Classics Faculty Publication Series

‘The Metal Face of the Age’: Hesiod, Virgil, and the Iron Age on Cold Mountain

Emily A. McDermott — Fri, 04 May 2012 12:40:32 PDT

A prominent theme in Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain is that redemption from the brutality of war may be achieved by retreat from the “metal face” of the contemporary age and return to a healing agricultural work ethic. In this context, the author makes recurrent reference to the classical topic of the “Golden Age,” a lost paradise on earth. He introduces this topic first as it appeared in Hesiod’s Works and Days, expressive of a profoundly pessimistic view that human history has been one long deterioration. As his protagonist’s physical and psychic homeward journey nears completion, though, he invokes the more hopeful vision put forward in Virgil’s Georgics – that the Golden Age may return, bringing contentment in place of vain strivings and peace in place of war, at least to those who make the moral choice to live in harmony with the rhythms of nature and to toil for generative, rather than destructive, purposes.

Playing for His Side: Kipling’s ‘Regulus,’ Corporal Punishment, and Classical Education

Emily A. McDermott — Fri, 04 May 2012 12:40:30 PDT

Rudyard Kipling’s short story, “Regulus,” revolves around the flogging of a student who has let loose a mouse in the drawing classroom of a turn-of-the-century British public school. The first part of the story is devoted to a fifth-form Latin class’s line-by-line explication of Horace’s fifth Roman ode, in which the story’s title character is presented as a paradigm of manly virtue; the remainder is given over to narration of the mouse-miscreant’s progress toward punishment, in thematic counterpoint to the Regulus exemplum. Within that idiosyncratic framework, the story tackles as ambitious a topic as the purposes of education, with particular attention to the contemporary curricular battle between the “ancient” and “modern sides” and to the shaping of character through a combination of Latin philology, compulsory team sports, and institutionalized corporal punishment. The story holds up a mirror to an educational system crafted to initiate a colonial society’s sons into the codes of behavior designed to perpetuate its rule.

Mr. Chipping and Mr. Hundert: Manliness, Media, and the Classical Education

Emily A. McDermott — Fri, 04 May 2012 12:40:28 PDT

James Hilton’s genial portrayal of a Latin master in a turn-of-the-century British public school, Goodbye, Mr. Chips, was published as a magazine story in England in 1933, in book form in America a year later; it has inspired two ﬁlm versions, one in 1939, one in 1969, and a full-length Masterpiece Theatre production for television in 2002. In 1994, Ethan Canin published his short story, “The Palace Thief,” presenting the unique tribulations of an ancient history teacher at an elite Virginia prep school; it was made into the 2002 ﬁlm, The Emperor’s Club. Both stories are predicated on teachers’ attempts to mold boys’ minds and character in the tradition of the Victorian British classical education; their plotlines similarly span decades in the lives of their protagonists, featuring their devotion to their profession and to the institutions they serve, their idealistic pedagogical goals, the ups and downs of their careers, and their eventual retirements. Within these similar outlines, the two literary originals differ radically in tone and theme – to such an extent, in fact, that one is tempted to read Canin’s story as a conscious inversion and subversion of Hilton’s iconic portrayal of a beloved schoolmaster. Further complexities arise when the cinematic versions of both stories are added into the critical mix, for each resulting text idiosyncratically invests its plot with meaning that varies according to its medium, its audience, and its makers’ cultural assumptions concerning both the Victorian educational ideal itself and the notions of “manliness” that underpin that ideal.

Frazier Polymetis: Cold Mountain and the Odyssey

Emily A. McDermott — Fri, 04 May 2012 12:40:26 PDT

Ever since its appearance in 1997, Charles Frazier’s novel, Cold Mountain, has been billed as a latter-day Odyssey. Separate unattributed book notes on the world wide web speak of its protagonist’s “dangerous odyssey” and his “odyssey through the devastated landscape of the soon-to-be-defeated South.” One reviewer styles the novel "a Confederate deserter's homeward odyssey"; another characterizes it as having “reset much of the 'Odyssey' in 19th-century America.” While such assertion of parallelism between the novel and Homer’s epic is widespread, it also tends to remain general and relatively unadorned. It evidently rests on such typically odyssean plot elements as a homeward journey (nostos) and geographicallychallenging and picaresque adventures. A more detailed comparison of Cold Mountain to its Greek archetype, however, reveals a richer, subtler and more systematic dialogue with the Odyssey that invites the reader to attend ﬁrst to plot parallels, both broad and speciﬁc, then to similarities and contrasts in the protagonists’ characterizations, and ﬁnally to ways that the resultant intertextuality helps to advance the novel’s themes.

Euripides' Second Thoughts

Emily A. McDermott — Fri, 04 May 2012 12:40:24 PDT

Euripides' extant Hippolytus was a rare "re-production" of an earlier play on the same mythic episode. The play contains a series of metadramatic comments on its partial interchange of Phaedra's and the Nurse's original roles. The Nurse's appearance in the "Stephanias" as seducer of a virtuous Phaedra is presented as a "change of mind." Her "second thoughts" (to corrupt, rather than dissuade Phaedra) mirror the playwright's decision to amend a shameless Phaedra's character by, conversely, degenerating the Nurse's. His covert comments on this strategy of reversal underline the oddity of his decision to correct his first try at the story.

Review of Inge Nielsen, Cultic Theatres and Ritual Drama in American Journal of Archaeology, on-line reviews, Vol. 111.1:

Kenneth S. Rothwell Jr. — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 12:42:33 PDT

Nielsen has done us a great service by collecting the considerable evidence for cultic performance spaces in Egypt, Mesopotamia, Syria, Phoenicia, Asia Minor, Crete, Greece, Sicily, and Italy. A table (340–41) gives an index of the 58 bestpreserved theaters, but dozens of others are discussed as well. Although some of the theaters could also have been used for “secular” literary drama, this volume focuses on cultic use. Nielsen’s observations should be of great interest to students of theater, religion, and ancient architecture.

Propertius on the Site of Rome

Kenneth S. Rothwell Jr. — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 10:49:54 PDT

The image of the site of Rome when it was hills, marshes and meadows, not yet spoiled by urban intrusion, was a favorite of Virgil and the Augustan elegists. In this paper I would like to examine the site as it appears in Propertius 4,1 ; 4,4 and 4,9. Although Propertius was following precendents from Tibullus 2,5 and Aeneid 8, his departures from the topography they mapped out need to be systematically examined. I will suggest (a) that Propertius generally offered a darker view of the site of Rome by endowing it with morally ambiguous qualities and by populating it with unappealing characters. Moreover (b) in fashioning this landscape Propertius settled on a view of the workings of nature -- consistent with other poems in Book 4 -- in which nature undermines human progress. This view of nature is further underscored by the suppression of the theme of the Golden Age.

Was Carcinus I a Tragic Playwright?

Kenneth S. Rothwell Jr. — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 13:31:41 PDT

If Carcinus I was a tragic poet, why would a scholiast attribute to him a play with the title "Mice"?