apollo!), but you can't seriously claim that the whole structure of Roman religion was of Greek origin.
So based on your report, you chose to interpret "gods and myths" as "religion", or else you bought an essentially incorrect idea of what we actually know about Roman mythology.
I want to go into two further things here. One is sort of a digression, but I'll do it first anyway, because the second is likely to piss you off.
Digression: Greek mythology is a really weird thing.
There's a book ascribed to someone named Apollodorus (he's sometimes called Pseudo-Apollodorus because there's someone else named Apollodorus who isn't the same guy) which basically catalogues all the heroes and gods and who's descended from who and so forth. In addition, there's Hesiod's -Theogony-, which does the same
thing for gods only. *In addition*, there's scads of poems in which it was customary for gods and heroes to take speaking parts.
This sort of structure *IS NOT NORMAL* for early literatures. Period. Full stop.
Nothing like it existed in Sanskrit until *long* after the beginnings of literature. I'm not at all sure there's anything like it in Chinese at *all*. We have a lot of prose stories in Irish about heroes, and a few in both Irish and Welsh about gods, but in neither case do we have anything remotely systematic, unless you count the -Lebor Gabala-. I can't think of a single other European literature that offers anything of the sort. In Arabic, it's absent; in Persian, it comes long after the beginnings, probably over a millennium later.
(Whereas Hesiod is, according to the theories of Barry Powell, less than a *century* after the beginnings of Greek literature.)
In Egyptian, there are three or four written theogonies, which agree on essentially nothing, and which have no perceptible influence on literature, *even* the minuscule proportion of literature that had anything to do with stories about the gods.
In Sumerian, we have stories about gods and heroes, but no systematising that I've heard of; in Akkadian, stories about gods and heroes, and systematising of gods, who existed in a roughly Roman profusion. In Hittite, we have no systematisation that I know of. Nor in Ugaritic. In Hebrew, well, um, yes, and if you buy the very latest radical views it's only a century or so after the literary beginnings, but I think *most* people would still subscribe to several centuries, if not more, between the books of Genesis and of Jubilees.
Oh, but I left one rather important example *out* of the above: Norse literature. In which we do have a system, and in which we do have lots of stories about lots of gods.
However. First of all, the system is much later. I gather if there *is* a single literary work behind it, that work is by Snorri Sturluson; but the oldest works we have date from about the 700s, five centuries earlier. Second, the Norse myths were, like the Greek ones, generally written down by people who no longer believed in their literal truth. If they ever had.
We *don't know* whether the Greeks ever literally believed the myths. Gregory Nagy has made something of a career out of arguing that the whole business of Olympians who knew each other was an invention of bards like Homer in the century in which Homer lived. (See, notably, -Pindar's Homer-, you want mainly the first and I think also the fourth sections. Various others of his books touch on this also.
I think the introduction to Jenny Strauss Clay's -Politics of Olympus- is a relatively helpful concise introduction to this line of thinking, but my description of it is not expanded on in any written source I've seen.)
We *do* know that we owe most of what we have of Greek mythology, other than Homer and Hesiod (and, I suppose, Pindar, if you can call his stuff myths), to people who time and again explained *indetail* how untrustworthy Homer (in particular) really was, or to
their contemporaries. Can you read Euripides from any position other than profound distrust of the myths? Just one generation later, we have men like Thucydides and Plato making mincemeat of them.
In a nutshell, it's my opinion that when people ditch a set of beliefs without replacing them, or at least without replacing them very fervently (the Norse case?), is when you have a shot at getting a set of stories about the gods. At other times, some combination of the sheer awfulness of the gods (who would dare tell stories about them?) or the sheer frivolity of storytelling (why waste precious parchment for this?) seems to win out. (Much of what little we have of Egyptian mythology we owe to magical spells: you told the story, you repeated some nonsense words, you got your magic. Some of the Akkadian epics appear to be stories told while idols were being put through their ritual paces.)
You seem to be assuming that Greek mythology is the human norm, that we should expect the Romans to have had something like it because everyone did. I know of no evidence that it is so, and much that it isn't. I think between the categories "literature" and "religion", which exist in many societies, "mythology" is only one possible bridge, and a fairly uncommon one.
This post is already long, and will become infinite if I try to provide you references for everything I say; let me know if there are specific items you want leads on.
OK. Digression over.
Now to your conduct:
Way up top there, in the quote I'm following up to, you referred to John Gardner's
-Grendel- as John Garner's -Beowulf-. And you referred to some version of -Beowulf- as a Danish ballad.
None of these errors is at all relevant to your point, is it?
Well, I don't see that an error in apparently the first half-hour of a semester course, an *explicitly* overview session, is at all relevant to that course *either*. Nor do I see that you've shown that an error happened. (Well, except for that bit about the HRE, if that really happened the way you've been telling it.)
So basically, at this point, all my money is on the grad student professor. Even though I've read only your side of it. You seem to have picked an argument for the sake of picking an argument, right at the beginning of a class, about something fundamentally unrelated to the topic of the course, and about something you did not in fact have any strong knowledge of. I'm not thrilled with the idea of someone trying to kick a student out of a class for some in-class objections, but you come off as so argumentative here that I'm not sure you aren't even worse in class. Regardless, as to the original incident, it looks to me like you made a stink about something that she may not even have gotten wrong, and then instead of shrugging it off you actually chose to dig in your heels and keep arguing it outside of class.
Well, this appears to have gotten you an education, so this is to the good; but I can hardly blame your instructor for being unhappy about it, since she's presumably been exposed only to your words, and those have been combative, repetitive, and largely lacking in substance.
You write a lot like I did before I read Strunk & White, so I'm picturing you as a freshman in college. I hope this is the case. This would mean that you can still learn better and indeed you are almost certain *to* learn better, and I'm seeing signs in this thread of your doing so, so I'm *not* trying to write you off, or insult you gratuitously. But I *am* trying to convey that you need to learn that there are times and places for everything, and like that, and the very beginning of your first class with a particular teacher is not the time and place for picking fights unless they really need to be picked.
Joe Bernstein
PS In my second-last class, a history of books and printing, my teacher reported that the Turks had fought the Mongols in Central Asia, and brought back knowledge of paper. I went to him after class and said "Um, close, but it was Arabs and Chinese..." He corrected himself at the next session. In my last class, on databases, my teacher put forward ISBNs as unique identifiers, after in several previous sessions students had done so, and based on my bookstore experience I said in class, "No, they aren't, sorry." A time and a place... What I can offer by way of examples.
Re: Mythology:The Greco-Roman Connection
> Way up top there, in the quote I'm following up to, you referred to John Gardner's
-Grendel- as John Garner's -Beowulf-. And you referred to some version of <Beowulf> as a Danish ballad. None of these errors is at all relevant to your point, is it?
Yes, sorry about "Grendel". But I did recall "Beowulf" as an Anglo-Saxon ballad, and ascribed it equally to the Danes on account of my understanding that the Angles were in possession of modern-day Danmark before their migration to England. All the same, I am happy that you are familiar with the references used in my point.
Now, did you actually have a disagreement there?
> Well, I don't see that an error in apparently the first half-hour of a semester course, an *explicitly* overview session, is at all relevant to that course *either*.
Then you need to look harder at your own assumptions.
Two ways of pursuing them:
1.
Is a professor in the habit of lecturing on things not relevant to the course? Assuming that there's a method to one's madness, as the saying goes, the historical survey wasn't given in vain. If it was worth class time to her, it's worth class time to me. And given my long-standing layman's interest in the ancient world, I attempted an observation. You seem blind to the fact that I have a right to so do.
2.
What is "relevant", and who decides? Such a question seems at the very heart of a course on literary theory, no? When even the historical record is accorded so little respect, what hope has a student's essays on subjective matters of art and taste and
sensibility?
> Nor do I see that you've shown that an error happened.
And as I have said on more than one occasion, it was most unfortunate that at the first or second sign of a contradiction, she cut me off, so that we were unable to settle the semantics of our disagreement first, to see whether we were even engaged in the same controversy or whether we meant different definitions by the same word.
But, be that as it may, by "the Romans renamed the Greek gods and goddesses" I understood her to have meant that they encountered Greece and, despite their awe, christened Greek Zeus Roman Iuppiter, Ares Mars, etc. (perhaps in a pique of pride, whatever). I did not understand that to be the case, and tried to note that. If you will review the posts which have supported this understanding -- curious that you detractors have not responded to them -- you will find that even if I am not altogether "right", neither am I altogether wrong, and thus the matter is of some complexity and not as settled as the professor's remarks lead one to erroneously believe.
> (Well, except for that bit about the HRE, if that really happened the way you've been telling it.)
Yes it did; why believe my report when you feel I can be shown to have erred, but doubt me just when I can be shown to have been in the right? She also thought the British bought Manhattan island from the natives, but luckily that era of history had more acquaintances amongst my fellows and they supported me in my correction that it was
the Dutch who had so acquired Manhattan. To her credit, she quickly sized up the opposition and deferred, I should think, to our numbers (three).
> So basically, at this point, all my money is on the grad student professor. Even though I've read only your side of it.
But you've not read my side of it, you've only gone by your own misinterpretation of it, which is not the same thing. For while it is not clear exactly where you and I differ on the historical facts (I have excised the first half of your reply from this post because this
latter half is the easier to disprove by far), you are clearly mistaken in believing that I had no right to contradict her, which belief may be safely inferred from your many comments on my poor timing and choice of place, if not implicitly my place, personally, as a student.
> You seem to have picked an argument for the sake of picking an argument,
How is noting another POV "picking" an argument, in the belligerent way you're suggesting?
> right at the beginning of a class,
As opposed to later in the semester when the Romans are forgotten?
> about something fundamentally unrelated to the topic of the course,
So if she had claimed that the earth is flat, I should just keep silent? That too would have been "fundamentally unrelated to the topic of the course".
> and about something you did not in fact have any strong knowledge of.
What constitutes "strong" knowledge, and since when has that become a prerequisite for noting another possibility?
What makes you think that she had "strong" knowledge, seeing how you are not sure whether her comments were pertaining to literature or religion or mythology?
> I'm not thrilled with the idea of someone trying to kick a student out of a class for some in-class objections,
And does that attempt not so strike you as too oddly inconsistent with her liberal values and those of the Academy, such that you ought to conclude that it was not a matter of scholarship with which she was concerned, but personal pride and ego? And here you are, blaming me, the victim of tyranny.
> but you come off as so argumentative here that I'm not sure you aren't even worse in class.
What do you mean by "argumentative"? If I don't agree, should that be counted against me? If I respond seriously at length, should that be a negative thing? I marvel at how easily people resort to such descriptions to condemn someone for a disagreement – by definition, one who disagrees is "arguing"!
It is true that you do not know how the incident played out in class, but you misread me here on usenet when you think being "argumentative" is a necessarilyl bad thing, and that I have been "argumentative" in that bad way simply because I honor my detractors with a considered response!
> Regardless, as to the original incident, it looks to me like you made a stink about something that she may not even have gotten wrong, and then instead of shrugging it off you actually chose to dig in your heels and keep arguing it outside of class.
But why should I shrug this off? It started out as very innocent observation on my part, but snowballed because she continues to perceive it as a personal attack. It is simply a case of ego on her part. I had apologized by e-mail, right after my initial one, when I
saw that even without observers she could not calm herself down, and yet I myself became roused by the injustice of her threat, and her remarks to "remember that it was [she] who over-tallied me", when nothing I have said ever made this personal.
Likewise, I am not letting go of this thread either, as you can see, because I don't care to be misrepresented. It is not personal at all, but somehow people take it personally. I submit that you folks have to learn to calm down and practice that humility you preach to me (and by extension the student population).
> Well, this appears to have gotten you an education, so this is to the good;
Yes, which was my aim all along, to determine which is the case. Now why is that a problem? And why is it that you unpaid strangers enlightened me more than she who is hired for the purpose of my education??
> but I can hardly blame your instructor for being unhappy about it, since she's presumably been exposed only to your words, and those have been combative,
How have I been "combative"?? Do recall that you and those like you are the ones performing ad hominem attacks, not I. It is instructive, in divining the motives of my detractors like yourself, to consider that they have not addressed the posts which have concurred with my understanding, but have replied to me in as a much a personal capacity as they should have restrained themselves to do in the scholastic one.
> repetitive,
I only sound repetitive because you people constantly bring up the same shibboleths about "respecting" The Professor. That is all your abhorrence boils down to.
> and largely lacking in substance.
Fine one you are to talk about substance, seeing how your complaint thus far has concentrated on my style.
> You write a lot like I did before I read Strunk & White, so I'm picturing you as a freshman in college. I hope this is the case.
And by what power of clairvoyance am I supposed to understand our similarities of writing?
And what of Strunk & White? They counsel against using commonplaces such as "as a matter of fact", "please find attached" -- but, actually, what would be the case were no one to use them at all? Would correspondence not be further improved by an extension of this logic, that we are freed from even "Dear So-and-so" and "Yours Truly"?
Whatever the case: this is usenet, I can't believe you expect better of such a forum but think the classroom a less sanctimonious where differing opinions are concerned.
> This would mean that you can still learn better and indeed you are almost certain *to* learn better, and I'm seeing signs in this thread of your doing so, so I'm *not* trying to write you off, or insult you gratuitously.
I don't at all feel insulted, but I am grossly frustrated that my rather specific questions beget as much criticism of my style as any response to their substance! I have been very clear from the outset, and have further refined the thrust of my queries since then, but what impresses you and those like you most is the fact that I should have deigned to disagree with a professor in class so early in the semester! And that I have to repeat myself to every new accuser is counted further against me! For there is nothing new to your charges against me, nor Mr. Fisher's, nor Mr. Minter's -- I believe Mr. Menes was the first to take note of my alleged "pig-headedness" and all that -- and yet here I am, REPEATING MYSELF because I take your response with more seriousness than I probably should, from that "practical" or "political" POV you hold ("relevancy", "time and place").
> But I *am* trying to convey that you need to learn that there are times and places for everything, and like that, and the very beginning of your first class with a particular teacher is not the time and place for picking fights unless they really need to be picked.
Joe Bernstein
It is unfortunate that open disagreement, no matter how civilly conveyed, constitutes "picking a fight".
Furthermore, you are arguing on grounds of practicality, and not on moral grounds at all, despite your pretensions. Surely it wasn't the "political" thing to do, but I really was hoping that this big-time liberal, who actually expressed solidarity with the black student who demanded more black authors on the syllabus of another English course, would countenance another POV from a student. I actually thought it would have been interesting! It is so commonly assumed that the Romans copied the Greeks, the way we travel abroad and imagine that all the world speaks English and are Americanized, I really thought it would have been interesting to alert people to the fact that there are
other POVs regarding what she seemed to have been saying ("the Romans renamed the Greek gods and goddesses…").
> PS In my second-last class, a history of books and printing, my teacher reported that the Turks had fought the Mongols in Central Asia, and brought back knowledge of paper. I went to him after class and said "Um, close, but it was Arabs and Chinese..." He corrected himself at the next session. In my last class, on databases, my teacher put forward ISBNs as unique identifiers, after in several previous sessions students had done so, and based on my bookstore experience I said in class, "No, they aren't, sorry." A time and a place... What I can offer by way of examples.
A time and place? No, the classroom is the best place for an honest disagreement, and it's unfortunate that people like you feel it is a sanctuary for a professor's ego, in effect if not in intent. For why else should anyone take offense at so esoteric, so innocuous a suggestion as mine was?
If you honestly examine your argument, you will see that it is just that very-same conservative POV which has been put forth throughout history, whether we're talking Socrates or abolition or Luther's 95 Theses or Vietnam or the eight-hour workday or Galileo's condemnation by the Church..."there is a time and place for everything"....
Lucius Alter illi qui "Disgusting" anglice (Latine odiosus) subscripsit sal.
Temet ipsum erigas quin sis Philoctetes. Vulnus, ut mihi videtur, tuo est decori cuius superbia sit flos.
Scripseras:
> the classroom is the best place for an honest disagreement, and it's unfortunate that people like you feel it is a sanctuary for a professor's ego, in effect if not in intent. For why else should anyone take offense at so esoteric, so innocuous a suggestion as mine was?
Magnopere assentior dummodo disceptatio sit, ut dicas, proba sinceraque. At tamen proposita argumentaque tua lectoribus tuis inopiam tantam produnt peritia ut videaris, quamvis id nolis, puerilis temerariusque imperitusque. Si suasor tibi essem, tibi unice commendarem refrenationem locutionis et iudici ut proposita argumentaque tua sub luminibus rationis et miserationis crescerent et florerent. Quamquam mihi non sumo neque arrogo ut tibi soli rem committam, verba Doctoris Angelici te in misericordiis disceptationis tuis fortasse consolabantur. Tolle igitur et lege:
Quia quaesisti a me, in Christo mihi carissime Ioannes, qualiter te studere oporteat in thesauro scientiae acquirendo, tale a me tibi traditur consilium: ut per rivulos, non statim in mare, eligas introire, quia per faciliora ad difficiliora oportet devenire. Haec est ergo monitio mea et instructio tua. Tardiloquum te esse iubeo et tarde ad locutorium accedentem; conscientiae puritatem amplectere. Orationi vacare non desinas; cellam frequenter diligas si vis in cellam vinariam introduci. Omnibus te amabilem exhibe; nihil quaere penitus de factis aliorum; nemini te multum familiarem ostendas, quia nimia familiaritas parit contemptum et subtractionis a studio materiam subministrat; de verbis et factis saecularium nullatenus te intromittas; discursus super omnia fugias; sanctorum et bonorum imitari vestigia non omittas; non respicias a quo audias, sed quidquid boni dicatur, memoriae recommenda; ea quae legis et audis, fac ut intelligas; de dubiis te certifica; et quidquid poteris in armariolo mentis reponere satage, sicut cupiens vas implere; altiora te ne quaesieris. Illa sequens vestigia, frondes et fructus in vinea Domini Sabaoth utiles, quandiu vitam habueris, proferes et produces. Haec si sectatus fueris, ad id attingere poteris, quod affectas.
Amicos cubanos habeo qui hac sententia posteriori utuntur Hispanice ad genus hominis peculiare depingendum: buche y plumas. Ne sis illa avis falsa.
Cura ut valeas.
Francis A Miniter
Unregistered User
(1/2/04 7:57 am) Reply
Re: Mythology:The Greco-Roman Connection
>What do you mean by "argumentative"? If I don't agree, should that be counted against me?
Not in itself. The right to disagree openly is a fundamental political right, at least in the USA. It is, however, not a fundamental right in a classroom setting, especially if there are other students, who have paid for the course and want to hear what the teacher has to say on the topics described in the catalogue and syllabus. Your "rights" there are limited so as not to interfere with the rights of the other students.
>If I respond seriously at length, should that be a negative thing?
Absolutely. We are not talking about you declaiming on a soapbox at Speakers' Corner in Hyde Park, but in a classroom on a relatively trivial matter. Definitely negative. Please understand, I am a strong proponent, advocate even, of the free speech clause of the First Amendment of the United States Constitution.
>I marvel at how easily people resort to such descriptions to condemn someone for a disagreement – by definition, one who disagrees is "arguing"!
Actually, no one has been condemning you. Certainly not Mr. Bernstein. We have been trying to point out to you that the way you are going about all this is neither effective nor persuasive. But it is very irritating, and we don't even have to put up with you in class for an hour at a time three times a week.
>It is true that you do not know how the incident played out in class, but you misread me here on usenet when you think being "argumentative" is a necessarilyl bad thing, and that I have been "argumentative" in that bad way simply because I honor my detractors with a considered response!
Endless picking at a minor point is not honoring of anyone, yourself least of all.
>But why should I shrug this off?
Because it does not matter.
> It started out as very innocent observation on my part, but snowballed because she continues to perceive it as a personal attack.
Maybe, you inadvertently gave her reason to feel attacked.
> It is simply a case of ego on her part.
?????? After 40+ emails to this newsgroup, whining about your "mistreatment" by her, you talk of HER ego?????
> I had apologized by e-mail, right after my initial one, when I saw that even without observers she could not calm herself down, and yet I myself became roused by the injustice of her threat, and her remarks to "remember that it was [she] who over-tallied me", when nothing I have said ever made this personal.
Your remarks about her in this newsgroup have been personal in nature. See comment above re ego. Also see earlier remarks belittling her standing as an instructor not a professor.
>Likewise, I am not letting go of this thread either, as you can see, because I don't care to be misrepresented.
I long ago feared that despite our best advice, you would continue your obsession here. I repeat what I said before. Make an end of it. There is nothing in all this that merits such compulsive hammering.
> It is not personal at all, but somehow people take it personally. The only person taking any of this personally is you.
-snip-
>How have I been "combative"?? Do recall that you and those like you are the ones performing ad hominem attacks, not I. It is instructive, in divining the motives of my detractors like yourself, to consider that they have not addressed the posts which have concurred with my understanding, but have replied to me in as a much a personal capacity as they should have restrained themselves to do in the scholastic one.
Your whole reply to Mr. Bernstein is a good example of being combative. He is only trying to help you.
>I only sound repetitive because you people constantly bring up the same shibboleths about "respecting" The Professor. That is all your abhorrence boils down to.
Society, whether of the Americas, Europe, Africa, Arab, Asia or whereever, is built on respect. If you do not show respect, you will not receive it. If you persist in not showing respect, you will end up friendless and jobless. Your distain for respect is causing you to be alienated from those with whom you would discourse. It is not a healthy way to act.
Re: Mythology:The Greco-Roman Connection
> Not in itself. The right to disagree openly is a fundamental political right, at least in the USA. It is, however, not a fundamental right in a classroom setting, especially if there are other students, who have paid for the course and want to hear what the teacher has to say on the topics described in the catalogue and syllabus. Your "rights" there are limited so as not to interfere with the rights of the other students.
But there was no "interference"! How do you come to imagine all this? Was my noting that the Romand and Holy Roman Empires are not "the same", and my correction that it was from the Dutch that the British received Manhattan, and not the natives, were those also statements interfering with the course of others' educations???
I made an observation in class upon being recognized the right to speak. I was cut off, and cut off again when I tried to elaborate. The whole incident took no more than two minutes of class time. You are seriously deluded if that constitutes "disrespect", and an "interference" of my fellow students.
> >If I respond seriously at length, should that be a negative thing?
> >
> Absolutely. We are not talking about you declaiming on a soapbox at Speakers' Corner in Hyde Park, but in a classroom on a relatively trivial matter. Definitely negative.
If it's "relatively trivial", then why should the professor threaten to drop me from the course? But of course, the matter's not trivial at all, seeing how the matter involves not that historical question but her ego. Of course, my own egotism has since been roused in response to her threats, but it's most unfortunate that she, and you and those like you here, cannot see the matter as simply one of scholastic truth instead of egoistic "respect".
> Please understand, I am a strong proponent, advocate even, of the free speech clause of the First Amendment of the United States Constitution.
I would grant you your self-description out of charity, but cannot seriously countenance your opposition here as an instance of your ideals in action.
> >I marvel at how easily people resort to such descriptions to condemn someone for a disagreement ? by definition, one who disagrees is "arguing"!
> >
> Actually, no one has been condemning you. Certainly not Mr. Bernstein. We have been trying to point out to you that the way you are going about all this is neither effective nor persuasive. But it is very irritating, and we don't even have to put up with you in class for an hour at a time three times a week.
Alright, if "condemnation" is too harsh a word for the nobility of your displeasure, would you accept "rebuke"?
What's "effective"? What's "persuasive"? I do not regard it as my task to persuade you to my POV regarding Roman history and myth, but I still imagine it a self-duty to answer when charged, however humorously.
Your irritation stems not from my remarks as much as your own not being able to restrain yourself the way you prescribe me to do! I done told you many times now to exercise "viewer discretion".
And that last quip of yours is only further evidence of disingenuity on your part: why insinuate that I am constantly contradicting her, when it is only a brief moment in time that we're considering?
> >It is true that you do not know how the incident played out in class, but you misread me here on usenet when you think being "argumentative" is a necessarilyl bad thing, and that I have been "argumentative" in that bad way simply because I honor my detractors with a considered response!
> >
> Endless picking at a minor point is not honoring of anyone, yourself least of all.
Which is why you feel it your moral mission on usenet to prolong by your own posts a thread whose existence you despise but which topic you care not to comment on?
> >But why should I shrug this off?
> >
> Because it does not matter.
Then why don't you??
> > It started out as very innocent observation on my part, but snowballed because she continues to perceive it as a personal attack.
> >
> Maybe, you inadvertently gave her reason to feel attacked.
Certainly inadvertently, for she takes the in-class contradiction the same way you and Messrs. Bernstein, Fisher, Menes, and Stonehouse do (even if in varying degrees): that it was not my place to comment contrarily on a matter of so light a gravity as to warrant a lecture.
> > It is simply a case of ego on her part.
> >
> ?????? After 40+ emails to this newsgroup, whining about your "mistreatment" by her, you talk of HER ego?????
You do seem incapable of memory, but I will reiterate for the benefit of any future passers-by:
I posted a question about "history". You and those like you rebuke me for the "disrespect" inherent in my civil, if still self-confident, in-class contradiction of her. Since then, she herself threatens to kick me out of her class. You have not even deigned to respond to the scholastic matter I had asked, but taken me to task MANY TIMES for having the audacity to imagine that my thoughts should be humored by the professor. This latest post of yours does not even add more fuel to the fire, because you are repeating the very claims you had already made, and made again lately by Mr. Bernstein. And yet both you gentlemen fault ME for the length of this thread, and that it's become ABOUT ME, when I posted originally asking about something else altogether???
> Your remarks about her in this newsgroup have been personal in nature. See comment above re ego. Also see earlier remarks belittling her standing as an instructor not a professor.
Your charges have long been unsupported, but they had the advantage of being so general in nature as to be quite a case of semantics to unravel ("respect", etc.)...now, however, you claim something specific, so I am better able than ever to respond: I "belittled" her IN RESPONSE to the suggestion by you and others who think like you that I as a mere student was out of line in contradicting her in class, the point being that as a grad student (I wasn't sure, but it was a possibility) she was "hardly better" than an undergrad student, on some views. I was hoping to highlight just how preposterous this tactic of "pulling rank" to adjudicate historical understanding and misconceptions was, and it is unfortunate you remain ignorant of the absurdity you employ.
> I long ago feared that despite our best advice, you would continue your obsession here. I repeat what I said before. Make an end of it. There is nothing in all this that merits such compulsive hammering.
And I repeat what I've told Mr. Bernstein: your ad hominem attacks are nothing new, and the brevity you so desire is prevented by your own habit of repetition; at least I can claim to be responding to a new respondent, whereas you are making the same off-topic charges at my person that you have made from the very first!
> > It is not personal at all, but somehow people take it personally.
> >
> The only person taking any of this personally is you.
I asked a question pertaining to scholarship. Far from providing even the shadow of an answer, your own responses have only been directed to why you feel I am flawed personally (being "argumentative", "disrespectful", etc.). If you persist in such blatant
self-contradictions, I shall be forced to withdraw the good will with which I have heretofore received your thoughts.
> >How have I been "combative"?? Do recall that you and those like you are the ones performing ad hominem attacks, not I. It is instructive, in divining the motives of my detractors like yourself, to consider that they have not addressed the posts which have concurred with my understanding, but have replied to me in as a much a personal capacity as they should have restrained themselves to do in the scholastic one.
> >
> Your whole reply to Mr. Bernstein is a good example of being combative. He is only trying to help you.
Again you do beg the question: what's "combative"?
> Society, whether of the Americas, Europe, Africa, Arab, Asia or whereever, is built on respect. If you do not show respect, you will not receive it. If you persist in not showing respect, you will end up friendless and jobless. Your distain for respect is causing you to be alienated from those with whom you would discourse. It is not a healthy way to act.
But I keep telling you that I have different notions of "respect"! Thus, I'm not arguing with you that "respect" isn't necessary, but that I simply don't think a disagreement with the professor in class constitutes its opposite! Adults of good will can disagree in good faith, as evidenced by our correspondence here, so I remain not defiant, as you may think, but mystified as ever. I mean, this is the heart of the democratic principle! I'm sorry if that sounds melodramatic, but I can't see how one expects meaningful dissent in civil society if within its proving grounds, such as the college classroom may be mistaken to be by those who think like me, the slightest contradictions are so severely sanctioned.
Again, I say to all the "authorities" that be to practice the humility they expect of others ("respect").
> Francis A. Miniter
And so they crucified Jesus when he showed them no "respect". Golly, but after seven million years of human evolution, the first question for some still remain "was I shown the proper deference?"
Joe Bernstein
Unregistered User
(1/2/04 8:22 am) Reply
Re: Mythology:The Greco-Roman Connection
There are tidbits of on-topicness in this post, but they aren't many or especially worth reading, unfortunately. I don't expect to post another such post in this thread, but there are a couple of things I thought worth getting said.
> Now, did you actually have a disagreement there?
No, I had a *point*. There's a proverb that states it briefly enough:
"To err is human".
> Two ways of pursuing them:
> 1.
> Is a professor in the habit of lecturing on things not relevant to the course? Assuming that there's a method to one's madness, as the saying goes, the historical survey wasn't given in vain. If it was worth class time to her, it's worth class time to me. And given my long-standing layman's interest in the ancient world, I attempted an observation. You seem blind to the fact that I have a right to so do.
I guess despite the huge volume of discussion I'm still unclear on the facts of the case. What happened *after* class? Did you send the first e-mail, or take the first whatever-the-next-action, or did she?
If you, and *in the absence* of confirmation of your view, then I have a problem with *that*.
If you want to be the first person in the course to raise your hand to correct the teacher, well, so be it. I've often been that person, and I don't think that aspect of my personality has done good things for me over the years - I am, at this point, facing homelessness in
three weeks - but of course your life could be utterly different. The mere correction-by-itself, whatever.
(Two more in the same session, hmmm. By that point I'd be thinking of self-preservation either in the form of getting out of the ignoramus's class, or in the form of keeping my mouth shut, but whatever.)
Regardless, I stand by what I said. Not everything someone is paid to say need be true for learning to occur, and *because* erring is human, it is in fact possible to learn a great deal even when some of what you pay someone to say is false. I learned a lot from the teachers I mentioned correcting in my previous post. I learn a lot from books I correct. One of my main topics of research at the moment is the history of Usenet, and the single work that has been most helpful to me is the Great Renaming FAQ, even though I myself have unearthed the evidence that its author got the original list of newsgroups wrong; believe me, if I had the money to pay Lee Bumgarner for that document, I would. We happily buy history books despite the unlikeliness that we'll agree with everything they say...
In a desperate attempt to bolster this post's on-topicness, I'll note that it is the duty of the classicists neither to assume that everything Tacitus and Suetonius say about the Principate is true, nor to repudiate them entire, but rather to *assess* what they say alongside the other evidence, and come to some sort of conclusion...
Etc.
Hence, a time and a place. In this case, I probably would have chosen, had I been there and had the same concerns as you, to talk to the teacher after the session. Maybe not; maybe what you did was the best of all possible deeds.
These threads have probably not been the best of all possible deeds, however.
> 2.
> What is "relevant", and who decides? Such a question seems at the very heart of a course on literary theory, no? When even the historical record is accorded so little respect, what hope has a student's essays on subjective matters of art and taste and
sensibility?
Well, and this is where I do sympathise.
> But, be that as it may, by "the Romans renamed the Greek gods and goddesses" I understood her to have meant that they encountered Greece and, despite their awe, christened Greek Zeus Roman Iuppiter, Ares Mars, etc. (perhaps in a pique of pride, whatever). I did not understand that to be the case, and tried to note that. If you will review the posts which have supported this understanding -- curious that you detractors have not responded to them -- you will find that even if I am not altogether "right", neither am I altogether wrong, and thus the matter is of some complexity and not as settled as the professor's remarks lead one to erroneously believe.
But if you really think that complexity would've been appropriate to this particular classroom, I honestly don't even know how to begin discussing that with you. Why? What do you think the students would have gained from an in-depth discussion of the matter?
Note that you didn't *launch* an in-depth discussion of the matter, so if you argue now that they would have gained something from it, you're arguing against the course of action you actually took.
But if you acknowledge that they wouldn't have, then we get back to the question of what is relevant, and that is *inherently* a question of times and places, no?
Tell me, is the following reconstruction of how the instructor *got* to the remarks you objected to roughly correct?
Once there were Greeks, and they had a literature that is ancestral to Western literature. The way it got that ancestral is by influencing the Romans. The Greeks influenced the Romans so much that the Romans even renamed the Greek gods ...
Something like that?
In that case, what's at issue is an *example*, where the main point is a different matter and beyond serious dispute. I would say such an example is a waste of time to argue with.
But if the path to those words was something different, maybe it's a different matter. Since you haven't (that I've seen) reported that path, I can't know.
> > So basically, at this point, all my money is on the grad student professor. Even though I've read only your side of it.
> But you've not read my side of it, you've only gone by your own misinterpretation of it, which is not the same thing.
*Excuse* me?
Nobody who disagrees with what you write can have read it?
Are you serious? Then why do you bother discussing things at all?
You're welcome to say I've misinterpreted it, but if you persist in this claim that I didn't read you before "misinterpret"ing you, I will know you for a hopeless troll and ignore you henceforth. I have better things to do than have conversations with people who accuse me of lying.
> For while it is not clear exactly where you and I differ on the historical facts (I have excised the first half of your reply from this post because this latter half is the easier to disprove by far),
This is disappointing. I would actually have *enjoyed* a discussion of the first half of my post, the half that's *on-topic* for these newsgroups. If you think I've got something wrong in there, it could be relevant to the most important area of research I do, and I want to know about it.
> It is not personal at all, but somehow people take it personally.
Well, you called me a liar, a bit up there. Oddly enough, I do take that personally.
The rest of this? No, not really. I see you as a somewhat more obstinate version of a younger me, with a somewhat worse teacher than I usually encountered. (I once got a worse grade on an exam because I insisted on seeing Beethoven as an example of a romantic composer, but that's about the extent of my experience of punishment for arguments.) I'm trying to point out that you're holding your teacher, and probably other teachers, to an unreasonable standard, because I think reasonable standards are a useful thing to learn, a thing I'd rather I'd learned sooner.
(And separately, to the extent that you have information for me about mythology around the world, I want to hear it. But you snipped that part...)
> > repetitive,
> I only sound repetitive because you people constantly bring up the same shibboleths about "respecting" The Professor. That is all your abhorrence boils down to.
Oh? Have I said anything at all about respecting her?
I *have* said I'm largely on her side, yes. I have no idea how much she knows in her own field, though, and I don't believe in respect for titles alone.
I do believe in respect for *situations*. There are other people involved in a classroom situation besides you and the teacher.
> > and largely lacking in substance.
>
> Fine one you are to talk about substance, seeing how your complaint thus far has concentrated on my style.
Do feel free to go back and adress what I wrote about the sheer oddness of Greek mythology. A good discussion of *that* is something I'd look forward to.
> > This would mean that you can still learn better and indeed you are almost certain *to* learn better, and I'm seeing signs in this thread of your doing so, so I'm *not* trying to write you off, or insult you gratuitously.
>
> I don't at all feel insulted, but I am grossly frustrated that my rather specific questions beget as much criticism of my style as any response to their substance!
Your questions have a stylistic problem that impedes people from answering their substance.
Your questions have been similar to the following (this is not an exact quote): Is there any evidence at all that the Romans had a mythology before Greek influence?
There are some fundamental problems with your categories here - we don't have a whole lot of evidence of "Romans" as a class earlier than Greek influence in their vicinity, for example - but the main problem with answering a question like that is that none of us claims to know *everything* there is to know about Roman mythology. Conceivably there *is*, somewhere, some sort of evidence that they had one prior to Greek influence, and if we said there wasn't, we'd be lying; but none of us have ever heard of any, so instead we say something like "Essentially all Roman mythology is based on Greek sources". And then you come back and say (correctly) that "essentially" is a weasel word (not a direct quote!), and you ask again. So you get the same answer again. And on and on without end.
My reading of the threads is that Roman literature and mythology were adopted wholesale from the Greeks, with the exceptions of satire in general, and of local myths (some of them). Roman religion, on the other hand, while always assimilative, definitely has its own history. You're welcome to read the threads differently, but since the above generally conforms to what I've read, I don't have anything to add. Except that my researches into the history of literature allow me to be somewhat more definite about the literature angle, both as regards literature itself and as regards the myths told in it, and allow me to generalise and note that I think you're building on a mistaken view of the universality of mythology.
So that's what I wrote. I'm sorry none of this is substantive enough for you, but it's the kind of thing you're likely to get. You are very unlikely on any Usenet group to get someone standing up and saying truthfully "Yes, I know everything that has ever been made known in this field, and I can inform you with absolute certainty that there is *NO* evidence of X." Although for strange enough X's you might get the second half without the first. In classics, which is arguably the oldest academic field in the West, you're even less likely to find someone willing to say such a thing.
> It is unfortunate that open disagreement, no matter how civilly conveyed, constitutes "picking a fight".
Had the two-minute (less than that?) disagreement in class been the only incident between you and this professor, I feel reasonably sure these threads would have been very different - probably not even have happened at all. So whether I'm right about your "picking a fight" kind of depends on what happened next, I'll admit.
> Furthermore, you are arguing on grounds of practicality, and not on moral grounds at all, despite your pretensions.
Huh? Where did I call you immoral?
It's possible to be preachy (which I certainly was) without preaching about anything specifically moral in nature.
Well, this is all I can see to answer quote-and-response. Perhaps you will reply. If you maintain your claim that I lied about having read your posts, then we will have nothing futher to talk about. If you reply in the spirit of this post, with further information about what actually appened or further arguments about what should have happened, I'm not sure what to do, because I'm not sure how to drag it back on-topic enough to keep posting about it; I'd be happiest having that conversation by e-mail, or perhaps in a
different newsgroup from any of those this is going to.
If, instead, you reply to what I wrote about the oddness of Greek mythology, I'll be much happier.
Re: Mythology:The Greco-Roman Connection
Joe Bernstein,
> There are tidbits of on-topicness in this post, but they aren't many or especially worth reading, unfortunately. I don't expect to post another such post in this thread, but there are a couple of things I thought worth getting said.
And I do appreciate that you share your thoughts, disagree as I have with them. Do not think that because I may remain in disagreement that I have not considered your remarks with the gravity they deserve, or at least as much as I can muster in one sitting.
> [etc. - we don't agree about the Angles but I don't claim enough knowledge to argue the point.]
Now what don't we agree about WRT the Angles? I know you concede the point, but I wasn't aware that we "disagreed" over the Angles, too! You mean you don't know that they came from Denmark? Well, that's what I recall, anyway, from some book or other.
> > Now, did you actually have a disagreement there?
>
> No, I had a *point*. There's a proverb that states it briefly enough: "To err is human".
Right, "errare humana est" (sorry, bad pig Latin there)... but I already realized that you believe me to be in error, so I don't see exactly what you mean to further suggest with that proverb.
> I guess despite the huge volume of discussion I'm still unclear on the facts of the case. What happened *after* class? Did you send the first e-mail, or take the first whatever-the-next-action, or did she?
>
> If you, and *in the absence* of confirmation of your view, then I have a problem with *that*.
What's "in the absence of confirmation of my view"? If you cannot grant me the facts of the matter, then there really is no point to the conversation, for it can only proceed from differing interpretations of the facts, but not when you deny me the good will to speak honestly of what had happened, as opposed to the why and wherefores ("interpretation").
As has been chronicled many times, including in that very post you'd replied to, I e-mailed her afterwards (for various reasons: I must rush to my next class, and so cannot stay behind to chat; I work full-time, and cannot make her office hours; e-mail could allow for some privacy, as well as allow one to respond at one's leisure; I could better explain myself and allow for greater detail). But I still don't see what's wrong with that. She's spreading misinformation in class after class! Someone should tell her that her fly's open, know what I mean?
Of course, I could have been wrong. But from lurking these NGs, I intimated that I was in rather good company WRT those matters about Roman and Greek gods and myths. In any case, it would have been a delightfully instructive exercise.
As it is, it's given me inspiration for my next novel; I've yet to try my hand at comedy dark and dry! =)
> If you want to be the first person in the course to raise your hand to correct the teacher, well, so be it. I've often been that person, and I don't think that aspect of my personality has done good things for me over the years
Why not? Perhaps you are confusing my situation with yours, and reading into my remarks?? I don't know that I should "want" to be that first person to contradict the professor (and they appear a damned touchy lot, for all their humanism -- I do think even the departmental secretaries have picked it up), but in this case it has just so happened.
As a matter of fact, I think her bombastic reaction was provoked in part because I seem the most unlikely rebel, and thus the sense of betrayal which seems to underlie the bad feelings: I'm a Chinese Clark Kent, if you know what that means (clean-cut, nerdy, nice young man), and it's all the more bitter. (And, of course, that she had indeed over-tallied me.)
> - I am, at this point, facing homelessness in three weeks - but of course your life could be utterly different.
GOOD GOD, I AM TRULY SADDENED TO READ OF YOUR PREDICAMENT!
Are you in NYC, by any chance? I had been homeless myself years ago right out of the Army for about three months (heh, no joke -- your chances of being homeless INCREASE with military service! NPR reported this statistical finding on "Morning Edition" some time within the past week), so I can really imagine what you are probably going through...I fail to see how my obstinacy may be related to your own, and how such a shared trait may be culpable for your current tribulation, but considering your situation I am all the more honored to have been the recipient of so much time and effort on your part. I am really sorry that we could not have disagreed under more agreeable circumstances, and I hope you'll forgive me my continued responses to your comments, made only as a matter of "honor" to myself and not in any way meant to further augment your troubles.
I will concede this whole matter, however, if you say so; I will drop this thread altogether, at once, if my replies somehow cause you to expend precious time considering them, due to that implacable intransigence you allege us to share, and by which you suggest that you are currently facing eviction. I am honestly sorry about your situation because I well know for myself what that condition is like, first-hand.
But my advice would be this, oddly enough: hold fast to your stubborness, for you will have need of such an emotional anchor if you indeed wind up homeless! You will find gainful employment yet for that aspect of your character.
> The mere correction-by-itself, whatever. (Two more in the same session, hmmm. By that point I'd be thinking of self-preservation either in the form of getting out of the ignoramus's class, or in the form of
keeping my mouth shut, but whatever.)
Well, color me naive, but I just didn't ever imagine it to be a big deal. We all have gaps in our knowledge, and she's a professor of English literature, not ancient history and classical mythology, so I just never figured on someone taking offense when none was intended.
> Regardless, I stand by what I said. Not everything someone is paid to say need be true for learning to occur, and *because* erring is human, it is in fact possible to learn a great deal even when some of what you pay someone to say is false.
Yes, all well and good, but those beautiful sentiments haven't anything to do with my in-class corrections/contradictions: I never claimed she wasn't qualified to continue lecturing simply on account
of these small matters (I have since wondered about her impartiality, but I have faith yet). I agree with you that "learning can still take place" and all that...the point is that in the interests of scholarship, one ought to maintain as much as possible an objectivity and disinterest beyond mere conceit or convention.
> I learned a lot from the teachers I mentioned correcting in my previous post. I learn a lot from books I correct. One of my main topics of research at the moment is the history of Usenet,
AH!
You know, I've often wondered when some scholar would take a scrutiny to such a marvel of human evolution and civilization! Wow, what is your project proposal?? I really hope you get that shelter situation sorted out quick and satisfactorily, because someone needs to do this history now!
> and the single work that has been most helpful to me is the Great Renaming FAQ, even though I myself have unearthed the evidence that its author got the original list of newsgroups wrong; believe me, if I had the money to pay Lee Bumgarner for that document, I would. We happily buy history books despite the unlikeliness that we'll agree with everything they say...
Yes, and usually the authors and publishers are glad to receive reproof. My contradiction was rather too timidly conveyed, for all my confidence, to constitute reproach.
> In a desperate attempt to bolster this post's on-topicness, I'll note that it is the duty of the classicists neither to assume that everything Tacitus and Suetonius say about the Principate is true, nor to repudiate them entire, but rather to *assess* what they say alongside the other evidence, and come to some sort of conclusion... Etc.
Agreed. Now if the ancients who were closer to the events cannot be wholly trusted, why a modern who deigns to pronounce authoritatively? Likewise the idea that she may be in error herself, instead of me – so why did we not simply investigate the matter in a spirit of
scholarship?
> Hence, a time and a place. In this case, I probably would have chosen, had I been there and had the same concerns as you, to talk to the teacher after the session. Maybe not; maybe what you did was the best of all possible deeds.
I thought my e-mail the next day was in effect just the same. As previously explained, I have no time after class because I have another one in another building to get to, and e-mail affords so many more advantages.
> These threads have probably not been the best of all possible deeds, however.
Seeing how your standards for usenet posting are not explicit, I cannot comment more meaningfully on our obvious disagreement here except to note just that fact and let it speak for itself.
> > 2.
> > What is "relevant", and who decides? Such a question seems at the very heart of a course on literary theory, no? When even the historical record is accorded so little respect, what hope has a student's essays on subjective matters of art and taste and sensibility?
> Well, and this is where I do sympathise.
Yes, thank you, I never could believe that we deeply disagreed.
> > But, be that as it may, by "the Romans renamed the Greek gods and goddesses" I understood her to have meant that they encountered Greece and, despite their awe, christened Greek Zeus Roman Iuppiter, Ares Mars, etc. (perhaps in a pique of pride, whatever). I did not understand that to be the case, and tried to note that. If you will review the posts which have supported this understanding -- curious that you detractors have not responded to them -- you will find that even if I am not altogether "right", neither am I altogether wrong, and thus the matter is of some complexity and not as settled as the
professor's remarks lead one to erroneously believe. But if you really think that complexity would've been appropriate to this particular classroom, I honestly don't even know how to begin discussing that with you. Why? What do you think the students would have gained from an in-depth discussion of the matter?
No, not in-depth, mind you -- to observe the complexity of a thing is not to explain it.
Anyway, it just seemed an obvious case of such gross oversimplification as to constitute a cousin to a lie, if not the falsehood's own brother, that I felt compelled to speak out. I think we all would appreciate it if someone told us our zippers were open, however embarrassing...I mean, the Empress has no clothes!
Certainly in terms of pedagogy, the professor candidly weighing the balances of controversy would have been an instructive example for the students as to the value of scholastic attention to detail and to veracity.
> Note that you didn't *launch* an in-depth discussion of the matter, so if you argue now that they would have gained something from it, you're arguing against the course of action you actually took.
No, it's no so irreconcilable as you think…one may believe in the value of further discussion without believing in its practicality, as you've noted.
No, not quite, for you'll recall that she stifled me in short order. Far from arguing against my actions, the range of actions were circumscribed by the professor (shut up and get on with the lecture, or go on and be rude). I offer the potential benefits of a more charitable, liberal outlook only in response to the charge that nothing positive *could have* resulted.
> But if you acknowledge that they wouldn't have, then we get back to the question of what is relevant, and that is *inherently* a question of times and places, no?
Well, I don't acknowledge that they wouldn't have had a positive effect, but neither do I see how even if they wouldn't have, my correction/contradiction could have been irrelevant on those grounds.
For I don't accept "relevancy" as being inherently a question of time and place (one may say that everything is, but where would that tautology leave us), except in a descriptive sense (as opposed to a
normative sense -- like how slavery is, for the humanist, "wrong" in a normative sense, which means for all times and places, even though it may be "right" in a descriptive sense for a Marxist, such as during
the Roman Republic and Empire): the historical record out to be "relevant" in and of itself amongst scholars and students in a classroom.
> Tell me, is the following reconstruction of how the instructor *got* to the remarks you objected to roughly correct? Once there were Greeks, and they had a literature that is ancestral to Western literature. The way it got that ancestral is by influencing the Romans. The Greeks influenced the Romans so much that the Romans even renamed the Greek gods ... Something like that?
Again I will be repetitive, but only as a courtesy to you: others have pointed out that she may have meant her remarks in just that spirit of "literature" as opposed to "mythology", and I have allowed for the possibility, while noting how thin of one it is, because of the clearly erroneous idea that "the Romans renamed the Greek gods", which isn't the case at all. Whether she was cognizant of the distinction
between "religion" and "myth" and "literature" remains unclear – she stifled the matter, after all – but that one statement about the Greek and Roman pantheons suggests that she may not have, and is in any case wrong in and of itself.
> In that case, what's at issue is an *example*, where the main point is a different matter and beyond serious dispute. I would say such an example is a waste of time to argue with.
The main point, as you say (namely, the Greek inspiration of Roman and Western literature) has nothing, properly speaking, to do with the "example"(that is, the Greek gods inspired the Roman gods [a
rechristening can be thought of as an inspiring or an informing), and thus the "example" is no example at all of the point: the main point is true, but its alleged "example" is not.
That is definitely worth pointing out: the Empress has no clothes, as it were. The argument has no strength against an analytical scrutiny.
> But if the path to those words was something different, maybe it's a different matter. Since you haven't (that I've seen) reported that path, I can't know.
Yes, it does seem that we're talking past one another.
You will have to once again pardon me for being "repetitive", as I've already provided such a reconstruction on a few occasions now, most recently in that very post to which you're now replying, and will do so again.
I have almost always prefaced a retracing of this now-labyrinthine affair with the disclaimer that my contradiction, and the reaction to it, never progressed beyond the "what" stage, that it never got to the
"how" and "why", so that I cannot claim to recount without the possibility of error.
However, to recap: she made a statement concerning the indebtedness of Roman grandeur to Greek glory where myths are concerned. She does not appear to have drawn a distinction between myth, literature, and religion. She did make the statment that the Romans renamed the Greek gods and goddesses.
Thus, it is not so much that I've not provided a "path" to those words, as much as you were operating under a wholly different notion (that is, viewing that path and those words through, I say, distorted
lenses), as dissected above in the explanation about the main point and its alleged "example".
> You're welcome to say I've misinterpreted it, but if you persist in this claim that I didn't read you before "misinterpret"ing you, I will know you for a hopeless troll and ignore you henceforth. I have better things to do than have conversations with people who accuse me of lying.
I do believe that you too are now letting your own ego dominate these proceedings. When I say that "you've not 'read' my side of it", I am employing the phrase as a figure of speech, equating it with "you've
only gone by your own misinterpretation of it", as should be clear from how one follows the other. I see now the semantic ambiguity, and wish I had caught it earlier, but it has really proven a pitfall only
because your ego cannot leap over it, but must be provided for every step of the way, so to speak. And it is precisely this sense of entitlement to "respect" that I decry, both here and in the classroom.
Again, when I claimed that you've not read my remarks, what I had meant was that you've misinterpreted them such that you might as well not have read them (akin, for your reference, to my on-going ontological issue about oversimplifications of the truth so outrageous as to prove more lies than half-truths – likewise, my remarks, I feel, have been so misunderstood that in effect they had not been read at all).
> This is disappointing. I would actually have *enjoyed* a discussion of the first half of my post, the half that's *on-topic* for these newsgroups. If you think I've got something wrong in there, it could be relevant to the most important area of research I do, and I want to know about it.
You could have taken my aside this way, but I will make it explicit now so that you do: I never claimed more than a layman's working understanding of these matters, and thus feel overwhelmed by the
"embarras des riches", the cornucopia of information, which you've very kindly and I should also think most helpfully provided, and I will need some time to digest it. As it is, I do not think we are in
disagreement, as I had implied. You make most interesting observations, but a preliminary review indicates no direct contradiction of what I still claim, WRT the Roman and Greek pantheons, though it seems to bear on what I have suggested (and not confidently "claimed") to be the case with Roman and Greek mythology, and I need to puzzle it all out later while I'm still working through the Gordian Knot of misconceptions about this matter between my professor and myself (as opposed to the "academic" matter classical mythology and religion).
> > It is not personal at all, but somehow people take it personally.
>
> Well, you called me a liar, a bit up there. Oddly enough, I do take that personally.
A liar? Do you mean the thing about "not 'reading' me"? 'Cause that's really taking it personally, in the most tragi-comic way, as detailed above.
No, I don't accuse you of lying. Neither did I my professor. But both of you seem to have taken offense quicker than a bullet to blood and a cat to its own tail!
> The rest of this? No, not really. I see you as a somewhat more obstinate version of a younger me, with a somewhat worse teacher than I usually encountered. (I once got a worse grade on an exam because I insisted on seeing Beethoven as an example of a romantic composer, but that's about the extent of my experience of punishment for arguments.)
Well! I believe I have a fair grasp of the Romantic period in Literature, and I think I recognize a Romantic painting when I see one, but I can't imagine by what curious tangents you insisted on Beethoven as a Romantic composer. I have even less of a musical understanding than I do a musical ear, so I would likely concede you any point you make on this.
> I'm trying to point out that you're holding your teacher, and probably other teachers, to an unreasonable standard, because I think reasonable standards are a useful thing to learn, a thing I'd rather I'd learned sooner.
Well, it was understood that we had different criteria, but I still don't know whether mine are necessarily "unreasonable". Hell, it seems unreasonable that tobacco companies should have to pay -- point being that criteria change, and what's radical today will seem conservative tomorrow.
You know, with regards to your usenet history: I haven't an inkling as to the "thrust" of your project, but it would be interesting to provide for the possbility that such free-thinking as is found on usenet may so change expectations or standards of casual conversation such that the apparent "pickiness" or "anal retentiveness" of mine become "de rigeur" tomorrow. I really do believe that in another three decades, ordinary discourse such as we conduct here will be the norm, not the exception -- discourse irrespective of place, time, status, etc., discourse adjudicated solely by learning and scholarship: i.e., the facts, or what logic may substitute for them.
> (And separately, to the extent that you have information for me about mythology around the world, I want to hear it. But you snipped that part...)
Mythology around the world? Insofar as what I may have would apply to that first half of your initial post to this thread, I will provide it.
> > > repetitive, I only sound repetitive because you people constantly bring up the same shibboleths about "respecting" The Professor. That is all your abhorrence boils down to. Oh? Have I said anything at all about respecting her?
I do apologize, then, if your objections on grounds of "time and place" do not suggest the issue of "respect" of the professor herself.
> I *have* said I'm largely on her side, yes. I have no idea how much she knows in her own field, though, and I don't believe in respect for titles alone.
Well then, we agree, as Socrates had claimed that all truly enlightened men must in the end.
> I do believe in respect for *situations*. There are other people involved in a classroom situation besides you and the teacher.
LOL, I can't believe you're resorting to that ol' canard!
I'll tell you what she herself must imagine of "other people involved in a classroom" besides herself and your implication of the value of their time, etc.: she just spent a good ten minutes (guesstimate -- but definitely more than the two spent on my disagreement with her) going on about the Holocaust because some jazz/kletzmer impressario was playing somewhere night the night before, which performance she had attended, which digression of hers was prompted by a student's quip about the Nazis, which was made in response to the professor's disclaimer that a literary theory can get so constantly talked about that it takes a life of its own, that that is like how a lie told seven times becomes the truth a la Hitler & Co. (and before you cite me Strunk & White again, note that my chronology is deliberately backwards in an attempt to achieve the effect of absurdity which would be commensurate with my own feelings about that episode)….
Look who's being "anal" and "unreasonable" now! (I don't say that personally, BTW.) It's obvious there's a lot of this kind of digression, semi and full, which goes on in a class...I've been hit by a car and you want to write me a ticket for jaywalking???
> > > and largely lacking in
> > > substance.
> >
> > Fine one you are to talk about substance, seeing how your complaint
> > thus far has concentrated on my style.
>
> Do feel free to go back and adress what I wrote about the sheer oddness of Greek mythology. A good discussion of *that* is something I'd look forward to.
You must understand that I was referring only to what I'd replied to "thus far", which has been a litany of your complaints, in which light it remains indeed odd that you should charge me with being superficial, seeing how your complaints have been lodged with the tell-tale words "time and place" and "respect" and "argumentative" and "combative" and "repetitive".
> > > This would mean that you can still learn better and indeed you are almost certain *to* learn better, and I'm seeing signs in this thread of your doing so, so I'm *not* trying to write you off, or insult you gratuitously.
> >
> > I don't at all feel insulted, but I am grossly frustrated that my rather specific questions beget as much criticism of my style as any response to their substance!
>
> Your questions have a stylistic problem that impedes people from answering their substance. Your questions have been similar to the following (this is not an exact quote): Is there any evidence at all that the Romans had a mythology before Greek influence?
Are those two paragraphs related? That is, when you say "stylistic problem", do you mean as per Strunk & White, or do you mean that the way the question's framed is ambiguous and overly simple?
If the former: well, I'd already replied to your appeal to manuals of style.
If the later: well, I'd already replied to such concerns, but I will REPEAT (I recall readily that I'd told Mr. Fisher this) myself again (yes, I know that to "repeat again" is redundant, but I employ it to emphasize the fact of repetition): she clearly treated the matter in a simplified manner, and it would do me no good to get more complicated on her than I already have (indeed, as you and such like you have taken me to task for doing by even making the contradiction ["relevant", etc.]), so I necessarily framed my question in simplistic
terms, such that an answer can be readily digested by her…since then, I have further refined the thrust of my queries, and have framed them in true-or-false terms, which affords simplicity of response while
providing sophistication of declaration.
> There are some fundamental problems with your categories here - we don't have a whole lot of evidence of "Romans" as a class earlier than Greek influence in their vicinity, for example -
Again I ask as I had of Mr. Fisher: do you mean by "don't have a whole lot of evidence" more properly that we have "none at all", or do you literally mean that we have some, just not a whole lot? For the point
of my question hinges on whether there is even one shred of evidence, which is all it would take to "prove" the contention that "the Romans" had their "own" "mythology" and their own gods "before" "the Greeks".
> but the main problem with answering a question like that is that none of us claims to know *everything* there is to know about Roman mythology.
Good grief, man: can you honestly suppose that one so given to questions as I would imagine that netizens of these NGs are absolute authorities of the antiquities???
> Conceivably there *is*, somewhere, some sort of evidence that they had one prior to Greek influence, and if we said there wasn't, we'd be lying;
Of course it's conceivable; I'd asked whether it's actually the case.
> but none of us have ever heard of any, so instead we say something like "Essentially all Roman mythology is based on Greek sources".
But that's just what I was trying to get at – whether your allowances for the contrary were "merely" good form, or whether there was in fact one shred of evidence to the contrary. You have now answered that question – for yourself. Others have not returned an answer.
> And then you come back and say (correctly) that "essentially" is a weasel word (not a direct quote!), and you ask again. So you get the same answer again. And on and on without end.
No, I did not ask again, except rhetorically, to emphasize the point: it only takes that one shred of evidence. That's all. It is certainly "conceivable", but with just one iota of evidence the matter enters the realm of fact. And the question I'd asked originally was a factual one. I am not asking whether it's "conceivable", I'm asking whether it's "actual".
> My reading of the threads is that Roman literature and mythology were adopted wholesale from the Greeks, with the exceptions of satire in general, and of local myths (some of them).
And so I inquired as to the particularities, if any would know, of these "native" local myths. For if these native myths are "truly" "native" and "mythic", then – I repeat -- one can agree with me, as others have, given their readings (I remain puzzled that for all your scholarship, and that of Messrs. Menes, Stonehouse, and Fisher, you have not responded to the similar findings of those posts), that the Romans *had* their own mythology once, even if they've preferred the Greek for its wealth of variety, imagination, etc.
> Roman religion, on the other hand, while always assimilative, definitely has its own history.
Right…and that answers the main part of my question. While it isn't clear that she distinguished between "religion" and "myth" and "literature", nor whether such division is useful or possible in this matter of the Greco-Roman connection, it was clear that the Romans did not rename the Greek gods and goddesses as she'd imagined.
Can you imagine spreading such misinformation semester after semester?
> You're welcome to read the threads differently,
I do not read them differently, but asking follow-up questions isn't an instance of that.
> but since the above generally conforms to what I've read, I don't have anything to add.
I don't know whether asking follow-up questions constitutes addition or subtraction, but I do not think they beg it.
> Except that my researches into the history of literature allow me to be somewhat more definite about the literature angle, both as regards literature itself and as regards the myths told in it, and allow me to generalise and note that I think you're building on a mistaken view of the universality of mythology.
Yes, I did gather that much from your post, and I would wager that that's the operating assumption of most of us, for no one's pointed to this "meta-level" observation until you have, and it is an interesting
one which requires further analysis to see whether you are truly onto something here, or whether it is "just another" semantic issue (for you are, in effect, challenging what I mean by "mythology", and I'm
not entirely certain that this question is useful, seeing how the word "mythology" has definite enough definition and has been employed by everyone who's posted to this thread without just the caution you are sounding…).
> So that's what I wrote. I'm sorry none of this is substantive enough for you, but it's the kind of thing you're likely to get.
What has not been "substantive" has been your charges to my style of discourse (which you allege has been "argumentative", "combative", "repetitive"). As I've noted several times now, and will likely still
do so below if warranted, what has been "of substance" (that is, pertaining to my questions, as had started this thread) in your response I must defer for a while longer for a proper analysis.
> You are very unlikely on any Usenet group to get someone standing up and saying truthfully "Yes, I know everything that has ever been made known in this field, and I can inform you with absolute certainty that there is *NO* evidence of X."
Surely, but I was under no such idealism.
> Although for strange enough X's you might get the second half without the first. In classics, which is arguably the oldest academic field in the West, you're even less likely to find someone willing to say such a thing.
Yes, well, if that's all it is, then: "mere" convention or etiquette which prevents one from saying that "there is *no* native Roman mythology" in favor of "there is no *evidence* of native Roman mythology".
> > It is unfortunate that open disagreement, no matter how civilly conveyed, constitutes "picking a fight".
>
> Had the two-minute (less than that?) disagreement in class been the only incident between you and this professor, I feel reasonably sure these threads would have been very different - probably not even
have happened at all. So whether I'm right about your "picking a fight" kind of depends on what happened next, I'll admit.
I've noted what happened next.
> > Furthermore, you are arguing on grounds of practicality, and not on moral grounds at all, despite your pretensions.
>
> Huh? Where did I call you immoral?
No, not that you called me immoral, but that you were arguing on "moral" grounds, insofar as you believed in "respect" (of time and place, etc.). I was merely pointing out that this "respect" was founded on practical considerations of politics rather than moral (okay, "moral") considerations of free speech and right scholarship.
> It's possible to be preachy (which I certainly was) without preaching about anything specifically moral in nature.
Well then, I don't mean by "moral" the colloquial defintions and connotations, but the rather more "philosophical" sort usually employed in debates of an ethical nature (basically the controversy can be understood as one of the ethics informing classroom behavior).
> Well, this is all I can see to answer quote-and-response. Perhaps you will reply. If you maintain your claim that I lied about having read your posts, then we will have nothing futher to talk about. If you reply in the spirit of this post, with further information about what actually happened or further arguments about what should have happened, I'm not sure what to do, because I'm not sure how to drag it back on-topic enough to keep posting about it; I'd be happiest having that conversation by e-mail, or perhaps in a
different newsgroup from any of those this is going to.
It's okay, you are only under obligation to yourself and your own sense of how to proceed, so whether this unhappy part drops or drags is something which time will tell -- and forgive.
> If, instead, you reply to what I wrote about the oddness of Greek mythology, I'll be much happier.
>
> Joe Bernstein
Yes, permit me to give credit where credit is due, and never let it be said that I do not recognize kindness when tendered it: thank you very much for your wonderful little essay on Greek mythology, which enlightened me to its complexity, and not only as to its myriad of tales and its richness of narrative texture and color, which could be induced by the sheer volume of it all, but in particular as to its very ontology -- its oddity, when seen against those of other civilizations. A response has been delayed while I carefully consider matters novel to me, as well as fend off yet more of the same old "personal" charges being leveled against me, but I am grateful, and I shouldn't think your summary of no future consequence either, so that while I may be undeserving of your good graces, some googler may still benefit from them yet.
Joe Bernstein
Unregistered User
(1/2/04 9:06 am) Reply
Re: Mythology:The Greco-Roman Connection
I find no need to quote or reply to a sizable part of the meta-discussion in the post to which I'm following up, and I have found some actual on- topic material to cite, so I'm going to follow up by posting. As yet, I've seen no complaints from readers of any of the newsgroups these threads are hitting about the cross-posting, so I'm not going to excise any (humanities.misc and especially alt.language.latin are the most obvious choices, though). I'm reading this thread from soc.history.ancient, but I also subscribe to humanities.classics.
NP,
> Now what don't we agree about WRT the Angles? I know you concede the point, but I wasn't aware that we "disagreed" over the Angles, too! You mean you don't know that they came from Denmark? Well, that's what I recall, anyway, from some book or other.
Yeah, but you wrote something about their having "dominated" southern Denmark at the time, and I don't know of any evidence for that; there's also the undefinedness of 'the time', because while the Angles were certainly there at around the time it looks like the existing poem -Beowulf- is set, they just as certainly weren't there at the time when the existing poem was written into the existing manuscript, and
it's rather hard to guess what the relevant date between those two actually is. (It's even possible, after all, that some ur -Beowulf- was composed much *earlier*, and the historical details that moor it to the 6th century or so are later accretions; though I would argue that this is monstrously improbable...)
So basically, when I read what you wrote about the Angles, I thought "That's wrong!" But I'm not equipped with either knowledge or research time to back up my claim, especially since what you wrote
probably wasn't well-defined enough in the first place to dispute coherently (for lack of a specific century). Ergo I snipped it all. As I hope you will this time, now that I've explained my ill-informed
reaction to you.
> > > Now, did you actually have a disagreement there? No, I had a *point*. There's a proverb that states it briefly enough: "To err is human".
>
> Right, "errare humana est" (sorry, bad pig Latin there)...but I already realized that you believe me to be in error, so I don't see exactly what you mean to further suggest with that proverb.
Well, I cited it further down in the post.
In case we have further discussions on Usenet, I'd like to note that I have an especially hard time interacting with people when it looks like they start replying to my long posts before they finish reading
them. In this case, I probably didn't make this structural element visible enough, but the central thrust of the post was that error is a human universal, and so how one reacts to error has to be modulated by
the situation, just as how one reacts to hunger, or speech, or any other human universal is modulated by the situation. Since my previous post had been wordy and diffuse, I wanted to introduce that structural element in the second post by quoting a terse proverb, and did.
Maybe you replied to it only after reading it through, maybe you replied as you read; either way, you didn't get that, probably because I didn't write clearly enough. Sorry. But I will mention that I get peevish with people who reply as they read, in case it comes up later.
> > I guess despite the huge volume of discussion I'm still unclear on the facts of the case. What happened *after* class? Did you send the first e-mail, or take the first whatever-the-next-action, or did she?
This is rather embarrassing, since in fact I had quoted a post where you *did* detail all this clearly. Oops. My apologies.
Sequence as I understand it:
1) Class
2) You posted here
3) You saw some replies
4) You e-mailed what you had so far to your teacher
5) Other events ensued.
This means you were the first person to act after the class, but arguably not in as half-cocked a way as I was inferring.
> > If you, and *in the absence* of confirmation of your view, then I have a problem with *that*.
> What's "in the absence of confirmation of my view"?
Far as I know, you hadn't (and haven't, but I'm not caught up in the other thread yet) gotten any explicit evidence by that time for most of your points. The renamed-the-gods thing is the obvious exception; I know there's been explicit evidence about that in these threads, and maybe you had it already when you sent that e-mail. Anyway, that's what I was talking about.
I don't consider having read Dumezil, by itself, as confirmation. So what I meant was "without having acquired anything further than the reading of Dumezil you had already done, to back up what you were
saying".
> that first person to contradict the professor (and they appear a damned touchy lot, for all their humanism -- I do think even the departmental secretaries have picked it up),
Well, I grew up in an academic family, and sort of take that for granted. There's a standing joke about departmental politics (as also some other kinds), that politics gets nastier the smaller the stakes. As it happens, no classicist should repeat that joke - my God, the stakes could hardly be higher than in, say, the 4th-century Roman Empire, but the politics were horrendous! But the point is that professors do tend to be touchy, yes. Nowhere more so than about what they teach, which is after all at once their stock in
trade and their pride and joy.
> (And, of course, that she had indeed over-tallied me.)
Meaning? She let you into the course despite an excess of students?
> > I learned a lot from the teachers I mentioned correcting in my previous post. I learn a lot from books I correct. One of my main topics of research at the moment is the history of Usenet,
>
> AH! You know, I've often wondered when some scholar would take a scrutiny to such a marvel of human evolution and civilization! Wow, what is your project proposal?? I really hope you get that shelter situation sorted out quick and satisfactorily, because someone needs to do this history now!
Oh, I'm no scholar. You want scholarship, look to the academics. I used to have my own domain name, and use different addresses depending on what the posts were about; the one I used for history was "fishtorian", both to reflect that my main historical topic is the history of fantasy, and that there's something more than a little fishy about calling me a Real Historian.
But you can see some of what I've done so far with the history of Usenet at my website. Unfortunately, the URL is going to change Real Soon Now, and I haven't worked out exactly what the new one will be; on the other hand, the new one will have about half again as much history at it, because I've been doing work since the last time I uploaded stuff. Anyway, I'm not enough of a people person to do a full-blown history; I've already slammed some of the main living people a full-blown historian would interview, so why should they want to talk to me? But I'm doing a chronology that I intend to turn into a basis for a database, and stuff like that; laying the groundwork.
> > These threads have probably not been the best of all possible deeds, however.
>
> Seeing how your standards for usenet posting are not explicit, I cannot comment more meaningfully on our obvious disagreement here except to note just that fact and let it speak for itself.
Cross-posting among five groups is rarely a good idea, particularly when cross-posting a discussion. In this case, I think you'd have been just as well off with three, and as best I can tell, most of your most useful replies have come from readers of just one, humanities.classics.
I've previously expressed some of what I'm unhappy about in your posting style, and I see no reason to repeat myself.
> > Tell me, is the following reconstruction of how the instructor *got* to the remarks you objected to roughly correct? Once there were Greeks, and they had a literature that is ancestral to Western literature. The way it got that ancestral is by influencing the Romans. The Greeks influenced the Romans so much that the Romans even renamed the Greek gods ... Something like that? In that case, what's at issue is an *example*, where the main point is a different matter and beyond serious dispute. I would say such an example is a waste of time to argue with.
>
> The main point, as you say (namely, the Greek inspiration of Roman and Western literature) has nothing, properly speaking, to do with the "example"(that is, the Greek gods inspired the Roman gods [a
rechristening can be thought of as an inspiring or an informing]), and thus the "example" is no example at all of the point: the main point is true, but its alleged "example" is not.
Well, granted, but so what? My point was that an example of that sort is inherently a minor matter. It's still more so if it is, in fact, no example at all, since that renders it *more* irrelevant.
(Since it appears my reconstruction was wrong, note that this paragraph and the preceding one are now, themselves, irrelevant examples. If you reply without snipping them, and I reply to your reply, I will
probably snip the set.)
> > But if the path to those words was something different, maybe it's a different matter. Since you haven't (that I've seen) reported that path, I can't know.
>
> However, to recap: she made a statement concerning the indebtedness of Roman grandeur to Greek glory where myths are concerned. She does not appear to have drawn a distinction between myth, literature, and religion. She did make the statment that the Romans renamed the Greek gods and goddesses. Thus, it is not so much that I've not provided a "path" to those words, as much as you were operating under a wholly different notion (that is, viewing that path and those words through, I say, distorted lenses), as dissected above in the explanation about the main point and its alleged "example".
I still don't know why she was talking about myths at all. So this is the missing path I still lack.
> > (I once got a worse grade on an exam because I insisted on seeing Beethoven as an example of a romantic composer, but that's about the extent of my experience of punishment for arguments.)
>
> Well! I believe I have a fair grasp of the Romantic period in Literature, and I think I recognize a Romantic painting when I see one, but I can't imagine by what curious tangents you insisted on Beethoven as a Romantic composer. I have even less of a musical understanding than I do a musical ear, so I would likely concede you any point you make on this.
Oh, look! Something arguably on-topic for humanities.misc!
Basically, I saw (and I'd like to think I'd written) that Beethoven was very much part of the Romantic movement in general. Whether he was a Romantic composer is another matter; I would argue that the kinds of emotion he worked with are alien to the high Classical, but I'd be on weak grounds. My professor was concerned that composers be put into their correct boxes, Classical here, Romantic there, and by saying that Beethoven had things in common with Wordsworth, for example, I was Wrong. I very much don't remember at least one crucial detail - whether the exam question was essay or multiple-choice! Because I can certainly see that my professor's attitude was appropriate for the latter case, although I'd still claim that the question itself was ambiguous...
> > > I don't at all feel insulted, but I am grossly frustrated that my rather specific questions beget as much criticism of my style as any response to their substance!
> >
> > Your questions have a stylistic problem that impedes people from answering their substance. Your questions have been similar to the following (this is not an exact quote): Is there any evidence at all that the Romans had a mythology before Greek influence?
>
> Are those two paragraphs related? That is, when you say "stylistic problem", do you mean as per Strunk & White, or do you mean that the way the question's framed is ambiguous and overly simple?
Not ambiguous, but something like overly simple, yes. The question is framed as an all-or-nothing, which makes it hard to answer "No" to. So their style makes substantive answers difficult.
> > There are some fundamental problems with your categories here - we don't have a whole lot of evidence of "Romans" as a class earlier than Greek influence in their vicinity, for example -
>
> Again I ask as I had of Mr. Fisher: do you mean by "don't have a whole lot of evidence" more properly that we have "none at all", or do you literally mean that we have some, just not a whole lot? For the point
of my question hinges on whether there is even one shred of evidence, which is all it would take to "prove" the contention that "the Romans" had their "own" "mythology" and their own gods "before" "the Greeks".
If I were to spend research time on this right now, I'd start by going to a book I reviewed on soc.history.ancient and humanities.classics some years ago, T. J. Cornell's <The Beginnings of Rome>. Since I'm *not* going to spend research time on it right now, I'm just going to bloviate on the basis of what my *extremely* fallible memory offers, and you can take it or leave it. You'd be much better off to rely on Cornell, but he's not terribly easy to read, so be warned. My review should be available at Google and may be useful as an introduction. There may well by now be more recent books that should be consulted as well; Cornell's appeared in 1995. Anyway, on with bloviation:
Rome, the site, as far as I know was not a city until sometime in the 9th century B.C. or so. We know that the Mycenaean Greeks traded in Italy centuries before this; I don't know whether they traded as far north as what would become the Etruscan territory, but I wouldn't be surprised. Anyway, Rome's *traditional* founding date of 753 B.C. is, per Cornell, not an especially noteworthy marker; he sees a
slowly growing settlement that has something of an abrupt take-off sometime around (if I remember right, atypically) 650 to 625 B.C.
By this time, I *think* the Greeks are highly active in Etruria, they *may* also be in Rome, and they're *all over the place* further south. Some of the oldest known writing in the Greek alphabet *comes from*
Italy, specifically Pithecusae, circa 770 B.C. Etruria got the alphabet not much later. Now, I don't know exactly what it was used for, but for what it's worth, Barry Powell has been arguing vigorously that the
main use of the Greek alphabet in its early years was *for poetry*. Which in turn was often epic poetry about gods and heroes: myth, in other words.
We know very little indeed about the mental worlds of the pre-literate Romans of, say, the 9th century. I honestly don't know that we know *anything* about them, although if we do, Cornell can probably provide a reference. By the time the picture gets clearer, Greek influence is pervasive. And by the time we definitely get written Roman references to myth, half of those references are *in* Greek.
(One thing I definitely remember from Cornell is this. There's a common canard that Rome was ruled for a time by an Etruscan dynasty, because Tarquinius Priscus and Tarquinius Superbus are said to have come from Etruria. Cornell points out that even if the entire story is reliable, what the story actually says is that Tarquin the elder was the son of a Corinthian - named Demaratus perhaps? - who had settled in Etruria; so by the standards of the time, what Rome got was a Corinthian, that is, *Greek*, dynasty. However, Cornell thinks the story is a crock for a variety of well-founded reasons.)
The whole category "Romans" is problematic for me. I tend to be much more interested in the imperial period than in what went before, basically because pre-imperial Rome didn't produce a lot of literature that has anything to do with fantasy. By the imperial period, talking about "Romans" in any sense other than "residents of the empire" is intensely problematic, and in a couple of centuries it doesn't even
have a legal foundation. But even before the empire, important Roman writers came from elsewhere (Terence is the most obvius example). If you were talking about, say, "Latin" mythology, and I suspect in at least one of your many posts you were, then I'd be on much less firm ground. But for Romans, anyway, I'm really not convinced there exists a period when we can talk about their culture's religious/mythological/literary realm in which that realm has *not* been affected by Greek influence.
> > Conceivably there *is*, somewhere, some sort of evidence that they had one prior to Greek influence, and if we said there wasn't, we'd be lying;
>
> Of course it's conceivable; I'd asked whether it's actually the case.
And all I can answer is "As far as I know, no."
Do you see? You frame a question as (again, not a direct quote, but very close) "Is there even one shred of evidence that the Romans had X?" And "As far as I know, no" isn't really a useful answer to that, now is it? Because I *don't* claim to have mastered all possible evidence. So why should you care about my limited chunk of knowledge?
Questions like that are in a *style* that is hard to answer responsibly, and at the same time convey any useful information.
> > My reading of the threads is that Roman literature and mythology were adopted wholesale from the Greeks, with the exceptions of satire in general, and of local myths (some of them).
>
> And so I inquired as to the particularities, if any would know, of these "native" local myths. For if these native myths are "truly" "native" and "mythic", then – I repeat -- one can agree with me, as others have, given their readings (I remain puzzled that for all your scholarship, and that of Messrs. Menes, Stonehouse, and Fisher, you have not responded to the similar findings of those posts), that the Romans *had* their own mythology once, even if they've preferred the Greek for its wealth of variety, imagination, etc.
I don't claim to have mastery of the details, and I'm trying *not* to go out and do new research for this thread. So I'm in no position to answer anyone who's agreed with you, or to annotate what others (Messrs Menes and Stonehouse, at least) have offered you. (Which is a pity. I'd be interested to know myself whether their examples come from early inscriptions, late literary sources, or what exactly. But I don't have time for that now. Someday...)
I don't remember posts concurring with you *and* offering evidence. I see no point in pitting my lack of evidence against others' lack of evidence, so I haven't.
Re: Mythology:The Greco-Roman Connection
I'll post two excerpts--one on Roman culture (agreeing with the teacher about the "common knowledge" and with NG Poster that scholars disagree), one on the nature of Greek mythology (vis-a-vis Indo-European)--both are from mainstream, respected scholars:
1)
From Denis C. Feeney, The Gods in Epic (pp. 103ff.):
"The first chapter demonstrated how central the epic tradition was to Greek religious and moral thinking...In Rome, on the contrary, the productions of poets--Greek or native--were marginal not only for
actual practice and belief but also for intellectual inquiry into religion....Cotta, one of Cicero's characters in his dialogue De Natura Deorum ('On the Nature of the Gods'), is able to represent the mythological stories about the gods as something wholly Greek, and wholly at odds with conventional Roman religion (Nat. D. 3.60)... "The reasons behind the Romans' comparative disregard for the theology of the poets are various...A prime explanation is to be found in the prime force of Roman religion, which was located in the social and public areas of life. Where the relationship of the state to the gods was paramount, where religion's function was to maintain that relationship in equilibrium, there was little place for narrative and for the more speculative modes of myth. The major gods of the Romans were persons, with attributes and powers; none the less, from the time we first encounter them, they are 'without kinship and unmarried, without adventures or scandals, without connections of friendship or hostility, in short, without mythology' [Dumezil, Archaic Roman Religion, p. 32]. It has, indeed, long been conventional to observe that such mythology as the Roman gods in time acquired was either
borrowed from the Greek stock of tales, or else formed by analogy.
"This commonplace, like so many others about Roman religion, is now being challenged and revised, and we are having to accustom ourselves to thinking of a much richer and older mythical imagination than had
traditionally been taken for granted. [See esp. T. P. Wiseman, "Roman Legend and Oral Tradition," Journal of Roman Studies 79 (1989) 129-37.] Even if, however, most contemporary scholars would cheerfully accept the indigenous character of such core Roman myths as Romulus and Remus, we must acknowledge that the Romans of the historical period, together with Greek observers, regarded the Roman gods themselves as being qualitatively different from the Greek gods in their freedom from the apparatus of fable and story. Dumezil makes this point very forcefully by quoting the lengthy passage in which Dionysius of Halicarnassus, a Greek historian of Augustus' time, expresses his admiration for the absence of myth concerning the Romans' gods. [Dumezil, pp. 49-50, quoting Dion. Hal. Ant. Rom.
2.18.3-19.1 and 2.20]...
"As a result, there was no core of anecdote to make sense out of, no authority in poetic accounts of the divine...."
2)
From Lowell Edmunds, introduction to chap. 4 of Approaches to Greek Myth, "Indo-European and Greek Mythology," p. 199 [the chapter itself is by J. F. Nagy, and attempts to find/confirm some IE connections in
Greek myth--specifically that of Orpheus]:
"Greek is an Indo-European language, and certain institutions of the ancient Greeks have an Indo-European look. Greek religion, however, is strangely non-Indo-European. With the exceptions of Zeus, Hades, and Poseidon, at least in some of their aspects, the Olympians are newcomers...Thus the Indo-European Pan becomes the son of the non-Indo-European Hermes... "If the Greek pantheon is largely non-Indo-European, the stories about the gods are unlikely to be Indo-European, and, in fact, it is
not a god but a hero, Heracles, whose myths can lay the best claim to Indo-European origin. For the most part, Greek contributes little to the reconstruction of Indo-European mythology; or to put the matter another way, returning from the reconstruction to the Greeks, one finds less than might have been expected..."
One of my points is that commonalities between Greek and Roman stories about the gods are far less likely to owe anything to common IE heritage, and far more likely to be a result of "literary" borrowing--NG Poster's cautions about the distinction between myth and lit notwithstanding. If there had been tape recorders in antiquity, things would be different...
Mischa
Matt Giwer
Unregistered User
(1/2/04 9:49 am) Reply
Re: Mythology:The Greco-Roman Connection
There is a common tendency to look at the ancient world as isolated events and relationships each based upon something that survived. It is not common to try to consider them as affecting each other. Thus if we consider we know of trade over the eastern Med from at least 1500 BC the difference between influence and adoption becomes very small.
Going from when Roman tradition says it was founded they would certainly have known of the Greek gods for about a thousand years. Not only known of them but followed them through their evolution to the familiar names and characteristics recorded in our popular mythologies. Given so many years they likely made some contributions to the evolution.
Given the Greeks converted the folk-art of storytelling into the formal discipline of plays they likely had the lead in the evolution of the gods simply by quality.
The Romans, besides what was interchanged between themselves and the Greeks, definitely had there own indigenous beliefs. Incidentally, religious belief, folklore and myth are not always and necessarily the same. One of the most important of ancient sources for this material is Ovid's Fasti. The poem deals with quasihistory, astronomy, religion, etc. In it will be found material on the Lemuria, Parilia, Lupercalia, etc. The Flora story, so celebrated in the middle ages by authors as diverse as occaccio and illon, is told here. Here's a sample, an invocation against the {"goddess" - if so she may be called - of mildew (IV.911-912), uttered by the flamen of Quirinus:
"aspera Robigo, parcas Cerialibus herbis, et tremat in summa leve cacumen humo..."
J.G. rzer's five volume edition is still a classic, wearing its age like a good year of Chateau Ausone. Either A.K. Michels' The Calendar of the Roman Republic or Pierre Brind'Amour's Le Calendrier Romain: recherches chronologique would be worth a read.
The appendix of Frazer's Loeb edition is an excellent little piece in itself, as is his introduction - on the Greek side - to his edition of the Library of Apollodorus.
Well, me too. For its full unlikeliness, you have to hear the theory in its full grandeur, though, and in that form, it actually comes to sort of kind of maybe make sense, in an admittedly rather crazed way. See, we know that Greek writing was invented only once (this part of Powell's argument strikes me as proven; it has to do with how different
inventions of writing tend to implement particular details differently, so if Greek writing had been invented multiple times, we'd see more differences than we do; in particular, the inventor of Greek writing made some really odd decisions, and there's no obvious reason they'd *all* be made the same way multiple times). If it was invented only
once, it had *an inventor*. (Ignoring trivia like a committee of inventors. Who convened the committee?) OK, so why did this inventor do this?
One piece of evidence Powell adduces is that an improbably large percentage of surviving early Greek writing is, in fact, poetry. The most famous example is the Nestor cup that has what looks like a symposium verse on it, but there's another two or three, out of a total of maybe five or six in the first half-century.
From here we go to the fairly amazing leap of faith. Powell notes that the conventional date for Homer, and the thus far archaeologically warranted date for writing, are fairly close to each other. He subscribes to the view that the -Iliad- and the -Odyssey- are
inconceivable without writing. Given these bases, he proposes that the inventor was someone who had heard Homer, decided this was an incomparable genius, and come up with a way to preserve his work. Basically, he sees recording sessions consisting of two geniuses.
He has some further stuff. Because papyrus was expensive, he suggests that the inventor lived on Euboia, which at that time was relatively wealthy. (Or: why anyone off-island cared about the Lelantine War.) He has a story giving a name to a Euboian inventor of writing, but I've forgotten the name. Etc.
It all hangs, sort of crazily, together, but it all just looks too good, and rests on way too little evidence and lots of assertions. Oddly enough, I find that it works best when combined with Gregory Nagy's utterly antithetical view that the Homeric epics only crystallised very slowly. I figure that if papyrus was *that* expensive, then there wouldn't have been very many written copies of the epics, for centuries after they were composed. But there could have been a few that were carefully copied from the original, and others that were records of performances. This would fit Nagy's observations on the "wild" papyri, and his insistence that the Archaic experience of Homer was fundamentally oral. The reason the Alexandrian vulgate won out, in that case, would be because one or more of the manuscripts the Alexandrians worked from was/were actually directly descended from the original, and the Alexandrians were not totally incompetent textual critics. Something like that.
I *like* this combination-scenario, but I still don't buy Powell's full-blown idea of two great geniuses, one room, two books. I figure I don't see any reason why the epics couldn't have been transmitted for a generation or so without writing, so the Meeting
of Titans just doesn't strike me as proven or provable.
> The one place where can have an idea of how ancient scripts were actually used
Huh? You are, I think, under-informed. To continue:
> is Mesoptamia where writing was done on soft clay tablets which were then baked. Usually a baked clay tablet in a dry climate wouldn't suffer damage worth noticing even in six thousand years and so the majority of every bit of writing ever done by Babylonians and Assyrians on clay is probably still there in Mesoptamia unharmed. Fire is good for them.
Nope, false, false. First of all, water is bad for tablets. So any site that gets waterlogged, bye bye records. This is why, for example, we don't have much that's really early from Babylon.
Second, tablets got re-used; that is, the clay in them was broken up and re-shaped. I don't know the details, but some of the most valuable records of the last days of Ugarit were actually found *in* the recycling factory.
Third, tablets can be broken. Much of the cuneiform legacy survives only in fragments whose piecing-together is the single greatest task of Assyriology.
Fourth and worst, tablets are by no means the only things Mesopotamians wrote on. They also used wax to do cuneiform on, and by and large we don't know what they wrote on wax. They *could* have used other media of which we're even more ignorant, and in their later days - after about 1000 B.C. - they certainly did; many reliefs of Assyrian kings show the king speaking and both a cuneiform scribe, and someone holding some kind of scroll, writing. The other three reasons would presumably be equal-opportunity levellers, but this fourth one seems likeliest to have hit specific types of writing in varying degrees.
Anyway, there *is* a reason we don't yet have a complete <Gilgamesh>.
> Over 90% of the tablets uncovered are business documents, nostly invoices and bills of lading and such. I suspect that is in the case in every culture. Writing spreads mainly because it is such a practical way of keeping tallies and accurate records and recording day-to-day information. Sending a short written message to someone is much less costly than going oneself or sending an messenger that one trusts implicitly to pass on the message and return with the answer.
Well, you can suspect it all you want, but do you have evidence?
Thing is, we *haven't* lost all indications of what early writing was used for elsewhere. We have a decent selection of it from Egypt, for example, and not of business documents. We have ostraca from the Greeks, and ostraca are what furnish the data on which Powell rests his bizarre theory. Etc. As far as I know, the evidence for Greek *and* Etruscan writing, for generations after the period Powell considered most closely, is *very* consistently *against* business records. The consistency is dazzling. I don't claim to be an expert, but from a fair amount of miscellaneous reading on the subject, the earliest business records in (non- Mycenaean) Greek writing known to me are the names of potters' workshops written on the pots starting, if I remember right, sometime
in the early 5th century BC, which is to say three centuries later than we start getting things like ostraca and epitaphs and dedicatory inscriptions at Delphi and other places.
I would certainly be interested in anything you can show to the contrary.
Keep in mind that these are seriously different societies. The aristocratic ethos of archaic Greece just doesn't exist in most periods in Mesopotamia. (Note that most of the Mesopotamian business records are records of large administrations, temples or states, not of private firms.) It makes perfect sense to me that the Greeks, and for that matter the Etruscans and Iberians and Libyans and maybe Gauls too, on meeting with the much more advanced Phoenicians, would adopt writing as a sign of elite status, and therefore restrict it to elite pursuits. This kind of showing off is classic in all sorts of contexts.
> But religious documents and hymns and mythic poetry are a large part of the other 10%. The Bible is still consistantly the best selling book in traditionally Christian countries.
Yeah, but during much of the archaic age, Homer *was* religious documents, hymns, and mythic poetry. So I'm not clear on how this does anything but undermine your objection.
> > The whole category "Romans" is problematic for me. If you were talking about, say, "Latin" mythology, and I suspect in at least one of your many posts you were, then I'd be on much less firm ground.
> We don't have ancient Italian literature or Latin literature. We don't even have literature from Greek city states in Italy. We have only Roman literature either centered totally on Rome or reworking Greek tales even when sometimes written by outsiders like Terence or that Cisalpine Gaul Virgil.
Um. Well. Let's see. We *do* have a small amount of Etruscan writing that may include at least one literary text, far as I know. (Is there now a decipherment that proves the longest text *isn't* literary?) I don't know whether the surviving inscriptions in Oscan, Umbrian, etc. offer any literary contents, though I'd certainly bet against it.
As for the Greek city states? Hmmm. Pythagoras doesn't properly survive, of course. I thought there were Sicilians whose works had made it - isn't Diodorus one? But you may be distinguishing Sicily from the mainland. I thought there were at least a few writers from the mainland whose works survived, but I'm really not sure, and I wouldn't be shocked to find otherwise. Do keep in mind, though, that the mainland cities mostly fell out of Greek rule quite early.
In *general*, though, these statements strike me as true. I don't think there's any particularly regional literature in the West until the second century A.D. in Africa, at earliest. The earlier boom in writers from Spain saw them all, except I guess Quintilian,
do most of their actual writing in Rome, or in the younger Seneca's case I guess in retirement at an Italian villa too.
What I meant by "less firm ground", though, is approximately this. I feel fairly confident in saying, on the basis of a huge sample of evidence, that the Romans didn't have myths of their own on anything remotely resembling the Greek scale; that if they had
myths at all that were entirely independent of Greek influence, those myths were of the patchy and fragmentary character that is, I think, actually fairly typical of most societies. But I don't have any huge sample of evidence as to the Oscans, say. For all
I know, they could've had an orally-transmitted, or even (still less plausibly) a written, equivalent to the -Bibliotheca- of Apollodorus, and we just didn't get it because the Oscans didn't win. Since I think Greek-style mythology is a minority taste, I wouldn't bet that way. But the silence of Rome on this subject is a kind of evidence; the silence of the Oscans on this subject is just a black hole, not evidence at all.
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