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Practice, Criticism, and Doing Classics

October 24, 2017 in Uncategorized | Permalink

For about five years now, I’ve been trying to learn to draw and paint, mostly through the Continuing Education program at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.  Last week my instructor suggested that I try copying paintings.  What I learned when I tried taught me something about painting and art criticism, but also something about what is, depending on how you look at it, either my job or my chief vocation: classical studies.

I set out to copy William Merritt Chase’s “The Big Brass Bowl,” now in the Indianapolis Museum of Art.  I had seen it at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in the exhibit “William Merritt Chase: Modern Master” and had a copy of the catalog.  Here it is, courtesy of Wikiart:

 

First I made a very quick—about 15-minute—watercolor sketch.  That taught me that there are five important things in the picture.  Three of them stand out when you see the painting: the bowl, the plate (but not, I thought, the fruit in it), and the red box.  Doing the sketch showed me that two other things matter to the painting just as much: the reflection of the box in the bowl, and the background along with the table surface, treated as a single graded area of color from black at the top to dark yellow ochre at the bottom.  It’s also important that the black of the background is almost impossible to distinguish from the edges of the bowl.

Then I taped a piece of oil paper to my easel and set to work.  Here’s what happened:

 

Painting this copy taught me a great deal more than the watercolor drawing had.  First, I learned that the proportions of Chase’s canvas help to make the painting work.  The original painting is almost square, about 35″ x 40″.  My sketch was 9″ x 12″, and my painted copy is even smaller at about 7″ x 8″, but its relative proportions are the same as Chase’s.  Keeping Chase’s proportions allowed me to understand how carefully he had arranged the objects on his field, with the right-hand edge of the plate and the left-hand edge of the bowl each overlapping the center line of the canvas.  Then, when I’d laid in the five important pieces that emerged from the sketch, I saw that the fruit in the bowl really had to be there.  The grapes on the tabletop in the left foreground are essential to giving a sense of depth and taking your eye into the painting, along a diagonal from the reddish grapes to the red box, and beyond it to its reflection in the bowl.  Without them, there’s just too much tabletop.  (And look how the red box on the other side sucks up the energy in that part of the painting, so that the wrinkles in the fabric in front of it are enough to fill the space.)  The grapes on the table make no sense without the other fruit on the plate–and in the much larger original, the wonderful still life that Chase embedded in the left center of his canvas matters even more.

I also learned a lot from what didn’t succeed in my copy; in fact, I probably learned more about painting from the copy’s failures than from its successes.  I didn’t, for example, succeed in copying Chase’s tonal gradations; there’s too much contrast in my copy between the foreground tablecloth and the black background, and between the midtones of the bowl and the dark edges, and not enough between the fruit and the rest of the painting.  You’ve probably noticed that I left out the wineglass; the truth is, I don’t understand what its job is in the painting.

This exercise may have made me a little better as a painter, but it made me a much more perceptive critic of Chase’s still life.  I have, in a way, begun to reverse engineer it to see how it works.  And this takes me to classics.  When we classical scholars—and I’m going to limit my subject to scholars of Greek and Latin literature—practice our craft, we are critics, and with rare exceptions we are analyzing things that we do not know how to make.  Few if any scholars of Greek or Latin poetry also write poetry in any language.  A few more engage in the wonderful parlor game called “composition,” which consists of translating from a modern language into Greek or Latin verse, but I have a sense that even that practice is now uncommon.  That’s why I have been glad to see the move toward “active Latin” or “living Latin” gain steam, thanks to the work of the Paideia Institute and others.  It’s not terribly important to be able to order a hamburger in Latin, although it’s fun to be able to get elaborate public jokes like the signs at the Wallsend Metro Station.  it is important, though, to have some sense, however imperfect, of what Vergil or Ovid were up to.  A few years ago I had a group of students who got far enough in Pantin’s First Latin Verse Book to be able to turn English translations of some of Ovid’s poems into Latin verse.  Reverse engineering Ovid’s work and then comparing their copies to his original gave them a better insight into his artistry than anything I could have said in class.  So let’s write Latin and copy paintings—not because we want to become poets or painters, but because the better we are at reading and thinking and seeing, the better we will become at being human.

–Lee T. Pearcy

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Cicero, Sign Wars, and the Left’s Problem with Messaging

July 1, 2017 in Uncategorized | Permalink

Cicero’s De Officiis (“Tully’s Offices,” as it used to be called) was a late addition to my summer reading.  I dipped into it thinking that a work written in 44 B.C. and called “On Obligations” (or, as Andrew Dyck suggests in his magnificent 1996 commentary, “On Appropriate Actions”) might have some relevance to a problem that I’m now thinking about, moral agency in the Aeneid.  I found in addition a book that is helping me think in a new way about some of our current political dynamics.

Writing as he did before Christianity and before Kant, Cicero assumes that being good—being just, honorable, or humane—is not solely a matter of the choices that we make as individuals.  Humans in his world are not autonomous agents acting on the basis of individual will and intellect.  For Cicero, our moral agency, and in fact our very humanity, is in part created by other people through our connections with them, and being good and human in turn depends on our participation in those connections:

But because, as has been brilliantly written by Plato, we are born not only for ourselves, but our country claims one share in our upbringing, and our friends claim another. Moreover, as the Stoics like to say, all things which the earth bears are created for the use of humans, but humans are created for the sake of humans, so that they themselves can be of benefit to one another. In this matter we ought to take nature as our guide, contribute our part to the common good, and by the exchange of obligations, by giving and receiving, now by arts, now by labor, now by talents, bind tight the social union of human with human. (De Officiis 1.7,22)

That takes me to a recent article in the Philadelphia papers (the Inquirer and Daily News, both owned by the same company, share a web site). Helen Ubinas writes about a controversy over signs–not semiotics or the feminist journal, but actual signs, which people have been putting in their yards.  We’ve all seen the “Hate Has No Home Here” signs, with a stars-and-striped heart and the same message in Arabic, Hebrew, Spanish, and other languages used by immigrants to America.  They sprang up in the aftermath of President Trump’s first immigration order (or Muslim ban), and there are still a lot of them around, at least in my neighborhood.

It doesn’t take much political savvy to conclude that the people with HHNHH signs probably aren’t Trump supporters, and so a Republican commissioner in Springfield Township has come up with an alternative sign, which Ubinas calls “a not-so-subtle, right-leaning, middle finger directed at those inclusive messages”–meaning the HHNHH signs. The alternative or Republican sign reads, “Love Lives Here. Love of God, Family, Friends, Country, Community & the U.S. Constitution.”

I want to use Cicero to suggest that these two signs show why Republicans, despite their unfailing fondness for ignoring economic reality, slashing social services, making abortion illegal, and blundering into wars in the Middle East, still manage to get people to vote for them in numbers sufficient to control the current Congress and send an ignorant, vulgar, misogynist liar to the White House. The fact is, Republicans are better at framing their message in a way that appeals to voters, as George Lakoff has been arguing for almost 40 years. “Love Lives Here” will win more votes than “Hate Has No Home.”

For a person who agrees with Cicero that being a moral human being means being involved in communities, families, and networks of mutual obligations, “Love Lives Here” is a better sign than “Hate Has No Home.” Helen Ubinas valiantly tries to invoke the inclusivity trope by proclaiming HHNHH “inclusive” and suggesting that mentioning God somehow amounts to “cutting out people who might believe in someone or something else,” but that seems a counsel of desperation. Ignore the messages, implied or not, in the two signs and look at their vocabulary, syntax, and rhetoric. One sign features a negative sentence (“has no”) about hate. The other has an affirmative sentence about love. Both signs exploit alliteration, but one pants feebly (H … H …N… H…H…), like an out-of-shape jogger, while the other piles it on: three Ls, two Fs, and a concluding series of Cs. One doesn’t just hint at the interlocking communities that make up human life, but talks about them. Given a choice between family, friends, country, and community, and maybe even God on the one hand, and merely excluding hate on the other, which would you pick? I know which I would choose, and I think Cicero would agree.

–Lee T. Pearcy

 

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Summer Reading

May 29, 2017 in Uncategorized | Permalink

Michelle Francl, my Bryn Mawr colleague and chemistry professor, has a new post on her Quantum Theology blog (highly recommended) about summer reading. My memories of summer childhoods have much in common with hers, even though mine are from the 1950s, not the 1960s, from urban Little Rock, Arkansas, not rural Illinois, and don’t involve much cooking.  But we do have one thing in common: lots of reading, and a public library that made it possible.  In Little Rock it was the old Carnegie building, columned and classicizing, with its entrance on Louisiana Street.  The children’s section was in the basement, with its own entrance off Seventh Street–the doorway was one of the rectangular openings on the lower level, just behind the automobile in this picture.

By way of a thank-you for Professor Francl’s offering, here’s my stack for the summer, in no order except how they happen to be at hand:

Rod Dreher, The Benedict Option. This one has come across my radar too many times to ignore–and there’s no point in reading only books that you think you’ll agree with.
Philip Roth, The Plot Against America.*
Siri Hustvedt, A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women.
Eleanor Dickey, An Introduction to the Composition and Analysis of Greek Prose.  One consequence of retiring from teaching Latin three or four times a day and Greek once, as I did for nearly 30 years at the Episcopal Academy, is that one needs to have a plan for keeping up the languages.  Doing a little of this a day is mine.
Geordie Greig, Breakfast with Lucian: The Astounding Life and Outrageous Times of Britain’s Great Modern Painter.
Cicero, De Officiis (On Moral Duties):  A late addition to the list–I dipped into it thinking it might have some relevance for a book about the Aeneid that I’m writing, and can’t put it down.

-Lee Pearcy

*Follow-up 7/1: This may be the scariest book that I’ve ever read. Especially now.

The Greek “Miracle” That Wasn’t, and Why It Mattered

May 13, 2017 in Uncategorized | Permalink

Two articles in the on-line journal Eidolon this month take on the so-called “Alt-Right” and its misuse of Greco-Roman civilization to justify the doctrine of white supremacy. Both of them get an important point wrong.

In “We Condone It by Our Silence: Confronting Classics’ Complicity in White Supremacy,” Rebecca Futo Kennedy argues that “As long as Classics justifies itself by claiming to be the foundation of Western Civilization, . . . it will continue to find itself uncomfortably at the contested center of the continuing culture wars.” She goes on to urge classicists—by which she seems to mean professors of classics—to abandon the “myth” of the “Greek Miracle,” the “supposedly unique flowering of arts, philosophy, and science between the sixth and fourth centuries BCE in Greece and western Anatolia.” She calls for increased critical engagement with the ugly realities of Greek civilization: slavery, misogyny, patriarchy, and exploitation.

Johanna Hanink, in her rather more interesting “It’s Time to Embrace Critical Classical Reception,” likewise takes classicists to task for desperately “insisting on the genius, exceptionalism, and ‘miracles’ of ancient Greece and Rome.” Her alternative is “critical classical reception,” founded on three pillars: an openly “activist” agenda, use of the “personal voice,” and acknowledging that “Greek and Roman antiquity have played a major role in constructing and authorizing racism, colonialism, nationalism, patriarchy, Western-centrism, body normativity, and other entrenched, violent societal structures.”

No one—or at least no one I know, or hope to know—will disagree with Kennedy and Hanink that some White supremacists and their politer enablers misunderstand the classical world. If David Duke, or for that matter either of the Steves, King or Bannon, could be transported back into fifth-century Athens or first-century Rome, they would find themselves in a world without much that they could recognize as white, European, or civilized. Western civilization—if it exists at all—is a problematic concept, and its relationship to Greece and Rome is not straightforward or a simple matter of foundation or creation.

On the other hand (and one of the things that we have learned from the Greeks called “Sophists” is that there is always another hand), Kennedy and Hanink underestimate the force of the classical world in the present. Greece is not important because of the origins of democracy or drama, or because of Pericles and the Parthenon, or even because it gave rise to all the -isms that some classicists love to hate. It is important because without what happened in Ionia during the seventh and sixth centuries BCE, and in Athens a bit later, we would not know how to think. Kennedy and Hanink would not know how to write the kind of essay that they have contributed to Eidolon.

This is a bold claim, and I don’t have space to defend it here. I’d like to suggest, though, two things: first, that intellectual and cultural developments in western Anatolia in the seventh and sixth centuries BCE, and in Athens a bit later, marked the beginnings of what we now call science and philosophy; and second, that no miracle was involved.

When I look at the surviving fragments of Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes, all active in sixth-century Miletus, I see a new kind of explanation emerging. These early thinkers—it begs a question to call them either “philosophers” or “scientists”—offer explanations of physis, roughly “the way things grow,” and in so doing they create a new kind of thought. Their explanations build on one another, and together they create three assumptions:

  • Explanation of physis will depend on abstract qualities: for Thales, “the moist”; for Anaximander, “the limitless”; for Anaximenes, “air.”
  • Explanations of physis will be continuous; that is, whatever explains phenomena in the parts of the world that we experience will also explain phenomena inaccessible to our experience, like celestial bodies or events. There will be no need to appeal to supernatural forces or beings.
  • Explanations of physis will be progressive; that is, any explanation can be replaced by a better explanation—one that offers a more plausible or convincing account of phenomena. Persuasive argument and disagreement are essential to explanation.

There is no need to invoke miracles to explain this new way of thinking. It’s about what one would expect from a place and time with access to a radically new information technology—alphabetic literacy; with a new economic tool that encouraged abstraction of value from physical objects—coinage; with a need to think about how to create societies from scratch—colonization; and with easy access to older, richer cultures in Egypt and the Near East.

There is more to it, of course. All three Ionians depend on mythological frames of reference and draw on Near Eastern and Egyptian cosmology and astronomy. Other cultures, notably China, developed important ways of explaining how things are. But the Ionians’ abstract, continuous, progressive way of thinking opens the door that leads to modern science, to philosophy, to academic argument, and to Kennedy and Hanink’s articles. When Kennedy and Hanink assume, without needing to give it much thought, that they can state a position and give reasons for it, that someone may respond to it or disagree, and that the stated positions will be judged by the quality of the arguments on both sides, they are following the track first trod by Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes. And by no one else.

–Lee T. Pearcy

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America’s Peloponnesian Food Fight

December 4, 2016 in Uncategorized | Permalink

A few days after the election, the New York Times published two maps based on county-level voting data. One map showed red America, counties that went for Donald Trump: an inland nation occupying most of the land area of the United States. The other map showed blue America: a scattered archipelago consisting of the coastal corridors and inland cities that voted for Hillary Clinton. I thought of Thucydides, the Peloponnesian War, and a couple of grocery stores.

The Peloponnesian War pitted two ancient Greek city-states, Athens and Sparta, each with its allies, in a war that lasted from 431 BC until Athens’ defeat in 404. Sparta was an inland power and depended on its unmatched hoplite soldiers and its power over the central Greek land mass. Athens controlled an empire of islands and relied on its navy and a steady stream of tribute from its allies. Because Thucydides, the historian of that war, wrote a classic study of geopolitical rivalry that is still studied at the United States Naval War College and elsewhere, it’s easy to think of Athens and Sparta as different nations, like the United States and China; in fact, two separate articles about China in the December 2016 issue of The Atlantic are far from the first to invoke the “Thucydides trap” to describe the way that a rising power inevitably comes into conflict with one that is already established.

Thucydides himself, though, makes it clear that understanding the war between Athens and Sparta meant understanding not only national interests and anxieties, but also different forms of a common Greek culture. Athenians and Spartans were both Greek: they spoke the same language, worshipped the same gods, shared a national literature and a foundational text, Homer, and met at common festivals. In the negotiations leading up to the war, Thucydides has a third party, a Corinthian ambassador, describe for the Spartans the ways in which their character and world view differ from the Athenians’. Those differences had as much to do with the war as Spartan anxieties about Athenian power or Athenian need for a maritime empire.

Thucydides makes me want to ask, are we one country? One polis, as the Greeks might have put it? One culture, as the Athenians and Spartans were? Trump voters are not Spartans, and Clinton supporters are a long way from being Athenians. As President Obama among others likes to remind us, we are all Americans, just as the Athenians and Spartans were all Hellenes. We speak versions of a common language and enjoy common festivals (thank you, Thanksgiving and Super Bowl Sunday). But in the 2016 election, Trump won 76 percent of the counties that have a Cracker Barrel and only 22 percent of those that have a Whole Foods. The gap in political views between organic shoppers and nostalgia seekers has grown steadily since 1992, according to Dave Wasserman of the Cook Political Report, and it hit 54% this year.

That food fight may reflect a more significant statistic: as the Brookings Institution reported, the roughly 500 counties that Clinton won accounted for 64 percent of U.S. economic activity in 2015, while the more than 2,600 that Trump won accounted for only 36 percent. This disparity is only one example of fractures in a common culture that is beginning to divide along lines drawn by income, education, and zip code. At the end of the first book of his history, Thucydides reports a speech by Pericles to the Athenian people. The coming war, he explains, will be decided by money: the Athenians’ wealth, and the Spartans’ lack of it.

I don’t see war between the people of the coasts and the people of the mountains and plains in America’s future—but like Athens and Sparta, we are growing farther apart as our interests diverge, and our common civic culture is in danger. We can and should be a diverse nation in which many cultures co-exist, but ironically, diversity only works if people can talk with one another; if, that is, they have some overarching civic culture in common. Otherwise it’s divergence, not diversity. It is not enough to share the same Constitution and laws. It’s time to read the same books. The first book of Thucydides might be a place to start—it analyzes the way in which Athens and Sparta went from close allies joined in a common cause to open enemies in the space of fifty years. Maybe it’s also time to sit down for a meal catered jointly by Whole Foods and Cracker Barrel.

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