Pnyx

[Ed Cryer]

http://tinyurl.com/cu4mr9n

What is a "pnyx"?

Ed

[Richard Tobin]

In article <km5jqm$m6p$1...@dont-email.me>,

Ed Cryer <e...@somewhere.in.the.uk> wrote:

>What is a "pnyx"?

A kind of bnox.

-- Richard

[John W Kennedy]

/The/ Pnyx was the Athenian Forum.

--
John W Kennedy
"Give up vows and dogmas, and fixed things, and you may grow like That.
...you may come to think a blow bad, because it hurts, and not because
it humiliates. You may come to think murder wrong, because it is
violent, and not because it is unjust."
-- G. K. Chesterton. "The Ball and the Cross"

[Ed Cryer]

Peter J Ross wrote:
> In humanities.classics on Sun, 5 May 2013 12:41:48 +0000 (UTC),

> I agree; it's clearly a mistake for "pyx" (πυξίς).
>
> Was the lady who owned it callipnygian?
>
>

Thanks for that. As you can see I'm reading some Margaret Doody novels.
With the help of a dictionary I've managed to decipher your pun too.
All this is very Aristotelian.
:-)

Ed

[Ed Cryer]

Peter J Ross wrote:
> In humanities.classics on Sun, 05 May 2013 21:56:51 +0100, Ed Cryer

> wrote:
>
>> Peter J Ross wrote:
>>> In humanities.classics on Sun, 5 May 2013 12:41:48 +0000 (UTC),
>>> Richard Tobin wrote:
>>>
>>>> In article <km5jqm$m6p$1...@dont-email.me>,
>>>> Ed Cryer <e...@somewhere.in.the.uk> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> What is a "pnyx"?
>>>>
>>>> A kind of bnox.
>>>
>>> I agree; it's clearly a mistake for "pyx" (πυξίς).
>>>
>>> Was the lady who owned it callipnygian?
>>>
>>>
>>
>> Thanks for that. As you can see I'm reading some Margaret Doody novels.
>

> I hope you're enjoying them, and that you don't find too many similar
> mistakes.

>
>> With the help of a dictionary I've managed to decipher your pun too.
>

> Richard's pun was much more proficient, since it contained an answer
> to the question.

>
>> All this is very Aristotelian.
>> :-)
>

> I've been re-reading the great man's Nicomachaean Ethics in an old
> Penguin translation, with less enjoyment than I expected. I suspect
> I'll enjoy the Greek text more, but I have to finish reading all the
> Greek poets first.
>
>
>

I've read "Aristotle Detective" and "Poison in Athens". I'm impressed by
the way she writes them in a contemporary style; without any of that
"ain't this quaint?" or "olde worlde" suggestions.
I also like the lack of women's lib attitudes. I'm sick of tirades
against "patriarchal and patristic societies". However, I suspect that
if I were to write to her and say "How could Athens have been p&p when
the patron goddess was a woman?", then she'd easily beat me down by
telling me that women couldn't attend Assemblies, had to veil their
faces in public and lived in the back with the kids and slaves. Hhhmm!
Yes, I won't take her on there! I might, however, gently lead her by the
hand down to Sparta, and show her some Spartan girls. They couldn't vote
either, but they were far more liberated than Athenian girls.

I have also got "Aristotle and the Secrets of Life", but I've read enough.

I wouldn't recommend Aristotle in the original Greek. It's far below the
beautiful, poetic style of Plato; more like Koine Greek.

Ed

P.S. This question of ancient Greeks' attitudes towards women is
sometimes a bit difficult to grasp. There's Sappho, for example. All the
lyric poets regarded her as the greatest; even Roman poets such as
Horace and Catullus.
However, you don't have to delve back to the ancient world for practical
examples. A mere read of John Stuart Mills' book in the 19th c reveals
all the same asperities and strangenesses;
http://tinyurl.com/casl5or
And then think of all the great women writers of that millennium; Jane
Austen, Mary Shelley, the Brontes, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Elliot etc.
I find it difficult to get my head around the lack of political persona
that they must have had to deal with as a daily reality.

[John W Kennedy]

On 2013-05-08 14:22:46 +0000, Ed Cryer said:
> P.S. This question of ancient Greeks' attitudes towards women is
> sometimes a bit difficult to grasp. There's Sappho, for example. All
> the lyric poets regarded her as the greatest; even Roman poets such as
> Horace and Catullus.
> However, you don't have to delve back to the ancient world for
> practical examples. A mere read of John Stuart Mills' book in the 19th
> c reveals all the same asperities and strangenesses;
> http://tinyurl.com/casl5or
> And then think of all the great women writers of that millennium; Jane
> Austen, Mary Shelley, the Brontes, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Elliot etc.
> I find it difficult to get my head around the lack of political persona
> that they must have had to deal with as a daily reality.

A mere hundred years ago, Jane Austen was regarded as a "man's writer",
on the theory that her precise observation and wit were too much for
poor little female brains to process.

--
John W Kennedy
"There are those who argue that everything breaks even in this old dump
of a world of ours. I suppose these ginks who argue that way hold that
because the rich man gets ice in the summer and the poor man gets it in
the winter things are breaking even for both. Maybe so, but I'll swear
I can't see it that way."
-- The last words of Bat Masterson

[Ed Cryer]

Peter J Ross wrote:
> In humanities.classics on Wed, 08 May 2013 15:22:46 +0100, Ed Cryer
> wrote:
>

> Men and women alike have almost no chance, as individuals, of gaining
> a "political persona" by voting in a "representative democracy". Our
> right to vote is nothing like the Athenian citizen's right to speak in
> the Ekklesia, and few men nowadays have as much political influence as
> the woman Aspasia had in Athens.

I don't think Aspasia could be said to have had much political
influence; probably no more than the courtesan of whom The Duke of
Wellington said "Publish and be damned".

I have a "political persona" in that I can vote; I pay attention to
politics, think about them, argue my corner with others, am a full
political animal in the Aristotelian sense.
And when I disagree with my MP I have the right to protest. Many people
band together to protest; against wars, against poll taxes, against
politicians.

How many ancient Greek women had anything like that? The only protest
from women that I can recall is Aristophanes' comic one in "Lysistrata".
No Margaret Thatcher, Yvette Cooper or Margaret Beckett.

Did ancient Greek women even discuss political issues? Very few, I
should have thought. They just didn't mix with the men like that; not
even at the Olympics.

The only soldiers that turn up in books by Jane Austen are viewed as
marriage possibilities. And the war against Napoleon was going on at the
time.

Ed

[Odysseus]

In article <518668c7$0$25620$607e...@cv.net>,

John W Kennedy <jwk...@attglobal.net> wrote:

> On 2013-05-05 12:41:48 +0000, Richard Tobin said:
>
> > In article <km5jqm$m6p$1...@dont-email.me>,
> > Ed Cryer <e...@somewhere.in.the.uk> wrote:
> >
> >> What is a "pnyx"?
> >
> > A kind of bnox.
>
> /The/ Pnyx was the Athenian Forum.

Indeed: see <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pnyx>,
<http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?l=pnuc&la=greek#lexicon>, &
<http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.00
57%3Aentry%3Dpnu%2Fc>

--
Odysseus

[j...@sfbooks.com]

On Wednesday, May 8, 2013 7:22:46 AM UTC-7, Ed Cryer wrote:

> However, I suspect that if I were to write to [Margaret Doody *] and
> say "How could Athens have been [patriarchal and ?patristic] when

> the patron goddess was a woman?", then she'd easily beat me down by
> telling me that women couldn't attend Assemblies, had to veil their
> faces in public and lived in the back with the kids and slaves.
> Hhhmm! Yes, I won't take her on there! I might, however, gently lead
> her by the hand down to Sparta, and show her some Spartan girls.
> They couldn't vote either, but they were far more liberated than
> Athenian girls.

Some years ago I studied a body of research mostly in anthropology
about "the rise of civilisation", or "the urban revolution", or
whatever you want to call it. The period during which this research
was published coincided with second wave feminism, and eventually the
researchers' blithe dismissal of gender inequality as irrelevant to
their topic was finally beaten down with observations that things
like the harem and foot-binding do not exist in hunter-gatherer
societies, so obviously gender inequality is something that evolves
culturally.

The more conservatively educated of these theorists already *knew*
this, precisely because Sparta and Athens are a spectacular contrast
along almost all the axes of the relevant theories. Including the
feminist ones that note that, as you say, Spartan women had it better.
Which is no surprise if you accept the eventual conclusion that
civilisation and gender inequality have a strong positive correlation.

Joe Bernstein

* Huh? I knew of her as a literary historian or some such who made
exaggerated claims for the importance of the Greek romances because
she wanted to dethrone the 18th century British as inventors of the
novel. She also writes novels? Is this a mystery series or plain
historical fiction?

--
Joe Bernstein, tax preparer and writer j...@sfbooks.com

[j...@sfbooks.com]

On Friday, May 10, 2013 4:08:35 AM UTC-7, Ed Cryer wrote:

> The only protest from women that I can recall is Aristophanes' comic
> one in "Lysistrata".

> Did ancient Greek women even discuss political issues? Very few, I
> should have thought. They just didn't mix with the men like that;
> not even at the Olympics.

Since I originally came to this group working on a history of fantasy
(work currently in abeyance but not abandoned), I have a peculiar
take on Aristophanes. I read his criticisms of Euripides as
including one that boils down to: "He turns the myths into fantasies!
But fantasy is a comedian's job!"

If we then define fantasy as the hallmark of Old Comedy, quite a lot
of the surviving or relatively well-documented Old Comedies work fine;
but <Lysistrata>, in particular, comes as a shock. See, he isn't
just saying that women protesting is *funny*; if I'm right, he's
saying it's *impossible*.

So I don't know where to draw the border. He depicts respectable
women discussing what they would know of politics - you can't
convince me many citizens' wives went around ignorant of whether
the city was at war or not. Is this, too, meant as fantasy? I'd
suspect not - fantasy normally isn't the whole show in any of his
comedies - but I couldn't swear to it.

Joe Bernstein

[Ed Cryer]

A lot of Aristophanes is pure slap-stick. You miss a lot of that when
you just read it. What hits you is the social and political satire. But
a lot of it is (was) at the level of Laurel and Hardy; or Buster Keaton.
People falling down, wearing a large phallus, tongues hanging out etc.

When you read Aristophanes' plays you end up asking yourself how the
devil did an Athenian jury manage to condemn Socrates to death on a
charge of "believing in gods other than those of his city"? I strongly
suspect that the "corrupting the youth" part of the charge weighed more
than Plato recognises in his "Apology"; that and possibly life-long
association with oligarchs such as Alcibiades.

Here's a sketch for a contemporary stand-up routine in Athens I've come
up with. I believe I could have gotten away with it.

Well, it's good to be back in Athens again. I see that Pallas Athene has
a nice new home up on the Rock, there. Me, I sleep in a barrel on the
sand down at Piraeus.
I was doing a gig up on mount Olympus two days ago. Things haven't
changed much there. Aphrodite's still chasing Ares around. He's got a
new lion skin suit; looks a real city-slicker, he does.
And then there's Dionysus. Hhmmmm! Still stoned out of his little mind.
I blame Zeus for all that, personally. I mean just what is an act of
God? "Hey Zeusie baby, was that your doing down on Thera? No? Too busy
spreading plague in Africa, eh?"



Ed

[Ed Cryer]

I find it difficult to explain why votes for women came so late to the
world. I've taken a short extract from "Lysistrata" below, and it
demonstrates quite starkly that in the battle of the sexes women had
quite a few weapons.
But why no votes? No voice in the Assembly? I can't fathom it.

Ed

CLEONICE
Fiddlesticks! these proverbs are all idle talk.... But if our husbands
drag us by main force into the bedchamber?

LYSISTRATA
Hold on to the door posts.

CLEONICE
But if they beat us?

LYSISTRATA
Then yield to their wishes, but with a bad grace; there is no pleasure
in it for them, when they do it by force. Besides, there are a thousand
ways of tormenting them. Never fear, they'll soon tire of the game;
there's no satisfaction for a man, unless the woman shares it.

[Ed Cryer]

The women that men saw in the streets of Athens, at the shops, at
fountains filling jars, would be poorer ones, slaves and flute-girls, or
maybe hetaeras. You could argue that the women in "Lysistrata" are
modelled on these. You could also argue that the view of women being all
sex-mad, unable to control their urges and passions (and therefore not
fully "rational" in that very Greek fashion), came from these too. These
ones would be more cheeky, more "feisty"; while the better class ones
were kept off the streets.

Ed

[Ed Cryer]

Peter J Ross wrote:
> In humanities.classics on Tue, 21 May 2013 18:24:24 -0700 (PDT),

> j...@sfbooks.com wrote:
>
>> * Huh? I knew of her as a literary historian or some such who made
>> exaggerated claims for the importance of the Greek romances because
>> she wanted to dethrone the 18th century British as inventors of the
>> novel. She also writes novels? Is this a mystery series or plain
>> historical fiction?
>

> They're detective stories, with the usual crimes, suspects and clever
> solutions, but there are extensive digressions into pure social and
> political history.
>
> Apart from the unfortunate pnyx/pyx mistake, the historical research
> seems to me to be immaculate.
>

As well as very modern and liberated for a woman.
She has won my full respect with the latest one I've read; "Aristotle
and The Secrets of Life".
She's no Jane Austen; and I mean that as a full compliment.

Ed

[Ed Cryer]

Peter J Ross wrote:
> In humanities.classics on Thu, 23 May 2013 20:04:49 +0100, Ed Cryer

> wrote:
>
>> Peter J Ross wrote:
>>> In humanities.classics on Tue, 21 May 2013 18:24:24 -0700 (PDT),
>>> j...@sfbooks.com wrote:
>>>
>>>> * Huh? I knew of her as a literary historian or some such who made
>>>> exaggerated claims for the importance of the Greek romances because
>>>> she wanted to dethrone the 18th century British as inventors of the
>>>> novel. She also writes novels? Is this a mystery series or plain
>>>> historical fiction?
>>>
>>> They're detective stories, with the usual crimes, suspects and clever
>>> solutions, but there are extensive digressions into pure social and
>>> political history.
>>>
>>> Apart from the unfortunate pnyx/pyx mistake, the historical research
>>> seems to me to be immaculate.
>>>
>>
>> As well as very modern and liberated for a woman.
>

> Apart from the woman who recently advertised her interesting new book
> about Linear-B, there's not much female participation in hum.classics,
> is there? Perhaps such phrases as "very modern and liberated for a
> woman" put them off.

>
>> She has won my full respect with the latest one I've read; "Aristotle
>> and The Secrets of Life".
>

> You'll like /Mysteries of Eleusis/. She's read and understood the
> Homeric Hymn to Demeter and the fragments of Hipponax so well that her
> novel helped me when I was reading the original texts.
>
> Are you finding, as I predicted, that each book is more enjoyable than
> the one before?

>
>> She's no Jane Austen; and I mean that as a full compliment.
>

> She resembles Jane in that her books are all similar. If you like one,
> you won't dislike the rest, and vice versa. I think Joe Bernstein
> ought to invest the minimum Amazon price in a used copy of /Aristotle,
> Detective/. After a hundred pages, he can either give up or buy all
> the rest.

>
>

I've read;
Aristotle Detective

Poison in Athens

Aristotle and The Secrets of Life

I've been a regular in this NG for almost 20 years. In that time I've
never met a woman here; and, apart from you, I don't
think I've ever talked to someone who's interested in what I'd term
"Classical Studies".
We sometimes get cross-posted to from other groups, and meet lots of
net-nuts. They belabour all kinds of theories as to who were the "sea
people". And one guy whose moniker was "Agamemnon" posted zillions of
things claiming that Greek hadn't changed at all from ancient times,
including pronunciation. That took ages to handle, and it drew in a vast
audience from all over the Net; but we just couldn't get him to the
ground - so much so that I thought he should change his moniker to
"Achilles" (fully dipped in the Styx (including the heel on this
occasion :-) )

Ed

[Ed Cryer]

Oh, and then there were present-day Macedonians fighting with Greeks as
to whether the Macedonians deserved the title of "Greeks".
And this super-cool winner of a Nobel Prize for literature sparked some
interest;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuBODHFBZ8k

Ed

[j...@sfbooks.com]

On Friday, May 24, 2013 6:05:38 AM UTC-7, Ed Cryer wrote:

> Peter J Ross wrote:

(with me three back)

>>>>> * Huh? I knew of [M. Doody] as a literary historian or some such

>>>>> who made
>>>>> exaggerated claims for the importance of the Greek romances because
>>>>> she wanted to dethrone the 18th century British as inventors of the
>>>>> novel. She also writes novels? Is this a mystery series or plain
>>>>> historical fiction?

>> I think Joe Bernstein
>> ought to invest the minimum Amazon price in a used copy of /Aristotle,
>> Detective/. After a hundred pages, he can either give up or buy all
>> the rest.

Um, well. If I were financially stable, that would make sense. But
I'm actually homeless because of long-term unemployment, so I'll
simply try libraries. Since I'm actually at a university library
today specifically to do massive catalogue work, let's see...

OK. Seattle Public Library confirms my claim as to her original
field, having only <The True Story of the Novel> (harrumph) and
an edition of Frances Burney's <Evelina> (plus a Russian translation
apparently of <Poison in Athens>). The King County Library System
adds an annotated <Anne of Green Gables> (L. M. Montgomery),
Burney's <Cecilia>, and something unfamiliar to me titled
<Catharine and Other Writings>, apparently a Jane Austen collection.

The University of Washington adds critical books about Burney
and Samuel Richardson, and about Augustan poetry, plus a recent
book about Venice. But it also shows, *contemporary* with all
this work, the following:

<Aristotle Detective>, 1978
<Aristotle and Poetic Justice>, 2001

the latter with a series-indicating subtitle, so there were
presumably books in between.

However, Worldcat adds (amid a bunch more 18th-century stuff)
only the following, which no local library owns any of:

<The Secrets of Life>, 2003
<Poison in Athens>, 2004 (in English, anyway)
<Mysteries of Eleusis>, 2005

Wikipedia supplies, in a fairly incoherent article, more:

<Aristotle and the Fatal Javelin>, 1980, presumably the reason the
2001 book had a series subtitle;
<Aristotle and the Ring of Bronze>, 2003, which may be a novella and
may be available only in Italian;
and <Aristotle and the Egyptian Murders>, 2010.

(The "Aristotle and" thing seems to represent true original titles,
but the editions in Worldcat are pretty consistently retitled.)

Near as I can tell, Seattle is a fairly lousy place to catch up
on this series, though I can indeed follow the suggested plan for
starting.

> I've been a regular in this NG for almost 20 years. In that time
> I've never met a woman here; and, apart from you, I don't think I've
> ever talked to someone who's interested in what I'd term "Classical
> Studies".

Huh? I've been a regular intermittently since about 1996, and I
remember at least Richard Alderson, T. H. Chance, and Richard
Schulman, if I've got the names right. Given that I don't actually
know Greek or Latin, these are people I've interacted with on
broader topics. But I suppose it's possible that none of them
is interested in what *you'd* term "Classical Studies", since I'm
not sure what that is. (Though presumably it also doesn't interest
me, or you wouldn't have left me out. I do remember that I've
rarely been interested in replying to your articles, over the years,
so presumably that's mutual...)

As for women? In the 90s I knew Jackie Murray, who was studying
Apollonius Rhodius in Canada (and who turns out to have gotten
her PhD at the university I'm visiting today, a year before I got
here, and is now at Skidmore), and more sustainedly Chrisso Boulis
of U Penn, whom I actually met in person during my one and only
travel vacation in 2001. I'm tolerably sure I met both of them
here; I specifically remember that when I mistakenly referred to
Ms. Boulis as a man, Rich Alderson corrected me. Katharine Griffis
was and still is posting about Egyptology, but not Classics, and
came to soc.history.ancient from sci.archaeology.

More recently women have been less prominent in pretty much
every part of Usenet I've paid attention to, certainly including
this one, although at the moment one newsgroup I used to follow
(news.announce.newgroups) is run by a woman for the first time
in its (24-year) history.

> We sometimes get cross-posted to from other groups, and meet lots
> of net-nuts.

I was one of those who *created* soc.history.ancient partly as a
place to *hold* the kooks, sanitation, if you will, for this group
and soc.history.medieval. That, at least, seems to have more or
less worked.

References to specific kooks (one of whom has recently reappeared
on soc.history.ancient, with the same sublime resistance to
other's ideas) snipped.

Joe Bernstein

[Ed Cryer]

I think my favourite was the woman who hired a taxi to take her from the
UK to Greece and back, just to spend 4 hours at the ruins of Mieza where
Alexander the Great went to school.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/suffolk/6706401.stm

Here's a nice picture from the times;
http://www.mlahanas.de/Greeks/Cities/Mieza.html

Ed

[Ed Cryer]

This is a present-day undergrad curriculum for "Classics".

http://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate_courses/courses/classics/classics_course.html

Ed

[Ed Cryer]

Peter J Ross wrote:
> In humanities.classics on Fri, 24 May 2013 14:05:38 +0100, Ed Cryer

> wrote:
>
>> I've been a regular in this NG for almost 20 years.
>

> I could have been here for 12 years, if the extreme rustiness of my
> Latin and Greek hadn't put me off.

>
>> In that time I've
>> never met a woman here; and, apart from you, I don't
>> think I've ever talked to someone who's interested in what I'd term
>> "Classical Studies".
>

> I don't know what you'd term Classical Studies. The phrase suggests to
> me "Classics in translation, without much intellectual rigour", which
> is not what we do here.

>
>> We sometimes get cross-posted to from other groups, and meet lots of
>> net-nuts. They belabour all kinds of theories as to who were the "sea
>> people". And one guy whose moniker was "Agamemnon" posted zillions of
>> things claiming that Greek hadn't changed at all from ancient times,
>> including pronunciation. That took ages to handle, and it drew in a vast
>> audience from all over the Net; but we just couldn't get him to the
>> ground - so much so that I thought he should change his moniker to
>> "Achilles" (fully dipped in the Styx (including the heel on this
>> occasion :-) )
>

> "Agamemnon" is alive and well and posting silly theories in
> rec.arts.drwho. His idea that the noun "Scot" originated as a
> disparaging abbreviation of "Scottish" (like "Brit" for "British")
> amused me immensely a few years ago.
>
>
There have been two contributors here who have fostered classical studies.
One is Francis Miniter who did a PhD thesis on Plato's Republic; and
he'll always take the time to engage in discussions about Plato.
The other is "aesthete8" who likes to stimulate discussion by posting
quotes from Aristotle's books, and asking for opinions. He must feel a
bit let down, though, because I've been about the only one who replies.
He does, however, ask questions in such an open style that he deserves
far more. There was one I particularly remember; about Sparta, and
whether we should regard it as having been an idyllic life-style.

Ed

[Ed Cryer]

On this subject I have something to say about the plays of Euripides.
Some feminists look at them through modern values and see a
proto-feminist in Euripides. They say that of his nineteen surviving
plays twelve are about women. And they find heroines in Alcestis,
Iphigenia and even Medea.
I can't share that view. That is not how a contemporary audience in
Athens or elsewhere in the Greek world would have seen them. They would
have seen those plays through a very, very different cultural
preconditioning than ours today.

Euripides highlights the violence done to women, how they are put
outside the pale; but in doing so he's not asking for inclusion for
them, for if he were, then there would be scenes and speeches portraying
that society of inclusion.
No, women represented for Euripides what they represented for most Greek
males; unreason, chaos, otherness. And at the boundary between the
reasonable and the unreasonable is where tragedy occurs. Phaedra with
her treacherous passionate love; the Bacchic women with their drunken
orgies; Aphrodite in "Hippolytus" with her vengefulness; Medea murdering
her own children for vengeance.

It would be nice to think of people coming away from a Euripides play as
they may have come away from an Ibsen play, discussing social change.
But no, they probably came away discussing how they should keep women
more closely under restraint.

Ed

[Ed Cryer]

Sophocles' play "Antigone" is a good example in point.
If you're like me, and see it through my modern democratic
sensibilities, then your heart goes out to Antigone. Faithful Antigone,
heroic and courageous; embodying all the best nutrifying qualities of
womanhood. And the villain is King Kreon; a kind of male chauvinist pig,
brought to tragedy by his stubborn refusal to compromise.

Is that how Sophocles' contemporaries saw it? I think not.

You have to refocus your mind to get their view; shift your perspective
and feelings with it. And then what you'll catch is Kreon's fatal flaw.
And that is part of unreason; he believes in revenge, and that's where
he comes a cropper. It's unreason that's stopping a compromise. Kreon is
fully entangled in the family-feud, blood-feud morality, where good and
bad depend upon whose side you're on, not reason.

Ed

[j...@sfbooks.com]

On Tuesday, May 28, 2013 11:17:32 AM UTC-7, Ed Cryer wrote:

> Ed Cryer wrote:

(and so on back a ways - y'know, I quote myself at times too, but it's
generally considered against the norms of Usenet. I'd wonder if it's
why our impressions of this group differ so greatly, but I know
better...)

Anyway, three ticks back I posted something related to gender
inequality in ancient Greece, and the next two ticks have been
ruminations, not all that closely related to what I said, on the
same subject. Until we get to this, about which I do have things
to say, although it's well over a decade since I read much Euripides.

> > On this subject I have something to say about the plays of Euripides.
> > Some feminists look at them through modern values and see a
> > proto-feminist in Euripides.

I'm not sure what you think they mean by "proto-", to the extent that
word is actually used of Euripides in this context. I would never
call Euripides a feminist, for bunches of quite obvious reasons. But
a proto-feminist? Someone who contributed to the possibility of
feminism as an intellectual perspective equal to other intellectual
perspectives? Heck, yeah. Even though that possibility wasn't much
used for many centuries, and a bunch more proto-feminists had to do a
bunch more to keep the possibility au courant in the meantime.

> > They say that of his nineteen surviving
> > plays twelve are about women. And they find heroines in Alcestis,
> > Iphigenia and even Medea.

I don't see how you can deny heroism to Alcestis. The others, I
grant, are iffier, though I seem to remember that the two Iphigenias
are not equivalent in this regard.

> > I can't share that view. That is not how a contemporary audience in
> > Athens or elsewhere in the Greek world would have seen them. They would
> > have seen those plays through a very, very different cultural
> > preconditioning than ours today.

Um, duh. And this is relevant how?

> > Euripides highlights the violence done to women, how they are put
> > outside the pale; but in doing so he's not asking for inclusion for
> > them, for if he were, then there would be scenes and speeches portraying
> > that society of inclusion.

Does Euripides portray what he wants, in general? For that matter,
can we tell? Do we know whether any of the surviving plays ended
trilogies? Seems to me we get a fair picture of what Aeschylus
wants in <The Eumenides>, and a half-decent picture of what Sophocles
wants in <Oedipus at Colonus>. But what does Euripides want? I'm
not sure.

> > No, women represented for Euripides what they represented for most Greek
> > males; unreason, chaos, otherness. And at the boundary between the
> > reasonable and the unreasonable is where tragedy occurs. Phaedra with
> > her treacherous passionate love; the Bacchic women with their drunken
> > orgies; Aphrodite in "Hippolytus" with her vengefulness; Medea murdering
> > her own children for vengeance.

Um, then what does Alcestis represent?

I think there are two basic reasons to see Euripides as a proto-
feminist. One, he's reasonably fair to his unusually prominent women
characters, allowing them both reasons for what they do (Medea, say;
also Hecuba) and actual chances at heroism (most obviously Alcestis).
Two, this is part of his broader originality in literature: he is,
to my mind, more or less the inventor of the concept of narrative
logic, the idea that characters and plots have to make sense and can
be subjected to reasonable criticism.

So feel free to think Euripides considers women relentlessly
unreasonable. I think he considers some so, and considers some men so
as well. Further, I don't intend by this apparently equalising remark
to deny that Euripides retained some fairly strong gender prejudices.
He nevertheless applies his own reason to women's actions, and
sometimes recognises their reason prompting those actions.

> > It would be nice to think of people coming away from a Euripides play as
> > they may have come away from an Ibsen play, discussing social change.
> > But no, they probably came away discussing how they should keep women
> > more closely under restraint.

Yeah, well, probably. It's well known that Euripides was ahead of his
time, and won more prizes posthumously than in his lifetime.

> Sophocles' play "Antigone" is a good example in point. If you're
> like me, and see it through my modern democratic sensibilities,
> then your heart goes out to Antigone. Faithful Antigone, heroic and
> courageous; embodying all the best nutrifying qualities of
> womanhood.

Um? Last time I read it what I remember is Antigone as implacable,
without an inch of give in her. Note her behaviour towards Ismene;
this may be "nutrifying", but certainly isn't nurturing.

> And the villain is King Kreon; a kind of male chauvinist
> pig, brought to tragedy by his stubborn refusal to compromise.

Um? What compromise is possible? Either Polyneices gets buried, or
he doesn't; there simply isn't a middle ground here.

> Is
> that how Sophocles' contemporaries saw it? I think not. You have to
> refocus your mind to get their view; shift your perspective and
> feelings with it. And then what you'll catch is Kreon's fatal flaw.
> And that is part of unreason; he believes in revenge, and that's
> where he comes a cropper. It's unreason that's stopping a
> compromise. Kreon is fully entangled in the family-feud, blood-
> feud morality, where good and bad depend upon whose side you're on,
> not reason.

Um, this is Sophocles, not Euripides, and I don't buy for one minute
that reason is what Kreon has offended against. Kreon is committing
a sin by denying proper burial to his own kinsman. This isn't rocket
science.

But Kreon isn't the protagonist of the play, Antigone is. And she is
because, like her father in <Oedipus Rex>, she's committed to a
course of action that collides directly with the world she lives in.
That's what Sophocles does: like a modern novelist, he puts more or
less good people (and yes, Antigone's a good person, though I'm pretty
sure I wouldn't invite her to any parties) into impossible situations
and watches what happens.

Joe Bernstein

[Ed Cryer]

That "compromise" with religious observances was the norm amongst the
Greek city-states of Euripides' day. Everything stopped for religion;
and I mean everything. Battles (and the classical Greeks were constantly
at war) were often stopped with a truce to pick up and bury the dead.
Wars were put on hold for religion; executions of prisoners were postponed.
In the "Iliad" Achilles goes utterly gaga after the death of Patroclus.
His wrath bubbles up into madness and he steps into barbarism; but he
hands over the body of Hector for burial - to do otherwise would have
put him beyond the pale for all time.

Everybody watching Euripides' Antigone would have looked upon Kreon as
having broken all limits; a diseased mind broken by vengefulness, not
fit to rule over a Greek city. Antigone's "right" to give formal burial
to Polyneices and get him across the Styx was well founded. I know
Sophocles called his play "Antigone" but the tragedy is Kreon's; he
loses his son too. Antigone is just one victim of unreason given power.

"Alcestis"; that's the name of the play but the tragedy is Admetus'.
I feel that in "Alcestis" Euripides is analysing tragedy itself; in an
almost comically ironic way. Alcestis is the man, Admetus is the
egotistical tragic character of the type that sparks tragedy by the
bucket-loads when given power.
I'm sorry to say that I actually laugh at the play, from the very start
when Death comes on and has a conversation with Apollo.

Ed

[Ed Cryer]

Peter J Ross wrote:

> You still haven't defined what you mean by "classical studies".
> Instead, you've merely given two individual examples of people who
> discuss "classical studies". Socrates would be disappointed.
>
> PJR: If a man wants to learn about medicine, would he be said to be
> learning medical studies?
>
> EC: How could it be otherwise, O PJR?
>
> PJR: And if a man wants to learn about society, would he be said to be
> learning social studies?
>
> EC: Evidently, in Zeus's name, O PJR!
>
> PJR: And if a man is said to be learning classical studies, what is it
> that he wants to learn about?
>
> EC: [INSERT PROVISIONAL DEFINITION HERE]
>

Sorry about that. I felt to be on uncertain ground; but I owe it to you
to explain why.

"Classics" proper centres around Greek and Latin languages & literature.
I'm sure it still does at all the UK universities where it's taught.
The history, architecture, sociology etc. are secondary to that.

But (and this is a big but for me) I'm a sociable sort of chap, and I
love talking about my interest. So I grab what little comes my way, and
that doesn't include much of the language or literature. "Classical
studies" seems a term suited to cover that residuum.

Ed

[Ed Cryer]

Peter J Ross wrote:
> In humanities.classics on Sun, 26 May 2013 13:04:48 +0100, Ed Cryer

>> The other is "aesthete8" who likes to stimulate discussion by posting
>> quotes from Aristotle's books, and asking for opinions. He must feel a
>> bit let down, though, because I've been about the only one who replies.
>> He does, however, ask questions in such an open style that he deserves
>> far more. There was one I particularly remember; about Sparta, and
>> whether we should regard it as having been an idyllic life-style.
>

> What did every intelligent Spartan do as soon as he became aware of
> alternative ways of life?
>
> He abandoned the Spartan way of life.
>
> On the whole, one would expect an idyllic way of life to remain
> tolerable to the people who lived it when alternatives were offered.
>
> Leonidas was the only Spartan king or general who wasn't corrupted by
> the Persians. Xerxes is said to have boasted that the arrows of his
> archers were fired in such numbers that they could blot out the light
> of the sun. "So what? One sweats less when one fights in the shade,"
> said Leonidas. But what if Xerxes had sent him some decent food and
> clothes? The pass of Thermopylae might have been taken bloodlessly
> within an hour.
>

Sparta was quite phenomenally successful in its day. But the big
question is "Why did no other city-state adopt its constitution?"

You have to bear in mind that many Athenians went Spartan; Alcibiades
and Xenophon included.

It appealed (as it still does) to ascetic minds; philosophers often
having such. But to the actual Spartans at the time it was no doubt very
different. It was probably the comradeship of the barracks and having
all those helots to do the toil, that counted for them. It was Athenians
who came up with that idyllic picture of the Spartan; Laconic in speech,
simple tastes and no luxury, happy to die for his gods and comrades.

When you look into the way the "krypteia" operated, well, it takes a
special kind of antisocial attitude for that.

"Young Spartan men who had completed their training at the agoge with
such success that they were marked out as potential future leaders would
be given the opportunity to test their skills and prove themselves
worthy of the Spartan military through participation in the krypteia.

Every autumn, according to Plutarch (Life of Lycurgus, 28, 3–7), the
Spartan ephors (classical Greek Ἔφοροι) would pro forma declare war on
the helot population so that any Spartan citizen could kill a helot
without fear of blood guilt. The kryptes were sent out into the
countryside with only a knife to survive on their skills and cunning
with the instructions to kill any helot they encountered at night and to
take any food they needed."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypteia

Hhhmm! It takes a special kind of antisocial attitude to stomach that.

Ed

[j...@sfbooks.com]

On Sunday, June 2, 2013 2:17:07 PM UTC-7, Peter J Ross wrote:

> Presumably one can't claim proficiency in (e.g.) Spanish studies
> without being able to read (e.g.) Spanish. Why are Literae
> Humaniores the only such studies to be demoted to a level where
> it's seriously claimed that the texts can be understood without any
> knowledge of the languages in which they were written?

Um. Please pardon me if I've missed something, but who's making
such a claim?

If it's degree-granting institutions, then yes, that's an issue,
and I vaguely remember that curricula were under discussion not
long ago.

But you use "seriously claimed" passively, and, for example,
just such a serious claim is made by the many publishers who
put forward "translations" of <Gilgamesh> made by people who
know no Akkadian (let alone Sumerian, to the extent that that's
relevant).

Another passive: "can be understood".

I'm working on a history of a mode of literature, and I'm
doing so with the intention of correcting errors in existing
histories. In order to do this, I have to write about any
number of texts written in languages I don't know. In fact,
I made it a rule when I started that while this project lasted -
which now seems frighteningly likely to be the rest of my life
as things are - I would learn no languages, primarily to avoid
delay but also favouritism.

Taken literally, your question suggests you consider a project
such as mine wholly illegitimate; suggests, in fact, that *no
human being* should *attempt* to answer questions if the
answers require input from many literatures. (For just one
example, "What are the ten greatest works of world literature?"
would presumably, in your view, be a question it is wrong to
answer.) Did you intend this set of meanings?

Joe Bernstein

[Rich Alderson]

j...@sfbooks.com writes:

> On Friday, May 24, 2013 6:05:38 AM UTC-7, Ed Cryer wrote:

>> I've been a regular in this NG for almost 20 years. In that time
>> I've never met a woman here; and, apart from you, I don't think I've
>> ever talked to someone who's interested in what I'd term "Classical
>> Studies".

Mr. Cryer,

Unless you are conflating "sci.classics" and "humanities.classics", you
haven't been a regular for 20 years. I did some research over the past
weekend after catching up in this group, and the RFD for
humanities.classics (which created the humanities.* hierarchy and turned
"The Big Seven" into "The Big 8") was issued by Chris Camiel on 4 June 1996.
Tomorrow is the 17th anniversary of the RFD; creation of the group would
have occurred 90 days later, by the rules in place at the time.

The earlier sci.classics was split off from sci.lang (where I was a
fully participating regular from c. 1986 until the 21st Century was well
under way), by an RFD submitted by Cary Timar on behalf of John Rickert
(another regular) on 27 February 1992 and approved for discussion by
tale on 4 April 1992.

Both RFDs contain definitions of the subject matter intended. I think
that in honor of the anniversary of humanities.classics, I'll post both
of them.

> Huh? I've been a regular intermittently since about 1996, and I
> remember at least Richard Alderson, T. H. Chance, and Richard
> Schulman, if I've got the names right. Given that I don't actually
> know Greek or Latin, these are people I've interacted with on
> broader topics. But I suppose it's possible that none of them
> is interested in what *you'd* term "Classical Studies", since I'm
> not sure what that is. (Though presumably it also doesn't interest
> me, or you wouldn't have left me out. I do remember that I've
> rarely been interested in replying to your articles, over the years,
> so presumably that's mutual...)

Hi, Joe, it's good to hear that you're still among us, and still working
on your big project.

I think you're talking about Richard Schuler, who thought I was insane
for collecting both 19th century language textbooks and modern comics,
playing rock music while reading the former and Mozart and Bach for the
latter. I wonder what ever happened to him?

I've been mostly a lurker in this newsgroup (which I helped to create)
for years, mostly because some of the current regulars are both rude to
their elders and unteachable. I found it less annoying simply not to
participate. Some still participate, in this very thread.

("Rude?" I hear you ask? Back when Usenet was still Usenet, and not a
dumping ground for Yahoo! Groups vel sim., I complained about a poster
who invariably sent 8-bit text to the 7-bit only universe of Net News,
sans transliteration, and found myself derided as a fusty old Luddite
unable to grasp the future. This in, of all things, a newsgroup
devoted to Things Past(TM).)

>> We sometimes get cross-posted to from other groups, and meet lots
>> of net-nuts.

Oh, it was far worse when we were sci.classics, believe me.

> I was one of those who *created* soc.history.ancient partly as a
> place to *hold* the kooks, sanitation, if you will, for this group
> and soc.history.medieval. That, at least, seems to have more or
> less worked.

I remember when you did that. Newsgroup creation was thankless then,
and I would imagine more so now, if it's even possible.

--
Rich Alderson ne...@alderson.users.panix.com
the russet leaves of an autumn oak/inspire once again the failed poet/
to take up his pen/and essay to place his meagre words upon the page...

[Ed Cryer]

Rich Alderson wrote:
> j...@sfbooks.com writes:
>
>> On Friday, May 24, 2013 6:05:38 AM UTC-7, Ed Cryer wrote:
>
>>> I've been a regular in this NG for almost 20 years. In that time
>>> I've never met a woman here; and, apart from you, I don't think I've
>>> ever talked to someone who's interested in what I'd term "Classical
>>> Studies".
>
> Mr. Cryer,
>
> Unless you are conflating "sci.classics" and "humanities.classics", you
> haven't been a regular for 20 years. I did some research over the past
> weekend after catching up in this group, and the RFD for
> humanities.classics (which created the humanities.* hierarchy and turned
> "The Big Seven" into "The Big 8") was issued by Chris Camiel on 4 June 1996.
> Tomorrow is the 17th anniversary of the RFD; creation of the group would
> have occurred 90 days later, by the rules in place at the time.
>
> The earlier sci.classics was split off from sci.lang (where I was a
> fully participating regular from c. 1986 until the 21st Century was well
> under way), by an RFD submitted by Cary Timar on behalf of John Rickert
> (another regular) on 27 February 1992 and approved for discussion by
> tale on 4 April 1992.
>
> Both RFDs contain definitions of the subject matter intended. I think
> that in honor of the anniversary of humanities.classics, I'll post both
> of them.
>

I've been here since about 1997. I don't recall sci-classics. So that
makes it about 16 years.

Ed

[j...@sfbooks.com]

This post is entirely off-topic, though it ends with some stuff meta
to this group.

On Wednesday, June 5, 2013 1:50:28 PM UTC-7, Peter J Ross wrote:

> In humanities.classics on 03 Jun 2013 22:04:26 -0400, Rich Alderson
> wrote:

[but this is Peter Ross first]

> You're using Gnus, which is perfectly capable of understanding
> MIME-encoded Greek characters. So are slrn, tin and nn. So are all
> other popular newsreaders that I know of - even Outlook Express and
> Google Groups - with the exceptions of XNews and trn, both of which
> were abandoned by their developers many years ago.

Apparently; I knew trn4 had been neglected for some time, but was
taken aback not even to find it listed in Wikipedia's lists of
newsreaders.

> The principal reason I put Greek verses into my .signature is to show
> users of obsolete software that they need to upgrade.

Problem is, for me trn4 *is* an upgrade. The only software I've used
that comes close in functionality for me is MacSOUP, which is even
more outdated, and only comes close. (Can't begin to describe how
much I'm looking forward to *header control*, for example, which
MacSOUP doesn't offer.)

I assume Gnus can do anything trn4 can do, but I doubt I have enough
time left in my life to master anything involving Emacs, so that's
no help; and I've tried Gnus once, so I know I'd have to master it,
and not just use it, to get trn4's abilities from it.

> > Newsgroup creation was thankless then, and I would imagine more so
> > now, if it's even possible.

> You can get a Big-8 newsgroup "created", in the sense of "added to an
> official list" more easily than in the past.

Hmmm.

Is interest in this form of "creation", then, as low as would appear?

I was involved in the creation of two groups (soc.history.ancient and,
as principal proponent, soc.history.early-modern), and worked on a
bunch more, starting in 1995. Up to 1998, when she-m came in, it
wasn't that hard to create a group if you had the necessary clues and
didn't happen to pick a topic too close to any of the main permanent
floating flamewars. The necessary clues could be hard to get (I won
fame on news.groups by writing an FAQ about them), and tough luck if
you wanted to create a group about, say, Pakistan or Armenia, but for
the most part, it wasn't that hard. (This was a change that kicked
in during maybe 1992 or 1993 for comp.* groups, and 1994 for the rest.
Prior to that, newsgroup creation had been harder, varying in
difficulty, since about 1983.)

From 1998 until the system definitively broke down in 2005, it got
harder and harder because votes became harder to find, until
finally *in* 2005, not a single group passed its vote. I was one
of the committee charged with fixing this, and wound up in what I
called the "loyal opposition" when the committee decided to become
the new operators of the Big 8; when the "term" for me that this
resulted in ended, I left newsgroup creation.

So let me see what happened, both before then when I was ignoring
that kind of discussion in my inbox, and after, when it wasn't
there. All this comes from the archives of news.announce.newgroups
at <http://www.big-8.org/> (the hyphen matters):

2006 - 10 creations. Huh. I had no idea.
2007 - 21 creations (16 of them, however, essentially without
proponents, as a sort of board experiment, after my "term")
2008 - 3 creations
2009 - 0 creations
2010 - 2 creations
2011 - 1 creation
2012 - 1 creation
2013 so far - 3 creations

Creations have been swamped until this year by a *long* series of
group removals, totalling easily ten times as many as the above
and possibly more. I don't know how this played out in
news.groups.proposals, a group I've never read, but it can't
have been *that* helpful. (I noticed one of the 16 groups
created without a proponent being removed; didn't look for the
others, but my guess would be that the experiment more or less
worked. I wonder if they'll repeat it.)

> But server admins pay
> less attention to the "official lists" than they used to. Big-8 is a
> lot more like alt.* than it used to be.

Official lists mattered at first because the "backbone" admins
agreed to adhere to them, back when Usenet traveled mainly by
UUnet feeds. Then they mattered because there were a whole lot
of conscious admins who cherished their right to run their own
server, but to varying degrees exercised that right carefully
around the Big 8. (Abby Franquemont-Guillory was widely respected
on news.* as news-admin of Tezcat, a Chicago ISP of those days and
my first ISP; but after she left, I documented a ton of cases where
Tezcat differed from the official lists, many dating to her tenure,
and often reflecting a clear intentional policy.) Finally they
mattered because they fed the list at isc.org, and the transit
servers used those.

Propagation to actual *user* sites, which the transit servers by
definition were not, was probably never all that automatic. We
had a lot of trouble with it when sci.classics was renamed to
humanities.classics (not assisted by the then-czar of the Big 8
screwing up the renaming [1]). It didn't come fast to she-m, and
was, I think, one factor (though not the main one) in the group's
failure to thrive. This is in 1998 now.

I didn't get much by way of clues later than that, although
propagation should've been *helped* when it became possible soon
after 2000 to issue proper Big 8 control message checkgroups
again. So I don't have any way to judge whether things have
really deteriorated since 1998.

Joe Bernstein

[1] David Lawrence, aka tale, ran news.announce.newgroups from I
think 1991 to, oh, 2003? If anyone cares I'll pin these dates
down, but although I actually have researched this topic's
history extensively, I don't have my notes here and have limited
multi-tasking where I'm writing from. Anyway, tale cared a lot
about automating tasks, which required carefully formatted
documents. We found out the hard way that he had never sorted
out with the Usenet Volunteer Votetakers a format for a one-off
renaming's Result posting, and it turned out that he used
carefully formatted Result postings to trigger scheduled events
in renamings. So those of us who'd worked in support of the
renaming spent *months* cajoling people and bullying ISPs to get
them to carry the renamed group because sci.classics was going
to go away. And then it didn't go away, and didn't go away,
and didn't go away ... And *then*, when tale found out his
mistake, he removed it instantly, with no chance to let people
know "OK, now it's for real". Basically, *.classics was treated
about as badly as I ever saw that system treat any actually
created group.

[Rich Alderson]

Peter J Ross <p...@example.invalid> writes:

> As far as I know, NNTP has been 8-bit-clean since it was invented.

The issue is not with NNTP as a protocol, but with the fact that it was
invented in an ASCII world. ASCII was a 7-bit character encoding; there
was no standard for the character set when an 8th bit was added. Many
Unix(TM) hosts simply stripped the high bit from incoming text, and that
affected NNTP as much as it did SMTP or any other text-oriented protocol.

> You're using Gnus, which is perfectly capable of understanding
> MIME-encoded Greek characters. So are slrn, tin and nn. So are all
> other popular newsreaders that I know of - even Outlook Express and
> Google Groups - with the exceptions of XNews and trn, both of which
> were abandoned by their developers many years ago.

I'm using GNUS under GNU Emacs 22.3, because that still understand the
RMail mailbox format, which I began using on PDP-10 hardware (as BABYL[1])
years before there was a GNUS (or VM) for Emacs.[2] I do not intend to
have my decades of mail files munged into a less useful format just
because the Emacs developers got a bug up their arses, and I don't have
the time to port real RMail forward to 23 or 24.

Unicode is far less well supported in that version of Emacs. I'd love to
read what you put into your signatures, but not at that expense.

> The principal reason I put Greek verses into my .signature is to show
> users of obsolete software that they need to upgrade.

I suppose that you also drive in the passing lane at below the speed
limit, because you disapprove of people daring to exceed it under any
conditions, that you point out to little old ladies with 16 items in their
shopping carts in the 15-or-less line that they are in the wrong, and have
other antisocial habits. I expect that you'll grow out of them one day,
and will stop acting the prat.

[1] "RMAIL" was the name of the original mail program written in MIT TECO
for the PDP-10; "BABYL" was the name of the second, which created the
mailbox format which RMS used when he created the new Lisp-based RMail
for GNU Emacs.

[2] As it happens, I am the current maintainer of EMACS (written in TECO
for the PDP-10 at the MIT AI Lab, mostly by RMS), and have been since
late 1999, when I submitted a Y2K bug fix for the DATE package in the
Emacs-related newsgroups and RMS turned the job over to me. Not a high
stress position, as you might imagine, but a point of pride nonetheless.

[Ed Cryer]

Without Unicode you're at a severe disadvantage when it comes to Greek,
Arabic, Hebrew or even Russian Cyrillic script.
Does that apply to webpages as well?
Can your browser present this newspaper as written?
http://www.tanea.gr/

Ed

--
Ἐν δορὶ μέν μοι μᾶζα μεμαγμένη, ἐν δορὶ δ' οἶνος
Ἰσμαρικός• πίνω δ' ἐν δορὶ κεκλιμένος.
(Archilochos)

[Rich Alderson]

Ed Cryer <e...@somewhere.in.the.uk> writes:

> Without Unicode you're at a severe disadvantage when it comes to Greek,
> Arabic, Hebrew or even Russian Cyrillic script.
> Does that apply to webpages as well?
> Can your browser present this newspaper as written?
> http://www.tanea.gr/

Of course it does, but what has that to do with the issue raised?

I don't read Netnews, or e-mail, using a Web browser. I use tools specialized
for the purpose which give me much more sophisticated control of the results.

[Ed Cryer]

Rich Alderson wrote:
> Ed Cryer <e...@somewhere.in.the.uk> writes:
>
>> Without Unicode you're at a severe disadvantage when it comes to Greek,
>> Arabic, Hebrew or even Russian Cyrillic script.
>> Does that apply to webpages as well?
>> Can your browser present this newspaper as written?
>> http://www.tanea.gr/
>
> Of course it does, but what has that to do with the issue raised?
>
> I don't read Netnews, or e-mail, using a Web browser. I use tools specialized
> for the purpose which give me much more sophisticated control of the results.
>

I find it difficult to accept a newsreader without Unicode.

Ed

[John Briggs]

On 31/05/2013 12:22, Ed Cryer wrote:
> Peter J Ross wrote:
>
>> You still haven't defined what you mean by "classical studies".
>> Instead, you've merely given two individual examples of people who
>> discuss "classical studies". Socrates would be disappointed.
>>
>> PJR: If a man wants to learn about medicine, would he be said to be
>> learning medical studies?
>>
>> EC: How could it be otherwise, O PJR?
>>
>> PJR: And if a man wants to learn about society, would he be said to be
>> learning social studies?
>>
>> EC: Evidently, in Zeus's name, O PJR!
>>
>> PJR: And if a man is said to be learning classical studies, what is it
>> that he wants to learn about?
>>
>> EC: [INSERT PROVISIONAL DEFINITION HERE]
>>
>
> Sorry about that. I felt to be on uncertain ground; but I owe it to you
> to explain why.
>
> "Classics" proper centres around Greek and Latin languages & literature.
> I'm sure it still does at all the UK universities where it's taught.
> The history, architecture, sociology etc. are secondary to that.

Actually, you've got that slightly backwards. Ancient history was
*always* part of classics. Literature was actually a later addition to
the Oxford Greats curriculum.
--
John Briggs

[Odysseus]

In article <slrnkq1ub...@pjr.no-ip.org>,
Peter J Ross <p...@example.invalid> wrote:

<snip>

> "Agamemnon" is alive and well and posting silly theories in
> rec.arts.drwho. His idea that the noun "Scot" originated as a
> disparaging abbreviation of "Scottish" (like "Brit" for "British")
> amused me immensely a few years ago.

And in SHA, where he has recently been on about his chronology again,
dating the Olympian gods & related heroes precisely and identifying them
with pharaohs & whatnot. Of his past etymological claims, the most
memorable to me were his derivations of Inuktitut _iglu_ from Gr.
_oikos_, and of "dragon" from _pentekonteros_.

--
Odysseus

[John W Kennedy]

On 2013-06-16 18:27:20 +0000, Odysseus said:

> In article <slrnkq1ub...@pjr.no-ip.org>,
> Peter J Ross <p...@example.invalid> wrote:
>
> <snip>
>
>> "Agamemnon" is alive and well and posting silly theories in
>> rec.arts.drwho. His idea that the noun "Scot" originated as a
>> disparaging abbreviation of "Scottish" (like "Brit" for "British")
>> amused me immensely a few years ago.
>
> And in SHA, where he has recently been on about his chronology again,
> dating the Olympian gods & related heroes precisely and identifying them
> with pharaohs & whatnot.

He wasn't ripping off Velikovsky when I knew him.

> Of his past etymological claims, the most
> memorable to me were his derivations of Inuktitut _iglu_ from Gr.
> _oikos_, and of "dragon" from _pentekonteros_.

He wasn't ripping off shtick from "My Big Fat Greek Wedding", either.

--
John W Kennedy
"Never try to take over the international economy based on a radical
feminist agenda if you're not sure your leader isn't a transvestite."
-- David Misch: "She-Spies", "While You Were Out"