In Australian politics it’s been a pretty awful week for women, with a range of rather horrid men from the conservative side of politics parading their misogyny in public concerning our (female) Prime Minister. But this blog isn’t the place for that (you can see my twitter for many comments illuminating what exactly I think of this country’s right wing). This blog’s about Classical History and related topics.

But as well as the political dimension, the Australian football manager (as in, the coach of the national soccer team, not as in so-called “Australian Football”, i.e. the Victorian game that’s played on Cricket ovals) made a terrible sexist gaffe about women shutting up in public (yes, he really said this). Now he claimed that the cause of this was actually him quoting a Latin expression mulieres taceres in ecclesia, an expression I have never heard before, but somehow as if quoting some old bit of sexist Latin that supposedly spouted out of some fourth century patristic saint somehow excuses your own sexism (and Osieck’s attempt at translation is thoroughly debunked here). So it’s been an entirely terrible week for women in general in this country, what with the army thing also coming to light (but to their credit, Army brass seem to have responded to this incident with some foresight and an excellent commitment to the ongoing acceptance of women in the military).

However so-called political columnist Annabell Crabb seeks to explain the week with this article A little more respect, a little less Latin, right?. Crabb tries to get a little even by using Google translate to tell Osieck, in Latin, that:

“Football experts should stick to football”

which Google translate apparently told Ms. Crabb was:

“ornare eu peritorum adherebit”

Oh, dear God, no. Anyone who says Google translate is OK is a fool. It doesn’t understand even something basic like verb tense, let alone mood or voice. Allowing for the spelling mistake of adhaereo, the above says something totally nonsensical like:

to embellish, well done! it will stick of experts

Well, In Latin you’re going to have a real problem with football of course, so let’s broaden the possibility to sport in general: “experts in sports should stick to sport” … using the 2nd person plural imperfect subjunctive active as a iussive for “should stick to”, and the dative (adhaereo takes the dative) for the thing that must be stuck to (ludo, sport), as well the genitive for “experts of sports”, I get something like:

periti ludorum ludo adhaerent

You could also probably use the gerundive adhaesundum est (or perhaps adhaesundi sunt in the pl. masc.) to imply a sense of obligation, but I’m not going to even attempt that here.

Comments invited.

in eum locum postquam demissus est Lentulus, vindices rerum capitalium, quibus praeceptum erat, laqueo gulam fregere

This is typically translated as something like the following:

When Lentulus had been let down into this place, executioners, to whom orders had been given, strangled him with a cord.

The translation above is almost exactly the one on Perseus, which is the 1899 English translation by J.S. Watson. But he has glossed “executioners” above as “certain men”.

But even then, the word “executioners” is a certain type of gloss. The Latin in question is vindices rerum capitalium, which is far more literally something like “the revengers of the capital matters”, or perhaps more favorably but still rather cryptic (although no more cryptic than “certain men”): “capital revengers”. Anyway this is where we get the idea of “capital punishment” or “capital crimes” from.

A strange turn of phrase, perhaps, but how exactly did Lentulus (and Cethegus, Statilius, and others too) die at the illegal order of Cicero? Is that “strangled with a cord”? Well, yes, but … no. In fact it’s far more brutal than that!

The Latin words for the method of execution are laqueo gulam fregere. Laqueo is ablative laqueus, meaning noose, snare, etc, lets say “by a noose”. Gulam is straightforward: it’s accusative gula – the throat or neck. Now that’s leaves the verb, fregere. Oh yes, perhaps “strangled”, but not exactly: there’s some typical archaising going on here by Sallust that’s altered the form of the verb somewhat, it’s really frango frangere fregi fractum … and look at that supine, fractum, which is were we ultimately derives the word “fracture”. And indeed frango means more like “break”, “crush”, “grind”, “bruise” and also by transference, “violate”, “subdue”, “soften”, and “weaken”. Lentulus is having his throat violated. This being ancient Rome, it’s not a noose breaking the neck as in a 19th century long-drop hanging: it’s a rather brutal garrotting, pure and simple.

So sure, while it might be fine to think that “certain men … strangled him with a cord”, but that makes it sound rather more pleasant a death than the way it surely was (and Sallust had just finished describing just how disgusting in darkness, filth, and smell, the dungeon where the execution took place, actually was). Therefore I think it’s far more fitting to think that in the dark and fetid pit of the Tullianum, that “the capital revengers … crushed his throat with a noose”.

The storm, it seems, is over the way this supposedly groundbreaking knowledge was revealed: in an article in the Guardian newspaper. That set off a rather frenzied reaction, links to which can be found in the Tumblr link I posted at the start of this article.

This sort of thing – research by newspaper article – happens in historical disciplines pretty much all the time and it’s hardly ever called out, at least in public. Its often accepted uncritically, even by scientists (because they are dealing with something outside their specialisation, usually). Think every time you see a newspaper article about an archeological find dealing with Alexander something or Cleopatra just-about-anything; it’s mostly fantasy masquerading as history-by-press-release. Sometimes this stuff takes on highly disturbing nationalist overtones – at least mathematics and physics are usually spared that ignominy! In part this is because the discipline of Classics itself has a deep coupling with a range of European pretensions about what exactly a worthwhile civilisation really looks like, and a pre-scientific origin in the collections of antiquaries, rather than a truly scholarly uncovering of the past, gentlemen merely wish to stock their houses and gardens with ancient objets d’art. Thus the object’s inherent beauty being more important than what it can tell us about the past (which led in turn to the destruction of evidence that wasn’t beautiful enough to take note of). There was also sometimes a uncritical acceptance that ancient writing was necessarily true in a rather straightforward manner, that led to artefacts being assigned appellations like “The mask of Agamemnon”.

All this led me a deeper meditation on the production of knowledge and how we go about obtaining it.

In the sciences, it’s usually taken there is a straightforward path to the establishment of truth. Develop provisional theory; determine novel predictions; undertake experiments; publish results; rinse and repeat. The biggest cries of outrage about Weinstein’s ideas were not just “show us your working” (i.e. “where’s the paper?”) but rather simply that “this is not science” as the usually-reliable PZ Myers posted. But you can note the first comment on that blog post by commenter “Unity”;

“This is not how anyone does science.”

Except mathematicians.

[ ... ] This is often how mathematicians operate, on the clear understanding that what they are present is, at this stage, provisional and that publication and peer review will necessarily follow – that is, of course, unless someone spots a serious flaw during the talk and raise it during the Q&A.

Several other commenters make similar points.

That’s not dissimilar to the way things work in the humanities (at least in Classics); you try out approaches at conferences and seminars and then later publish your work, of course with fundamental caveat of the important differences as to how argumentative ‘proof’ works between the humanities and the sciences.

Still, those links led me to this interesting article by Caroline Chen about an extraordinary proof of an important mathematical conjecture by Shinichi Mochizuki just last year (don’t worry, you need a Mathematics degree to understand the article, at least).

This is fascinating because the article points to an approach that’s diametrically different from the “publish first, questions later” method that we’re given by some of the commenters on the Weinstein controversy. Here, a brilliant but reclusive mathematician has simply dumped his proof of the conjecture on the internet and refuses to come to seminars and explain what it all means to other mathematicians. The problem it seems is that the papers are long, and full of very dense and new mathematics. So mathematicians who want to understand the proof need to do a lot of work digging into this new and dense mathematics; not surprisingly, not very many of them possess both the ability and the will to do this. They want the seminar version, but the author won’t supply the seminars. Talking about Machizuki, a mathematician, Cathy O’Neil says;

“You don’t get to say you’ve proved something if you haven’t explained it,” she says. “A proof is a social construct. If the community doesn’t understand it, you haven’t done your job.”

So why the original reaction to Weinstein couched in terms of the diametrically opposite terms? I can’t say anything about the correctness of either Weinstein or Machizuki, but I think it’s an object lesson that even Mathematics, the purest of the pure sciences is still firmly rooted in human social systems. Evidently if you don’t co-operate with social standards like “don’t have your results trumpeted in the newspaper before your colleagues see them” and “don’t just dump your proof into a series of long papers on the internet” you’re not ‘doing science’. While the science itself may be mathematically rigourous, like everything else that humans have discovered or invented, it’s deeply embedded in social systems, not just mathematical ones.

Links

• Science is Beauty Tumblr
• Dear Guardian, You’ve Been Played
• Eric Weinstein’s invisible theory of nothing
• Maybe the next Einstein, but I doubt it
• Weinstein’s theory may explain why the universe works the way it does
• PZ Meyers says: ‘This is not science’
• An outsider’s theory of everything
• A Tale of Two Oxford Talks and Eric Weinstein on Geometric Unity
• The Paradox of the Proof (about Mochizuki).

Hannibal’s journey across the Alps to attack the Romans in Italy is one of the most celebrated and famous events of Roman history. This paper deals with one of major accounts of this event, and its aftermath: the story of the crossing in Livy’s book 21, and the battles which follow it at the River Trebia and Lake Trasimene. In particular, the paper will highlight a number of connections in Livy that are found between the personality of Hannibal, the events of the Alpine journey, and Livy’s representation of the Italian landscape. The paper will argue that, starting with the divine vision of the ‘wasteland of Italy’ that was granted to Hannibal at 21.22.6–9, Livy’s depiction of Hannibal, and his journey across the Alps, have strong correspondences in the way the landscape of Italy was rendered in Livy’s literary scheme. It will show that the manner in which Hannibal inflicted defeat on the Romans, is intimately tied, in a very literary way, to both the representation of the alpine crossing and the content of Hannibal’s dream that precedes it. Although the annihilation of the Roman army at Cannae is the military highpoint of Hannibal’s career, this paper will demonstrate that it is the battle of Lake Trasimene, with its rich tapestry of omens, prodigies, weather, terrain and an earthquake mid-battle, that marks the centrepiece of Livy’s representation and the crescendo of Hannibal’s journey through Italy.

There’s lots of other really good papers being presented over the three days, and the registration is really quite cheap, so if you’re on the USA Eastern seaboard in July this year or feel like a trip there, you should come along, say hello, hear my paper and a whole bunch of even better ones.

[1] No, I’ve got no idea why the Pacific Rim Roman Literature Seminar is in a city on the Atlantic Ocean either, but as it’s Manhattan I’m not complaining.

This is our second call for papers. The abstracts are due 31 May 2013. If you can, please consider submitting an abstract. More information about the conference can be seen at our website – http://perspectives2013.org/, but the basic information is reproduced below.

Perspectives on Progress – An interdisciplinary postgraduate and early career researcher conference, at The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia. November 27-29, 2013.

The organising committee is pleased announce that Dr. Alastair Blanshard and Dr. Sarah Pinto have each agreed to deliver Key Note Addresses at Perspectives on Progress, 2013.

Dr. Blanshard is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Sydney. His most recent monograph is Sex, Vice, and Love from Antiquity to Modernity (Wiley Blackwell, 2010). In addition to his work on ancient sexuality, Dr. Blanshard is also concerned with examining the role that the classical past plays in the history of ideas.

Dr. Mills’s Futures of Reproduction: Bioethics and Biopolitics (Springer, 2011) is a compelling interrogation of the myriad bioethical issues associated with liberal eugenics and selective reproduction. As the recipient of a prestigious Australian Research Council Future Fellowship, Dr. Mills is currently working on a project concerned with exploring the concept of responsibility as it pertains to issues in reproductive and maternal-foetal medicine.

Call for Papers

In 1968, historian Sidney Pollard defined the Victorian ideal of ‘progress’ as, “the assumption that a pattern of change exists in the history of mankind… that it consists of irreversible changes in one direction only, and that this direction is towards improvement.” Despite the increasingly problematic nature of this ideal, the ‘progress myth’ still remains pervasive in the Western cultural tradition.

This postgraduate and early career researcher conference seeks to promote innovative interdisciplinary dialogues interrogating the concept of progress by bringing together scholars from across the humanities and social sciences.

Contributions are invited from disciplines ranging from history, classics, religion and philosophy through literary, media and cultural studies to anthropology, psychology and political science. Conference delegates will be invited to consider how the idea of progress influences their own work, while being given the opportunity to explore how this intersects with scholarship in other disciplines.

The conference committee invites proposals for papers in the form of an abstract of between 250 and 300 words to perspectivesonprogress2013@gmail.com by 31 May 2013. Paper format is a 20 minute paper with a 10 minute period for questions and answers.

Can’t work out the root form of a irregular Latin conjugation? Confused as to whether it’s a 3rd declension neuter plural or a 1st declension feminine ablative .. or even nominative? Is that 1st/2nd pl. dative or ablative, or a 3rd m/f sing. genitive? Know how to parse the form, but don’t know the vocabulary?

Well, there’s an App for that!

There’s now a free iPad version available. You can read more about it, and get it from the App Store, via this link: http://inlustre.net/latinowl/.

vos enim, ad quos litteras L. Piso de suis rebus non audet mittere, qui Gabini litteras insigni quadam nota atque ignominia nova condemnastis, C. Caesari supplicationes decrevistis numero ut nemini uno ex bello, honore ut omnino nemini (Cic. Prov. X.25).

In fact you, to whom L. Piso does not dare to send letters concerning his affairs, you who condemned the letters of Gabinius, with a certain extraordinary censure, and novel dishonour, you voted supplications to C. Caesar, in number as no man, in one war honour as altogether no other.

Later, in XIII.33, we find that a region (Gaul) formerly not known through letters, not even through rumour (fama), has now been tramped all over by Caesar’s army:

… et quas regiones quasque gentis nullae nobis antea litterae, nulla vox, nulla fama notas fecerat, has hoster imperator nosterque exercitus et populi Romana arma peragrarunt. (Cic. Prov. XIII.33)

… and of those regions and those nations, no letters, no voice, no report had before made note to us, these were traversed over by our commander, our army, and by the arms of the Roman people.

And as we know, famously written on by the man himself:

Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres … (Caesar, de Bello Gallico 1.1.1)

The whole of Gaul is divided into three parts …

Update: Schema will now include a ‘urn’ attribute

Warning: this is a long and somewhat technical post about using the Perseus CTS API to fetch classical texts as XML data

This stuff is important for software developers and “digital classicists” (that is, classicists who work with computer-information systems for analysing information about the classical world).

On the Digital Classics mailing list, some helpful hints managed to emerge to my queries. The first is, the Perseus XML interface I was using (it’s the one that’s behind the helpful “XML” button at the bottom of each passage in the HTML version that you typically use with your web browser) is probably on its last legs.

CTS Overview

The more up-to-date (but still in beta) version is Perseus CTS; where “CTS” stands for Canonical Text Services. CTS is built on work done by the Homer Multitext Project.

CTS appears to have three main functional components:

• A catalogue service (actually called “getCapabilities”)
• A reference validation and exploration service
• A service that retrieves text

Some commentary on its limitations

What it is missing, is a search service. The catalogue is huge. It has listed in it every available Greek and Roman text in the Perseus database and includes details of all editions and translation of each text. It’s available here http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/CTS?request=GetCapabilities and I’m not actually linking that URL because don’t click on it just yet. It’s 2.1 MB of XML. Your browser may not like especially like it. Mine only manages to load it properly half the time.

When you do manage to download it and save it on your local disk (highly recommended), you’ll see it’s a pretty comprehensive catalogue of the data. Unordered. With no links to the texts in either the reference validation or text retrieval services, and nothing obvious as a field that gives you the unique identifier needed.

What the references are constructed from

The reference validation service assumes you know the reference you want to validate (and discover the sub-components of). But you need that first-level peek into the initial reference. Perseus uses Thesaurus Linguae Graecae referencing system for Greek texts, and the Packard Humanities Institute PHI Latin Texts system for Latin texts. These both principally organise their respective corpora around authors, assigning each their own index number. Thus, Homer is ‘tlg0012′ and Livy ‘phi0914′.

The references are formatted into a type of reference called a URN.

How to create the references

Now I’m going to tell you how to construct a functional reference ID for the CTS system.

First thing, load the catalogue URL into your browser. I’m not going to link it but cut and paste this one into your browser: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/CTS?request=GetCapabilities – if you know how to use Wget or Curl use that instead.

Save the file to a convenient location on your disk. I called mine “CTS.xml”.

Open the file in a text editor. Notepad won’t cut it. Word most certainly will not (it’s not even a text editor!). One the Mac, I recommend BBEdit. [Update: it's been pointed out on the mailing list that Oxygen XML editor is an ideal tool. I use this tool at work and have it on my Mac at home. An Academic licence is $99, a full one nearly $500. Unless you do extensive work in XML I would not recommend to buy it. Probably on Windows by default Internet Explorer is the default program for an XML file. It, or Safari on the Mac, will suffice to read the document. Google's Chrome also works pretty well. Browsers will also "pretty print" the XML to make it easier to view.]

Use your editor’s search capability to find the author you want.

The ‘textgroup’ (normally the author) identifies the first level

You’ll find that the author’s work is contained in an XML element called “textgroup”. Here’s the text group for Livy, along with the groupname element identifying it:

<textgroup projid="latinLit:phi0914">
  <groupname xml:lang="en">Titus Livius (Livy)</groupname>
  ... (thousands of lines omitted)
</textgroup>

Pay careful attention to the ‘projid’ attribute of the textgroup. This helps form the root of the URN used to identify the text in Perseus. The URN always starts with ‘urn:cts:’. Add the projid to that, like this:

urn:cts:latinLit:phi0914

Check it in the reference validation service

That’s all texts/editions/translations by/of Livy in the Perseus database. Here’s a link to the reference validation service: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/CTS?request=GetValidReff&urn=urn:cts:latinLit:phi0914. If you open that link, you’ll see, in XML, a list of all the available URNs for every version and edition and translation of Livy in the database. But unfortunately, no descriptive information what each version edition or translation is!

We still need the catalogue file. Go back to the catalogue file.

The ‘work’ identifies the next level of reference

Search for a book. In my case, let’s look for “Book 1″ of Livy. You’ll see the catalogue file is unordered. The version I looked at, Livy books started at Book 11 (what? The one of the missing books is miraculously in the Perseus database I hear you say? Unfortunately, it’s just the periocha of book 11). The unordered nature of the database make it especially annoying: you have to search, and you can’t browse.

Anyway the entry for Book 1 looks something like this:

<textgroup projid="latinLit:phi0914">
  <groupname xml:lang="en">Titus Livius (Livy)</groupname>
  <!-- ... (thousands of lines omitted) -->
  <work projid="latinLit:phi0011" xml:lang="lat">
    <title xmlns="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xml:lang="en">
    The History of Rome, Book 1</title>
 <!-- ... (thousands of lines omitted) -->
</work></textgroup>

See how the Book is contained in an XML element called “work”? Note the “projid” element of the work. In this case, we don’t need the “latinLit:” part, the interesting part of the id is the “phi0011″: that’s the ID for Book 1 of Livy. We add it to the URN we’ve been constructing as follows:

urn:cts:latinLit:phi0914.phi0011

The ‘edition’ and/or ‘translation’ identifies a specific version of the work

While that’s supposed to be valid reference to Livy’s book 1, Perseus contains at least two Latin editions of the text and three English translations. These are listed inside the “work” element in either “edition” or “translation” elements, like so (for brevity I have omitted some lines that give data about the citation system of the edition):

<work projid="latinLit:phi0011" xml:lang="lat">
  <title xmlns="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xml:lang="en">
   The History of Rome, Book 1</title>
  <edition projid="latinLit:perseus-lat1">
    <label xml:lang="en">The History of Rome, Book 1</label>
    <description xmlns="" xml:lang="en">Titi Livi ab urbe condita libri 
     editionem priman curavit Guilelmus Weissenborn editio altera auam
     curavit Mauritius Mueller Pars I. Libri I-X. Editio Stereotypica.
     Titus Livius. W. Weissenborn. H. J. M&amp;#252;ller. Leipzig. 
     Teubner. 1898. 1.
    </description>
    <!-- some lines omitted -->         
  </edition>
  <translation projid="latinLit:perseus-eng1">
    <label xml:lang="en">The History of Rome, Book 1</label>
    <description xmlns="" xml:lang="en">Livy. Books I and II With An
     English Translation. Cambridge. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard 
     University Press; London, William Heinemann, Ltd. 1919.
    </description>
    <!-- some lines omitted -->         
  </translation>
  <edition projid="latinLit:perseus-lat2">
    <label xml:lang="en">The History of Rome, Book 1</label>
    <description xmlns="" xml:lang="en">Livy. Books I and II With An
     English Translation. Cambridge. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard 
     University Press; London, William Heinemann, Ltd. 1919.
    </description>
    <!-- some lines omitted -->         
  </edition>
  <edition projid="latinLit:perseus-lat3">
    <label xml:lang="en">The History of Rome, Book 1</label>
    <description xmlns="" xml:lang="en">Livy. Ab urbe condita. Robert
     Seymour Conway. Charles Flamstead Walters. Oxford. Oxford 
     University Press. 1914. 1.</description>
    <!-- some lines omitted -->         
    <memberof collection="Perseus:collection:Greco-Roman"></memberof>
  </edition>
  <translation projid="latinLit:perseus-eng2">
    <label xml:lang="en">The History of Rome, Book 1</label>
    <description xmlns="" xml:lang="en">Livy. History of Rome by Titus
     Livius, the first eight Books. literally translated, with notes 
     and illustrations, by. D. Spillan. York Street, Covent Garden,
     London. Henry G. Bohn. John Child and son, printers. 1857. 1.
    </description>
    <!-- some lines omitted -->         
  </translation>
  <translation projid="latinLit:perseus-eng3">
    <label xml:lang="en">The History of Rome, Book 1</label>
    <description xmlns="" xml:lang="en">Perseus:bib:oclc,2311635, Livy.
     History of Rome. English. Translation by. Rev. Canon Roberts. New
     York, New York. E. P. Dutton and Co. 1912. 1. Livy. History of 
     Rome. English Translation. Rev. Canon Roberts. New York, New York.
     E.P. Dutton and Co. 1912. 2.</description>
    <!-- some lines omitted -->         
  </translation>
</work>

Now, assuming we’re after the Teubner edition of the text (the first one), we can use that edition’s ‘projId’ attribute as before, and stripping the ‘latinLit’ from it and adding it to the URN we’ve been building up, we get:

urn:cts:latinLit:phi0914.phi0011.perseus-lat1

This is the complete reference to the Weissenborn & Mueller edition of Livy’s Book 1 published by Teubner.

Check it in the reference service

We can hit up the reference validation service with that URN as follows: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/CTS?request=GetValidReff&urn=urn:cts:latinLit:phi0914.phi0011.perseus-lat1 – you will see a complete collection of URNs for the distinct parts of Book 1 in the Teubner edition of the text.

URNs for specific passages

This URN is all of the preface that’s found at the start of Book 1:

urn:cts:latinLit:phi0914.phi0011.perseus-lat1:pr

This URN is all of Chapter 1 of Book 1 (not including the preface):

urn:cts:latinLit:phi0914.phi0011.perseus-lat1:1

You can also get parts of chapters, here is 1.4.2:

urn:cts:latinLit:phi0914.phi0011.perseus-lat1:4.2

Fetch the text chunk you want

These arguments are passed to the ‘urn’ parameter of text retrieval service of Perseus like this: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/CTS?request=GetPassage&urn=urn:cts:latinLit:phi0914.phi0011.perseus-lat1:pr (that’s the preface).

Anatomy of the URN format used by Perseus

    urn:cts:latinLit:phi0914.phi0011.perseus-lat1:4.2
    {1}:{2}:   {3}  :   {4} . {5}   .  {6}       :{7}

• {1} It’s a urn. This part is fixed.
• {2} The urn is part of the ‘cts’ namespace. This part is fixed.
• {3} The Latin Literature namespace. Would be ‘greekLit’ for Greek texts, and possibly other values.
• {4} The textgroup’s identifier. It’s normally either the TLG or PHI author index value. In the catalogue it’s contained in the ‘projid’ attribute of the ‘textgroup’ element, stripped of the namespace.
• {5} The work’s identifier. This may map to an author’s title or to an individual book in a larger collection of texts. This also apparently comes from either TLG or PHI indices (I’ve not verified this fact for sure). In the catalogue it’s contained in the ‘projid’ attribute of the ‘work’ element, stripped of the namespace.
• {6} The edition of the work. This may also be a translation. This is a Perseus-specific value. In the catalogue it’s contained in the ‘projid’ attribute of the ‘edition’ or ‘translation’ element, stripped of the namespace.
• {7} The text reference. This will be specific to the work and edition you are referencing. You can find out a simple unadorned list of what’s available by querying the reference validation service with the URN up to this point at the argument.

Note how the textgroup, work and edition use dots for separators but otherwise the data element delimiter is a colon.

Commentary

There are still problems:

• You cannot get all of book 1 in a single hit (at least for Livy).
• If you want book 2, you have to repeat this process (it’s phi0012)
  • So, Chapter 1 of book 2 of the Teubner text looks like this URN: urn:cts:latinLit:phi0914.phi0012.perseus-lat1:1
  • Repeat and rinse for other books/editions
• Entirely different authors and works may have different results or slightly different algorithms for building URNs.
• The catalogue elements ‘textgroup’, ‘work’, ‘edition’ and ‘translation’ should each have a child element, ‘urn’, that builds this URN for you, so that such explanations as I’ve attempted are unnecessary.
• The reference checking service needs to include a modicum of descriptive information about the URNs that are returned.
• There needs to be a search service that stitches all this together.

I hope someone can find this of use.

However, if anyone can answer the following questions about Perseus, its data format and URL scheme, or know where I can find answers, I’d be much obliged.

The first question I have, is why does the XML interface behave inconsistently in the data it returns? Can it be made consistent? More importantly, can it be made predictable and therefore computable?

Here are some examples of what I mean.

First, something that behaves reasonably predictably. These first links are to Caesar’s de Bellico Gallico

• This link: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/xmlchunk?doc=Perseus:text:1999.02.0002:book=1 returns all of book 1 (well I didn’t check all the way to the bottom of the document but it looks right to me).

• However, if you try this link: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/xmlchunk?doc=Perseus:text:1999.02.0002:book=1:chapter=1 you will see 1.1 of that same work.

• Can you see the pattern developing here? Try this one: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/xmlchunk?doc=Perseus:text:1999.02.0002:book=1:chapter=1:section=5 and it shows you 1.1.5 as you would predict.

Clearly, the “document name” is “1999.02.0002″ and by adding arguments :book=n :chapter=n and :section=n you can select more or less of the content as you wish. Perfect! Give me a reference to Caesar and I can retrieve the text in an easily transformable XML format.

In contrast to to the former logical behaviour, consider these following links to Weissenborn and Muller’s 1898 edition of Livy’s text.

• The first link I tired, I expected to behave like the first one of Caesar’s above: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/xmlchunk?doc=Perseus:text:1999.02.0169:book=1 … however it returns only 1.1.1 (^ actually I’ll get to exactly what the text is in a second).

• This link: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/xmlchunk?doc=Perseus:text:1999.02.0169:book=1:chapter=1 behaves as one expects and returns 1.1 (^)

However if you look at those two links, you’ll see the text is not the same text. That’s because what I really labelled above a “1.1.1″ is really book 1 praefectus 1. You can access it directly with this URL:

• http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/xmlchunk?doc=Perseus:text:1999.02.0169:book=1:chapter=pr (the entire preface).

OK, so maybe the Livy text is thrown by the presence of the special “preface” chapter.

• Lets try book 2: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/xmlchunk?doc=Perseus:text:1999.02.0169:book=2 … nope, that’s definitely only 2.1.1

• http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/xmlchunk?doc=Perseus:text:1999.02.0169:book=2:chapter=1 … and this one is all of 2.1

• We can also select a specific section: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/xmlchunk?doc=Perseus:text:1999.02.0169:book=2:chapter=1:section=8 (2.1.8).

Additionally, if you want, say, book 22 chapter 1, you might predict that this could work:

• http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/xmlchunk?doc=Perseus:text:1999.02.0169:book=22:chapter=1

But sadly, no. That’s not even a valid document. I guess the later books are in different editions, and thus to get to book 22, it’s an entirely different document URL.

• http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/xmlchunk?doc=Perseus:text:1999.02.0170:book=22:chapter=1

Let’s try to get the whole book contents:

• http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/xmlchunk?doc=Perseus:text:1999.02.0170:book=22 … Ah, nope, it’s just 22.1.1 again.

Predictability is one of the greatest virtues for URI schema, and this seems to break it. The data inside the documents suggest it is broken into book, chapter, section, and the URL retrieval scheme suggests it can be retrieved as such, but there is different behaviour depending on the document content (Livy or Caesar).

So it looks like that in my app I’ve have to build a static tree of the document URLs, rather than being able to compute them on the fly, which is a much better way of doing things, usually.

Does anyone have any insight to this behaviour of Perseus? Suggestions? Comments?

• Latin OWL Facebook page
• @LatinOWLApp on Twitter
• LatinOWL for iPhone – FREE

For the several people asking about the iPad version, there’s a little way to go before it will be ready for me to upload to the App Store. I will probably put it up in the store once I’ve got the search history working to my satisfaction (for example: filtering out bad searches!). I actually used the iPad version on the weekend to help me while I was doing some translation and using it “in anger” is one of the best ways to work out what needs to be fixed in order to be usable in a basic sense.

There are some other features, such as much prettier formatting of the dictionary entry on the right hand side, that also need to be added. The very plain formatting works on the iPhone version because of the lack of space, however on the iPad it needs more legible formatting. I’ve also got some ideas to use the XML dictionary versions from Perseus rather than HTML but this would require more processing (and more programming on my part) before it can be displayed. I’m also thinking heavily about “pre-loading” the dictionary when you do the search so the entries appear almost “instantly”. However instead of waiting until I get every little last thing done, what I’ll do is release the initial version and try to push regular updates (as iOS users will know, updates are free once you buy the App). There’ll be more updates however as I add more features.

In the meantime, to whet your appetites, here are some screenshots of the current development version of the iPad version.

• LatinOWL 4 iPad search results with a selected entry:

• LatinOWL 4 iPad search entry popover:

• LatinOWL 4 iPad previously searched history list:

Well, there’s an App for that!

I’ve written an iOS app for iPhone (4, 4s, & 5, with iOS 6) called LatinOWL. It is available for free. It allows you to lookup any inflection of a Latin word, find the root form, and select the dictionary entry. The data comes from Perseus.

You can read more about it at this link: http://inlustre.net/latinowl/.

Or, just get it straight from the App Store.

There is a much more powerful (but not free) iPad version in the works. There are no plans for Android versions.

Quorum ego nihil dico, patres conscripti, nunc in hominem ipsum: de provincia disputo. Itaque omnia illa, quae et saepe audistis et tenetis animis, etiamsi non audiatis, praetermitto; nihil de hac eius urbana, quam ille praesens in mentibus vestris oculisque defixit, audacia loquor; nihil de superbia, nihil de contumacia, nihil de crudelitate disputo. (Cic. Prov. 4,8)

Of those things I say nothing, conscript fathers, against the man himself [I say nothing] now, it is concerning the provinces that I examine. And so all those things, which often you have both heard and held in mind, even if you would have not heard [them], I let them go. I mention nothing of his temerity concerning this city, which he has fixed powerfully in your minds and eyes, nothing on his arrogance, nothing on his obstinacy, nothing concerning his barbarity, do I investigate.

No, yep. None of those things. Won’t mention them. Yes that’s right, we’ll be passing straight over his character entirely, that calumnious obstinate back-stabbing arrogant barbaric son-of-a-bitch, who has been threatening this very city with all manner of indignities, which, I’m sure, you all recall since I last mentioned it, without me having to drag it up all over again. No, but what I want to discuss, is the disposition of the provinces, a matter of high affair and utmost importance to the state, and nothing at all do with how this guy is a villainous blagger and outrageous chancer (just ask those Greeks that he stole all that loot from, if you want to find out about that, because I’m certain not going to talk about it here), but everything to do with, for the very highest of reasons, mind you, of fuck that guy, for entirely impartial and cooly calculated reasons of state, which have nothing at all do with any personal enmity we may have had in the past.

True story.

hoc illud est praecipue in cognitione rerum salubre ac frugiferum, omnis te exempli documenta in inlustri posita monumento intueri: inde tibi tuaequae rei publicae quod imitere capias, inde foedum inceptu, foedum exitu, quod vites. — ‘Here in acquiring knowledge of [history] it is particularly salutary and fruitful, for you to behold lessons of every type [as if] laid out on a brilliant memorial: from that you may make use for yourself and your public business what to copy, from that you may shun [that which] is detestable in the beginning, [and] detestable in the conclusion.’ — (Livy 1 pr.10)

urbani, seruate uxores: moechum caluom adducimus. aurum in Gallia effutuisti, hic sumpsisti mutuum

Men of the city, lock up your wives: we bring the hairless fucker! The gold in Gaul you fucked away, here you procured the loot!

Suetonius, Jul. 51

esse apibus partem diuinae mentis et haustus | aetherios dixere — Vergil, Georgics 4.220-221

Just saw this quoted in Claire Preston, 2006, Bee London: Reaktion Books. Google tells me that Claire Preston is Professor of Early Modern English literature at the University of Birmingham. It’s quoted, in itself a quote, from 17th C. Italian writer. I really, really, want to like this book. I love Bees. I love this sort of scholarship (although this is not really a piece of serious scholarship, and for me, just light-hearted summer reading). It’s a really interesting book about Bees, their natural and social history,

However the book is full of quotes, from English translations, mostly Dryden, of Vergil, quoted by page number. Which is really, really sloppy, because it makes much of the translation’s meaning (bees keep shop, they live in a commonwealth, etc), when the translations can’t be necessarily trusted. But never mind, until I saw the above passage translated as:

It is said that bees share divine intelligence by drinking ethereal draughts.

I just can’t let it pass. Plainly, apibus is dative/ablative apis (“bee”), so it means “to/by/with/from bees”. diuinae mentis is genitive f. singular, so “of the divine mind” and partem is accusative, and forms both the object and forms part of the infinitive-accusative construction esse … dixere. So I think apibus is dative, so that leaves it as “to/from bees”. However I doubt that et haustus aetherios is the agent of partem diuinae mentis, because clearly the et is introducing a new clause, it’s an additional accusative object with an implicit verb like ‘[given] to the bees’, with aetherios a nominative an accusative plural adjective used as a substantive “… and drinking ethereal [elixirs]“, supposing that if you can be drinking anything ethereal, it would have to be an elixir of some sort. So I think something like, to be quite literal for the moment about the infinitives:

to be to the bees a share of the divine mind, and drinking ethereal [elixir], to have said.

But of course, infinitive-accusative, oratio obliqua, indirect speech, and esse with the dative can mean in the sense of ‘to belong’ or ‘to pertain to’, so naturally;

It is said that to the bees [belongs] a share of the divine mind, and drinking ethereal elixirs.

Curiously, Lewis and Short on Perseus gives esse as the present infinitive active also of edo, “to eat”, and the presence of haustus, “drinking” … really makes me wonder if the translation could be rendered along the lines of:

It is said that the bees eat of the divine mind, and drink ethereal elixirs.

There’s also a sense with aetherius can mean “heavenly” or “celestial”, not just “ethereal”, and in that sense it tickles my fancy much better in terms of its relation to “the divine mind”, so perhaps we could render it;

It is said that the bees eat the Mind of God, and drink of Heaven.

After all the part of Georgics here immediately after this expounds on how God permeates all existence:

deum namque ire per omnes | terrasque tractusque maris caelumque profundum — Vergil Georgics 4.221-222. (see here).

More prosaically, however, and bringing it back to earth for a moment, I’d say it most likely translates:

It is said that to the bees belongs a share of the divine mind, and the drinking of heavenly elixirs.

Thanks ever so much,

A frustrated PhD student.

(Greece & Rome, I’m looking at you especially)

Who says education (even in the sciences) is about “the sale of information”? This is the voice of someone who confuses facts and information with knowledge and wisdom. A category error. The elite will still get their expensive Harvard education and the rest of humanity will be forced to live on the free scraps of “information” that fall off the table.

Walking along, say a major road built 200 years before, would an average Roman citizen of the late Republic and early Empire have known about the person who built the road? Would they know who Flaminius was? His name was on the main road north out of Rome and all the up through Italy to Ariminum (the borderland of Roman territory when he built it in 220 B.C.). Augustus personally undertook its restoration, strategically it was an important road. But its builder died in a famous battle (Trasimene) only a few years thereafter. What sort of education was necessary before they would know? Obviously Cicero and Varro knew who he was but these are men famed for being knowledgeable and erudite. What about your average citizen?

I find this question is almost unanswerable. Does anyone have an opinion?

View PLV Inscriptions (Chesters) in a larger map

You can find much more data for many inscriptions found along Hadrian’s Wall at the blog perlineamvalli.wordpress.com – there are great maps and colour-coding as to the precision of the known location of each inscription.[1]

Now the reason this is of particular interest to me is that some years ago now, when I was doing my Master’s degree, I wrote a paper analysing the location of the inscriptions in the RIB classified by deity name. Now I didn’t have the time, resources, or luxury to research to exactly where every inscription was found, so instead I used the county listed in the RIB as an approximate guide to the location, plus any general information I could glean from papers where the inscriptions were either the subject or incidentally, but authoritatively mentioned.

Initially I was looking for patterns in male/female deity distribution, but the major thing I stumbled upon was that the Jupiter inscriptions (along with inscriptions to the imperial genius, &c.) are all mainly found in the region of the wall (generally northern, “military” areas). Whereas inscriptions to Mars especially (this includes the syncretic agglomerations of Mars and other gods which seems to occur more frequently in the RIB than for Jupiter, excluding that were explicitly imperial cult) are in the main found in the southern “civilian” areas. In fact if you turned up an altar with an inscription in Gloucestershire (just to pick a southern county not quite randomly) my guess it would most likely be either to Mars or Mercury (or one in a smaller but still significant group of rather miscellaneous deities). Jupiter is nearly always up in the north (although this may be biased by large and distinct groups of altars to Iupitter Optimus Maximus that seem to have been buried in or near forts on the wall for reasons not quite clear to me).

Now this might be entirely unremarkable except for the fact I kept turning up assertions in the literature that indicated the opposite was occurring in Gaul; i.e. that Mars was a distinctly “military” deity with Jupiter being the “Romanising”[2] god that civilians preferred to pick for local syncretion. So there’s some process of local adaption going on beyond the differences often noted between the Greek East and the Gallic Western/Northern parts of the Empire.

This was my only real venture into any sort of archaeological data analysis, something you’d think I’d be good at given my computer science background, but after dabbling in it for a semester I rather abandoned that type of research for a more literary-historiographical focus for both my Masters dissertation and now my PhD thesis.[3]

[1]. This tweet also confirms that the entire dataset will be available from perlineamvalli.org.uk

[2]. Scare quotes deliberate. This is a loaded and highly contested term which I’m just going to hand-wave away for the purposes of this blog post.

[3]. In the main because my institution doesn’t have a lot of ways it could support such a research focus; also I’ve always been drawn to the classical literature first and foremost.

The much-loved classicist Mary Beard continues to conquer the airwaves, this time as an advisor on Plebs, a new sitcom set in Ancient Rome.

They are comparing it The Inbetweeners (in togas), which doesn’t help me as I’ve never seen that show (just its ads, which were unappealing to me), but here’s a more useful (for me, anyway) log line:

“The idea was to make the historical setting by-the-by and root it in modern concerns. We wanted to stay away from the clichés of camp silliness or austere classical actors,” says [the writer] … “Tonally, it’s much more Seinfeld than Up Pompeii.”

Seinfeld? In Rome? That could be … erm … interesting.

For writing, i.e. getting out complex ideas quickly without interrupting flow, a keyboard is supreme (for the moment at the least). For example, when I went to Los Angeles six weeks ago (a 14 hour flight from Brisbane) I had the iPad with the Zagg with me on the plane and I had a compelling thought that was going to feed into a paper I am writing for ASCS 2013 conference; I was able to quickly churn out about 1200 words for the paper right there on the plane. Now I also had the laptop (a MacBook Pro 15″) on the plane in the overhead locker, but really, the iPad with the Zagg keyboard is exactly perfect for this.

Read the rest: http://www.crazymcphee.net/x/2012/11/03/keyboards-and-tablets-and-writing/.

… simply to insist — again — on the ineffable mystery of literature isn’t particularly interesting.

Literature, like all art, does have an element of “ineffable mystery” but that’s not the only thing it has.

Anyway the entire polemic seems to me to be misplaced. It might be a new feeling for academics of English literature to be relying on databases and software tools but I suspect most modern Classicists simply couldn’t live without their Perseus or Brepolis access. Perhaps because Classicists are also nearly always Classical Historians and many of us have a close relationship with Archaeology and Archaeologists. Many of us Are Archeologists first and foremost (I’m not, however). Those of us trained in the Internet Age are completely normalised to the idea of databases and digital resources. Many of us have pocket Latin and Greek dictionaries in the form of smartphone applications.

But I think, in the Classical field, it goes to something deeper. Our field has always had an element of this: lonely scholars slaving over commentaries, compiling dictionaries or creating concordances. I certainly do not envy those who came before us and built up databases of texts with an index for every unique word stem used in it! That, to me sounds like such an amazingly stultifying job description, I’m glad I live in an age when all that prior hard word can be digitised and automated and made available for my daily use at the touch of a button!

But there’s also a great insight that I think is yet to be fully realised. For example, the creation and classifying of stemma codicum, so important to us in understanding how the literature has been transmitted to us through the ages, I think may be an area that will benefit from future computational insights. Another could be understanding the relationship of texts and authors; and the identification of insertions and errata another. These are things which were once done by hand, now the use of computers can speed them up and let scholars do the important work of humanist analysis and understanding rather than the mere donkey-work of collating word-frequency tables and transmission of stylistic markers in different works. Where the understanding of texts intersects with the understanding of history, the use of computational analysis, like that of definitive archaeological data before that, will also help us to sharpen our focus and broaden our horizons.

I for one welcome our new computer overlords.

Read all about its fascinating story in A Roman Emperor Sojourns at the Getty Villa.

The Seen and the Unseen: Perception and Authority in Livy’s Battle Narratives

At the battle of the Trasimene Lake in 217 B.C., the consul C. Flaminius led his army into a fog that arose from the lake, which obscured their vision of Hannibal’s army lying in ambush. This paper will examine a number of aspects in Livy’s representation of Flaminius and the defeat at Trasimene in conjunction with Feldherr’s (Feldherr 1998) ideas surrounding the spectator and the spectacular. Taken as a whole, the episodes explored in this paper will show that Livy did not set out simply to denigrate Flaminius by repeating the opinions of sources hostile to him, but to have him fulfil an important role in a thought-provoking exemplum about the exercise and the visible representation of power. The paper will link Flaminius’ nebulous perception of the natural world around him to his own invisibility in the Roman civil ceremonies that should have marked his investiture as consul and departure to command the army. It will also explore the theme of sound versus sight in the human perception of battle. It will show the connections between the rational mind of ‘autopsy’ and the irrational emotions which only hear the dissonant clamour of the invisible enemy, in the battle of Trasimene, Hannibal’s crossing of the Alps, and the sack of Rome by the Gauls in the 4th century B.C. as it appears in book 5.

There’s also some additional points I’d like to make about the “invisibility” of Flaminius at Trasimene and in Rome, but I’m leaving those as surprises in the paper.