Re: This Day in History [CC]

I believe the allegation was that the Iraqis had removed Kuwaiti infants
from incubators in order to cart the incubators off to Iraq.  If I
remember correctly, this was later shown to be a fabrication; Saddam's
troops did loot Kuwait City during their occupation, but evidently this
kind of story was expected to have a greater emotional impact.  The
alleged incident may have been in 1990 rather than 1991.

Thomas Jefferson in the U.S. Declaration of Independence characterizes
the Indians' "known Rule of Warfare" as "an undistinguished Destruction
of all Ages, Sexes, and Conditions."

Cf. also Psalm 137.9, with reference to Babylon:  Happy shall he be,
that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.

Then there's Cromwell in Ireland.

George Pesely, Austin Peay State University

-----Original Message-----
From: Classical Greek and Latin Discussion Group
[mailto:CLASSICS-L <at> LSV.UKY.EDU] On Behalf Of Diana Wright
Sent: Sunday, February 29, 2004 5:52 PM
To: CLASSICS-L <at> LSV.UKY.EDU
Subject: Re: This Day in History [CC]

Weren't the Americans told the Germans did this in Belgium in 1914, &
the Iraqis did this in Kuwait in 1991?

DW

Re: This Day in History [CC]

Re: This Day in History [CC]

Yes. But (if I understand your point correctly, which I might not; the 
passages deserve to be brought forward anyway) my point was that its 
appearance in the Iliad and the other Cyclic (or proto-Cyclic) material 
might be layered atop an earlier tale that saw the Trojan War not as a 
10-year siege but as a hit-and-run raid.

PTR

On Feb 29, 2004, at 7:35 PM, AllenAmet <at> aol.com wrote:

> The knowledge of Astyanax' forthcoming death is guessed in 
> Andromache's lament in Bk XXIV, 734-737: [Lattimore]
>
>   "or else some Achaian
> will take you by hand and hurl you from the tower into horrible
> death, in anger because Hektor once killed his brother,
> or his father, or his son;"
>
>  or the oft cited VI, 57, when Agamemnon chastises his brother:
>
>  "No, let not one of them go free of sudden
> death and our hands; not the young man child that the mother carries
>  still in her body, not even he, but let all of Ilion's
> people perish, utterly blotted out and unmourned for."
>
>   So is this a reflection of reality, or poetic license? It certainly 
> proves the power of personal revenge as a motive - hardly lacking even 
> in a multi-national world.
>
> Allen
> BC

Semicolons in History

Regarding semicolons, list members may be interested in a book
(currently ranked at number 2 at amazon.co.uk!) by Lynne Truss, due
to be released in the U.S. in April: Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero
Tolerance Approach to Punctuation. It sounds like it'll be a great
little read.

On a more personal note, my thanks to David Lupher for remembering my
Rebecca's birthday. I am surprisingly refreshed and newly hopeful
about humanity after an afternoon of watching a dozen fancily-coiffed
little girls dancing to the soundtrack of Freaky Friday in feather
boas.

>Yes, poor Frederic.  For a more recent unfortunate---and a little
>classical content here---pity the plight of poor Rebecca Seidemann,
>to whom list-member Debra Hamel dedicated her recent book "Trying
>Neaira."  Though Rebecca (who happens, by the way, to be Debra's daughter)
>was born eight years ago, she is celebrating her second birthday
>today, which puts her only a few weeks behind her sister Melissa,
>born in 2002.   That's hard cheese on Rebecca, but a mercy to parents
>who might want to economize on presents!

--
Debra Hamel

Trying Neaira: http://www.tryingneaira.com
Book-blog:     http://www.book-blog.blogspot.com
Book-mom.com:  http://www.book-mom.com
Rawhide:       http://www.book-mom.com/RAWHIDE
Main site:     http://www.dhamel.com

marblehead <at> dhamel.com    phone: 203-281-7594    38 Garfield Avenue
http://www.dhamel.com    fax: 630-604-3986      North Haven, CT 06473
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Re: This Day in History [CC]

Re: This Day in History [CC]

Speaking of Native Americans and Colonial conflicts ...
especially the killing of children ... I post below a single
couplet from my old friend Christian Wedsted (1720-1757),
whose Latin verse I am (ever so slowly) getting edited,
translated, and researched. It comes from his moving elegy
to the victims of the Gnadenhütten Masssacre of November 24,
1755 (near modern day Leighton in the Blue Mountain region
of PA, north of Bethlehem), where eleven Moravian
missionaries lost their lives in a raid by Delawares allied
with the French.

W 38, ll. 30-31:

O infans martyr, cum patre et matre sepulta
 flammis! ornabit pulcra corona caput.

Wedsted himself had left the settlement earlier that year
and had retirned to Bethlehem, apparently unsuited for the
rigors of the frontier life; but his close friend Jonathan
Fabricius remained and was one of the victims. He merits
several lines in the poem.

The work seems to have been written soon after the attack,
which was one of the reasons that the Colonial PA government
soon erected a string of forts in the area. Benjamin
Franklin, who was the head of the Colonial Assembly's
defense committee, was appointed by the governor to
undertake the task.

The interested can read more in the Pocono Record of
9/19/98:

"Our fortifying fathers: Before minimalls, before
convenience stores, this area was a frontier of forts."

Online at:

http://www.poconorecord.com/1998/lifestyl/lf091998.htm

Great stuff, this.

JMM / LMC

Re: This Day in History [CC]

At 07:35 PM 2/29/2004, John M. McMahon wrote:
>Speaking of Native Americans and Colonial conflicts ...
>especially the killing of children ... I post below a single
>couplet from my old friend Christian Wedsted (1720-1757),
>whose Latin verse I am (ever so slowly) getting edited,
>translated, and researched. . . .

Says DD: Please tell me when it becomes available as a book. Or when you
have a whole batch to provide. Best, DD

Coming Soon: Lanx Satura

I haven't been posting much lately on my main weblog
(http://www.curculio.org) because I've been working on a series of spin-off
weblogs, each of which will present a work of literature in daily or weekly
slices, with the comment section open for more structured discussion than a
mailing list can offer.  These are to some extent experimental, but I think
weblogs may well serve as a suitable delivery vehicle for several kinds of
literature.  Some works demand to be pondered carefully and discussed with
others, and many of those most worth pondering are written in discrete parts
suitable for daily or weekly reading and discussion.  Other works are better
read in bits because they are too light rather than too heavy. These would
include epigrams, aphorisms, and jokes such as those collected in the
Philogelos -- not that the Philogelos is one of those I'm working on (too
many really dumb jokes even for my taste).

Which authors will be included?  Check my website late tomorrow (March 1st)
for the first two or three lit-blogs.  I was hoping to have them up 1 minute
after midnight for the start of the archaic Roman year, but it looks like it
will be later tomorrow, since I have a very bad cold.

In the mean time, here are hints on the identities of some of the authors:

1. Which Roman author would most appropriately debut on March 1st?  That
should be easy.

2. Which (relatively) modern author would most appopriately be paired with
him, as a native of the same town and great admirer of his fellow townsman?

3. Which (relatively) modern poet wrote not one but two five-act tragedies
on Nero, so irretrievably out-of-print that even xeroxes are hard to come
by, but admired by Yvor Winters and the one or two other critics that have
ever read them?

4. If A. E. Housman is the classicist who has been most successful as an
author of English literature, who is the mediaevalist?

Final (non-riddle) question:

Has Lanx Satura already been claimed as a title for a classics-related
project?  It would be a very suitable name for a smorgasbord of assorted
authors, but I don't want to step on anyone's toes.  Since readers will be
offered slices of works, I suppose I could call it TMHMATA (that H is of
course an Eta not an Aitch).

Michael Hendry
6310 Frederick Road, Apt. 1
Catonsville, MD 21228
(410) 788-6853
E-mail:  curculio <at> earthlink.net
Web-page:  http://www.curculio.org

French theaters won't show 'Passion'

http://www.suntimes.com/output/news/cst-nws-passion29.html

French theaters won't show 'Passion'
Chicago Sun-Times
February 29, 2004
BY KIM WILLSHER

  PARIS -- French cinema chains are refusing to distribute or screen Mel
Gibson's controversial film "The Passion of the Christ" because of fears
it will spark a new outbreak of anti-Semitism.

France is the only European country where there is still no distribution
deal for the film, which depicts the last days of Jesus Christ in graphic
detail and is accused by critics of stoking anti-Jewish sentiment.

The film was released in America last week, but French distributors are
wary of its impact on audiences and want to gauge its reception elsewhere
in Europe, where it is due to open next month.

"We don't want to be on the side of those who support such anti-Semitism,"
a veteran film industry figure said. "When we distributed 'It's a
Beautiful Life' by [Roberto] Benigni, we were worried about the risk of
making a comedy about the Holocaust, but that was different. There's
enough anti-Semitic stuff circulating here already without us throwing oil
on the fire."

The debate over the film is highly sensitive in France, where a spate of
firebombings of synagogues and Jewish schools and attacks on rabbis over
the last year has led Israel to denounce it as the most anti-Semitic
country in Europe.

Anger with Israel among France's large and growing Muslim population,
combined with the strength of right-wing parties in some French districts,
have contributed to an atmosphere that has alarmed political and Jewish
leaders.

Last year, Paris police were forced to set up a dedicated unit to deal
with anti-Semitic crimes. Schoolteachers complain they face a hostile
reaction among Muslim students when trying to teach the history of the
Holocaust, which some equate with Israel's actions against Palestinians in
the occupied territories.

Many in France fear "The Passion" will stir up angry reaction of a
different kind. The newspaper Liberation described Gibson's faith as "a
Shiite version of Christianity . . . imbibed with blood and pain" which
"reduces the message of Christ to his death by torture."

Sunday Telegraph

Re: Greeks and Egyptians

Thanks for your response, Bob.  Of course I wasn't posing the question
myself, merely forwarding it from the Straight Dope newsletter, in order to
show how it responded (which requires going to the webaddress given, of
course).  Good to have your information, nevertheless.  Best, Jack

Jack Kolb
Dept. of English, UCLA
kolb <at> uclae.du

>Dear Jack,
>
>All very tough questions.  I guess there's the problem of what the Greeks
>did get and what at least some of them thought they got.
>
>E.g.:  Herodotus thought they got their gods from Egypt, or at least,
>greatly impressed by the antiquity of what he found there, wanted to think
>they did.
>
>Herodotus II.4: "But as regarding human affairs, this was the account in
>which they all agreed: the Egyptians, they said, were the first men who
>reckoned by years and made the year to consist of twelve divisions of the
>seasons. They discovered this from the stars (so they said). ----- Further,
>the Egyptians first used the appellations of twelve gods which the Greeks
>afterwards borrowed from them."
>
>There's a beginning and your queries raise the wonderful question of how the
>Greeks without much real history available to them constructed their own
>past in their minds.
>
>Best,
>Bob Bazemore
>Worcester, MA
>e-mail bazemore <at> post.harvard.edu
>
>
>----- Original Message -----
>From: "Jack Kolb" <kolb <at> UCLA.EDU>
>To: <CLASSICS-L <at> LSV.UKY.EDU>
>Sent: Sunday, February 29, 2004 3:20 AM
>Subject: Greeks and Egyptians
>
>
> > [I'm trying to catch up with a huge backlog of mail; my apologies if this
> > has already been noted]
> >
> > STAFF REPORT
> >
> > Dear Straight Dope:
> >
> > I was watching a special on Egyptian gods today, and this
> > question came up. When one society conquers another (as
> > when the Greeks conquered the Egyptians), usually elements
> > of the conquered society are incorporated into the
> > conqueror's. Are there any Greek gods that came out of the
> > Egyptian conquest? --Rick Garnett
> >
> > Guest contributor Fierra replies:
> >
> > Could be.
> >
> > Expecting a little more, were we? OK, you asked for it.
> > There are several aspects to your question:
> >
> > 1. Were elements of Egyptian society incorporated into
> >     Greek society?
> > 2. Were any Egyptian gods incorporated into the Greek
> >     pantheon?
> > 3. Did this only take place amongst the Greeks living in
> >     Egypt, or among those Greeks back in Greece too?
> > 4. What evidence do we have and how reliable is it?
> >
> > For more, see:
> > http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/mgreekegyptgods.html
> >
> >