Mary Beard and Stephen Greenblatt

This has been bothering me ever since I first held in my hands a copy of The Swerve, the hugely-acclaimed book by Stephen Greenblatt about the ancient Roman Epicurian philosopher Lucretius and his book-length poem de rerum natura, and Poggio, the 15th-century scribe who stumbled across a copy of it, and noticed one of the blurbs on the dust jacket.

I do not know very much about Mary Beard. She is Professor of Classics at Cambridge, Professor of Ancient Literature at the Royal Academy, and the Classics editor of the Times Literary Supplement. Many of her fellow Classicists revere and positively adore her.

On the other hand -- if we may believe the dust jacket of The Swerve --



-- she is the person who wrote:

“A wonderfully engaging book starring two often forgotten heroes of Western culture: the Roman poet Lucretius, who argued that the world was made up of atoms and that fear of death was foolish, and Poggio Bracciolini, whose rediscovery of Lucretius's great poem launched all kinds of radical intellectual inquiry into the modern world. Another triumph for Stephen Greenblatt."

Alright: Lucretius, often forgotten? Onward.

I have long known that not every blurb on every dust jacket was written by someone who actually read the book in question. In the past several years I have had to accept the fact that such mendacity is perpetrated not only by hack book reviewers in mainstream media, but also occasionally by academics whom I greatly respect. In Robinson Jeffer's words: "Be angry at the sun for setting/If these things anger you."

I do get angry at the sun for setting, now and then. I wonder whether Jeffers sometimes did too.

I'm sure that Mary Beard is not the only Classicist ever to have accorded The Swerve more than very faint praise -- in fact, I have a feeling that if I continue to carry on in this manner, I may hear directly from some others -- but she is the only one I can think of, and I have looked around a bit.

The problem is, I'm not sure which should upset me more: that Professor Beard would write such a thing about a book she hadn't read, or that she would write such a thing about The Swerve after actually having read it.

No, that's a lie: the latter would upset me much, much more. It would be a great relief to learn that Beard had not read The Swerve, that compendium of completely misleading assertions about Epicurism, atomism, Lucretius, Poggio, textual transmission and many other things, at the time when the above blurb was written. Or that she had authorized someone else to write the blurb in her name, and then forgot about the matter entirely.

It was with tremendous reluctance, after years' worth of acquaintances telling me all sorts of absurd things which they had "learned" from The Swerve -- Lucretius and Poggio ushered in the Renaissance?! De rerum natura came within a hair's breadth of being lost forever?! -- that I finally read it myself. I really ought to read an entire book or two by Beard before I diss her -- but that blurb on Greenblatt's book makes me really, really not want to.

There are -- how many? hundreds of thousands? millions? of people running around loose today, who believe that Epicurus came up with the theory of atoms, that Epicurian philosophy would have been forgotten without Lucretius, that atomism would have been forgotten without Lucretius, that the ancient Classics were not studied in the Middle Ages, that Lucretius's book went unread for a thousand years, that it would be unknown today except for Poggio, that it only just barely survived, and other things which are completely, 100% untrue, all because of that one God-damned, best-selling, hugely-awarded book by Greenblatt, with that blurb on its dust jacket by perhaps the single most pre-eminent Classical scholar living today.

I am angry at the sun. I am angry at the world and the way that it is.

Democratic Candidates For President in 2020

Gabriel Debendetti thinks that Democrats' chances in the 2020 Presidential election may be hampered by too many candidates.

I think Debendetti is a Republican.

I'm not worried about a bunch of Democrats in the primaries. Real Democrats know when it's time to drop out and support the nominee. I'm worried that Bernie, who pretended to be a Socialist for a long time before this brief period of pretending to be a Democrat, might screw us with his giant ego, again. Yes, Bernie is a fake Socialist: Socialism, by definition, means working well with colleagues, for the greater good, for the benefit of those most in need of help. Bernie is an Independent if there ever was one: the opposite of a Socialist. Anti-social. We Democrats are Socialists, and it's high time we stopped being afraid of the word, and afraid to read the European Socialists, from before Marx to the Frankfurt School to after Gregor Gysi, who have so much to teach us. And it is definitely way past time for us to be afraid of going negative on Bernie.

J Lincoln Hallowell Jr summed up Bernie's relationship to the Democratic Party very well during the 2016 campaign. The quote is often mistakenly attributed to Barney Frank. I mistakenly attributed it to Barney on this blog. Sorry, Barney. As Hallowell said:

"The Democratic Party. The party that gave this country its first African-American President; the party that is poised to give this country its first woman nominee of a major party, very likely its first woman President; a party chaired by a Jewish woman; a party which features the first openly gay member of the United States Congress on the party’s rules committee; isn’t 'progressive' enough, or inclusive enough, according to a 75 year old straight white male, who 'white flighted' his way out of the most ethnically diverse city in the country, to the whitest state in the northeast United States, and who just passed his 1 year anniversary of declaring himself a member of the party, that he thinks that he is the only fit candidate to be the party’s nominee for President. A nomination which if he can’t secure it by the ballot, has threatened to secure it by lawsuits, and more than just hinted at violence."

Here are some remarks about Bernie which, at least according to the Boston Globe, Barney actually did say:

“Bernie Sanders has been in Congress for 25 years with little to show for it in terms of his accomplishments, and that’s because of the role he stakes out.”

“I think he has unduly denigrated the {House of Representatives} and a lot of the members,” Frank told The New York Times in 1991. “It does not help leftist causes to make people think government is full of poltroons and charlatans.”

“Bernie alienates his natural allies. His holier-than-thou attitude—saying in a very loud voice he is smarter than everyone else and purer than everyone else—really undercuts his effectiveness.”

““But maybe [being effective] is not his goal. There are some people who seek to have a major effect inside, and others who opt to use the place as a platform.”

“I think when he first got here, Bernie underestimated the degree that Republicans had moved to the right … I get sick of people saying ‘a curse on both your houses.' When you point out to them that you agree with them on most things, they’ll say, ‘Yeah, well, I hold my friends up to a higher standard.’ Well, OK, but remember that we’re your friends.”

“I think it is a lack of information, to be honest,” Frank said, explaining Sanders’s appeal [in the 2016 primaries]. “You have people, I believe, who do not understand how hard it is to make change. [It is] the importance of not just being idealistic, but being sensibly pragmatic and keeping their ideals. Sanders is getting their support.”

“Is pragmatism the opposite of idealism? Or is pragmatism a necessary adjunct to idealism? I think Bernie Sanders tends to have the approach, ‘Don’t be pragmatic, state your ideals, state what you think is the right policy, and be very wary of compromise and of accepting less than you want.'”

Exactly: Sanders is a schmuck, and his supporters are uninformed idiots. Do not wait to go negative on Bernie.

David Butterfield on the Early Textual Transmission of Lucretius

Textual transmission is the means by which a text -- for example, de rerum natura (On the Nature of Things), a book-length Latin poem of Epicurian philosophy written in the 1st century BC by a man named Lucretius, his only surviving work -- has been passed along -- in Lucretius' case, manuscripts written in the 9th century BC were copied into other manuscripts in the 15th century, and printed editions have been made based on various manuscripts. This is called the direct tradition. In addition, other authors have quoted or described passages from Lucretius poem: this is referred to as the indirect tradition.

In this blog post, I criticized Stephen Greenblatt for including grossly misleading and just plain inaccurate statements about the textual transmission of de rerum natura in his book The Swerve.



Although reading The Swerve was a very disappointing and upsetting experience for me, all the more so because so very many readers who know even less about ancient Latin literature than I do have assumed that Greenblatt knows much more about it than he obviously does, it led me eventually to another book which I positively love: The Early Textual History of Lucretuius' De Rerum Natura.



It is hard to imagine 2 books about the same book which would be more dissimilar than Greenblatt's book and Butterfield's. The Swerve is a very popular book, full of wild exaggerations, reckless speculation and plain inaccuracies, while The Early Textual History of Lucretuius' De Rerum Natura is definitely not for most readers. It is very radically limited to statements which Butterfield can support with exhaustive evidence. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. I'm sure Butterfield would agree; however, in this book he strictly limits himself to that for which he build a solid case. It seems that even compared to many of his colleagues in Classical Studies, Butterfield is very conservative in stating evidence for the transmission of Lucretius.

And yet, what is left over after Butterfield is done rejecting evidence which he deems not sound enough, still presents a picture of a much greater readership of and interaction with Lucretius' poem than that presented by Greenblatt, who carelessly dismisses a thousand years between Late Antiquity and the Renaissance in which, he says, Lucretius was forgotten.

First of all, there are the manuscripts, both those which we still have, and those whose existence the extremely-cautious Butterfield confidently posits.

And I must not go any further before assuring you that I am not a Classicist, nor a scholarly editor, and cannot yet follow Butterfield in all the details of his arguments for the previous existence of manuscripts of de rerum natura. (I've included the modifier "yet" because I intend to re-read Butterfield's book over and over, because I enjoy doing so, and also to consult many of the works Butterfield mentions in his footnotes, so that I may eventually understand him more fully than I now do.) Rather than go into too much detail and risk mis-representing what Butterfield says, I will try to keep it simple, and if there's actually anyone reading this who cares to investigate the matter further, but hasn't yet read Butterfield's book, he or she can read Butterfield's book.

And yes: some of the Latin names of codices below are abbreviated, in the same form as they appear on p 32 of Butterfield, because after I thought it over, I decided that if I tried to write out the full names I would probably mis-spell some. I admit it. I ain't frontin'.

First, the direct transmission: We currently have 3 9th-century manuscripts of Lucretius: the most significant one was written early in the 9th century, on pages which are oblong in shape, and has therefore come to be referred to as O; another, from the late 9th century, is written on square pages and is called Q, from the Latin quadratus, meaning square; and finally there are 3 fragments of another manuscript from the late 9th century, fragments which, together, Butterfield calls S, after the Latin schedae, meaning fragments.

In addition, Butterfield feels that 6 more manuscripts, now missing, written between the 8th and around the 12th century, can be confidently posited:

-- Ω, an 8th-century manuscript from which O was copied;

-- Ψ, also called the Cod. Sang. mid-9th century, copied from Ω, and from which in turn both Q and S were copied;

-- the Codex Dungali, copied from O in the 9th or 10th century;

-- the Cod. Murbac., or Poggianus, the copy which Poggio, a hero of Greenblatt's, found in "some German monastery" (Poggie was not more specific than that in his letter describing the find), copied from O in the 9th or 10th century;

-- the Cod. Corb., copied from Q, possibly in the 12th century; and

-- the Cod. Lobbes, unrelated to any of the others, copied in the 12th century.

So, there are 9 manuscripts of Lucretious' poem, right smack in the middle of the era when, according to Greenblatt, Lucretius was unknown. Plus whatever the Cod. Lobbes was copied from.

In Butterfield's opinion, all of the manuscripts from the 15th century or later were copies, or copies of copies, etc, of Poggianus, although one of them could have been correcting using O.

Next, the indirect transmission: Between the 1st century BC and the 10th century AD, Butterfield says (p 100), "Fifty-five different Latin authors cited 492 different Lucretian verses in full or in part."

In addition, there are 16 fragments which at various times have been thought to have been parts of Lucretius' poem not found in the direct transmission. The skeptical Butterfield says we do have sufficient evidence to regard any of them as actual quotations from Lucretius.

And then there is a very long and very remarkable footnote, pp 286-288, note 1 of Appendix II, in which Butterfiled discusses about a dozen authors who quote Lucretius between the end of the 10th century and Poggio's discovery in 1417, who in Butterfield's opinion could have been quoting from the indirect tradition and not from manuscripts of the entire poem; and about a dozen more who other scholars have said were acquainted with Lucretius, but, according to Butterfield, with insufficient evidence.

The more I learn about Poggio, who according to Greenblatt ushered in the Renaissance by discovering the Poggianus or Cod. Murbac., the less I like him. He seems to me to have been pathologically ill-mannered. Many have taken him to have been badly-disposed toward monks and monasteries, but maybe he just hated everybody, and it only seems that he hated monks because he had mostly to do with monks and monasteries, because monasteries were where most of the manuscripts were which he was looking for. Maybe if he had been a clockmaker instead of a Classical scholar, he would've poured all of that verbal abuse onto his customers, and we never would have heard about it because he would have written far fewer letters, and they all would have been lost.

Speaking of pieces of writing being lost: for a while I thought of accusing Poggio of actually having impeded the process of Classical Studies, because again and again I read of him finding some old manuscript (old in his own time) which was then lost. But as I studied further I saw that Poggio was hardly unique in this regard. For example, look at the 6 now-lost Lucretian manuscripts described above: only 1 passed through Poggio's hands before being lost.

Reviewing Butterfield's book in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review, Lisa Piazzi remarks, "Probably only a few specialists will read it from beginning to end." A few specialists and at least 1 oddball autistic blogger. And perhaps 2 or 3 of you will have found this blog post interesting.

SIHH Is Not the Only Show in Town

In an earlier post, I mentioned that the SIHH in Geneva, 15-20 January this year, is one of Switzerland's 2 major watch shows, and the more exclusive of the 2 The other major show, Baselworld, happens in March.

However, there is another watch show going on right now in Geneva, which calls itself simply "Geneva Days." This began last year: it seems that LVMH, the company which owns the brands Tag Heuer, Zenith and Hublot, reacts to not being invited to SIHH by pulling a huge yacht up to the pier at Geneva while SIHH is going and having their own show on the boat.

I have heard vague reports about one person connected with SIHH complaining about the goings on aboard this boat, saying that is shows that LVMH is violating some spirit of "fair play." I don't know whether such complaints have actually happened, and if so, whether they actually reflect the attitudes of many people at SIHH. I hope not: it's rather silly to be ostentatiously, notoriously snobbish, and complain about fairness at the same time. In any case, I don't think that SIHH has to worry about "Geneva Days" stealing their thunder. I only learned of its existence just now. My first reaction is that it looks like fun, as do LMVH's brands:

I mentioned in an earlier post that, as far as I could tell, a watch show is a lot like an auto show, although of the 2, I've only been to auto shows so far. When I wrote that earlier post, I didn't realize that the Detroit Auto Show is also going on at the same time as SIHH. It started on the 13th and runs until the 28th.

Here's Tag Heuer's official Geneva Days 2018 web page.

And here's the Detroit Auto Show's website. The show is officially called the NAIAS, the North American International Auto Show, but I have a feeling that if you call it the Detroit Auto Show, more people will know what you're talking about.

I wonder how many people find it inconvenient that SIHH and the Detroit Auto Show, or Baselworld and the Leipzig Book Fair, happen at the same time. Detroit is a lot farther away from Geneva than Leipzig is from Basel.

I Still Don't Have Much to Say About SIHH 2018

However: Hodinkee has a huge awesome page full of links which say lots and lots about many of the most exciting new watches at SIHH, in Hodinkee's opinion, which is a lot more than Joe Blow's opinion, in my opinion. Seriously: if you like watches but you've never heard of either SIHH or Hodinkee -- it's a website dedicated to watches -- just click on that, and you'll thank me.

Here's a new watch at the SIHH which Hodinkee and a lot of other people (including me) are very impressed by: the Laurent Ferrier Galet Annual Calendar Montre École:

Dream Log: 17th-21st-Century Action-Adventure Movie

I dreamed I was on the set of an action-adventure movie, with a minor role in the cast but a major role as one of the producers, almost a co-director, having a lot of back-and-forth discussions with the director about how this film was going to look and sound.

Many recent movies have had scripts by Shakespeare in contemporary settings. This movie took its script from some later 17th-century English playwright, from a play with lots of swordfighting. In our movie, as in some of the above-mentioned Shakespeare movies, the swords were replaced by guns. The setting was midtown Manhattan, in and among the skyscrapers.

Most of the characters had the hair and clothes of conventional 21st-century businesspeople, but many of the people carrying 21st-century guns -- not all of them -- had an appearance with strong 17th-century touches: very, very long 17th-century hair, knee-high boots, black jackets with a bit of brocade. I played one of the minor gunmen. Although in the actual 17th century the hair-impaired often wore long wigs, I had real hair which reached almost to my waist. Black and curly hair. It wasn't clear whether my hair was naturally black and curly or had been colored and curled for this role.

We didn't look like 17th-century people who had traveled here in a time machine, but like 21st-century people who had made some bold fashion choices. Besides our guns, there were other 21st-century notes to our appearance: belts, watches, gloves, etc, tended to be contemporary. Trousers which didn't balloon up. There weren't many 17th-century moustaches to go with the long hair, nor many 17th-century hats. Men were mostly either clean-shaven or had 21st-century-style trimmed beards. We didn't wear a lot of ruffles. The overall effect was very butch both for male and for female killers who borrowed fashion touches from the 17th century. When we didn't walk, we drove cars rather than riding horses.

The script, however, was pure Baroque, taking delight in long and elaborate sentences. All of the characters were very sophisticated speakers. Long speeches mixing aggression with wit took place in boardrooms, and punctuated gunfights in parking garages and on sidewalks.

SIHH 2018 is underway!

Here is the official website. SIHH -- the Salon International de la Haute Horlogerie Genève, the International Salon of High Horology in Geneva, is one the 2 biggest watch shows in Switzerland, the other being Baselworld, which will happen in March. SIHH is smaller and snootier. The automobile industry has auto shows, the watch industry has watch shows. As far as I can tell, auto shows and watch shows are very similar, and if you'd been to one, the other would feel quite familiar. But don't quote me, because so far I've only actually been to auto shows.

My Facebook feed is full of reports from SIHH. It's all really overwhelming. I don't know much to tell you about it, because it's too much and I'm very new at this and I don't know how to process and evaluate the information. Also, I'm exhausted from setting up my new computer. The new purchase may prove to have been a total waste, besides being an emotionally shattering and exhausting experience. I wasn't able to import any downloads or bookmarks, as I wanted to, but I do have the same settings, which I didn't want to have anymore and which I don't know how to change. Also, the screen is smaller, which is bad, because I like large type. On the other hand, this new computer is touch-screen. How much difference will that make? I have no idea. I'll keep you posted if there's anything about touch-screen significant enough to mention.

Here is one of the watches unveiled today at SIHH, a piece by Urwerk which I like:

It's called the Black Platinum UR-210 Royal Hawk.

I may have a more detailed report about SIHH tomorrrow -- about SIHH, not from SIHH, like many horological publications -- and then again, I may not.

Horological means having to do with time and timepieces, but I think that these days it's mostly used to refer to watches and not clocks. Don't quote me on that, cause I'm not 100% sure. A few of the fanciest watchmakers also make clocks these days, and there may be some clocks at SIHH and Baselworld 2018. But again: don't quote me on that.