Okay kids, I’ve made up my mind

And I’m going to Mykonos/Delos this weekend.  Screw my finals (in Orthodox and Archaeology of Athens), I’m going to the birthplace of freakin’ Apollo.

‘Freakin’ Apollo’ is an epithet.  Well, it is now.

Stay tuned for pictures and whatnot.

Also, for those of you in Oberlin, my plans are still up in the air, but I will try hard to be there for Commencement.  It all depends on whether I get the Newberry job or not, kids.  If I’m working in Oberlin I will definitely be there.  If not, well, I’ll try.  Deal?

In other things

1. I am now an Advanced Open Water Diver!  Yes, I did my Deep Dive yesterday, and it was fun.  I did not die.  Now, paperwork pending, I will have made €300 worth of diving worth it.
2. 7 pages into the Orthodox paper…I am pretending really really hard that it matters, just like my advisor told me to, and it’s working, somewhat
3. I only have 2 more days of class left, holy shit
4. Finally submitted my honors proposal.  Still doing it on Menander.  It’s a matter of pride now; I’ve started and I won’t let the fact that there isn’t much of Menander’s text left stop me!

Week 1 at Oxford

The most blindingly obvious differences are in the system. Having studied in the US for two years, where time is structured around classes, here there really isn’t much of a structure. I could attend lectures, or I could sleep all day. I could work at my translations a little bit every day until the next tutorial meeting, or I could do it all the day before.

Even the work for my tutorial isn’t that structured. ‘Translate as much as you can’, my tutor says. Just how much that is is debatable.

It’s unfortunate IFSA-Butler chose to place me in St Catz, where they don’t do Classics. This means the college library is of no use to me, and there’s nobody here I can even really discuss Classics with in earnest.

Other than that I have no complaints. The sun is still making occasional appearances, the lecturers have been informative (I am attending lectures on Plato and Aristophanes), and my tutor is helpful.  The city of Oxford is beautiful, but that was to be expected.  Now, off to translate 150 or so lines before Tuesday.

polymorphing opinion

Two years after I first bought it I have now decided to re-read CW Shelmardine’s Greek for Beginners.

I spent all of my first year learning Attic Greek, tossing it out the window so I could read Homeric Greek the semester after that, and then picking up Ionic so Herodotus would be readable, and now that I don’t know what exactly I’ll be doing next semester I thought a refresher would be advisable.

Also with all this rain pouring outside it seems like a good use of time. I am now discovering that I do not know the first and second declensions. When I start trying synopses I believe my brain will spontaneously explode.

In other occurrences, that Arrian/Alexander article has now been submitted, hopefully to be rolled out in the publication this coming December, if that works out.

[composed and posted with ecto]

Protected: Homer, Pindar, Xenophon, and…Arrian?

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First real post

And of course it deals with Classics.

My main project involves spending a great amount of time with Arrian’s Ανάβασις Αλεξάνδρου (The Campaigns of Alexander–it’s on Google Books in English [and if you like pain, 4 out of 7 of its books are on Wikisource in Greek], should you be inclined to peruse it).

Johannes Schulze, an eminent figure in the Prussian education system in the 19th century, died in 1869. This is where our story starts. The man had an incredible personal library, probably the best in Europe at the time–20326 volumes, collected over the span of his lifetime. A clever Northwestern professor heard of it and convinced Northwestern to purchase the collection, and they transported it to the States just as the war between Prussia and France started. The fact that Northwestern’s library only had 3000 volumes before they received this collection makes the acquisition so much more important; it kickstarted the library’s growth.

It’s not just the sheer size of it that makes it impressive though: it’s also what’s actually in the collection. (And of course I’ll just list the Classics ones–to be fair it is mostly Classics.) Some of the first ever examples of Greek type are in it, and the first printings of Herodotus and Aristophanes in the original Greek.

Now 20000+ volumes is a formidable number, so there has to be a much smaller focus to the project. Ever the consummate scholar and philologist, Schulze, in addition to his 80 different editions and printings of the Anabasis, translated it himself. This seems as good a point as any on which to focus. Firstly, it gives interesting insights to his scholarly interests. Secondly, it has nice parallels. As Arrian collected different accounts of Alexander’s campaigns, Schulze collected different versions of Arrian’s histories. As Arrian was the model of historiography from that point on, Leopold von Ranke, Schulze’s prodigy, was the father of historiography and of modern history. Even though the Anabasis is a formidable work in and of itself, its effects on the field of historiography and its importance to Schulze make it of more interest to me and connect it to the Schulze exhibit and the forthcoming (hopefully) publication.

Wow, that was a lot of blather! I’m just dumping all my thoughts here, hopefully to form a coherent outline by next week so I have something to show my boss, that I actually do things in my office besides hide from everyone else.

If by some bizarre chance you have anything to say about this, feel free. I’m running out of ideas.

And if for some unfathomable reason you want to read more about Schulze and the coup de bibliothèque which Germany still rues to this day, Jeff Garrett’s page is a good place to start.