And no birds sing.

Italy, it seems, didn't have a lock on access to the Underworld with Cumae. Phyrgians had Ploutonion:

A “gate to hell” has emerged from ruins in southwestern Turkey, Italian archaeologists have announced. 

Digital reconstruction

Known as Pluto's Gate -- Ploutonion in Greek, Plutonium in Latin -- the cave was celebrated as the portal to the underworld in Greco-Roman mythology and tradition. 

Historic sources located the site in the ancient Phrygian city of Hierapolis, now called Pamukkale, and described the opening as filled with lethal mephitic vapors.

“This space is full of a vapor so misty and dense that one can scarcely see the ground. Any animal that passes inside meets instant death,” the Greek geographer Strabo (64/63 BC -- about 24 AD) wrote. 

“I threw in sparrows and they immediately breathed their last and fell,” he added.

More here.

An Atlas for Homer

Here's a nice atlas full of illustrations of the Iliad and Odyssey, via Public Domain Review.

Shopping in Ancient Rome

From a review of Claire Holleran's Shopping in Ancient Rome:

Take the shops and bars you see lining the streets in all the best-preserved Roman towns. Walk down the main streets in Pompeii or Herculaneum and (as modern tourist guides always insist) you can feel comfortably at home in what seems recognisably close to a modern cityscape: bars and cafés (tabernae, popinae or cauponae) with their counters facing the pavement to catch passing trade, and shops (also called tabernae) with wide openings to display products and entice customers inside. There are even traces of the big shutters that made these openings secure at night, and the little snicket doors that would let the proprietor into his establishment if he didn’t want to take his shutters fully down.

Insights into Jews and Greeks

A new book by Amos Oz and Fania Oz-Salzberger, Jews and Words, treats the deep relation of Jews to books and the act of reading:

 

A nice interview of Oz and Oz-Salzberger here.

 Out of print, but occasionally available through resellers, Anne Rockwell's Temple on a Hill gives us a bit of the world of Athens, with great characters and glimpses of the Greek mind:

 

Venetian artist at the Ringling

The Ringling Museum is set to open an exhibit of Paolo Veronese's work.

Paolo Veronese (1528–1588) was one of the giants of Venetian Renaissance painting. Though perhaps best known for his grand ceiling paintings and large Biblical feast scenes, Veronese and his workshop created altarpieces and smaller religious paintings for private devotion or collectors, as well as portraits, depictions of sensual narratives drawn from the classical tradition, and allegories glorifying the Venetian state. Veronese was also an outstanding draughtsman.

The exhibition Paolo Veronese: A Master and His Workshop in Renaissance Venice presents some of the artist’s finest paintings and drawings now in North American museums and private collections, as well as a selection of prints after important works.

The exhibit will run from Dec. 7, 2012 to April 14, 2013. Some distinguished scholars and lecturers will be coming - schedule here.

Veronese, The Art of Painting

Liberal education is a conversation . . .

Mark Kingwell, a teacher in Toronto, on returning to a humanistic basis for education:

We philosophers don’t value Plato because he has been around so long; he has been around so long because he’s valuable. . . .

Sitting together in groups, with a shared text before us, still works as well as it did two millennia ago. And many innovations, such as flashy PowerPoint slides or “clickers” that rate instant comprehension, are just gadgets. Gadgets can be fun, but they are no substitute for reading, writing and discussion. . . 

Liberal education is a conversation, not a data transfer that might be accomplished as well online. That conversation starts in a room, with other people. It can even be a large room, if the professor is engaging and enthusiastic.

Montaigne's beams and the cultivation of freedom

A friend posted these links:.

The first is a catalog of the inscriptions that Montaigne placed on the beams of his famous library.

The second is an editorial on why narrow models of education are a betrayal of pedagogy.

An unusual wall painting in Pompeii.

As we've often alluded to the complex relationship of the worldview of the Greeks to that of the Hebrews -- here's a painting found at Pompei that suggests at least an awareness of the Old Testament wisdom books among 1st Century AD Romans:

According to Theodore Feder, the painting depicts the scene of Solomon in judgment, and the two women each claiming to be the mother of an infant, and how he decided that case. Feder says it's quite likely that the two figures on the far left, observing the scene, were meant to represent Socrates and Aristotle, thus bringing Hellenic philosophy into the chambers of Israel's wisest king.

Interestingly, Socrates's posture here is not unlike that of a satyr, which is interesting in light of a tradition stemming from Plato's Symposium. In that dialogue, Alcibiades compares Socrates to Silenus, an ugly old satyr to all appearances, but one who contains invaluable riches within. Feder's article is here. More on Silenus on the Ovid blog here.

(Thanks to Arline for the pointer to Feder's article.)

US Gnoticism?

For an informed discussion of the relation of Romanticism to religion -- a kind of anticipation of the "death of God" proclaimed by Nietzsche -- have a look at this piece by Simon Critchley in the NY Times. Interestingly, citing Harold Bloom, it focuses on Mormonism, but locates that sect, tellingly, within the gnostic tradition:

Why I Love Mormonism

The Joseph Smith sermon alluded to is the King Follett sermon.

Newton on the cusp

Often wrongly portrayed as a cold rationalist, Isaac Newton is one of history’s most compelling figures. It is true that he was capable of the most precise and logical thought it is possible for a human to achieve: his three years of obsessive work that gave birth to the Principia, containing his theory of gravity, stand as the greatest achievement in science. 

Just as certainly, though, he was also consumed with what we would now view as completely unscientific pursuits: alchemy and biblical prophesy.

Was Isaac Newton a Scientist? A Sorcerer? Or Both? 

The Bible as philosophy

Yoram Hazony

What precisely is the content of the natural law ethics that emerges from the History of Israel? How is this ethics related to the content of the Mosaic law imbedded in this History? And how does it relate to the instructions God is depicted as giving individuals on particular occasions regarding specific actions they are to undertake? All three of these questions will have to be given satisfactory answers if we are to attain a clear view of the ethics of the History. And such a view will be needed, I suspect, if we wish to gain a full picture of the ethics of the prophetic orations and other biblical works as well.

http://www.npr.org/books/titles/160350794/the-philosophy-of-hebrew-scripture?tab=excerpt#excerpt


"The bottom line is that the Bible introduces hope into human political affairs. What it does is it takes the individual, empowers the individual and says, 'Somewhere above you, there is a transcendent God who is not controlled by the king or by the priests or by the military, a power in the world that is able to hear you, and that is going to allow you to develop your understanding of what's right, and of the way the world should develop.' All of human history has proceeded from that first spark of hope that appears in the Hebrew scriptures."
http://www.npr.org/2012/09/04/160388922/an-individualist-approach-to-the-hebrew-bible

Classics in comic dress

The Graphic Canon (Seven Stories Press) is a gorgeous, one-of-a-kind trilogy that brings classic literatures of the world together with legendary graphic artists and illustrators. There are more than 130 illustrators represented and 190 literary works over three volumes—many newly commissioned, some hard to find—reinterpreted here for readers and collectors of all ages.

Volume 1 takes us on a visual tour from the earliest literature through the end of the 1700s. Along the way, we're treated to eye-popping renditions of the human race's greatest epics: Gilgamesh, The Iliad, The Odyssey (in watercolors by Gareth Hinds), The Aeneid, Beowulf, and The Arabian Nights, plus later epics The Divine Comedy and The Canterbury Tales (both by legendary illustrator and graphic designer Seymour Chwast), Paradise Lost, and Le Morte D'Arthur. Two of ancient Greece's greatest plays are adapted—the tragedy Medea by Euripides and Tania Schrag’s uninhibited rendering of the very bawdy comedy Lysistrata by Aristophanes (the text of which is still censored in many textbooks). Also included is Robert Crumb’s rarely seen adaptation of James Boswell’s London Journal, filled with philosophical debate and lowbrow debauchery.

More...