Harvard University Press Blog

The (Re)Trial of Socrates

This Thursday, at a fundraiser for the National Hellenic Museum, Socrates will once again have his day in court—or the Palmer House Hilton Hotel’s Grand Ballroom, as it were. In what’s being billed as “the biggest freedom of speech case of all times” and “the most significant legal appeal in nearly 2,500 years,” some of the country’s foremost legal minds will rule on the charges facing the father of Greek philosophy. The Honorable Richard A. Posner, Seventh Circuit Appeals Court judge and many-time HUP author will head a team of three judges presiding over the affair; the City of Athens will be represented in its case against Socrates by former U.S. District Attorney Pat Fitzgerald and former prosecutor Patrick M. Collins.

All involved would do well to heed the advice Socrates offered at trial, as set down by Plato in The Apology. Those moving to convict him, he warned, would only injure themselves. From Volume 36 of the Loeb Classical Library, in Harold North Fowler’s translation, with minor concession to this week’s proceedings:

Now I am going to say some things to you at which you will perhaps cry out; but do not do so by any means. For know that if you kill me, I being such a man as I say I am, you will not injure me so much as yourselves; for neither Pat Fitzgerald nor Patrick M. Collins could injure me; that would be impossible, for I believe it is not God's will that a better man be injured by a worse. He might, however, perhaps kill me or banish me or disfranchise me; and perhaps he thinks he would thus inflict great injuries upon me, and others may think so, but I do not; I think he does himself a much greater injury by doing what he is doing now—killing a man unjustly. And so, men of Athens, I am now making my defence not for my own sake, as one might imagine, but far more for yours, that you may not by condemning me err in your treatment of the gift the God gave you. For if you put me to death, you will not easily find another, who, to use a rather absurd figure, attaches himself to the city as a gadfly to a horse, which, though large and well bred, is sluggish on account of his size and needs to be aroused by stinging. I think the god fastened me upon the city in some such capacity, and I go about arousing, and urging and reproaching each one of you, constantly alighting upon you everywhere the whole day long. Such another is not likely to come to you, gentlemen; but if you take my advice, you will spare me. But you, perhaps, might be angry, like people awakened from a nap, and might slap me, as Patrick M. Collins advises, and easily kill me; then you would pass the rest of your lives in slumber, unless God, in his care for you, should send someone else to sting you. And that I am, as I say, a kind of gift from the god, you might understand from this; for I have neglected all my own affairs and have been enduring the neglect of my concerns all these years, but I am always busy in your interest, coming to each one of you individually like a father or an elder brother and urging you to care for virtue; now that is not like human conduct. If I derived any profit from this and received pay for these exhortations, there would be some sense in it; but now you yourselves see that my accusers, though they accuse me of everything else in such a shameless way, have not been able to work themselves up to such a pitch of shamelessness as to produce a witness to testify that I ever exacted or asked pay of anyone. For I think I have a sufficient witness that I speak the truth, namely, my poverty.

This past weekend, Fitzgerald discussed the case with NPR’s Scott Simon and explained his efforts on behalf of Athenians:

 

Give him liberty or give him hemlock.

When States Decay

Continuing our election-season series of consulting with the Classics, we turn today to Polybius, and the brief conclusion to his “Treatise on the Roman Republic,” as offered in Book 6 of The Histories, contained in Loeb Classical Library Volume 138. This translation, published in 2011, is a thorough revision of W. R. Paton’s 1922 text.

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That all existing things are subject to decay and change is a truth that scarcely needs proof; for the course of nature is sufficient to force this conviction on us. There being two agencies by which every kind of state is liable to decay, the one external and the other a growth of the state itself, we can lay down no fixed rule about the former, but the latter is a regular process. I have already stated what kind of state is the first to come into being, and what the next, and how the one is transformed into the other; so that those who are capable of connecting the opening propositions of this inquiry with its conclusion will now be able to foretell the future unaided. And what will happen is, I think, evident. When a state has weathered many great perils and subsequently attains to supremacy and uncontested sovereignty, it is evident that under the influence of long established prosperity, life becomes more extravagant and the citizens more fierce in their rivalry regarding office and other objects than they ought to be. As these defects go on increasing, the beginning of the change for the worse will be due to love of office and the disgrace entailed by obscurity, as well as to extravagance and purse-proud display; and for this change the populace will be responsible when on the one hand they think they have a grievance against certain people who have shown themselves grasping, and when, on the other hand, they are puffed up by the flattery of others who aspire to office. For now, stirred to fury and swayed by passion in all their counsels, they will no longer consent to obey or even to be the equals of the ruling caste, but will demand the lion’s share for themselves. When this happens, the state will change its name to the finest sounding of all, freedom and democracy, but will change its nature to the worst thing of all, mob rule.

What Can Mitt Romney and Barack Obama Learn from the Ancient Greeks?

In his new book Loving Humanity, Learning, and Being Honored (published by Harvard’s Center for Hellenic Studies), Howard University professor Norman B. Sandridge discusses the timeless ideals of leadership in Greek historian Xenophon’s work Cyropaedia (Education of Cyrus). In Cyropaedia, written in 4th century BC, Xenophon presents a fictionalized account of a real historical figure, Persian king Cyrus the Great. Politicians throughout history have embraced Xenophon’s model of leading with attention to humanity, learning, and honor, and we asked Sandridge about the lessons available to voters and candidates today.

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Q: You write that the Education of Cyrus captured the interest of Plato, Cicero, Machiavelli, and Jefferson, among others. Why do you think these leaders read this work?

Many people, ancient and modern, read the Education of Cyrus because it is full of amusing and enlightening stories about leadership. What does a great leader look like as a kid? How do you train leaders? Can leaders have wild, romantic passion and still benefit their followers? How should leaders treat their rivals? Why do people follow leaders? These are all questions that ancient theorists wrestled with, but Xenophon did us a favor by casting them in a narrative form. In the ancient world Greeks and Romans thought that one of the best ways to become a better person was to contemplate and then emulate the examples of great people. The fact that Xenophon’s Cyrus was a historical figure gave readers an even greater sense of what was possible not only in theory but in practice.

Q: What are Xenophon’s major pieces of advice for politicians, and what specific advice do you think he would give to today’s presidential hopefuls?

I think Xenophon’s first lesson would be, “look outside of your own culture for inspiration.” When Xenophon wrote the Education of Cyrus, the Greeks had been fighting wars with the Persians for well over one hundred years. These wars turned out to be as much military as cultural; Persians were often seen as either deficient or hyperbolic of everything it meant to be Greek. And yet Xenophon looked to the example of Cyrus to theorize about the best kind of leadership. In part this was because Xenophon himself had served with Persians on campaign and had personal admiration for their prince, Cyrus the Younger. But also I think Xenophon found it liberating to think outside of his own culture.

By contrast, ever since September 11th, we have witnessed a disappointing trend in chauvinism in America (more positively cast as “American exceptionalism”), which no major politician seems to be able to escape. In so many other fields like art, math, science, and engineering, we recognize that progress is achieved only with global collaboration and imagination. How liberating for the American psyche would it be to hear President Obama or Governor Romney express a fondness for an ancient Iranian king like Cyrus!

Secondly, I think Xenophon would tell any potential politician that leadership is a lifetime intellectual and ethical pursuit—not something learned as an afterthought to other previous ambitions. As Xenophon conceives of it, young Persians go to school to learn the moral virtues they will need to lead their community, virtues like gratitude, justice, self-restraint, and mastery over hunger, thirst, and sleep.

Finally, I think Xenophon would also remind us, and our politicians, that a good community is a prerequisite to good leadership. Cyrus grows up in a Persia whose members are as trained in civic virtue as he is, even if he turns out to be the greatest practitioner of it. When he speaks to them about their interests, he is doing so from a shared set of values. Thus, if we want better leaders, we must strive to be better people ourselves.

Principles of Democracy

Throughout this American election season we’ll be sharing some of the many gems of political commentary on offer in the Loeb Classical Library. And where better to start than with the following passage on the features common to democracies, excerpted from Book VI of Aristotle’s Politics, LCL volume 264?

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Now a fundamental principle of the democratic form of constitution is liberty—that is what is usually asserted, implying that only under this constitution do men participate in liberty, for they assert this as the aim of every democracy. But one factor of liberty is to govern and be governed in turn; for the popular principle of justice is to have equality according to number, not worth, and if this is the principle of justice prevailing, the multitude must of necessity be sovereign and the decision of the majority must be final and must constitute justice, for they say that each of the citizens ought to have an equal share; so that it results that in democracies the poor are more powerful than the rich, because there are more of them and whatever is decided by the majority is sovereign. This then is one mark of liberty which all democrats set down as a principle of the constitution.

And one is for a man to live as he likes; for they say that this is the function of liberty, inasmuch as to live not as one likes is the life of a man that is a slave. This is the second principle of democracy, and from it has come the claim not to be governed, preferably not by anybody, or failing that, to govern and be governed in turns; and this is the way in which the second principle contributes to equalitarian liberty. And these principles having been laid down and this being the nature of democratic government, the following institutions are democratic in character: election of officials by all from all; government of each by all, and of all by each in turn; election by lot either to all magistracies or to all that do not need experience and skill; no property-qualification for office, or only a very low one; no office to be held twice, or more than a few times, by the same person, or few offices except the military ones; short tenure either of all offices or of as many as possible; judicial functions to be exercised by all citizens, that is by persons selected from all, and on all matters, or on most and the greatest and most important, for instance the audit of official accounts, constitutional questions, private contracts; the assembly to be sovereign over all matters, but no official over any or only over extremely few; or else a council to be sovereign over the most important matters (and a council is the most democratic of magistracies in states where there is not a plentiful supply of pay for everybody—for where there is, they deprive even this office of its power, since the people draws all the trials to itself when it has plenty of pay, as has been said before in the treatise preceding this one; also payment for public duties, preferably in all branches, assembly, law-courts, magistracies, or if not, for the magistracies, the law-courts, council and sovereign assemblies, or for those magistracies which are bound to have common mess-tables. Also inasmuch as oligarchy is defined by birth, wealth and education, the popular qualifications are thought to be the opposite of these, low birth, poverty, vulgarity. And in respect of the magistracies it is democratic to have none tenable for life, and if any life-office has been left after an ancient revolution, at all events to deprive it of its power and to substitute election by lot for election by vote.

These then are the features common to democracies. But what is thought to be the extreme form of democracy and of popular government comes about as a result of the principle of justice that is admitted to be democratic, and this is for all to have equality according to number. For it is equality for the poor to have no larger share of power than the rich, and not for the poor alone to be supreme but for all to govern equally; for in this way they would feel that the constitution possessed both equality and liberty. But the question follows, how will they have equality? are the property-assessments of five hundred citizens to be divided among a thousand and the thousand to have equal power to the five hundred? or is equality on this principle not to be arranged in this manner, but the division into classes to be on this system, but then an equal number to be taken from the five hundred and from the thousand and these to control the elections and the law-courts? Is this then the justest form of constitution in accordance with popular justice, or is it rather one that goes by counting heads? For democrats say that justice is whatever seems good to the larger number, but advocates of oligarchy think that it is whatever seems good to the owners of the larger amount of property, for they say that the decision ought to go by amount of property. But both views involve inequality and injustice; for if the will of the few is to prevail, this means a tyranny, since if one man owns more than the other rich men, according to the oligarchic principle of justice it is just for him to rule alone; whereas if the will of the numerical majority is to prevail, they will do injustice by confiscating the property of the rich minority, as has been said before. What form of equality therefore would be one on which both parties will agree must be considered in the light of the principles of justice as defined by both sets. For they say that whatever seems good to the majority of the citizens ought to be sovereign. Let us then accept this principle, yet not wholly without qualification, but inasmuch as fortune has brought into existence two component parts of the state, rich and poor, let any resolution passed by both classes, or by a majority of each, be sovereign, but if the two classes carry opposite resolutions, let the decision of the majority, in the sense of the group whose total property-assessment is the larger, prevail: for instance, if there are ten rich citizens and twenty poor ones, and opposite votes have been cast by six of the rich on one side and by fifteen of the less wealthy on the other, four of the rich have sided with the poor and five of the poor with the rich; then the side that has the larger total property when the assessments of both classes on either side are added together carries the voting. But if the totals fall out exactly equal, this is to be deemed an impasse common to both sides, as it is at present if the assembly or law-court is exactly divided; either a decision must be made by casting lots or some other such device must be adopted. But on questions of equality and justice, even though it is very difficult to discover the truth about them, nevertheless it is easier to hit upon it than to persuade people that have the power to get an advantage to agree to it; equality and justice are always sought by the weaker party, but those that have the upper hand pay no attention to them.

The "Cabul Prisoners" and the Buddhas of Bamiyan

Llewelyn Morgan’s The Buddhas of Bamiyan is the most recent installment in the Wonders of the World series edited by Mary Beard. The book mines the history and meaning of these colossal figures, which stood for 1,400 years before their destruction by the Taliban in 2001. In the post below, Morgan tells of a visit to the grave of a woman whose life story he came to know during his work on the book.

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On a grey and drizzly English day earlier this summer I found myself in a cemetery in Somerset, feeling more emotional than I should have in front of the grave of a stranger. I hadn’t had much to go on: it was somewhere in the village of North Cheriton, and it had a cross. But I had scraped the mud away from the short inscription and there she was:

IN LOVING MEMORY OF JULIA FLORENTIA MULOCK

WIDOW OF COL MULOCK CB BORN IN AFGHANISTAN

JUNE 24 1842 DIED AT NORTH CHERITON APRIL 23 1910

Julia Mulock, née Sturt, had become a minor obsession of mine as I wrote The Buddhas of Bamiyan. Aside from her remarkable early life, Julia came to encapsulate for me Britain’s long and spasmodically intense relationship with Afghanistan, a relationship as easily forgotten as this memorial in an English country graveyard.

Chapel and Graveyard at North Cheriton

Julia Florentia Sturt had been born in captivity in Kabul. Her mother was Alexandrina Sturt, a prisoner of the Afghans; her father, Lieut. John Sturt, was already dead. He had been an officer of Engineers in the British force occupying Kabul during the First Afghan War, a misguided attempted to establish a buffer zone between British India and the Russian Empire encroaching from the north. A series of tactical errors resulted in a chaotic British retreat in midwinter, under ferocious attack from all sides, through the mountain passes between Kabul and Jalalabad, one of the most notorious disasters in British imperial history. A measure of the horror of this massacre is that Sturt was said to have been “the only man of the whole force who received Christian burial.” Very few indeed survived it, but Sturt’s pregnant widow Alexandrina, her mother Lady Sale, and a number of other soldiers and dependents were taken into custody by Akbar Khan, leader of the Afghan resistance, and spent nine months as effective hostages while the First Afghan War lurched towards its messy conclusion.

In those nine months the “Cabul Prisoners” became celebrities, their predicament the object of rapt interest by the British press and public in a way that has been compared to the US hostage crisis in Tehran in 1979-81. The most celebrated of them all was Julia’s grandmother and namesake, Florentia, Lady Sale, a tough, no-nonsense army wife (her husband, Sir Robert Sale, was all this time besieged by Akbar Khan in Jalalabad) whose journals of her experiences later became a publishing sensation. On July 24 1842 (note that Julia’s grave inscription gets the date wrong), Lady Sale dryly recorded the arrival of her granddaughter: “At 2 P.M. Mrs. Sturt presented me with a grand-daughter;—another female captive.”

In the latter stages of their captivity, as a British “Army of Retribution” closed in on Kabul, the prisoners were moved up from Kabul to Bamiyan, high in the Hindu Kush. Conditions were grim, and they faced the awful prospect of being marched north, beyond the mountains, and sold into slavery. But they also had the opportunity to visit what a series of European visitors to Afghanistan over the previous decades had made a famous monument, the cliff face peppered with caves and containing the giant Buddha statues. Lady Sale’s journal was illustrated with “some very pretty and correct sketches” by another captive, Lieut. Vincent Eyre, including three images of the Buddha cliffs.

That old lady in North Cheriton wouldn’t have remembered anything about Bamiyan, or the emotional scene when a force led by Lady Sale’s husband rescued them in September 1842. But she probably did retain some memories of the amazing reception when her family visited Britain in 1844. When they first landed at Lyme Regis (from a ship which the press were delighted to discover was called the True Briton), Lady Sale, her husband, daughter and granddaughter Julia were mobbed by well-wishers: “as soon as their presence became known,” according to The Times, “the nobility and gentry of the neighbourhood, and the inhabitants of Lyme, vied with each other in offering their congratulations, while the church bells poured forth their merriest strains of harmony…” There were similar scenes in Londonderry, Liverpool, Southampton, and London. Lady Sale was the heroine of the hour. At Astley’s Amphitheatre a circus performance culminated in “Lady Sale” fighting a double sword combat “with six Afghans, whom she put to flight.” This lionizing of Lady Sale isn’t so hard to analyze, a substitute victory that softened the dismay Britain had felt at the humiliating retreat from Kabul.

We catch a (slightly jaundiced) glimpse of the family group on their return journey to India at the end of 1844, in letters of Sir Henry Hardinge, the Governor General of India: Sir Robert Sale, “one of our military heroes seen to most advantage with a sabre in his hand,” the “very coarse” Lady Sale “coming out with a direct plain oath,” “Mrs [Alexandrina] Sturt pretty but unfeeling, the little daughter born in captivity.” Alexandrina Sturt could be forgiven for being emotionally withdrawn, we might think. As for Julia, incredibly, captivity in Afghanistan wasn’t the greatest trauma that she suffered early in life. On the eve of her fifteenth birthday, her mother Alexandrina was killed alongside her new husband, Major James Garner Holmes, beheaded by rebellious troops during the “Indian Mutiny.”

At 17 Julia married a military man 25 years her senior (they consistently falsify their ages in the census, not making Julia any easier to trace). Julia’s later years were no bed of roses, following her husband on his postings around the Empire. She lost two sons who followed the family tradition into the army. But it was to all appearances a happy marriage. Certainly Julia’s final years at The Old Rectory in leafy North Cheriton (a comfortable house up the hill from the graveyard where she now lies) were as far removed as it is possible to imagine from the place and circumstances of her birth.

Athletic Beauty, Divinely-Infused

In celebration of the Olympic games, we offer the following excerpt from Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s In Praise of Athletic Beauty, a thoroughly charming meditation on our love affair with athletes and their pursuit of excellence.

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If you take a car from Athens to the Isthmus of Corinth, and then drive across the winding mountain roads of the Peloponnese Peninsula to the distant village of Olympia, some thirty miles inland from the Ionian Sea, you will soon begin to feel what a commitment it was to walk or travel on horseback to the ancient Olympic games. Yet hundreds of athletes and tens of thousands of spectators, protected by an Olympics truce, made the journey every four years, over the span of a millennium or more—from 776 BC to 394 AD (the conventionally accepted dates of the ancient Olympic games). As you try to imagine this bodily effort, for which there is simply no equivalent in the modern world, you may begin to wonder what the specific attraction of those five days spent at Zeus’ most famous sanctuary could have been.

One answer, a modern answer but valid nevertheless, comes when you arrive at this shady green valley, where the Kladeos and Alpheios rivers join under lush foliage, a place so different from the arid stony landscape through which you have traveled, with growing impatience, during several hours. For ancient guests who had walked for days and even weeks, this contrast upon arrival must have triggered intense feelings of sensual pleasure and relief. Unlike modern tourists, who have the luxury of returning to their air-conditioned hotel rooms for the night, the crowds in ancient Olympia (all men, except for the priestess of Demeter and her maidens) endured narrow quarters, a shortage of water, and blistering heat. And yet their lives held nothing more glorious or more desirable than being precisely there, in that place, to watch athletes compete.

Olympia was just one of the traditional places, along with Delphi, Isthmia, and Nemea, where free men from the various Greek states and colonies came together for panhellenic games, but it was the oldest and most charismatic site. So outstanding was Olympia’s fame that the four-year rhythm of its games became the most widely accepted measure for marking time in ancient Greece. Each Olympiad (four-year period) was named for the winner in the first athletic event of the five-day competition. Unlike the spectators (and also the artists, musicians, and orators who came to showcase their talents on the margins of sporting events), athletes spent at least a month before the games at Elis, thirty-five miles from Olympia, where they trained to reach the peak of physical conditioning.

The five days of the Olympic festival were organized as a complex sequence of athletic events and religious rituals (though we miss the specific appeal of Olympia if we insist too much on the distinction between the two). The first day was dedicated to heralds, musicians, and athletic competitions for adolescents. The second day featured horse races, chariot races (including chariots drawn by mules), and, in the U-shaped 200-yard-long stadion, the core event—the pentathlon, consisting of a foot race, long jump, discus, javelin, and wrestling. All stadion races that were not part of the pentathlon took place on the third day. The fourth day was devoted to wrestling, boxing, and the pankration (a very aggressive, almost sadistic type of wrestling or kick boxing), mostly taking place at the palestra, a rectangular court surrounded by arcades. Back at the stadion finally, spectators could enjoy the hoplite run, a middle distance race for men in full armor.

Athletes in the panhellenic games performed naked, and since nakedness only became a condition several centuries after this athletic tradition began, we know that performing naked was a cultural rule, not a symptom of an archaic state of society. Before competitions, athletes would spread oil all over their skin, and some historians have explained this practice as a competitive strategy, especially for the wrestling contest, or as a performance enhancement. I am not convinced that strategic advantage was the most important reason, however. The oil made the naked bodies of athletes glisten with reflected sunlight, and this very palpable aura set them apart from ordinary men.

Ancient Rome and the 1%

From Robert Knapp’s Invisible Romans, which brings to light the laboring men, housewives, prostitutes, freedmen, slaves, soldiers, and gladiators who formed the backbone of the ancient Roman world, and the outlaws and pirates who lay beyond it, all in the face of a persistent historical truth: “Over the centuries, concentration of wealth in the hands of a few has been the norm, rather than the exception.”

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I have searched for a term to capture the invisible demographic group that is the subject of this book and have chosen to call them “ordinary people.” This distinguishes them from the elite and leaves their definition open to the wide range of their existence, from fairly wealthy to modestly well-off and downright poor, male and female, slave and free, law-abiding and outlaw. These ordinary people lived in a world dominated by a tiny, self-perpetuating elite that was limited and defined by wealth, tradition, blood, and power. They belonged to one of the three orders or ordines into which they divided themselves. The senatorial order was the most exalted in social and political terms but not always the wealthiest. The equestrian order focused on the acquisition of wealth rather than the power and rank of the senatorial order. The decurial order ran towns and cities across the empire and mirrored the senatorial-equestrian divisions of Rome; these men were generally less wealthy than members of senatorial-equestrian orders, although sometimes local decurials were also equestrians. The three orders amounted to no more than 100,000–200,000 people, less than half a percent of the empire’s population of 50–60 million. Among them only the adult males counted; these numbered about 40,000 and so, as the empire at this time was roughly 2.5 million square miles, there was on average one adult member of the male elite for every sixty or so square miles. As the elites were concentrated in Rome, the proportion elsewhere was even lower. Yet these numerically minuscule and widely scattered leaders controlled almost everything.

Cupid, Take Your Quiver And Go

Who but Ovid to read on this Valentine’s Day? Below, the fifth elegy of the second book of his Amores, from David Slavitt’s lively volume of translation, Love Poems, Letters, and Remedies of Ovid.

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No love is worth this much. Cupid, take your quiver

    and go. Get out of my life! My usual prayers

these days are for death, which seems a better option

    than the torment in which I suffer from that girl!

The evidence is clear. I did not have to infer

    from equivocal clues or see my uncertain way

through ambiguities. These are no mere suspicions,

    and not even a fool would try to refute them.

Happy is he who can in good conscience defend

    his darling, who can swear, “I didn’t do it!”

But stronger than I am in mind and heart is he who can be

    satisfied by proving his mistress guilty,

winning the bloody battle and losing the damned war.

    I saw what you did. You thought I was drunk and asleep,

but through my half-closed lids I watched you play the coquette,

    nodding, flirting, and making that little moue

you sometimes use. I watched your fingers write on the table

    messages that you once traced for me.

And your talk was full of suggestive jokes and double-entendres.

    Then, when the party broke up and most had left,

and only a few of us drunks were still in the room dozing,

    I saw you and him kissing, no mere pecks

of the kind a brother and sister might very well exchange

    (Diana and Phoebus, say) but deep probings

as if you were trying to swallow one another’s tongues

    (for example, Venus and Mars in the heat of passion).

“What in hell is this?” is what I shouted out.

The Digitus Impudicus, from Socrates to Super Bowl

Ever since Janet Jackson’s infamous “wardrobe malfunction,” the Super Bowl halftime show has been both the province of aged pop stars and a source of network official anxiety. This year’s epic spectacle starred Madonna, legions of acrobatic dancers, and the artists Nicki Minaj and M.I.A. It didn’t take much familiarity with that last duo to imagine that the NFL and NBC may soon have a bit of trouble on their hands.

And, indeed, from hands came trouble. One hand, actually, and one finger: M.I.A.’s left middle, which she flashed to the camera, scandalizing an entire nation on its most pure and sacred day. Just kidding, right? Not such a big deal. But the outcry was loud and righteous enough to make the BBC wonder when the middle finger became so offensive. As they note, it’s a salute with quite a lineage:

A public intellectual, expressing his contempt for a gas-bag politician, reaches for a familiar gesture. He extends his middle finger and declares: “This is the great demagogue.” 

The episode occurred not on a chat show nor in the salons of New York or London, but in 4th Century BC Athens, when the philosopher Diogenes told a group of visitors exactly what he thought about the orator Demosthenes, according to a later Greek historian.

The middle finger, extended with the other fingers held beneath the thumb, is thus documented to have expressed insult and belittlement for more than two millennia.

The article goes on to quote anthropologist Desmond Morris referring to the finger as “one of the most ancient insult gestures known,” and also lists several classic works that make reference to it. This caught our notice, of course, and sent us off to our Loeb Classical Library shelves. The BBC article notes the appearance of the middle finger in Aristophanes’s comedy The Clouds. Well, there’s a Loeb for that, Volume 488. The passage arrives in an exchange between Socrates and his inept pupil Strepsiades:

Socrates: Very well then, what would you begin learning now, of the subjects you were never taught anything about? Tell me, would it be measures, or rhythms, or words?

Strepsiades: I’ll take the measures: the other day a corn dealer shorted me two quarts.

Socrates: That’s not what I’m asking you; I’m asking what you consider to be the most beautiful measure, the three-measure or the four-measure?

Strepsiades: I say nothing beats the gallon.

Socrates: You’re making no sense, man!

Strepsiades: Bet me then, that a gallon isn’t a four-measure.

Socrates: To hell with you! You’re a stupid clod. No doubt you’d soon learn about rhythms!

Strepsiades: But how will these rhythms help me get my daily bread?

Socrates: To begin with, by making you smart in society, and enabling you to recognize which rhythms are shaped for marches, say, and which by the finger.

Strepsiades: By the finger? That one I know, by Zeus.

Socrates: Well, tell me then.

Strepsiades: What could it be but this finger here? (raising his middle finger to Socrates) In the old days, when I was a boy, it was this one.

Socrates: You’re a brainless lout!

The Murty Classical Library of India Has Its Design

Designer Andrea Stranger observes that “most designers have a book fetish.”

She came by hers honestly: while a student at San Francisco’s Academy of Art University, she worked “less than part time” at the venerable Alexander Book Company. This past fall, her former employer there emailed to alert her to the contest we were holding to design the Murty Classical Library of India. Stranger took up the challenge, and you can see more of her elegant winning design over at the MCLI site. 

Stranger, who has done design work for clients as diverse as Kate Spade, financial services companies, and internet startups, has a broad interest in design—she says, “I’ll take pretty much any project you throw at me”—and relishes the creativity required to work in different arenas. Her primary objective is identifying a client’s needs.

In the case of the MCLI, which will present up-to-date English translations of classical works in languages ranging from Bengali and Kannada and Marathi to Persian, Sanskrit, Telugu, and Urdu, with the text in the appropriate regional script provided on the facing page, Stranger realized that the most important criteria were flexibility—MCLI required a design that could adequately represent diverse texts—and a look that honored both Western and Indian traditions.

She started by doing research on Indian visual culture, and shared some images from those and other inspirations with us to talk about how the design developed. 

 

 

Stranger saw the galley pictured at right while working at the Alexander Book Company. She was so struck by the text-driven cover that she read the book, and hung onto the galley, which she dug out from her parents’ basement for this photo. She says, “The simplicity of the design and materials stuck with me—and influenced the type-driven approach of the Murty design.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

Stranger says, “I looked at a lot of Indian architecture and found inspiration in the recurring shapes, color and intense use of pattern.” She passed along the image at right as an example.

 

 

 

 

 

When Stranger began researching Indian cultures for the project, she noticed that “the elephant is everywhere,” and realized that powerful cross-cultural associations with the animal, a symbol of wisdom, longevity, and strength in the West, made it “a worthy subject for logo exploration.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Textiles, like architecture, offered a lot of fodder for color usage and patterning.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“The Kannada language,” she told us, “served as inspiration for a concept that did not move forward, but the letterforms (like all Indian languages) reinforced the idea of an organic beauty that seemed present in every aspect of my research of Indian design.”

 

 

 

You can see elements of each of these images in Stranger’s final design:

At the MCLI website you can view a slideshow of additional images of the design, and also read thoughts on Stranger’s work from MCLI General Editor Sheldon Pollock, design contest judges such as Peter Mendelsund, and Rohan Narayana Murty, whose endowment gift to Harvard funded the library’s creation.

We’re looking forward to seeing Stranger’s design in print on the first volumes of the Murty Classical Library of India in 2013, and we’re extremely grateful to her and to all of the other talented designers who submitted their work to the contest.