Vergil’s fancy to the bees, and the heavenly elixir

08 Tuesday Jan 2013

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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.

On referencing – a note to book and journal editors

27 Thursday Dec 2012

Posted by in Academia, Software & Tools

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  1. Endnotes blow big dirty chunks. They are anti-reader. Please, do not ever use endnotes, I don’t care how venerable your journal is and how long its been in business and how many decades you’ve used end-notes. Get rid of them. Footnotes only. If you hate the look of footnotes at the bottom of the page, too bad, don’t have any notes (or use an inline style, like MLA).
  2. That old style of referencing, e.g. ‘Burck., op. cit. 32ff’ … no, a thousand times no! I’m interested in this reference. Now I have to search through all your references backwards from this reference because you may have quoted several works by someone like Burck. Again, it’s anti-reader. Stop it.
  3. Use a variation of Author:Date format, inline or footnoted, it’s not important, like this: ‘Author YEAR: page’ … then attach a bibliography (particularly after I read your article and realise it is only of marginal interest to my own research but I nonetheless want to raid your bibliography).

Thanks ever so much,

A frustrated PhD student.

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

The end of the University?

19 Wednesday Dec 2012

Posted by in 21st century history, Academia, Digital Classics, History, Humanties, News Items, Personal, Science & Tech, Social Sciences

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This article shows its own biases in a very important way, and I quote: “Because recent history shows us that the internet is a great destroyer of any traditional business that relies on the sale of information.”

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.

How much would an average Roman have known about their history?

08 Saturday Dec 2012

Posted by in Classical history, Literature, Roman history

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Recently, writing my paper for ASCS 34 this January I was confronted with the question How much did the average Roman citizen know about their own history?

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?

RIB inscription find locations at Chesters (and elsewhere) from @perlineamvalli

04 Sunday Nov 2012

Posted by in Ancient Religion, Archaeology, Personal, Roman history

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Via @perlineamvalli comes this interesting set of mapping data for the RIB (Roman Inscriptions of Britain) that have been found at Chesters Roman Fort along wall mile 27:


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.

Plebs: the sitcom

04 Sunday Nov 2012

Posted by in Reception, Roman history

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I kid you not! From The Independent newspaper — a six part sitcom called Plebs will air on British TV next year (northern Spring). When I first saw the headline I immediately thought of those so-rubbish-they’re-almost-good British 1970s shows like Bless This House, Are You Being Served?, or On The Busses (no, that one’s just plain rubbish), but apparently not:

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.

On using my iPad for writing my thesis

03 Saturday Nov 2012

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On my technology blog “let x=x” I wrote:

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/.

Digital Classics and the data of ineffable mystery

31 Wednesday Oct 2012

Posted by in Digital Classics, English Literature, Greek Classics, Latin Classics, Literature, Science & Tech, Software & Tools

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I found that this article, by Stephen Marche titled Literature is not Data: Against Digital Humanities, in the Los Angeles Review of Books, was very thought provoking as far as polemic goes. Of course literature isn’t just mere “data”; but I also think that data about literature can still give you insight into it. One of the comments, by “mad scientist”, sums up the biggest problem with this critique when it says:

… 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.