Sometime in the fall of the yearA.D. 9, three Roman legions madetheir way through a wooded and

marshy area, now the community ofKalkriese northwest of modern Osna-brück, Germany (see Fig. 2, page 2).While negotiating narrow sandy pathsthrough a great moor located at the footof a modest hill, they were attacked by alarge force of German tribesmen hiddenamong the trees. The guerillas were ledby Arminius, a German warrior of one ofthe ruling clans of the Cherusci, whohad been an officer in the auxiliarybranch of the Roman army. The com-mander of the Roman legions was P.Quintilius Varus (also known in somesources as P. Quinctilius Varus), a rela-tive by marriage of the Emperor Augus-tus, who had been appointed Legate ofthe Rhine Army with the added respon-sibility of establishing a new Romanprovince in northern Germany. Over thenext three days, some 15,000 soldiersand assorted camp-followers were mas-sacred in that moor: this is now calledthe Battle of the Teutoburger Wald orthe Battle of the Teutoburg Forest. TheRomans lost three legions (XVII, XVIII,and XIX). Varus committed suicide onthe battlefield; his head was later sentby the Germans to Rome via anothertribal chief. The victor Arminius did notenjoy the fruits of his labors long; hewas killed about a decade later by mem-bers of his own family, and his wife andson died in Roman captivity. Eventual-ly the moors and wild animals and therelative silence of German oral tradi-tion buried the site of the battle in themists of time.

The German tribes did not leave awritten record of their triumph sincetheir culture was not a literate one. The

Romans retreated from northern Ger-many after Germanicus’ incursions inA.D. 15 and made no further attemptsto colonize the area, but the Germansmay have venerated the battle site as asacred place (Peter S. Wells, The BattleThat Stopped Rome: Emperor Augustus,Arminius, and the Slaughter of the Legionsin the Teutoburg Forest, 2003, 177-199,

Book Review: CattusPetasatusby James B. Rives

Jennifer Morrish Tunberg and Terence O.Tunberg, trans. Cattus Petasatus: The Cat inthe Hat in Latin. Bolchazy-Carducci Publish-ers, 2000. Pp. 75. Illustrations throughout.Paperback $16.95. ISBN 0-86516-472-X;Hardcover $22.50. ISBN 0-86516-471-1.

One of the more curious literary sub-genres is that of Latin translations

of classic children’s books. Over the lastforty-five years we have had Winnie ille Pu(Alexander Lenard, 1960), Fabula de PetroCuniculo (E. Peroto Walker, 1962), Aliciain Terra Mirabili (Clive Harcourt Car-ruthers, 1964), Domus Anguli Puensis(Brian Staples, 1980), Ursus nominePaddington (Peter Needham, 1999), theTunbergs’ own Quomodo Invidiosulusnomine Grinchus Christi natalem abro-gaverit (1999), Regulus (Augustus Haury,2001) and, most recently, Harrius Potter etPhilosophi Lapis (Peter Needham, 2003);Hellenophiles will be pleased that anancient Greek version of Harry Potter andthe Philosopher’s Stone has also now beenpublished (Andrew Wilson, 2004).

I must confess that I have not alwaysbeen a huge fan of such works. One of thepleasures of good children’s literature is thesimplicity and lucidity of the writing, the

OF BATTLES AND THE WRITINGOF HISTORY: THE BATTLE OFTHE TEUTOBURG FORESTby Madelyn Bergen Dick

A publication of the American Philological Association Vol. 4 • Issue 1 • Spring 2005

Classics and the 77th annual scripps national spelling bee ..............4

Notable Web SIte: “The VRoma Project” .................................................................5

The Story of the Alphabet ...................6

She’ll Always have paris: Helen in Wolfgang Petersen’s “Troy”........10

What’s Cooking? New (and old) in Ancient food Studies......................12

Book Review: “Gardener’s Latin: A Lexicon”...........................................................13

Book Review: “Climbing Olympus:What You Can Learn From greekmyth and wisdom.......................................16

An Adventure on Mount Olympos...............................................................17

Guidelines for contributors........20

continued on page 2

Insi

de

®

continued on page 3

Fig. 1. Granite blocks showing the pathof the Roman army at Kalkriese. Thedisarray in the foreground illustratesthe disintegration of the Roman lineduring the ambush by the Germans.Photo credit: Madelyn Bergen Dick.

235). It is perhaps not impossible to findobscure traces of this battle and its after-math deeply buried in the myths thathave come down through oral traditionsin the guise of epics that are the basisfor the Nibelungenlied and Gudrun andrelated stories. One particular memorymight be enshrined in the battlebetween Siegfried and the dragon; thelatter is a beast with scaly armor andfiery breath. It has been suggested thatthis may be the monstrous image of aRoman soldier (Wells, 30).

The Romans themselves were noteager to advertise this disastrous event;they were profoundly superstitiousabout such horrendous defeats of theirwell-trained and much-feared legions byobscure tribesmen. This may have pre-vented the reestablishment of the threelost legions. The Roman sources do notdeliberately hide the battle from ourview, but they are not particularly forth-coming with details either.

The earliest account comes from C.Velleius Paterculus, a Roman officerwho, sometime about A.D. 30, pub-lished a Compendium of Roman History.Velleius concentrated on the personalityof Varus and briefly described the bat-tle. P. Cornelius Tacitus wrote anaccount in his Annals after A.D. 110; hisvery full discussion was really aboutGermanicus who went to northern Ger-many in A.D. 15, found the battle site,buried all the bones of the dead sol-diers, and defeated the German tribes atthe Weser River. In the reign of Hadri-an, L. Annaeus Florus included adescription of the events in his Epitome(ca. A.D. 125). To this we must add theaccount of Hadrian’s personal secretary,C. Suetonius Tranquillus (ca. A.D. 69-ca. 140), who in his Life of Augustus left avivid description of Augustus as hereceived the news of the destruction ofthree of his legions. Suetonius alsoreported information on the disaster,much condensed, in his Life of Caligula.At the beginning of the third century,the Greek historian Cassius Dio (ca.A.D. 150-235) reassembled the storyfrom many sources into a dramaticretelling.

What then happened in A.D. 9 in thesaltus Teutoburgiensis, that fearsome placesomewhere northeast of the Rhine fron-tier? This is the story Roman historianshave told us and archaeologists haveexpanded: Augustus sent Varus tonorthern Germany to finish the job of

creating the province of Germania thathad been started by Drusus, the brotherof the future emperor Tiberius. Varus,assuming that the German tribes were

sufficiently pacified and that he couldmove quickly in establishing fullRoman rule, did not pay too much

OF BATTLES AND THE WRITING OF HISTORY: THE BATTLE OF THETEUTOBURG FOREST continued from page 1

2

Fig. 2. On this map of Roman military camps at the time of Augustus and Tiberius,Kalkriese is marked with an X (http://www.geschichte.uni-osnabrueck.de/projekt/frame2.htm). The little squares mark the Roman camps. The arrows mark troop move-ments during the time of Augustus. The map is part of the Web site Kalkriese: DieÖrtlichkeit der Varusschlacht, Ein studentisches Projekt an der Universität Osnabrück(http://www.geschichte.uni-osnabrueck.de/projekt/start.html). The map is by EdwardMenking, Universität Osnabrück, ©1997, and is used courtesy of Dr. WolfgangSpickermann, Universität Osnabrück.

continued on page 8

x Kalkriese

way that the authors achieve striking effectswhile limiting themselves to ordinary vocab-ulary and constructions. Yet words andidioms that are ordinary in English are notnecessarily easy to render in Latin, a chal-lenge that the translators generally meetwith great labor and ingenuity. As a conse-quence, the translations themselves oftenstrike me as more belabored and ingeniousthan simple and lucid, a shift in registerthat, in my view, pretty much defeats thewhole point.

And then a friend gave me a copy ofCattus Petasatus (see Fig. 3). My expres-sions of polite gratitude quickly turned tounfeigned delight as I opened the coversand sampled what lay inside: here at last isa Latin translation that truly captures thespirit of the original. And what an original!As most people know, Dr. Seuss wrote TheCat in the Hat in 1957 as a book forbeginning readers, with the idea that it hadto be simple enough for them to read ontheir own but also fun enough for them towant to read it at all. He achieved the sim-plicity by strictly limiting his vocabulary to220 words, virtually all of them one-sylla-ble, and by using only the most basic syn-tax. But it was in the fun that his genius lay.Quite apart from his absurdist scenario andimaginative illustrations, his very use of lan-guage was fun: the insistent rhythms andrhymes of his verses make them almostimpossible to stop reading. In theserespects, The Cat in the Hat would seemone of the worst candidates for translationinto Latin since insistent rhythms and rhymesare not things that most of us associate withLatin literature.

To a large extent, however, we do thisnot because accentual rhythms and end-rhymes are incompatible with the Latin lan-guage but simply because classical authorsdeliberately avoided them. Strong rhythmsand rhymes seem to have played more of arole in popular verse and came into theirown in the Middle Ages. It is from this tradi-tion that the Tunbergs have drawn theirinspiration, as they explain (in English aswell as Latin) in an appendix on their verseform. In place of Dr. Seuss’ largely anapes-tic rhythms and end-rhyme in alternatinglines, they use a line of four trochees with avery high coincidence of word accent and

metrical beat (hence the insistent rhythm)and end-rhyme in the last two syllables ofevery couplet (hence even more insistentrhyme than the original). Here, for exam-ple, is their version of the Cat’s openinglines on page 7:

“Cur sedetis?” inquit ille,“Ludos vobis dabo mille!Cattus, etsi sol non lucet,Ludos vobis huc adducet!

Obviously, this is not Vergil, but thenneither is Dr. Seuss Milton, and it is won-derful to see the Tunbergs achieve the samesorts of effects in Latin that Dr. Seuss did inEnglish. These effects are so basic and yetso delightful that one does not need muchLatin to enjoy Cattus Petasatus. (The Tun-bergs have now applied the same tech-niques to a translation of Green Eggs andHam [2003] with apparently equal suc-cess.)

Could this book serve beginning readersof Latin in the same way that Dr. Seuss’original serves beginning readers of Eng-lish? Undoubtedly. Although the Tunbergsdid not manage to restrict themselves to

only 220 words, their vocabulary is fairlystraightforward, and they provide a con-venient glossary at the end. Likewise, theirsentences are short and simple, and thecontext will make the meaning clear evento readers puzzled by the grammar. Forbeginning students, the strong rhythmic pat-tern should make this a painless lesson inpronunciation and word accent; for moreadvanced students, it could serve as thebasis for a discussion of quantitative versusaccentual meters. Most importantly, foreveryone, it will make Latin fun, and that isa rare achievement. As the Cat himself says(on page 18 of the original), “It is fun tohave fun/ But you have to know how.”

James B. Rives (jrives@yorku.ca) is Asso-ciate Professor in the Division of Humanitiesand the Program of Classical Studies atYork University in Toronto, Ontario. Whennot reading children’s literature (in English),he studies religion in the Roman Empireand teaches courses on Latin language andliterature and Roman culture.

Book Review: Cattus Petasatus continued from page 1

3

Fig. 3. The Cat in the Hat. ™ & © 1957Dr. Seuss Enterprises, L. P. All rightsreserved. Used by permission.

Current Eventsin Classics

Barbara Gold, the APA Vice-President for Outreach, and

two members of the APA OutreachCommittee, Mary-Kay Gamel andJudith P. Hallett, will establish anAPA Web site for “Current Eventsin Classics” (lectures, museumopenings, outreach events) andfind people in key areas around thecountry who can feed steady infor-mation to that site. Mary-KayGamel will coordinate theatricalproductions, films, and videos inparticular. They will create links toexisting Web sites of this natureand also use state coordinators tohelp identify classically-relatedevents around the country; many ofthese coordinators will ideally beleaders of the state classical organi-zations. Any ideas for creating andmaintaining such a Web site wouldbe welcome. Please contact Bar-bara Gold at bgold@hamilton.edu.

Iarrived at the Grand Hyatt Hotel indowntown Washington, D. C. –headquarters of the 77th Annual

Scripps National Spelling Bee – on themorning of June 2, 2004, just in time tocatch Round Two of the competition.Amphora had asked me to attune myreportorial antennae to the classicalreverberations of this event: the wordsof Greek and Roman provenance cho-sen to measure orthographical knowl-edge, and the students and teachers ofthe Latin and Greek languages partici-pating as spellers, officials, and staff.And as the occasion literally demanded,I made a beeline for the press desk inorder to obtain my 2004 Bee Week Guide,the official kit for members of themedia.

Also available online atwww.spellingbee.com, the Guidecontained the schedule for Bee Week(the final rounds and social events heldin the nation’s capital from Sunday,May 30 through Friday, June 4); detailsabout the Scripps National Spelling Beeprogram, competition, and prizes; mediainformation; contest rules; statisticsabout the 2004 Bee participants andprevious finalists; a list of past champi-ons and their winning words; photos andbrief biographies of Bee officials andstaff; and photos accompanied by longerbiographies of all the 265 middle schoolstudent spellers who qualified for the2004 finals.

And, yes, swarms of representativesfrom both broadcast and print mediasurrounded me. The cable televisionsports network ESPN had exclusive livecoverage rights for much of the compe-tition. Other media outlets were alsoallowed to broadcast the event live upuntil ESPN’s live broadcast began andeven to tape the event during ESPN’slive broadcast for airing at a later time.

What I gleaned from the Bee WeekGuide was welcome as well as edifying,the culmination of a year-long learningprocess. I was a spelling bee championmyself in my senior year at Cheltenham(Pennsylvania) High School, triumphingwhen the other finalist, himself a formervictor, missed the “s” in “grosgrain.”Yet I knew almost nothing about theAnnual Scripps National Spelling Beeprior to June 2003, when my daughter –a journalist who had just finished a

vignette on the Beefor U. S. News andWorld Report –insisted that Iaccompany her toSpellbound (2002), acinematic chronicleof the 1999 competi-tion, publicized bythe promotionallogo “Little kids.Big words. Americandreams.” Directedby Jeffrey Blitz, analumnus of TheJohns Hopkins Uni-versity WritingSeminars and theUniversity of Southern California filmprogram, Spellbound fully lived up to itstitle, mesmerizing me with the power ofboth its narrative and message.

While it lost out to Michael Moore’sBowling for Columbine in the category ofBest Documentary Feature Film at the2002 Academy Awards, Spellbound offersa glimpse of contemporary Americansociety and values that is every bit asperceptive and affecting as Moore’s.But, as Anton Bitel, an Australian classi-cist now based in England, noted in hisreview (available online at www.movie-gazette.com/cinereviews/461), Blitz’ssubtle, indeed lyrical, mode of cinemat-ic expression contrasts sharply toMoore’s signature, showboatingapproach.

Blitz himself accounts for his film’sgross of more than $5 million, and thepopular appeal that a figure of this mag-nitude implies, by observing that someviewers regard the Bee as a “kind ofAmerican Dream, where ‘mastery’ ofEnglish suggests mastery of culture.”He also suspects that the film’s focus onthe support and unconditional loveafforded the contestants in the Bee bytheir families resonated widely.

The film interweaves the stories ofeight Bee finalists: middle school stu-dents from different social and econom-ic backgrounds, educational institutions,ethnic groups, and regions of the UnitedStates. Classics gets a significant cut ofthe cinematic action. “Big” words ofGreek and Latin provenance pose someof the most unforgettable challenges tothe contestants. Some of the finalists are

identified as Latin students, and one asa major beneficiary of intensive tutoringin Latin and Greek etymology. Mostimportant from the perspective of classi-cists, Jacques Bailly, a former nationalchampion, does a star turn on screen asthe Associate Pronouncer: he holds adoctorate in classics from Cornell Uni-versity and is Associate Professor ofClassics at the University of Vermont(see Fig. 4).

In 2003, Bailly ascended to the posi-tion of Pronouncer. According to the BeeWeek Guide, once the Word Panel foreach Bee creates the final word list forthat year’s competition, the Pronouncerthen researches each word’s pronuncia-tion or pronunciations, compilingdetailed notes about various aspects ofthese words. During the oral rounds ofthe Bee, after Professor Bailly has pro-nounced the word to be spelled, aspeller may not only query him abouthow the word is pronounced but alsoask him to define it, identify what partof speech it is, use it in a sentence, andgive its etymology. When providinginformation about the language of originfor each word, Bailly draws heavily onWebster’s Third New International Dictio-nary, one of the competition’s sponsors.And as the words given the contestantsin 2004 alone testify, those with Greekand Latin roots vastly predominate.

CLASSICS AND THE 77TH ANNUAL SCRIPPSNATIONAL SPELLING BEE by Judith P. Hallett

4

Fig. 4. Professor Jacques Bailly at the2003 Scripps National Spelling Bee.Image used courtesy of the ScrippsNational Spelling Bee. Photo credit:Mark Bowen/Scripps National SpellingBee.

Of the twenty-five qualifying wordsin Round One, eighteen derived fromGreek or Latin, for example, Boeotian,onomatopoeia, rhinorrhagia, separate,supererogatory, and triskaidekaphobia.Among the Greek and Latin words inRound Two were apocope, corybantic,flebile, Laodicean, litotes, Pierian,pyrrhic, and urticant. Strikingly, manywords of classical derivation on theselists are, in fact, “technical terms” thatclassicists habitually employ in learneddiscussions of ancient Greek andRoman literature, history, geography,and religion.

Speaking about the Bee severalmonths later at the October 2004 meet-ing of the Classical Association of theAtlantic States (CAAS), Bailly acknowl-edged and explained the pride of placeawarded in the 2003 and 2004 ScrippsNational Spelling Bees to words ofGreek and Latin origin, including spe-cialized vocabulary items beloved ofclassicists. To some extent, this classicalemphasis is predictable. As the peda-gogical material posted on the Bee web-site (under the rubric of “Carolyn’s Cor-ner”) documents, difficult spellingwords in English are overwhelminglyLatin and Greek in origin.

This classical emphasis also belongsto a longstanding Bee tradition. Thevery first Bee champion, in 1925, earnedhis crown with “gladiolus”; his fourimmediate successors captured theirswith “abrogate,” “luxuriance,” “albu-men,” and “asceticism.” Decades later,two champions of my own acquaintancewon with “meticulosity” (in 1950) and“eudaemonic” (in 1960). Bailly owes hisown 1980 victory to “elucubrate”; the1981 winner who now directs the Bee –Page Pipkin Kimble – owes hers to “sar-cophagus.” And though “Purim,”“luge,” and “kamikaze” are to be foundon the roster of winning words from1983 through 1993, words of classicalderivation have more than held theirown as makers of champions in the pastdecade: viewers of Spellbound may recallthat Nuper Lala, the 1999 winner, nowa University of Michigan undergraduateand a Bee staff member, acquired herlaurels with “logorrhea.”

In media interviews held betweenrounds of the competition on June 2,2004, Bailly shared some thoughts onwhat he, as an educator, regards as thegoals and achievements of the Bee. Hedefined the Bee as a quintessentiallydemocratic educational program, insofaras winning depends on both merit andluck. In addition, he underscored thatthe biggest winner of any spelling bee is

On the VRoma homepage, aglobe with a Roman gate

at its center invites visitors to timetravel to an interactive simulationof the ancient city of Rome (see Fig.5). The adjoining scroll offers links toclassical images and other cultural and ped-agogical Internet resources created byVRoma core faculty.

Launched with the help of a 1997National Endowment for the Humanities(NEH) Teaching with Technology Grant, theVRoma project has been bringing “theexcitement of classical studies” (to quoteAmphora’s mission statement) to a diversegroup of users. They range from a middle-school student who wrote “I have neverreally been interested in history until thesubject of Rome came up,” to a high-schoolstudent studying Latin in New Zealand whowants to “to get a feel of the ‘experience’rather than just studying it,” to a concertpianist and conductor “with a passionateinterest in Ancient Greece and Rome,” to anon-academic from the Netherlands whodesires to “keep the Classics alive, showRomans might be all dead but were neverboring.”

Central to the VRoma community is anonline “place,” a virtual environment com-bining Web and MOO (Multi-user dimen-sion, Object Oriented) technology that canbe visited as a guest or as a registered userwith personal password, character name,and avatar. Here users can chat with otherconnected users in real time. They can alsovirtually walk through the fourteen regionsof Rome, learn about the various buildingsand how they were used, converse with

“bots” with preprogrammed dia-logue (some of it in Latin) such as

the emperor Antoninus Piusand a greedy landlady in

the Subura, and take achariot ride in the CircusMaximus.

A tour guide, Let’sGo, VRoma! (Eamus

VRomam), helps visitorsnavigate the streets of this

complex city. Although the

simulated city is rich with images, this is nota three-dimensional virtual-reality re-creationof Rome. The technology has been kept sim-ple deliberately so that people all over theworld can connect with equipment no moresophisticated than a browser and an Inter-net connection. This also encourages usersto draw actively on their own imaginationsin order to weave together the images, tex-tual cues and information, and interactiveobjects into a meaningful vision of theancient city. The VRoma MOO aims to offeran immersive, emotionally engaging “virtu-al field trip” to ancient Rome.

The other resources offered by VRomado not require logging in to the MOO. Themost widely used of these is the ImageArchive, containing thousands of high-quali-ty images related to classical antiquity anddesigned for use on the Web. These photo-graphs were donated by classics facultyand are available without charge for non-commercial Internet or classroom use. Theyinclude photos of many objects and arti-facts not easily accessible from othersources, especially a growing collection ofdetailed images of ancient coins.

For example, without VRoma, onewould have to visit the Terme Diocleziano,

Notable Web Site: The VRoma Project http://www.vroma.org

by Barbara F. McManus

5continued on page 19

Fig 5. VRoma homepage(http://www.vroma.org).

continued on page 6

Aristophanes’ Frogs Now Available on CD

The original Broadway cast recording of the 2004 Lincoln Center Theater production ofAristophanes’ Frogs is now available on CD from PS Classics (http://www.psclas-

sics.com). For a discussion of this production as well as other recent productions of Aristo-phanes’ comedies, see “‘The Time is the Present, the Place is Ancient Greece’: The (Very)Contemporary Comedy of Aristophanes,” by Elizabeth Scharffenberger in Amphora,Issue 3.2 (Fall 2004). An electronic link to this issue may be found at the APA Web site(www.apaclassics.org).

National Museums of Rome, to see a sec-ond-century A.D. bronze owner’s stamp(signaculum) of a businesswoman whoimported wine and oil (particularly appro-priate to this publication since smallamphoras are used as word dividers on thestamp). The image has been reversed so

that the letters read in the order that theywould appear on the stamped item: theouter circle gives her name in Latin,“[belonging to] Coelia Mascellina, daugh-ter of Gnaeus,” while the inner circle is anabbreviated version of her name in Greek(see Fig. 6). An image like this, presentinglittle-known information about women’s par-ticipation in Roman trade, helps VRoma tofulfill its mission of bringing to a broadaudience “the excitement, immediacy, and‘virtual re-creation of lost contexts’ that mod-ern technology can expedite” (quoted fromthe VRoma NEH grant proposal).

Barbara F. McManus (bmcmanus@cnr.edu)is Professor of Classics Emerita at The Col-lege of New Rochelle in New York. She isa founder and co-director of the VRomaProject and has recently completed a termas APA Vice President for Professional Mat-ters. She is the author of Classics and Femi-nism: Gendering the Classics (1997) and iscurrently writing a biography of the pio-neering woman classicist Grace HarrietMacurdy (1866-1946).

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Notable Web Site: The VRoma Project continued from page 5

Fig. 6. Bronze owner’s stamp of CoeliaMascellina (http://www.vroma.org/images/mcmanus_images/signaculum.jpg).Photo credit: Barbara McManus.

If you have ever wondered what ittakes to convert a scholarly subjectinto popular yet intelligent nonfic-

tion, just ask two lovers of classics, JohnMan and David Sacks. They will tellyou it takes a lot of perspiration – and alittle inspiration from Homer.

Sacks and Man have both writtengood reads on the history and use of thealphabet, from its roots in Egypt to itsvarious contemporary offshoots. Man’sbook is Alpha Beta (2001); Sacks’ book isLetter Perfect (2004). Neither is a profes-sional classicist, but each strives to givethe Greek and Roman aspects of thealphabet their full due. And they areinspired rather than daunted by themass of data surrounding our ABC’s.Sacks catalogues, letter by letter, theenormous impact of the alphabet on theworld, compiling facts and history rang-ing from the ancient Phoenicians to theorigin of the phrase “O.K.” Man, for hispart, focuses on the alphabet as a whole.In an interview graciously granted to mefor this article, Man reveals that hewrote Alpha Beta using the alphabet“like a character in a story. It has an ori-gin and a journey, and evolves, andalong the way, fascinating things hap-pen.” And Man does mean one alphabetwith one origin: “The alphabet, despiteits multifarious forms, was a uniqueidea, arising only once, spreading acrosscultures and down centuries.”

Man’s earliest experiences with clas-sics provided a solid foundation for hisvisualization of the alphabet as the heroin a kind of epic journey. At twelve, helistened raptly as his Latin teacher in aBritish boarding school read to the classan English translation of the Odyssey, alittle every day, until they finished thepoem. “There’s a tremendous arc to thatstory,” he continues in the same inter-view. “All the various storylines come tothe same point. You never feel as ifyou’re in a digression.” In fact, theCyclops episode of the Odyssey so cap-tured Man that he leads off Alpha Betawith an account of his first encounterwith the monster. “From those vividreadings . . . I received a clear message:the story – speaking so directly from soremote a time – mattered.”

At first glance, the development ofthe alphabet might promise a story morecompelling to scholars than to generalreaders. But Man sees the hiddenpotential in recounting the journey ofthe essential medium for transporting so

many ancient tales to the present day. Man begins with a fascinating

account of the alphabet’s infancy. In1990 at Wadi el-Hol, a little-knownarchaeological dig near EgyptianThebes, Egyptologist John Darnell dis-covered stone-carved marks resemblinga proto-alphabet. Immediately, hefeared that robbers would hack theinscriptions out of the rock and sellthem on the black market. The raceagainst time described in the book wasfirst told to Man by Darnell’s wife Deb-orah Darnell, also an Egyptologist.“Deborah felt a violent rush of adrena-line,” Man writes of the Darnells’ dis-covery of robbers at the dig site, thenquotes Deborah Darnell directly, “‘All Ican compare it to is if you were to comehome and there was somebody beatingup your children’” (72).

The vividness of Man’s descriptionadds interest to what potential readersin the popular audience might have con-sidered mere squiggles, an early form ofa script found in the Sinai desert calledProto-Sinaitic (Sacks also includes adetailed discussion and photographs ofthe script). The Darnells had foundwhat they considered to be the alphabetin its infancy emerging from its motherscript, Egyptian hieroglyphics. Semitic“mercenaries” (Sacks) or “marauders”(Man), who lived in Egypt around 2000B.C. and spoke “Proto-Sinaitic,” wouldhave been responsible for the invention,having seen the potential in hieroglyph-ics to express their own language. Thisinscription, the argument goes, is arecord of that early expression.

Man speculates that the Exodus(another good story) may be a memoryof the migration of this Semitic peopleto Israel with the new type of writingthat was eventually used to record themajor events of the monotheisticHebrew religion. From there, the neigh-boring Phoenicians acquired this form ofwriting as well and spread it to Greecethrough traders and artisans.

In Greece, Man finds, the alphabetbecomes a powerful engine for thetransmission of ideas. He writes that,without the alphabet, none of theGreeks’ achievements would have sur-vived them. Like a happy coincidencein a novel or movie (except that this is atrue story), “They [the Greeks] justhappened to live near one of the cul-tures that had stumbled on the alphabet,and they just happened to be at a crucial

THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET by David Frauenfelder

stage in social evolution that made themopen to its adoption” (16). This happycoincidence led to a number of stunningintellectual and social achievements.

This enticing side discussion – a vari-ation on how small groups of peopleproduced great change, explored inbooks such as Thomas Cahill’s How theIrish Saved Civilization (1995) and TheGifts of the Jews (1998) – still takes sec-ond place to the alphabet as character ina story. Man wonders how, if the Greeksgot along fine as an oral society (as Mil-man Parry and others have taught us),the alphabet found its place in the Hel-lenic world. How did it, like Odysseusamong the Phaeacians, prove its worth?

To answer the question, Man let hisimagination work on a very early andincomplete inscription from the Dipy-lon Vase, a large, wide-mouthed, intri-cately-painted piece of pottery dating toabout 750 B.C., which reads “Who nowof all dancers dances most playfully, lethim . . . .” Man writes (219):

Imagine the end of a dance contest,the winner recalling the herald’s open-ing invitation and wanting somereminder for his family or his patron ofwhat the pot means. He shouts to thecrowd: “Does anyone here knowPhoenician writing?”An eager hand reaches up . . .“Whatshould I write?”“What the herald said: Who now of alldancers dances most playfully, let himbe rewarded with this pot.”The man scratches with a sharp stoneon the black paint. “Look, now thepot speaks!”

Man does not suggest that this episodehappened in an actual ancient Greekdance contest. He uses the story to illus-trate his argument that “Writing, ratherthan being imposed from the top down,is a bottom-up activity, spread not byscholars but artisans” (222-23). Throughimagination, Man makes complicatedscholarship accessible to a lay audience.

While Man concentrates on the histo-ry and transformative power of thealphabet as a whole – the big picture, soto speak – Sacks, in his book Letter Per-fect, highlights each letter (the book isan outgrowth of a series of essays hewrote over a period of twenty-six weeksfor the Ottawa Citizen newspaper). Sacksthus analyzes his subject in minutedetail but, at the same time, never losessight of his audience, the general reader.“I proceeded,” he writes in his preface,“to dip into other aspects of the story . . . . What I uncovered was a trove ofwisdom and lore worth celebrating. And

worth sharing” (xii).That word “story” is again no coinci-

dence. Sacks personifies each letter inthe alphabet, giving it a quirky person-ality, starting on page 44 with A as“First and Best” (“Associated withbeginnings, fundamentals, and superior-ity, the letter A has traveled first classdown through history.”) and ending, onpage 358 with Z as “Exzotic” (“a conso-nant that can seem racy and elusive orjust plain disadvantaged”). Letter Perfectexcels particularly in tracing the evolu-tion of the letters, as in his discussion ofthe ancient Roman k-sound trio, C, K,and Q: “K drew the short straw of thearrangement: it came to be almostentirely neglected by the Romans. Byabout 300 B.C. it was used for only ahandful of Latin words” (206). In thecity name Karthago, “the unusual Kmust have looked extra creepy toRoman eyes” (206). The wryness inSacks’ narrative (a reviewer in the BrynMawr Classical Review referred to it as“perkiness”) aims to hold the readers’attention as he guides them throughcomplicated scholarly issues.

Both authors have distilled a tremen-dous amount of complex informationinto their respective books. How didthey do it?

They started with good teachers.Both studied at Oxford University, writ-ing weekly essays critiqued by tutors.Sacks graduated from Swarthmore Col-lege before receiving his M.A. in Clas-sics from Oxford, where he studied withancient historian Oswyn Murray, authorof Early Greece (1986) and co-editor ofThe Oxford History of the Classical World.Man studied French and German atOxford and then did graduate work inthe history of science. Both are full-timewriters who have also spent decadesfine-tuning their style for popular audi-ences.

Sacks emphasizes the need toresearch, research, research – then con-dense with maximum clarity. “Here’s agood discipline,” he told me in a recentinterview. “Take three years of your lifeto research, say, the history of Commu-nism. Then boil that down to the best500 words you can write.” Sacks alsoemphasizes that “You have to picturewhy this is important to the generalreader – why he or she should care.”

Sacks’ comment brings us back toMan’s contention that story is all impor-tant in interpreting classical subjects forthe general reader. “There is somethingfundamental about narrative to humanbeings,” he says. “All information bene-fits from connecting with emotion.”

This is asentimentordinaryancient Greekswould haveunderstood fromfirsthand knowledge. Forthem, myths combined entertainment,history, even scholarship: myths were“at first the sole explicit form of intel-lectual activity,” according to WalterBurkert, a distinguished scholar ofancient religion and mythology (GreekReligion, trans. John Raffan, 1985, 8).

Scholars will differ concerning theevidence presented by John Man andDavid Sacks. The scholarly world isalways refining and rethinking itsanswers within its own specializedmilieu. But thanks to these two engag-ing authors and others like them, abusy, easily-distracted modern worldreceives a worthy message: the ancientworld matters.

David Frauenfelder (frauenfelder@ncssm.edu) teaches Latin, Greek, and GreekMythology at the North Carolina School ofScience and Mathematics. More of histhoughts on the classical and contemporaryworlds may be found at http://www.myth.typepad.com.

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The Classical Buzz

APA Speakers Bureau

The APA maintains a roster of enthu-siastic speakers who are available

to address a wide variety of audiences– civic groups, professional societies,library and other reading groups, mid-dle schools and secondary schools, jun-ior and senior colleges, universities,and many other organizations.

The Speakers Bureau can be foundby going to the APA Web site atwww.apaclassics.org and clicking onOutreach, listed on the left hand side ofthe screen of the home page. UnderOutreach, you will find the SpeakersBureau. The Bureau lists e-mail address-es of dozens of speakers as well asdescriptions of the talks they are pre-pared to give. A glance through thetopics described there will make clearthe breadth of presentations that areavailable, from “Medical Practices inPompeii and the Roman Empire” to“Women’s Letters from Ancient Egypt.”

attention to German customs or to theGermans’ enormous sense of their ownworth. Blind to warnings from someGerman leaders, he trusted Arminius athis peril. Persuaded by the Germanchieftain that a revolt was brewingsomewhere northwest of the probablesite of his summer camp, Varus agreedto a detour to quash the incident as hewas moving his legions from the WeserRiver towards their winter quarters nearXanten on the Rhine. Halfway betweenthese two locations, a large number ofGerman tribesmen ambushed theRoman forces in an area of moors, bogs,and dense forests. Over a three-dayperiod, almost all of the Roman legionsand their camp followers were killed.

Early Roman sources are very sparseon detail; there is an assumption thatthe description of the battle was eithertoo well known or too gruesome to bearrepeating. The writers are far moreinterested in the aftermath. Suetoniustells us that Augustus was horrified:“Indeed, it is said that he took the dis-aster so deeply to heart that he left hishair and beard untrimmed for months;he would often beat his head on a door,shouting: ‘Quinctilius Varus, give meback my legions!’ and always kept theanniversary as a day of deep mourning”(Life of Augustus, 23, trans. RobertGraves, Penguin, 1979). Velleius saysonly: “Hemmed in by forests andmarshes and ambuscades, it [Varus’army] was exterminated almost to a man. . .” (Compendium, CXIX, trans. F. W.Shipley, Loeb, 1924). Florus repeatsthis story and adds details of the Ger-man tribesmen torturing their captives(Epitome 2.30). Information about thebattle is summarized by Tacitus as apreface to his description of Germani-cus’ campaign in A.D. 15 (Annals 1.61).Cassius Dio weaves all these layerstogether and gives a full account of thebattle, repeating the main outline butadding details about the weather – itwas raining and very windy – and a gen-eral description of the battlefield withits deep ravines and dense forests(Roman History LVI.20-1). To sum upthe information succinctly, our historicalsources agree that the disaster was acombination of German treachery andRoman stupidity: “. . . Varus, who was,it must be confessed, a man of characterand of good intentions, lost his life andhis magnificent army more through lack

of judgement in the commander than ofvalour in his soldiers,” wrote Velleius(Compendium CXX.5); and from the manwho knew the participants, this is a dev-astating evaluation. What is missingfrom all the accounts is a good knowledgeof where the event had taken place:quite soon, the saltus Teutoburgiensis hadceased to be a real place and hadbecome a state of mind, a wild forest ofthe imagination.

In the nineteenth century, after thedefeat of Napoleon, patriotic Germanswith solid classical educations and aninterest in historical research began tostudy the origins of German history, andthis battle became crucial to their inves-tigations. Wells details this process inThe Battle That Stopped Rome (30-36,228); so does Simon Schama in hisinsightful book, Landscape and Memory(1995, 75-120). About 1875, a statue ofArminius, now called “Hermann derCherusker,” was erected near Detmoldin what were believed to be the rem-nants of the Teutoburger Wald. Thesite, which I visited in 1981, resemblesCassius Dio’s description of the battleeven though there were no archaeologi-

cal finds in this area. Indeed, TheodorMommsen, the leading nineteenth-cen-tury German historian of ancient Rome,disagreed profoundly with that choiceand had already championed a locationnear Osnabrück. About a hundred yearslater, archaeologists proved him right.

It took a military engineer with abent for excavating battle sites to locatethe place. Beginning in 1987, MajorTony Clunn spent a decade reconnoi-tering a very large area north ofOsnabrück where he was stationed withthe British army. He found coins andinvestigated treasure hoards and coincollections that had been unearthedover the centuries. He also realized thatthe building of the Mittelland-Kanal inthe nineteenth century had altered thelandscape and lowered the water tableof the region and thus dried up moorsand marshes and made them moreaccessible. In the fascinating narrativeof his book, In Quest of the Lost Legions:The Varusschlacht, Discovering the VarusBattlefield (1999; an expanded andrevised edition is due for release short-ly), excerpts from his diaries are inter-spersed with learned discussions ofimportant archaeological insights. Thoseelements are made vivid through his(admittedly) fictionalized account ofwhat must have happened to the sol-diers – a chilling retelling of the totalannihilation of almost 18,000 people.

I visited the battle site on a brightJune day in 2003. The approach to thesite is through a gateway and a modestbuilding that leads to a small courtyard,a children’s playground, and a rustic-style restaurant. Also at the site is awell-preserved manor house from theearly nineteenth century that nowserves as the headquarters of the archae-ological team (see Fig. 7).

Throughout the Middle Ages andbeyond, this site was a thriving agricul-tural community, ruled over by a localaristocratic family. Now the battle sitehas been allowed to regain its naturalstate of forest, marshy meadows, andmoors, with few exceptions. Amongthese are a replica of a Roman frontierfort that serves as the museum, theremains of partially-rebuilt German pal-isades, which were the earliest finds ofthe archaeological excavations (see Fig.8), and granite slabs marking theordered advance of the Roman armyinto the moors and showing its disinte-gration during the ambush (see Fig. 1,page 1). If one stands at the top of theRoman fort, the sheer vastness of thesite becomes instantly apparent: a roughestimate of the area considered for

OF BATTLES AND THE WRITING OF HISTORY:THE BATTLE OF THE TEUTOBURG FOREST continued from page 2

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Fig. 7. Nineteenth-century manor housethat now serves as the headquarters ofthe archaeological team at Kalkriese.Photo credit: Madelyn Bergen Dick.

archaeological excavation is severalmiles in diameter (see Fig. 9). Theguide at the site remarked that it couldeasily take twenty-five years before theentire area is thoroughly examined. Theincredible number of finds, mostlyRoman, shown at the museum give buta faint indication of what might still bein the ground. Among the exhibits are aspectacular mask (see Clunn, 103-104),both large and small items used by aRoman army, and human and animalbones of every description, most verysmall. Also on display are coins, bothfrom the hoards collected over the cen-turies and those found by the archaeo-logical team, among them several goldcoins newly minted in the reign ofAugustus.

But no amount of sunshine and chil-dren’s laughter can quite obliterate thefeeling of a brooding quietness: if yourimagination is good enough – and mineis – the noise of the battle, the moans ofthe dying, and the shouts of the victorsseem to echo over the site. Marchingalong the granite slabs that mark theadvance of the Roman legions intochaos and death and walking slowlyalong grassy paths, I found myselfspeaking in hushed tones to my com-panions and making frequent stops tosurvey the landscape. Almost two-thou-sand years have passed since those threedays of slaughter, but that does notlessen the importance of the events thatoccurred here nor the almost eerieeffect upon the site.

In the study of history today, battlesno longer loom as large as they once did.And yet historians cannot avoid the useof these defining historical markers.The battle of Actium in 31 B.C. was onesuch decisive battle in the history ofRome. It started the Roman Empireunder Augustus. The battle of the Teu-toburg Forest, which we know aboutmostly from the losers, was another.

This battle prevented the develop-ment of Germania as a Roman province.Archaeological evidence has substantiat-ed the attempt of the Roman imperialgovernment to create in north andnortheastern Germany a province on themodel of Gaul. This was probably adefensive action spurred on by the inse-curity of the Roman government overits northern frontiers, which led toRoman armies marching across the areato the Elbe River. The Romans wonmost of the armed conflicts, but theyseem never to have been able to beatthe tribes into submission. Augustusspent much time in his early imperialcareer on the Rhine, and his appoint-ment of Quintilius Varus, who had beena successful governor in North Africa aswell as in Syria, seemed a shrewd move.The Roman government had everyhope of success; Roman supply galleyscame from Gaul into the Weser estuaryand south on that river, deep into theGerman countryside. Varus’ summercamp was located in Hessen, north ofmodern Frankfurt, and his winter quar-ters were on the Rhine near the modernDutch border. Had the venture beenhandled more diplomatically and hadthe various German tribes in the areafelt that it was to their advantage to cul-tivate the Roman connection, then thesuccess of Arminius to mobilize hiscountrymen against the intruders mightnot have been quite so spectacular.Beyond that, the defeat of the Romanlegions had a marked impact on thedevelopment of the German tribes.Roman occupation of Gaul and con-frontation with German communitiesalong the Rhine frontier had produced amore warlike society among the Ger-mans, and archaeological evidence fromgrave deposits attest to this develop-ment (Wells, 213-20, 236). This processof militarization continued and wouldhave profound consequences for the

development of European history. The battle also determined the limits

of Roman domination in central Europe.The area east of the Rhine and north ofthe Danube remained outside Rome’spolitical control, and the outposts builtby Augustus became the main defensepoints on a long frontier. It also allowedfor the development of language andcustoms in northern Germany that owedlittle to Rome. Without the German vic-tory in the Teutoburg Forest, wouldthere have been well-trained and well-armed Angles, Saxons, and Frisiansready to invade Roman Britain? Wouldthere have been a Frisian dialect thatcame to be the basis of English, as ablydemonstrated in Melvyn Bragg’s TheAdventure of English: The Biography of aLanguage (2004)? Would the Germanelements of law and government and,indeed, of life-style have flourished andbecome so dominant in the develop-ment of the European Middle Ages?

In short, the massacre in the saltusTeutoburgiensis, now known as the com-munity of Kalkriese, proved a profoundlesson in imperial vulnerability fromwhich Augustus never recovered andwhich became deeply enshrined in thebedrock of imperial politics. The geo-graphic expansion of the RomanEmpire moved beyond the accomplish-ments of the first century A.D. inBritain and the Balkans, but theRomans did not go beyond the Germanfrontier established early in the reign ofTiberius: “The result of this disasterwas that the empire, which had notstopped on the shores of the Ocean, waschecked on the banks of the Rhine”(Florus, Epitome, 2.30, trans. E. S. Fos-ter, Loeb, 1929). For better or worse,the northern lowlands, with their riversand moors, their isolated agriculturalhomesteads and small villages, contin-ued over the centuries to create theirversions of law, government, and lan-guage and, with these, the foundationsof modern Europe.

Madelyn Bergen Dick has been teachingmedieval history at York University inToronto, Ontario since 1968. She is current-ly the Chair of the School of Arts and Letters,Atkinson Faculty of Liberal and Profession-al Studies. She has published Mater Spiri-tualis: The Life of Adelheid of Vilich(1994) and articles in Medieval Germany,An Encyclopedia (2000). Her currentresearch is on German aristocratic women inthe tenth century. She has had a life-longinterest in the battle of the Teutoburg Forest.

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Fig. 9. Battle site as seen from thereconstructed Roman fort. The graniteblocks, bottom right, show the path ofthe Roman army. Photo credit: MadelynBergen Dick.

Fig. 8. At the left, a reconstruction of theGerman palisades at Kalkriese; at theright and behind, a reconstruction of theRoman defenses. Photo credit: MadelynBergen Dick.

Readers of Homer’s Iliad oftennote that the epic presents fewerfemale characters than the

Odyssey. There are several complexfemale figures in the Odyssey, perhapsbecause many of the episodes accordingprominence to women take place indomestic locations, such as the house-hold of Penelope and Odysseus in Itha-ca. Due to the Iliad’s martial theme andnarrative, however, opportunities formortal female characters to emerge asdeveloped characters are limited: eitherthey are family members of the Trojanheroes who stay safely within the wallsof the besieged citadel, or they are gerata,“prizes,” prisoners of war won by theGreek heroes and held in the tents ofthe invaders’ encampment. Then thereis Helen, the Spartan femme fatalewhose actions started the war – sheabandoned her husband, Menelaus, forthe handsome Trojan prince Paris, andthe Greeks then decided to seek retri-bution. In the film Troy (2004), Wolf-gang Petersen, acclaimed German direc-tor of several films with largely if notexclusively male casts, such as Das Boot(1982), In the Line of Fire (1993), AirForce One (1997), and The Perfect Storm(2000), makes drastic revisions to theway in which Homer portrays the Iliad’shandful of female characters. Petersenattenuates some of these female charac-ters (Andromache), amalgamates someof them with other characters (Briseisand Cassandra), and even eradicatesthem (Hecuba) in his cinematic versionof the Trojan legend. So viewers rightlyask why the female characters have sucha minimal presence onscreen and, inparticular, why the central figure ofHelen is noticeably marginalized in thefilm’s narrative and represented as abland and manifestly unconvincingimage of her Homeric self.

In a film that reportedly cost morethan $200 million, industry watchersexpected Petersen to cast a well-knownactress of international stature as theravishing Spartan queen Helen. Despiterumored interest from such Hollywoodheavyweights as Nicole Kidman andJulia Roberts, Petersen instead cast arelatively unknown young Germanactress, Diane Kruger (see Fig. 10).Petersen said he wanted “fresh faces,”and after paying $17.5 million for Amer-ican movie star Brad Pitt to play

Achilles, that is apparently all he couldafford. Kruger, a placid blonde newcom-er with just a few films to her credit, is aformer ballet dancer and model-turned-actress who, at the age of twenty-seven,looks much younger. After an interna-tional search that launched a thousandhead shots, in the fall of 2003, Petersenchose Kruger for the role, and WarnerBrothers issued a press release wherethe director praised her “stunning beauty. . . charisma and artistry” (quoted byFred Schruers in “Troy Story,” Premiere,May 2004, 50).

Kruger is certainly beautiful, but

there are very few women working inthe film industry today who are notimages of perfection. In fact, all theactors in the movie Troy, male andfemale, are exceptionally good-looking,and the filmmaker’s emphasis on physi-cal beauty is entirely consistent with theheroic ideals of the Iliad. As Petersensaid: “I think these epic stories needattractive people. So I decided I will gofor a high standard of beauty” (quotedby Josh Tyrangiel, “Troy Story,” Time,May 10, 2004, 69).

Nevertheless, whether or not Krugeris pretty enough for the role, manyviewers feel that there is somethinginsubstantial or insufficient about her, adiminutive or adolescent quality thatfails to capture the sexual magnetism ofthis legendary beauty. As film critic LisaSchwarzbaum observed: “Kruger . . .turns the beauty of yore into that of arm

candy whose smolder might just launcha scuffle between her date and any com-modities trader who hits on her at aManhattan cigar bar” (“Myth Behavin’,”Entertainment Weekly, May 21, 2004, 55).This “downsizing” of Helen’s charismain the film requires an exploration of thechoices that led to casting Kruger in therole and an examination of why theresult might seem aesthetically and dra-matically inadequate.

First, it would be enormously diffi-cult to find an actress to portray Helenwho would satisfy everyone or evensome of the viewing audience. Manypeople have a picture of Helen in theirminds, either perfectly clear or a littlefuzzy, but indelible and wholly theirown. Nancy Worman, one of the manyclassicists who have written about theiconic Helen of the literary tradition, hasrecently observed that Helen remainselusive, unattainable, hard to grasp,always mobile, and on the verge of dis-appearing (“The Body as Argument:Helen in Four Greek Texts,” ClassicalAntiquity 16.1, April 1997, 151-203).Even when Helen stands still for amoment, as she does among the Trojanelders on the wall at Troy (Iliad 3.139-244), she is covered in shimmering veilsthat impede any knowledge of her: sheis never readily visible, never easy toapprehend, clad in gleaming robes thatstun the viewer’s vision. The idea ofHelen – goddess, queen, temptress,runaway wife, whore – exists in an ever-changing dynamic, to be molded toindividual desires as needed.

Thus, any tangible face set upon thisshiny, slippery canvas is bound to disap-point and frustrate the viewer. Just asHelen is imagined by people in differ-ent incarnations, perhaps she is imag-ined in culturally-specific ways.Petersen, the native German director,may have chosen his own country-woman, Kruger, because she embodiesa familiar image of Helen he has longheld in his mind’s eye. While he has notcommented on his casting of a Teuton-ic-looking Helen, Petersen did discusshis choice of a specifically fair-hairedand light-eyed appearance for his moviequeen: “Helen of Troy had to be other-worldly, a blond aberration among theswarthy Greeks,” noting that Kruger’s“lambent blue-green eyes and aristo-cratic bearing” would set her apart from

SHE’LL ALWAYS HAVE PARIS: HELEN IN WOLFGANG PETERSEN’S TROYby Monica Silveira Cyrino

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Fig. 10. Diane Kruger as Helen fromTroy (Warner Brothers, 2004).

the rest of the cast (quoted by Schruers,“Troy Story,” 114).

Whether Petersen was referring toancient or modern Greeks is unclear: theHomeric epics, however, depict certainheroes whose hair is xanthos, “golden” or“tawny” (Menelaus: Iliad 3.284 and oftenelsewhere; Achilles: Iliad 23.141;Odysseus: Odyssey 13.431), and manyGreeks today, especially in Larissa andfarther north, are quite blond. Yet thenotion persists that the fair-haired Greekwas (and is) an anomaly, as film criticRichard Corliss asks with deliberateirony: “Who knew Greece had so manyblonds?” (“That’s What You Call aHomer,” Time, May 10, 2004, 72). Per-haps the director intended Kruger’s yel-low hair to make a visual link betweenHelen’s distinctive appearance and thedivinity of the demigod Achilles asplayed by Pitt, with his long, straw-col-ored locks. Petersen seems to suggestHelen’s fair appearance is an effect of theGreeks’ imagining her as not just betterthan but different from them, therebyassociating her with the most elite class ofheroes and reflecting her semi-divine sta-tus as the daughter of Zeus.

Whether Petersen’s idea is valid –that Helen’s exceptional quality shouldbe visually indicated by some particularcoloring – the fact remains that the epicliterary tradition does not really specifywhat she looked like: her epithet euko-

mos, “with nice hair” (as at Iliad 3.329)is often misleadingly translated “fair-haired.” When Helen makes her publicentrance in the teichoskopia, the “viewfrom the wall” in Iliad 3, the Trojan eld-ers remark: “She seems strikingly likethe immortal goddesses in her look”(Iliad 3.158). Throughout the epic liter-ary tradition, the most beautiful of thegoddesses is Aphrodite, and the factthat the epithet “golden” is exclusivelyreserved for her has been much dis-cussed by classicists (such as PaulFriedrich, The Meaning of Aphrodite,1978); in the Iliad alone, the goddess iscalled chrusee, “golden,” several times(3.64, 5.427, 19.282, 22.470, 24.699). IfHelen resembles the goddessAphrodite, whose avatar she is oftenconsidered, Helen must be marked bygoldenness in some way, whether bythe actual color gold, or metaphoricallyby the value of gold, expressing the

superior nature of her beauty over thatfound in all other mortal women.According to sociologists, since brownhair is the norm in Mediterranean cul-tures, blond or red hair would be consid-ered “deviant,” both unusual and, thus,remarkable hair colors (noted by MarthaBarnette, “Fixed Signals,” Allure, Octo-ber 2004, 280).

Even so, if the director wanted toportray a “golden” Helen, still he couldhave cast an extraordinary tawny-hairedactress of international renown, such asCate Blanchett, Gwyneth Paltrow, orCharlize Theron, who have earned sev-eral Golden Globes and Oscars amongthem. The burnished metallic veneer oftheir award statuettes would metaphori-cally reflect the radiance of Helen’s epicbeauty, just as their fame and prestigesuggest Helen’s own notoriety.

Kruger’s distinction as a character inthe film is also marked, perhaps inadver-tently, by her Teutonic accent. The othermostly British and Australian actors in thefilm intone their lines in the haute-Eng-lish style called Received Pronunciation,attempting to render their differentlyaccented English into one harmonioustimbre. Kruger’s rounded German elocu-tion, therefore, sets her apart from theGreek as well as the Trojan characters. Insounding so different from the other char-acters, Kruger recalls the Italian actressRosanna Podestà who was cast as Helenin Robert Wise’s earlier epic film Helen ofTroy (1956). Podestà spoke no Englishand had to learn her lines by rote. It isperhaps not surprising that Kruger alsolooks very much like Podestà (both arepetite and blonde) since Petersen couldhave been influenced by this cinematic“tradition” (see Fig. 12).

Whatever her appearance, Helenshould impress the eye and strike theheart with her powerful, astonishingpresence. The most jarring visual quali-ty displayed by Kruger as Helen is herminiaturization, a combination of heryouth and slight build, which can per-haps be attributed to the “Orlando Fac-tor.” One of the first actors cast byPetersen was Orlando Bloom, the slen-der teen idol who played Legolas in theLord of the Rings trilogy. Petersen gavehim the role of Paris, the winsome butreckless young prince of Troy whoseabduction of Helen provokes the inva-sion of Troy by the Greek forces. Aftercasting Bloom, the director may havewanted an actress to play Helen whodid not outclass her screen lover interms of personality, maturity, andphysical stature (see Fig. 11).

Yet several sources support thecontinued on page 18

Fig. 11. Diane Kruger as Helen andOrlando Bloom as Paris from Troy(Warner Brothers, 2004).

Fig. 12. Rosanna Podestà as Helen andJack Sernas as Paris from Helen of Troy(Warner Brothers, 1956).

11

The study of food in Greco-Romanantiquity has taken a huge leapforward in the last few years.

Knowledge of how people in theancient world produced, processed, andconsumed their food, as well as howthey regarded it and wrote about it,affords valuable new insights into Greekand Roman history.

We find descriptions of the food con-sumed by the ancients in many kinds ofliterature, such as agricultural manualsand natural histories. Since thesesources present this information in astraightforward manner, it is relativelyeasy to interpret the content. But whatabout the frequent references to foodthat we find in ancient literary works,particularly in genres such as satire andcomedy?

In recent scholarship on this topic, adivision has arisen that we can best cat-egorize by using terminology borrowedfrom the philosophy of language andtheology as “cognitive” or “realist” onthe one hand, “non-cognitive” and“anti-realist” on the other. For the “cog-nitive” or “realist” school – representedby Andrew Dalby, Phyllis Pray Bober,Patrick Faas, and the current authors –actual practices and substances liebehind (or correspond to) the survivingwritten evidence about food, its use,and its status. Scholars following the“non-cognitive” or “anti-realist”approach – represented by John Wilkinsand Emily Gowers – prefer to see refer-ences to food, its use, and its status pri-marily (if not exclusively) in symbolicterms in a conceptual world created byauthors, which may not necessarily haveany link with actual ancient culinarypractice.

The division between cognitive andnon-cognitive approaches is in somerespects, however, a false one; there aremany layers of meaning in ancient liter-ature, and adhering to one at theexpense of the others is to fail to see thewhole picture. A simple example mayhelp to clarify the issue: in Horace’sstriking philosophical Satire 2.4, we aretold by the philosopher who holds forththat we ought to know about the “sim-ple” and the “double” sauce (Horace,Sat. 2.4.63-9). The ingredients of the“simple sauce” are oil, fragrant purewine, muria (a kind of garum elsewhere

described as popular with the lowerclasses), chopped herbs, and saffronfrom Parnassus. For Emily Gowers, theculinary meaning is superficial; thepoet/cook is concocting mixed andmessy iura, “laws,” rather than saucesthat are tasty (The Loaded Table, 1993,157). But are we to assume that a saucesuch as this could actually have beenmade and consumed or that the ingredi-ents have merely been chosen for theirmetaphorical meaning? Is it possiblethat these ingredients are intentionallywrong or unusual compared with “real”sauces? Does it matter that the recipewas not potentially good to eat? Wewould still assert that it must have beenconsumable at the level of real food aswell as being consumable as metaphor:the power or “taste” of the latter isdependant on the reality of the former.

As it happens, this kind of sauce actu-ally existed. Called an oenogarum, inmany ways it resembles the basic saucethat we find described in Apicius (therecipe collection attributed to the gour-met Apicius that we can date, by the lastrecipes that were added to the collec-tion, to the fourth-fifth centuries A.D.).Apicius has 459 recipes written and col-lected by slave cooks over many cen-turies, and its beginnings may be as earlyas the mid-first century A.D. One reasonfor identifying Apicius’ basic sauce with

the sauce described in Horace is thatApicius sometimes refers to it as simplex.Furthermore, the oenogarum sauces inApicius also contain pepper, spices, liqua-men (somewhat different from garum andmuria, but nonetheless a fish sauce),sweet wines, and occasionally oil. Signif-icantly, Apicius states that these oenoga-rum sauces are often thickened withstarch, which probably makes the “sim-ple” sauce into a “double.” Gowers,though, interprets this latter concoctionas symbolizing the “two-faced nature ofcontemporary law” (156).

Horace’s reference to the ius simplexraises other issues: is it relevant that thegourmet is using muria rather thangarum, or do we have to rethink the ideathat muria is an inferior fish sauce? Whyis there no pepper? Other such saucesinclude it. Is this a more sophisticatedand subtle idea of oenogarum in contrastto the less selective sauces in Apicius?What does this tell us about Apicius?

Yet, in spite of the difficulties of thecognitive versus non-cognitive divisionin ancient food studies, scholars are stillgoverned largely by one or the otherapproaches. John Wilkins, in his non-cognitive approach, not only rejects theculinary information but also rejectsmuch of the food that he findsdescribed there: “. . . the predominantflavor we have found in ancient Greekfood . . . is a rank, slightly rotting quali-ty” (John Wilkins and Shaun Hill, Arche-stratus: The Life of Luxury, 1994, 23).Wilkins is specifically referring to Greekand Roman food and its use of fishsauce and other potent spices such asasafoetida (silphium). Such a damningcritique of ancient cooking needs com-ment for it is surprising how common-place an attitude it is. To suggest thatthe ancients chose to eat food that wasrank and rotten is to misunderstandcompletely the nature of the ingredientsand how they interact. Such misunder-standings play havoc with literary appre-ciation of the texts, too.

Wilkins goes even further in hisstudy The Boastful Chef (2000) andrejects the idea that New Comedy’sdepiction of the growing interest in gas-tronomy among Athenians need haveany link with what they were actuallyeating. It is a literary study, not anexploration of culinary practice in

12

WHAT’S COOKING? NEW (AND OLD) IN ANCIENT FOOD STUDIES by Christopher Grocock and Sally Grainger

Fig. 13. Christopher Grocock in hisRoman persona with a portable cookinghob at the Roman site of Corbridge onHadrian’s Wall,1999. On the hob is areplica testum (“portable oven”) that isbeing heated by charcoal.

ancient Athens. (We might expectsomething more definitive as far as actu-al foodstuffs are concerned in his forth-coming Food in the Ancient World [withShaun Hill, June 2005]). As notedabove, Emily Gowers, who also followsa non-cognitive approach, considersculinary references in Roman Satire tobe superficial, primarily fulfilling ametaphorical and symbolic function.

Scholars following a cognitiveapproach, on the other hand, argue thatreferences to food in satirical literaturecorrespond to some actual culinary facts.Andrew Dalby has written extensivelyon ancient cooking and society, largelywith a Hellenistic slant, in the last fewyears. Dalby’s first book, Siren Feasts(1996), traces the tradition of Greek cui-sine from its earliest prehistoric originsto the late Byzantine period. Dalbyassumes that when characters in fourthcentury B.C. comedy display an interestin gastronomy, they reflect the senti-ments of actual people in Athens at thattime: “Gastronomic opinions weresomething more than the whims of indi-vidual authors” (112).

Dalby’s invaluable handbook Food inthe Ancient World from A to Z (2003) hasentries not only on the food and drinkbut also on the aromas of archaic andclassical Greece, of the HellenisticGreek states, and of the RomanEmpire. His other books cover a widerange of culinary topics. DangerousTastes: The Story of Spices (2000) beginsin the ancient world and traces the storyof spices to the present day. Flavours ofByzantium (2003) is invaluable for itsinsights into the Eastern RomanEmpire and the ways in which Romanfood evolved, with the addition of Arabinfluences, into medieval food. Empireof Pleasures: Luxury and Indulgence in theRoman World (2000) concerns not justfood but all aspects of manufacture andfarming in the form of a gazetteer. Itcombines the pace and scope of a narra-tive with the versatility of a referencetext, thanks to its place-by-place organi-zation. Empire of Pleasures also goesbeyond the Roman Empire and offersan equally well-documented account offood production in Africa, along thetrade routes beyond Egypt, and even inChina and India.

Also cognitive in its approach is PhyllisPray Bober’s Art, Culture, and Cuisine:Ancient and Medieval Gastronomy (1999),which is a vast survey of gastronomy thatgives Greece and Rome due prominence.She produces a comprehensive account ofRoman dining and eating using evidencefrom both archaeology and literature, with

Bill Neal. Gardener’s Latin: A Lexicon.Algonquin Books (http://www.algonquin.com), 1992. Pp. viii, 136.Numerous illustrations. Hardcover $14.95.ISBN 0-945575-94-7.

Bill Neal’s posthumously published Gar-dener’s Latin: A Lexicon is a sprightly

little book that will inform and delight awide variety of readers. Organized aroundan alphabetically arranged listing of overtwo thousand Latin species designations, ittakes the reader on a scientific, historical,and cultural journey through descriptivebotanical terminology. The work’s intendedaudience is first and foremost the amateurgardening community; but despite somelimitations and oversights, it provides any-one interested in plants and their names afertile source of information.

In the introduction (iii-viii), garden writerBarbara Damrosch effectively recounts thedevelopment of the Linnaean system ofbinomial nomenclature. She makes a solidcase for using proper botanical Latin inmodern horticultural applications. Her lucidbut light-hearted explanations serve as a fit-ting prelude to Neal’s listing of the individ-ual species designations. That treatment,ranging from abbreviatus to zonalis, zonatus,is simple, direct, and eminently useful. Mostof the species names are given in the adjec-tival nominative singular masculine form.Less often, entries exhibit alternatives to thatpattern. Accents are added to each entryfor help in basic pronunciation. Thestraightforward English translations are asliteral and brief as accuracy permits.

Even for those with no knowledge of Latin,the book’s simple alphabetical arrangementcan lead to a ready awareness of the basicmeaning of Latin words. Thus, under the letterB, thirteen names begin with the same com-bining form brevi- (“short”), including, forexample, such terms as brevicaulis (“short-stemmed”) and brevirostris (“short-beaked”).Likewise, recognizing how new speciesnames are formed in combination with oneanother can help the reader understand thenaming process itself. For instance, the termsfolius (“leaved”) and florus (“flowered”) arefrequently combined with another descriptiveterm, as in brevi-folius (“short-leaved”), to form

another species designation. In fact, simplyby paging through the species listings ran-domly, the casual reader may easily learn,through repeated exposure, some basic Latinvocabulary.

Yet the work comprises more than botan-ical definitions. While the multitude ofentries alone would make Gardener’s Latina handy reference tool, the basic listing ofspecies names itself is enhanced andenriched on almost every page by an arrayof charming images. Moreover, a randomglance at the page margins rewards thereader with an engaging potpourri of prac-tical gardening information, curious folkbelief, historical anecdotes, and quotes andanecdotes drawn from a variety of writersboth ancient and modern.

The combination of these two featuresadds an expansive quality to the book. Con-sider the material accompanying the speciesdesignation euphorbioides (“resembling thespurges, Euphorbia”). Here the reader istreated to an attractive line drawing of aspurge plant, to the English herbalistCulpeper’s instructions for using the plant toremove warts, to Neal’s own comments on itsmedicinal qualities, and to a quote from Plinythe Elder explaining that the genus name hon-ors Euphorbus, the physician to King Juba. Inaddition to other bits of classical information,among its pages can be found references tomyth, history, science and medicine, and liter-ature with quotes from Homer, Vergil, andShakespeare, among others.

Despite this far-ranging richness, howev-er, the attentive reader should be wary of afew weedy tangles that Neal has allowedto crop up here and there. Noteworthyamong these is that an entire sidebardescription (as in euphorbioides above)may be devoted to one botanical genuseven though genus names are not properlypart of the work’s main listing. This tenden-cy, though nicely sprucing up an otherwiseunadorned list of technical terms, may atfirst seem slightly out of character for awork devoted primarily to a straightforwardenumeration of species names.

There are also some surprising omis-sions. Several common Latin and Greeknames for ordinary plants used as modern

Book Review: Gardener’s Latin: A Lexicon by John M. McMahon

13continued on page 14continued on page 14

a discussion of key recipes from Apicius,and also gives a sound defence of thatbook against the all-too-common chargeof “over-seasoning.”

Around the Roman Table (trans. ShaunWhiteside, 2003) by Patrick Faas is acomprehensive account of Roman foodand dining from a very practical view-point, covering the history of gastronomyin Rome, dining etiquette, the meal andthe menu, and serving dishes and kitchenequipment. He covers flavors and basicingredients and also gives numerousredacted recipes based on originals.

Underpinning the cognitive approachthat we prefer are studies in economicsand archaeology. P. Garnsey’s Food andSociety in Classical Antiquity (1999) dis-cusses food availability, using evidencefrom archaeology in Italy and a widerEuropean context to good effect andfocusing on bone and dental health as aguide to nutritional outcomes. Thebook’s second half explores the social,religious, and cultural functions of foodand its metaphorical use, dependingmore on symbolic and structuralistapproaches. Joan P. Alcock’s Food inRoman Britain (2001) draws on archaeol-ogy from Britain; her observations arecorroborated by literary sources fromItaly. Food in Antiquity (ed. J. Wilkins,D. Harvey, and M. Dobson [1995]) is acollection of essays that provide someremarkable and penetrating insightsinto food staples, their social and reli-gious context, and a wider explorationof foodways in the Ancient Near Eastand Britain, as well as in the Greco-Roman world.

Two very important reference worksmerit mention as well. The CambridgeWorld History of Food (ed. K. F. Kipleand K. C. Ornelas, 2000) contains 2,153pages and uses the work of a diverserange of historians, anthropologists, andscientists from the United States. Thisbook, which began its life as a history offood and nutrition, is very wellresearched from a scientific perspective.The Oxford Companion to Food (ed. AlanDavidson, 1999; revised ed. by TomJaine, forthcoming) is another excellentreference work. Since the sections con-cerning classical food are written byAndrew Dalby, the researcher may usethis volume with confidence.

No survey of Greco-Roman food stud-ies, however, is complete without a dis-cussion of garum. This is the name for a

type of fish sauce. Liquamen and muria arealso considered similar forms of fish sauce.These sauces were used, often in place ofsalt, as a seasoning in cooking in thekitchen as well as at table. Roman poetsoften talk of stinking garum: Horacedescribes muria with a powerful odor inSat. 2.4.66, and Pliny the Elder actuallydescribes garum as the liquor from putre-faction, though we must not take this tooliterally (Pliny, HN 31.93). Garum couldbe made from salt and the intestines offreshly-caught fish, but it could also bemade from the flesh of fish and fromsmaller fish such as anchovy, with variousamounts of added intestines to speed upthe dissolving and fermenting process.When freshly made and well kept, thesefish sauces were not necessarily rotten;however, if they were exposed to the air,then the mixture would oxidize and give a“stale or off ” smell.

What went into Roman fish sauce is acomplex issue (the most detailedaccount of garum and liquamen is RobertI. Curtis, Garum and Salsamenta [1991]).Suffice it to say, though, its salt contentwas sufficiently high and the fish sofreshly caught that preservation ratherthan decay was the result. The sauce ofchoice in Apicius is not garum but liqua-men, and we cannot assume that thesesauces were the same at all timesdespite suggestions from ancientauthors that they were. Liquamen seemsto have been made largely from anchovyand corresponds to nuc nam, the South-east Asian fish sauce; nuc nam has a com-plex flavor-enhancing quality that is par-ticularly successful in redacted recipesusing sweet and sour ingredients such ashoney and sour wine and also with thecomplex spice mixtures that are typical

WHAT’S COOKING? NEW (AND OLD) IN ANCIENT FOOD STUDIES continued from page 13

14

species designations are absent: cepa(“onion”) as in Allium cepa and faba(“bean”) as in Vicia faba, to mention justtwo. A lack of pronunciation guidelinesbeyond the simple accentuation includedwith each entry may leave some Latinlessreaders at a loss. Confusion may also arisefor some because of an occasional lack ofconsistency in giving adjectival genderforms. As for additional references, oneshould add to Neal’s helpful bibliographyRobert Shosteck’s Flowers and Plants: AnInternational Lexicon with BiographicalNotes (1974), a more comprehensive butsimilarly accessible treatment of both com-mon and Linnaean plant names.

Lastly, it would be remiss not to mentionone glaring factual error in the book thatresonates in the larger realm of Roman his-tory. The entry capricornis (“like a goat’shorn; of or from or from below the Tropic ofCapricorn”) is accompanied by the patentlyfalse statement that “the constellation ofCapricorn is visible only in the SouthernHemisphere.” Having adopted the constel-lation as his own personal birth symbol,surely the emperor Augustus would havehad some reservations about that claim.

Despite any shortcomings, though, Gar-dener’s Latin deserves a place on the refer-ence shelf within ready reach. Educators, infact, might even consider its use as avocabulary building tool for students in thebiological sciences. Anyone else leafingthrough its pages is sure to reap a rich har-vest from Neal’s pleasant foray into theworld of botanical nomenclature.

John M. McMahon (mcmahon@lemoyne.edu) received his Ph.D. in ClassicalStudies from the University of Pennsylvania(1993) and is Associate Professor of Clas-sics at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, NewYork where he directs the classics program.An avid amateur naturalist since childhood,his scholarly activities include research andwriting on natural history, folklore, and med-icine in classical literature. He also serves inlocal town government and has long beenan advocate for environmental responsibilityand sustainable development.

Book Review: Gardener’sLatin: A Lexicon continued from page 13

Fig 14. Sally Grainger in her Romanpersona at the Roman site of Corbridgeon Hadrian’s Wall, 2001, with someyoung visitors.

of Roman sauces. But scholarly approaches aside, what

is also of great interest to classicists andcooks alike is reproducing Romanrecipes in the modern kitchen. Thereare a great number of modern recipebooks containing redacted ancientrecipes. We would obviously recom-mend The Classical Cook Book (1996) bySally Grainger and Andrew Dalby: SallyGrainger has selected recipes that areeasy to reproduce and reflect the diversi-ty of foods and tastes available. A Taste ofthe Ancient World (1992) by Ilaria Giacosaalso has excellent recipes correspondingclosely to the originals. She is able tolink the ancient recipes closely to hernative Italian cuisine, which gives newinsights into the originals. Roman Cook-ery: Ancient Recipes for a Modern Kitchen(1999) by Mark Grant gathers up practi-cally every usable recipe from theancient world not found in Apicius, cov-ering nearly 1,000 years of developingculinary history and drawing on a vastarray of literature. In themselves, theserecipes are not distinctive or unified, butGrant argues that they share a “lowerstatus” as everyday and ordinary food, asopposed to the recipes in Apicius, whichmany define as catering to “high status”eaters. His premise is false: both therecipes that are found in Cato, Columel-la, Galen, Pliny, Anthimus, and the vastarray of foodstuffs described in NewComedy preserved in Athenaeus canhardly have unity or represent “vulgar”society in contrast to the food in Apicius.This conclusion has also led Grant erro-neously to define garum and fish saucegenerally as a high-status product notconsumed by the general populace.Archaeological evidence alone points towidespread consumption of all the fish-sauce products. Quality is another mat-ter, however: high-status garum was rela-tively expensive compared with the fishsauces made with unselected fish prod-ucts.

We have applied our various skills(one of us is a Latinist specializing inthe late and medieval periods, the othera former professional chef turned foodhistorian) to an edition of Apicius (forth-coming, 2006). The work has takenmany years of research and what canonly be described as “field trials.” Wehave experimented with the recipesusing replica equipment, making use ofexperimental archaeology in a con-trolled environment and also cookingfor large audiences of tasters who haveconfirmed (or rejected!) our offerings(see Figs. 13 and 14). This iterativeprocess has allowed us to understand

the techniques involved in Romancooking generally, and in turn, this hasinformed our translation.

We fully acknowledge that to turnthe recipes in Apicius into successfuldishes is a tricky business. There arefew quantities provided, and judgingthe amount of each ingredient requiredis a skill that takes time to acquire.Roman sauces have been condemnedfor their “contrasting and self-defeat-ing” use of numerous spices and herbsin the same sauce (Bober, 156). But byactually comparing the average Apiciansauce with any recipe from the Asiansubcontinent, one finds that the cookswho wrote the recipes in Apicius areoften rather sparing in their use ofspices. In any complex blend of spicesand liquids, a balance is necessary toensure that the resulting sauce is notdiscordant: sour, sweet, bitter, and salt –all must be in harmony with the spices.The Latin term temperare, “to temper”or “balance the flavors,” is a frequentinstruction in the Apician recipes, and itis the secret of any good sauce.

As an example of how these issuesmay be addressed, here is a translation ofa recipe from Apicius for Ostian ofellae,taken from our forthcoming edition ofthe text, with an adaptation for modernuse. Ofellae are highly seasoned marinat-ed meat pieces, in this case belly pork,that may be served as a gustum (starter).

Translation of Apicius 7.4.1

Ostian ofellae: mark out the ofellaepieces on the skin, leaving the skinuncut. Pound pepper, lovage, dillseed, cumin, silphium, one bay berry;pour on liquamen, pound again. Pourinto the roasting dish with the ofellae.When it has marinated for two tothree days, lay it out and tie it up in across-shape and put it in the oven.When you have cooked it, separatethe ofellae which you have marked out,and then pound pepper, lovage, pouron liquamen and a little passum so thatit becomes sweet. When it is simmer-ing, thicken the sauce with starch,smother the ofellae and serve.

Adaptation for Modern Use

2 lb belly pork (in strips or as a wholepiece)½ teaspoon peppercorns ½ teaspoon lovage seed1 teaspoon dill seed1 teaspoon cumin 1 good pinch asafoetida powder1 laurel berry (from a bay leaf bush,not flowering laurel which ispoisonous!)2 tablespoons fish sauce (use nuc namor nam pla)

Roast and grind all the spices to a finepowder. Cut the strips of belly porkinto dice, or if you have the pork inone piece, cut through the meat whilekeeping the skin intact as above. Mixthe spices with the fish sauce and rubit thoroughly into the pork meat.Refrigerate for 3 days. Tie up thewhole joint as a parcel with the fat onthe inside. Roast the meat well so thatit is crisp. Cut or pull off the individ-ual pieces of cooked meat and servewith the sauce below.

Grind 6 peppercorns with ¼ teaspoonroasted lovage seed. Add to ½ pint sweetwine (such as Muscat de Rivesaltes)and ¼ pint fish sauce. Bring to the boiland thicken with starch such as arrow-root or corn flour. Pour over the freshlyroasted meat and serve.

Sally Grainger (sallygrain@aol.com) is achef and food historian who lives in Englandin a small Surrey village with her husbandDr. Christopher Grocock, a teacher ofLatin and ancient history in a local school.

15

(ISSN 1542-2380) is publishedtwice a year by the American

Philological Association (APA). The APA, founded in1869 by “professors, friends, and patrons of linguisticscience,” is now the principal learned society inNorth America for the study of ancient Greek andRoman languages, literatures, and civilizations.While the majority of its members are university andcollege classics teachers, members also includescholars in other disciplines, primary and secondaryschool teachers, and interested lay people. The APAproduces several series of scholarly books and textsand the journal Transactions of the American Philologi-cal Association. An annual meeting is held each Janu-ary in conjunction with the Archaeological Instituteof America.

All of the APA’s programs are grounded in the rigorand high standards of traditional philology, with thestudy of ancient Greek and Latin at their core. Howev-er, the APA also aims to present a broad view of classi-cal culture and the ancient Mediterranean world to awide audience. In short, the APA seeks to preserve andtransmit the wisdom and values of classical culture andto find new meanings appropriate to the complex anduncertain world of the twenty-first century.

The APA’s activities serve one or more of theseoverarching goals:

• To ensure an adequate number of well-trained, inspirational classics teachers at all levels,kindergarten through graduate school;

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The APA welcomes everyone who shares thisvision to participate in and support its programs. AllAPA members receive Amphora automatically as abenefit of membership. Non-members who wish toreceive Amphora on a regular basis or who wish fur-ther information about the APA may write to TheAmerican Philological Association at 292 Logan Hall,University of Pennsylvania, 249 S. 36th Street,Philadelphia, PA 19104-6304, or at the e-mailaddress: apaclassics@sas.upenn.edu. The APA Website is at www.apaclassics.org.

Members are urged to pass this copy of Amphoraon to non-members and to request additional copiesof Amphora from the APA office.

®

Stephen Bertman. Climbing Olympus:What You Can Learn From Greek Mythand Wisdom. Sourcebooks, Inc.(http://www.sourcebooks.com), 2003. Pp.230. Paperback $14.95. ISBN 1-57071-929-2.

C limbing Olympus is a self-help bookfounded upon the values of ancient

Greece. Stephen Bertman, who holds aPh.D. in Greek and Latin literature fromColumbia University, uses life-forming prin-ciples culled from Greek history, philoso-phy, and mythology to show how theancient Greeks can serve as a model for afull and satisfying life in the modern world.He challenges his readers to think of theancient Greeks not as kindred souls but asaliens from another world who were guid-ed in their living by principles radically dif-ferent from those used today. Writing notso much for the classical scholar or Hel-lenophile as for the reader to whom theworld of ancient Greece is a foreign experi-ence, Bertman draws this reader into theclimb toward Olympus by good storytellingaccompanied by the promise of usefulguides for everyday life. While many ofBertman’s models, like Achilles andUlysses, would be labeled as privilegedmales today, others, like Athena, Penelope,and Psyche, offer a more diverse perspec-tive for the modern reader.

Bertman’s Olympus stands on eight pil-lars of ancient Greek wisdom. The first ofthese is “Humanism,” which Bertmanexplains by telling the stories of the choicesof Achilles and of Ulysses (the Roman namethat Bertman prefers to the Greek “Odysseus”).Achilles chose a short but famous life overa long life in obscurity. The vulnerable heelby which he died at Troy is, for Bertman, asymbol of the essential fragility of humanity.Similarly, Ulysses’ decision to reject animmortal existence with the goddess Calyp-so to return to his beloved Penelope andinevitable death in Ithaca was an affirma-tion of humanity, despite its frailty and vul-nerability.

The second pillar is “Pursuit of Excel-lence,” which Bertman aptly presents in thecontext of the heroic code of Homeric war-

riors like Glaucus and Hector and the artis-tic ideal portrayed in the sculpture of thediscus thrower by Myron. At the same time,the myths of Niobe, Arachne, andAgamemnon serve as warnings to humansabout the dangers of arrogance, of pursu-ing excellence inappropriate to humanism.

“Practice of Moderation” is, therefore,the third pillar of Greek wisdom. The Greekemphasis on the golden mean, on modera-tion, Bertman suggests, can be seen in thevery structure of the Greek language withits balanced periods marked by the parti-cles men and de and with its fondness forsymmetry and ring-composition. At thesame time, he offers a series of admonitorymyths in which humans are destroyed byimmoderation: Icarus, who flew too close tothe sun; Hippolytus, whose extreme chastityled to punishment at the hands of Aphrodite,goddess of love; and the excessive angerof Agamemnon and Achilles at the begin-ning of the Iliad.

In order to achieve the appropriate bal-ance between excellence and moderation,a person needs “Self-Knowledge,” Bert-man’s fourth pillar of wisdom. Here, ofcourse, he focuses on Apollo’s shrine atDelphi where the words “Know Yourself”were inscribed on the temple facade andwhere the Greek hero Oedipus failed torecognize the truth of the fatal oracle givento him by the god. Oedipus’ downfall washis arrogant pride in his intellectual excel-lence, the intelligence by which he solvedthe riddle of the Sphinx. Yet this same rid-dle-solver failed to know himself, killed hisown father, and married his mother. Bert-man also cites Plato’s “Allegory of theCave” and the story of Ulysses in the caveof the Cyclops as examples of the humanstruggle in search of self-knowledge.

As the divine embodiment of “Rational-ism,” the fifth pillar of wisdom, Bertmanappropriately chooses Athena, the Greekgoddess of wisdom. On the human level,Bertman seeks models of rationalism in thecrafty weaving of Penelope, Ulysses’ wife,and in the skilled workmanship of Daedalus,the builder of the Cretan labyrinth. Forexamples of irrationality, Bertman suggeststhe Centaurs fighting the Lapiths, the wrath

of Achilles in the Iliad, the obstinacy ofboth Antigone and Creon, the barbarousacts of Medea, and even the hubristic actsof Pericles and his fellow fifth-century Athe-nians.

With the aid of rationalism one canmove to “Restless Curiosity,” the sixth pillarof wisdom. As persistent seekers of suchwisdom, Bertman suggests Ulysses deter-mined to hear the beautiful but fatal song ofthe Sirens, Psyche desirous to know theidentity of her mysterious husband, and thephilosopher Socrates, whose relentlessquest for knowledge eventually led to hisexecution in 399 B.C.

The seventh pillar is “Love of Freedom.”Bertman offers the myth of Menelaus’ strug-gle with Proteus as a metaphor for thehuman struggle to achieve freedom. Healso sees this theme in the Greek war ofresistance against Persian servitude, in thegrowth of Athenian democracy, and evenin the release of Persephone from theUnderworld. Freedom from death, howev-er, is more problematic, as illustrated bythe myths of both Alcestis and Orpheus andEurydice.

The last pillar is “Individualism.” Bert-man sees the Greek celebration of the indi-vidual in the many hero cults of Greekmythology, which include stories such asJason’s quest for the Golden Fleece and thelegends surrounding Alexander the Great.The story of the Lotus-Eaters in the Odysseyillustrates the disadvantages of lost individu-ality, while the myth of Narcissus is a warn-ing against extreme individuality or self-absorption.

Bertman concludes his construction ofthe Greek temple of wisdom with a cautionabout obstacles that may inhibit the effortsof the modern reader. These include thelure of technology, affluence, and thespeed of travel and communication, all ofwhich, for Bertman, encourage a falsesense of security, factual knowledge, andexperience rather than true wisdom andself-knowledge. Bertman remains cautiouslyhopeful that, despite such impediments,future human beings may be able to recre-ate a Golden Age founded on these eightpillars of Greek wisdom.

In an addendum to this climb, Bertmanalso considers some of the wisdom offeredby the ancient cultures of Rome, Israel,

Book Review: Climbing Olympus: What You CanLearn From Greek Myth and Wisdomby Thomas J. Sienkewicz

16continued on page 18

Many readers of Amphora willremember both the highlyinteresting account by Ourania

Molyviati of her climb up Mount Olym-pos (Amphora, issue 2.1) and JaniceSiegel’s account of her own climb(Amphora, issue 2.2), which became thefoundation of the large collection ofWeb pages on her site, Dr. J’s IllustratedGuide to the Classical World. The follow-ing is a small sequel to those twoOlympian tales.

I was driving north from Athens on asummer day in the 1960’s on my way tothe Vatopedi Monastery on MountAthos. My intent was to investigate amedieval manuscript of Euripideanquotations (a gnomologion) in the Vato-pedi library. I passed a road sign saying“Litokhoron” (in Greek) and remem-bered having read in the Guide Bleu ofGreece that Litokhoron was the townfrom which climbs up Mount Olymposgenerally began. Since I did not have aspecific appointment at the Vatopedilibrary and since, as I thought, I mightnot pass this way again, I decided tostop and see what the possibilities wereof making the climb. As it happened, inLitokhoron, I came upon two youngAmericans who were about to start ontheir way up Olympos. They had hireda guide with a baggage mule to accom-pany them through the valley of Prioniup to the shelter of Spilios Agapitos.There they planned to spend the nightand, the next morning, make the ascentto the top of Olympos with the officialmountain guide. I asked if I could tagalong with them, and they replied thatthey had no objection. And so we start-ed.

We hiked our way in leisurely fash-ion from Litokhoron through the lovelyvalley of Prioni alongside a smallstream. To avoid the mid-afternoonscorching heat, we took a long siesta inthe welcome shade of some trees andthen resumed our hike towards the endof the afternoon. By early evening, afteran upward climb of several miles, wereached the Spilios Agapitos shelter,which had living quarters for the localguide Costas Zolotas and his wife andsleeping accommodations for sixty hik-ers. We had a hearty supper and thenwent early to bed in anticipation oftomorrow’s more strenuous climb.

After an early breakfast, we startedupwards. I remember the path being

fairly steep and rigorous, but nothingdangerous. We reached the highestpeak of Homer’s “many-peaked Olym-pos,” Mytikas (around 9,000 feet),around 10 a.m., after two hours of steadyclimbing (see Fig. 15). The view fromthe top was literally like that enjoyed bythe gods. I could imagine Zeus standingon the highest summit of the then-known world, gazing not only at theother surrounding high peaks such asStefani and Profitis Ilias but also peeringout across the flashing blue of theAegean and, on a clear day, all the wayto Troy. The imagination runs wild. Myonly disappointment was in not findingany trace of the throne of Zeus.

Reluctantly, we started our descentfrom this awe-inspiring site with many abackward glance. Our plan was to stopbriefly at the Spilios Agapitos shelter fora light lunch and then to make our wayunguided back to Litokhoron, aiming toarrive before dark. Here is where Ibegan to have problems. Several weeksearlier, I had taken a swim at Nauplionand had accidentally stepped on a seaurchin, a small creature with sharpspines protruding from its back, one ofwhich pierced the sole of my right foot.I immediately pulled the spine out, andalthough there was some discomfort inthe following days, I thought that thiswould stop as the puncture healed. Iwas wrong. As I later discovered, the tipof the spine was still lodged in the soleof my foot, and the constant pressure onmy foot during the hike graduallyturned mild discomfort into constantpain. As the descent continued, I foundthat I had to walk more and more slow-ly. At first I could keep the two Ameri-cans in sight. Then I could keep them

within hailing distance. But finally sightand sound disappeared. I continued onthe path as quickly as the pain wouldallow, meeting no one. I tried to walkfaster but soon realized that I would notmake it back to Litokhoron before dark.Daylight disappeared, and I could nolonger see or find the path. When I triedto advance, I would crash into trees andbushes. Ironically, I could see, far in thedistance, the lights in Litokhoron, butto my frustration, I was unable to getfrom here to there. I wondered whatwas the best way for me to pass theincreasingly cool night on the slopes ofOlympos. (There was not even a wildolive bush for me to crawl under asOdysseus had done when he finallyemerged on the shore of Scheria, land ofthe Phaiakians.)

As I stood there wondering, I heard afaint noise about ten yards away. Thensilence. I cautiously advanced in thedirection of the noise and then heard itagain. I stopped; the noise stopped.Something strange was going on. Afterfour or five repetitions of this cat-and-mouse game, I caught a glance of a crea-ture ahead of me and saw that it was amule. I looked at him, he looked at me,and apparently we both decided thatneither of us was dangerous for theother. I now moved more hopefully inhis direction while he advanced, keep-ing the same distance ahead of me. Isuddenly realized that he was knowing-ly and confidently proceeding along thelost downward path toward Litokhoron!With suspended disbelief, I followedhim for two long hours down this pathuntil we reached the main road wherethe nearby lights of Litokhoron lightedmy way to salvation. At this point themule simply vanished. I am convincedthat this mule was Hermes, god of way-farers, in disguise. At Litokhoron, Imade the appropriate libation.

Stephen G. Daitz is Professor Emeritus ofClassics at the City University of New York.After the ascent of Olympos, he was inspiredto do complete recordings of the Iliad and theOdyssey in the restored historical pronunci-ation of ancient Greek. His e-mail issgdaitz@aol.com. (He does not have Hermes’e-mail address.)

AN ADVENTURE ON MOUNT OLYMPOSby Stephen G. Daitz

Fig. 15. Mytikas, the highest of the eightpeaks of Mount Olympos. Photo credit:Janice Siegel (http://lilt.ilstu.edu/drjclassics/sites/olympos/mytikasBIG.htm).

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notion that the ancient Greeks prizedheight in both men and women andassociated it with divinity. Both thegoddesses Aphrodite and Demeter aredescribed as tall in their respectiveHomeric Hymns since their heads hit theceiling of the rooms they occupy (Hymnto Aphrodite, 173-74; Hymn to Demeter,188-89). Centuries after Homer, theGreek historian Herodotus relates a taleabout the tall peasant girl Phye, whowas employed by Peisistratus to portraythe goddess Athena as she rode in achariot to proclaim the return of thetyrant from exile (The Persian Wars 1.60).

As for Helen’s age, she herself saysduring her lament for the slain Hector atthe end of the Iliad: “This is now thetwentieth year since I went away andleft my home” (Iliad 24.765-66). Even ifone allows for exaggeration on Helen’spart as well as for the narrative device ofcollapsing “mythological time” over theintervening years, if she had beenaround twenty when Paris came to Spar-ta, after ten years of war Helen wouldhave to be at least thirty years old bythe time the wooden horse rolled intoTroy. There was also a tradition inarchaic Greek poetry that Helen left adaughter behind in Sparta when sheeloped with Paris (see Sappho, fragment16). Since David Benioff’s script startsthe story with the couple’s fateful meet-ing in Sparta and since the actionextends over a few brief months, endingwith the death of Achilles, Petersenseems to have telescoped Helen’s age,focusing on the ideal mythic momentwhen she fell in love with Paris andescaped with him to Troy. In the film,Helen tells Paris that she was sixteenwhen her parents married her off toMenelaus. Petersen thus puts her in herlate teens or early twenties by the timethe Greeks arrived at Troy, which fitsthe very young-looking Kruger.

All the same, by deciding to matchhis girlish Helen to his adolescent heart-throb Paris, Petersen missed an oppor-tunity to create a provocative story arcby pairing an older, wiser, more experi-enced Helen with a younger, hotheadedParis. The epic Helen expresses bothregrets and guilty self-awareness of herrole as the casus belli when she is inTroy, telling Priam and the Trojan eld-ers on the wall that she wished she haddied before she left her home (Iliad3.170); later, in their boudoir, Helen dis-

plays anger and disgust towards herwayward lover but cannot resist hisoverwhelming sexual allure (Iliad 3.421-47). When the cinematic Helen tellsParis during an early rendezvous inSparta, “Last night was a mistake . . .I’ve made many mistakes this week,” itis hard to reconcile this world-wearycomment with the sexual avidity of ayoung woman just a few nights afterAphrodite brought her together with hernew lover.

Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy offers manyvisual and aural thrills, but the film’spresentation of Helen falls short of satis-factory. It would perhaps be unfair to cri-tique the film for its intense, and gener-ally successful, focus on the martialtheme of the Iliad, where the charactersof the women are simply not as richlydeveloped as those of the male warriors.Indeed, the movie Troy was produced inthe context of a modern film industrythat celebrates the exploits of machomale action heroes, where female char-acters (when they appear at all) tend tobe less fully defined. Petersen’s ownbody of work, moreover, suggests hisdirectorial interest in the trials of mas-culinity. Above all, it would be impossi-ble to cast Helen in such a way that sat-isfies most people, especially classicists.Still, it would have made more commer-cial and artistic sense to cast a high-wattage and easily-recognized celebrityin the role, just as Pitt was cast asAchilles, in order to evoke the superstarquality of Helen, her quasi-divinity, herauthority as a symbol of beauty, and herultimate inaccessibility.

Monica Silveira Cyrino is Associate Pro-fessor of Classics at the University of NewMexico in Albuquerque. She teaches and pub-lishes regularly on classics, film, and popu-lar culture and has appeared as a commen-tator on The History Channel. Her nextbook, Big Screen Rome, surveys severalmovies set in Roman antiquity and will bepublished by Blackwell in December 2005.She welcomes comments and questions atpandora@unm.edu.

18

SHE’LL ALWAYS HAVE PARIS: HELEN IN WOLFGANG PETERSEN’S TROYcontinued from page 11

Egypt, and Mesopotamia. The climb to Olympus that Bertman

offers in this little book is well worth theeffort for both the general reader and theprofessional classicist. The former will findan excellent introduction to the wisdom ofancient Greece. The latter will be remindedof the many reasons why the study of theclassics is so attractive to and rewardingfor serious scholars.

Thomas J. Sienkewicz (toms@monm.edu) is the Minnie Billings Capron Profes-sor of Classics at Monmouth College in Illi-nois. He served as Chair of the Committeefor the Promotion of Latin for the ClassicalAssociation of the Middle West and Southfrom 1997 through 2003. He is Vice-chairof the National Committee for Latin andGreek and is one of the founders ofNational Latin Teacher Recruitment Week.He was recently elected Vice-president ofthe American Classical League and, withLeaAnn A. Osburn, is author of Vergil: ALEGAMUS Transitional Reader (2004).

Book Review: ClimbingOlympus: What You CanLearn From Greek Mythand Wisdomcontinued from page 16

Coming in FutureIssues of Amphora

Papyrological Triage: Saving the Most Desperate at Oxyrhynchus andHerculaneum

What’s New at Pompeii

Classics and the U. S. Presidency

A Day in the Life of a ClassicsLibrarian

Ancient Plagues

The Importance of Parents in aClassical Education

Novel Approaches to the Classics III

Oral Latin

African-Americans and Classics

Naming Children in Ancient Greece

not always the winner of the contest;any student who has learned a greatdeal about English from preparing for aspelling bee has profited more from theprocess of preparation than he or shecould have possibly profited from plac-ing first. The diversity among the con-testants rated notice too, as did the dif-ferent types of parental, school, andcommunity involvement that contributeto the success of the competition. Itoften takes the proverbial village to pro-duce a spelling champion.

One benefit of the Bee, not articulat-ed in these interviews, but obvious toclassicists, is that by heightening aware-ness of Greek and Latin “word power”among middle school students, teach-ers, and parents, the Bee promotes thestudy of classical languages, particularlyLatin. During the CAAS luncheon ses-sion at which Bailly spoke, another 1999Bee finalist who appears in Spellbound,April DeGideo – now a student at NewYork University – delivered a tribute inLatin to Mimi Bender, with whom shebegan to study Latin at Mount St.Joseph Academy in Flourtown, Penn-sylvania in the fall of 1999, after andbecause of her stellar performance inthe Scripps National Spelling Bee (seeFig. 16). April’s parents, memorablyinterviewed in the film and stronglysupportive of her four years of studyingLatin, were also there to support her inher Latin speaking debut and to honorher teacher.

In his CAAS presentation, Baillyurged classicists to get involved as vol-unteers in the local qualifying competi-tions sponsored by Scripps newspaperchains and thereby offer further encour-agement for Latin (and eventuallyGreek) language study to the participat-ing spellers and their families. Classi-cists are particularly suited to suchinvolvement because of their expertisein Latin, the “key” parent language ofBee vocabulary, as well as in Greek. So,too, their training requires familiaritywith the modern languages that haveexercised the greatest influence on con-temporary English: French, German,Italian, and Spanish. Indeed, no otherprofession offers its practitioners thesame “skill set,” one needed at manycompetitions. Classicists also know howto use a dictionary correctly, to interpretwhat its entries say and do not say, aspecial skill possessed by very few.

A list of the eighty-five sponsoringnewspapers – which serve English-speaking populations in the Bahamas,Europe, Jamaica, Saudi Arabia, and theU. S. (including Guam, Puerto Rico, andthe U. S. Virgin Islands) – appears at theend of the 2004 Bee Week Guide. TheGuide’s biographies of the 2004 finalistspellers sponsored by each newspaperwould suggest that classicists are alreadyhaving an impact on what these youngpeople study, both in and out of school.They state that the Des Moines Register’sMatthias Gassman “has studied Latinand Greek and is a member of a classicshonor society”; that Grant Remmen,from the Fergus Falls (Minnesota) DailyJournal, “earned perfect scores on theNational Latin Exam and the NationalMythology Exam”; and that CharlotteBlacklock, from the Times Herald Recordin Middletown, New York, takes part in“a great books tutorial involving thereading, study and culture of ancientGreece.”

For the record, the Bee Week Guide,relying on the authority of Webster’s Dic-tionary, defines the “bee” in “spellingbee” as a collaborative rather than acompetitive venture: “a communitysocial gathering at which friends andneighbors join together in a single activ-ity (sewing, quilting, barn raising, etc.),usually to help one person or family.” Italso suggests that the word in this sensederives from Middle English bene,which means a “prayer” or “favor.”Cognate with “boon,” bene was used inpre-industrial England for “voluntaryhelp given by neighbors toward theaccomplishment of a particular task.”The Guide adds that recent scholarshave rejected any connection between“bee” in this sense and the insect or the

“industrious, social nature of a bee-hive.”

The Guide does not suggest anyGreek or Roman etymological parent-age for “bee” in this sense, either. As afeminist classicist, aware of the associa-tions made between bees and praise-worthy women by Phocylides,Semonides, and Xenophon, I was hop-ing to discover a classical link of thissort. The best connection that I couldascertain between this type of “bee”and industrious, communally-mindedwomen is that forty-two of the seventy-nine champions (53%) since 1925 havebeen girls. And, with the exception ofthe three girls who won with “knack,”“schappe,” and “chihuahua” in 1932,1957, and 1967 respectively, all of thesefemale spelling champions owe theirvictories to words of classical derivation.

Judith P. Hallett (jeph@umd.edu) isProfessor of Classics at the University ofMaryland, College Park, and a member ofthe Amphora Editorial Board.

CLASSICS AND THE 77TH ANNUAL SCRIPPS NATIONAL SPELLING BEE continued from page 5

19

Fig. 16. Speller April DeGideo at the72nd Annual Scripps National SpellingBee in 1999, from the film Spellbound(ThinkFilm, 2002). Photo courtesy ofDavid Fenkel.

AmphoraAmphora is named after theGreek and Roman storage vesselof the same name. Appealingly

anthropomorphic in form, with itsnarrow neck, rounded belly, and

tapered foot, this two-handled vesselserved to transport and distribute a varietyof useful and highly valued commodities allover the ancient world.

The symbol of the amphora captures thespirit of our publication. The two handles atthe neck of the amphora symbolize theGreek and Roman worlds. The base sym-bolizes our world today. One needs a firmgrip on both the top and bottom to releasethe contents. Just as an ancient amphoraheld many types of food – olive oil, wine,fruit, meat, and fish, for example – our pub-lication offers a wide range of articles onclassical antiquity, designed to nourish themind in a variety of ways. People from allwalks of life used amphoras. So, too, ourpublication is designed to be used by every-one with an interest in the classical past.

For articles on the amphora in theancient world, see Mark Lawall, “TheAmphora and Ancient Commerce,”Amphora, issue 1.1 (Spring 2002); andElizabeth Lyding Will, “From Italy to India:Mediterranean Amphoras and Roman Eco-nomic History,” Amphora, issue 2.2 (Fall2003). Electronic links to past issues ofAmphora may be found on the APA Website (www.apaclassics.org).

A Publication of theAmerican Philological

Association

Editor

Anne-Marie LewisYork Universityamlewis@yorku.ca

Editorial Board

Marty AbbottDirector of Education, American

Council on the Teaching of ForeignLanguages (ACTFL)

mabbott@actfl.org

Adam BlisteinExecutive Director, APA

blistein@sas.upenn.edu

Helene Foley Barnard College

hf45@columbia.edu

Mary-Kay GamelUniversity of California-Santa Cruz

mkgamel@ucsc.edu

Barbara GoldHamilton Collegebgold@hamilton.edu

Judith P. Hallett University of Maryland, College Park

jh10@umail.umd.edu jeph@umd.edu

Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow Brandeis University

aoko@brandeis.edu

Daniel Mendelsohndamendel@princeton.edu

Matthew S. Santirocco New York University

cyberdean@nyu.edu

Andrew Szegedy-Maszak Wesleyan University

aszegedymasz@wesleyan.edu

Susan Ford WiltshireVanderbilt University

susan.f.wiltshire@vanderbilt.edu

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Sponsorship: Amphora, a publicationsponsored by the Committee on Out-reach of the American PhilologicalAssociation, is published twice a year,in the spring and fall.

Readership: Amphora is intended for a wide readership that includes thosewith a strong enthusiasm for theclassical world: teachers and students,present and former classics majors,administrators in the field of education,community leaders, professionalclassicists, and interested academicsand professionals in other fields.

Submissions: Amphora welcomes sub-missions from professional scholars andexperts on topics dealing with theworlds of ancient Greece and Rome(literature, language, mythology, history,culture, classical tradition, and the arts).Submissions should not only reflectsound scholarship but also have wideappeal to Amphora’s diverse outreachaudience. Contributors should be will-ing to work with the editor to arrive at amutually acceptable final manuscriptthat is appropriate to the intendedaudience and reflects the intention ofAmphora to convey the excitement ofclassical studies.

Suggested Length of Submissions:Articles (1200-1800 words), reviews(500-1000 words).

Anonymous Refereeing: Submissionswill be refereed anonymously.

Footnotes: Amphora is footnote free.Any pertinent references should beworked into the text of the submission.

Addresses for Submissions:Submissions (and enquiries) may besent either by mail to the postal addressbelow or electronically to the e-mailaddress below:

Dr. Anne-Marie LewisEditor, AmphoraDepartment of Languages, Literatures,and LinguisticsRoss Building S 561York UniversityToronto, ON M3J 1P3 CANADAamlewis@yorku.ca

American Philological Association292 Logan Hall, University of Pennsylvania249 S. 36th StreetPhiladelphia, PA 19104-6304E-mail: apaclassics@sas.upenn.eduWeb site: www.apaclassics.org

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