Uncategorized – Page 16 – Roman Revolutions

Politics Mastery Quiz Cometh!

By admin | February 20, 2022 | Comments 0 Comment

Greetings Roman,

This week you’ll prove your knowledge of Roman politics by completing a simple quiz on important attribute, offices, and organs in the Roman government. Since the game operates within the parameters of Roman governance, it is vital that you understand the players, the processes, and the parts or the Republic.

The quiz will consist of around 30 questions in 3 parts:

Magistracies & Assemblies
True / False about the Roman constitution, political offices, etc.
General Politics & Scenarios (here you will receive a very short sketch of a situation or action and you will select what happens next based on your knowledge of Roman politics).

To successfully complete the map quiz, you must by the end of the day on SATURDAY.

☐ Complete your quiz with honor. This quiz is closed book and must be completed without notes or other resources.Once you have seen the quiz, you should not refer to notes or other resources. You have as long as you need to take the quiz but it must be done in a single sitting.

☐ Correctly identify at least 90% of the items on the quiz.

If you have scored above an 80% you may automatically revise your quiz (see course blog, “Guidelines for Revising Quizzes”, for more information).

You may RETAKE a quiz with a lower score by use of a tabella.

To help you prepare, here are several resources. In essence, if you know the information on these two documents, you will have your basic Roman politics down (note that you’ve already encountered all of this; this quiz is an opportunity to consolidate that knowledge and spot any gaps in advance of the game).

The Cursus Honorum Handout (slightly updated)
This flow chart, slightly less confusing than the one shown in class.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to ask.

When you are ready to take your quiz, you may do so here.

Martial, Book of Spectacles 24

By admin | February 16, 2022 | Comments 0 Comment

This is another epigram commemorating the opening of the Flavian Amphitheater. Reread the introduction to Martial in Francese to review the context.

Whatever Rhodope* is said to have watched on Orpheus’ stage,
Your amphitheater, Caesar, displayed to you.
Cliffs crept close and up ran a forest–incredible!–
A forest like the grove of the Hesperides might have been.
Every species of wild beast was there mingled with livestock
And above the poet many birds petched,
But the poet was laid low, torn apart by an unpleasing bear:
This alone happened au contraire.**

* a mountain in Thrace.

**[i.e. contrary to the expected story; the last words of the Latin poem are in Greek, and literally mean “contrary to the story”]

If you are unfamiliar with the basic myth of Orpheus, you can read a short summary, here. Note that between his attempt to rescue his wife from the Underworld and his death at the hands of the Maenads, Orpheus sat in the shadow of Rhodope and sung a lament for his lost beloved. The song was so beautiful that nature itself approached to listen, as the mosaic below illustrates.

Detail from Orpheus Mosaic. Regional Archaeological Museum Antonio Salinas, Palermo.

Here, for the Latinate among you, is the original poem.

Quidquid in Orpheo Rhodope spectasse theatro
     dicitur, exhibuit, Caesar, harena tibi.
Repserunt scopuli mirandaque silua cucurrit,
     quale fuisse nemus creditur Hesperidum.
Adfuit inmixtum pecori genus omne ferarum               5
     et supra uatem multa pependit auis,
ipse sed ingrato iacuit laceratus ab urso.
     Haec tantum res est facta [par’ ‘istorian].

Review of “New Approaches to Greek and Roman warfare”

By admin | February 15, 2022 | Comments 0 Comment

If you were interested in learning more about ancient battle in practice and aftermath, there’s a review of an interesting new book in Bryn Mawr Classical Reviews: Lee L. Brice, ed., New approaches to Greek and Roman warfare. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 2020. Pp. 216. ISBN 9781118273333. $69.95.

This collected volume offers “new approaches” to ancient warfare. So what’s new? The most prominent theme, linking four of the thirteen essays, is that of military psychology.

Roman siege expert Josh Levithan’s piece on “moral and morale” in sieges investigates why sacks of ancient cities were so merciless, pointing out that by closing their gates those within a city had refused a fair fight in the fields outside, denying the besiegers the contest in the virtus of all combatants that an open-field battle promised. When the city fell they were not, therefore, entitled to the ethical protections a fair fight granted the defeated, since they were themselves fighting in an immoral fashion. Levithan also points out that the taking of fortified places required not merely normal military courage, but—from those few first over the wall—exceptional, almost suicidal, courage, setting an “oddly epic stage” (145); the long fatigues of the siege, followed by such extreme heroism, also made the successful besiegers think that they were entitled to the greater satisfactions (in slaughter, rape, and plunder) of an unrestrained sack. This paper deserves praise too for its sensitive treatment of the relationship between actual ancient combat and literary depictions of ancient combat, a particular interest of this reviewer, but judging by other work recent and forthcoming, an expanding area of scholarly concern….

Guidelines for Revising Quizzes

By admin | January 31, 2022 | Comments 1 comment

If you earned below the specification threshold on a quiz, you can can still complete the activity by revising it.

In general, if you miss the threshold by 1 question, you automatically have the opportunity to revise your quiz; please note that if revising you must successfully revise all the questions you missed to complete the quiz successfully. If you have scored lower on a quiz, you may still revise using a tabella (tabella must be submitted with revisions).

To revise a quiz you must:

complete a question-by-question reflection detailing (1) what you missed or misunderstood and (2) why for every error. Your reflection for each question must include (3) the correct answer.
Complete the revision by attaching a “wrapper” that summarizes the kinds of errors that you made and outlines a plan to prevent them in the future (in this class and beyond). This wrapper should be a few sentences to a short paragraph. It need not be extensive, but it should demonstrate serious consideration of the your process leading up to and in taking the quiz and how to improve your process in the future.
The revision should be emailed to me before the start of the second class after the quiz.

Classics Colloquium: Examining Gender in Ancient Texts (Charles Kuper’s Talk)

By Baumann | January 31, 2022 | Comments 0 Comment

This past Friday, I attended a classics colloquium lecture called “The Grammar of Sanctity” with speaker Charlie Kuper, in which he discussed his work examining gender in the Greek, Latin, and Syriac versions of the “Life of Euphrosyne Who Was Called Smaragdus.” When I think about the discussions of gender and sexuality, I think of the modern day, where we are truly coming to question gender norms of the past. It’s crazy to me that during the time of the Romans they were more inclusive with pronouns by having specific masculine, feminine, and neuter pronouns that people could use. There are languages such as German that to this day still don’t include neuter pronouns. One of the other things that stood out during the talk is how the ancient literature talked and supported the idea of changing names. Names were super important to Romans and they strongly identified with their names so to change their name, instead of just adding an additional name, shows the true acceptance they had of switching genders. It’s cool that the Romans seem to have accepted changing genders but more importantly changing names. The “Life of Euphrosyne” was one of the examples given of pronoun changes that was really helpful to see how over the course of a text the same person could be referred to using different pronouns.

The debate of appearance vs reality/interior was also really interesting especially because to this day we still judge people for their exterior looks and clothing instead of taking the time to get to know them and what really goes on inside them. The fact that ancient literature was discussing being true to yourself and issues surrounding your exterior appearance and interior thoughts and emotions. I brought my friend, Janet, along to the presentation and after it was over we had a fun discussion about languages and their pronouns as well as gender expression. We talked about how originally ancient languages were quite gender inclusive but then modern languages evolved and became less inclusive. Today we are back to trying to get the languages we use daily to be more inclusive. We have drawn a lot of lessons from ancient civilizations but in my opinion there is still more we can learn especially when it comes to acceptance of different genders, pronouns, and letting people be themselves.

Reading ancient texts in the “widest form possible” (Charles Kuper’s talk)

By Ruhl | January 30, 2022 | Comments 0 Comment

In Charles Kuper’s talk, “The Grammar of Sanctity,” he provided a critical analysis on some of the earliest versions of the story “The life of Euphrosyne who was called Smaragdus.” Euphrosyne was a woman who disguised herself as a man ( Smaragdus) in order to join a monastery. There are 13 versions of this manuscript in Greek, Latin, Syriac, and Armenian, and many of the versions are significantly different as to when they use the name “Euphrosyne” or “Smaragdus” and “him” or “her” at different times throughout the text. Since pronouns in Latin and Greek indicate the gender of the subject (I don’t know about Syriac and Armenian), the authors of many of the original manuscripts used their own interpretation of the story in order to choose a masculine, feminine, or neutral pronoun. Since Kuper wants to write a translation in which he does not take a singular stance on Euphrosyne’s/Smaradus’s gender at these ambiguous moments in the story, he replaces many pronouns with *NO SUBJECT* [his or her] or *NO SUBJECT* [he or she]. He showed pictures of pages where this was used in almost every sentence (and it actually seemed difficult to read at times), but he is just trying to best represent all of the possibilities instead of interjecting his own interpretation.

Kuper said that when writing a translation, you always need to have one main manuscript that provides the basis for the storyline. While he does follow one text more closely than the others, he does want to try and give an accurate account of the works of all original 13 authors to the best of his abilities. He mentioned that one modern interpretation says that Euphrosyne was trangender, but he feels like making a generalizing statement like this does injustice to the complexities of the text. He said that it is best to read ancient texts like this, and hagiography in particular, in the “widest form possible.” This seems like a really good idea when reading history, and historians like him make it possible for us to read a single book, and benefit and learn from other interpretations of the story (via footnotes, text, etc). This is particularly important for non open-source manuscripts.

Lastly, I thought one of the questions from an audience member was really interesting. The audience member asked if Kuper ever thought of writing his translation as an online document with hyperlinks to show more detail. He said that his translation is intended for print, but briefly acknowledged the “visual humanities.” I’m excited to keep my eyes open for texts like this as technology and the field of visual humanities keeps developing.

Gender, Transformation, and Change in Ancient Manuscripts

By Mann | January 30, 2022 | Comments 0 Comment

I attended a classics lecture at Bryn Mawr College, “The Grammar of Sanctity” with speaker Charlie Kuper in which he discussed his work examining gender in the Greek, Latin, and Syriac versions of the “Life of Euphrosyne Who Was Called Smaragdus.” The story itself is about a girl named Euphrosyne who was raised by her single father in ancient Greece. She decided to leave home in pursuit of becoming a monk and living at a monastery. In order to do so, she disguised herself as a man and changed her name to Smaragdus (the Greek word for emerald). Her gender transformation worked to fool the priest into allowing her to stay at the monastery, but quickly the other monks began to lust after Smaragdus and she was sent elsewhere so that she could not affect the monks in such an ungodly way. Smaragdus fell ill and found her father to whom she admits that she is his daughter. She passed away and was buried at the monastery as a saint. Charlie Kuper works to analyze this story through ancient manuscripts specifically to look at the way in which Euphrosyne’s gender pronouns change throughout the story. He has been studying 13 ancient manuscripts that tell this story in the languages of Greek, Latin, Syriac, and Armenian. Within the manuscripts, the pronouns for Euphrosyne differ and often change from she/her to he/him when the saint changes their name to Smaragdus. The saint’s gender also changes back and forth quickly between lines. The way in which the gender pronouns change is dependent on the scribe’s interpretation of the work. For example, in one of the Greek manuscripts, the scribe changed the pronouns of Euphrosyne when she changed her name and filled the text with messages of transformation, appearance, and change, in order to elicit the idea that “the body may change, but the soul does not.” Kuper discussed that ancient Greek and Latin scholars were very interested in pronouns and gender, which is interesting because it is often thought that age-old ideas about gender were limited to the gender binary that many are pushing against today with the idea that gender is a spectrum. I brought my friend, Jordan Denaver, to the talk and afterwards we discussed how and why Kuper’s work could have an impact on society. We discussed that this kind of examination of ancient works helps to rethink queer identities in ancient times, which could maybe translate to more open ideas about gender, transformation, and breaking rigid binaries that are ingrained in society today.