Harvard University Press Publicity Blog

On the value of athleticism

In the wake of the Patriots' Super Bowl disappointment, a few caustic words from Euripides on the value of athletes:

Of countless bad things existing throughout Greece none is worse than athletes as a breed. First, they neither learn well how to manage a household, nor would they be able to learn--for how could a man who is a slave to eating and dominated by his belly acquire wealth to exceed his father’s? Moreover they cannot manage poverty or cope with misfortunes: because they have learned no good habits, a change towards difficulties is hard on them. They are splendid in their prime and go proudly about as ornaments to a city; but when old age in its harshness falls upon them, they fade away like cloaks that have lost their threads. I blame too the Greeks’ custom of gathering to pay these men useless honours for the sake of a feast. Why--what man who has wrestled well, what man fleet of foot or that has thrown a discus or boxed a jaw well, has defended his ancestral city by winning a wreath? Are they going to fight enemies with a discus in their hands, or drive enemies from a fatherland? ... Wreathing with leaves should be for men who are wise and brave, and for the man who leads a city best through being prudent and just, and whose words deliver it from evil acts by removing feuds and factions: such are the things good for every city and all Greeks.

A bit harsh, no? But everyone's entitled to their own opinion. This quotation, by the way, is taken from our forthcoming Loeb Classical Library™ 504, Euripides' Fragments, portions of fifty-two tragedies and eleven satyr plays that complete our knowledge of this greatest of ancient playwrights.

Three new I Tatti volumes

We're pleased to announce three additions to the I Tatti Renaissance Library for the fall season:

• Pietro Bembo's History of Venice chronicles the internal politics and external affairs of the legendary republic, principally conflicts with other European states (France, Spain, the Holy Roman Empire, Milan, and the papacy) and with the Turks in the East. History of Venice, Volume 1, Books I-IV is the first in a projected three-volume edition of this seminal work, available now for the first time in English.

• Leonardo Bruni (1370–1444) was the leading civic humanist of the Italian Renaissance, famous in his day as a translator, orator, and historian, as well as the best-selling author of the fifteenth century. His History of the Florentine People is generally considered the first modern work of history, and was widely imitated by humanist historians for two centuries after its official publication by the Florentine Signoria in 1442. This third volume concludes the edition, the first to make the work available in English translation.

• Pius II (1405–1464) began life as Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini in a small town near Siena and became a famous Latin poet and diplomat. Originally an opponent of the papacy as well as something of a libertine, Aeneas eventually reconciled himself with the Roman church and became a priest, then a cardinal. Finally he was elected Pope Pius II (1458) and dedicated his pontificate to organizing a pan-European crusade against the Ottoman Empire. Pius’s Commentaries, the only autobiography ever written by a pope, was composed in elegant humanistic Latin modeled on Caesar and Cicero. This edition contains a fresh Latin text based on the last manuscript written in Pius’s lifetime and an updated and corrected version of the 1937 translation by Florence Alden Gragg.

More on the I Tatti Renaissance Library--history, purpose and forthcoming volumes.

Los Angeles Latinists, take note

From the UCLA Center for Medieval & Renaissance Studies:

“Thrice-Born Latinity”
Friday, November 2 - November 3, 2007

After a first birth before the age of the Roman Kings, the Latin language has enjoyed many rebirths: one in the Carolingian era, another in the High Middle Ages, and a third in the Renaissance. In our own time, two extraordinary scholarly enterprises have renewed the vigor of Latinity: the Catalogus Translationum et Commentariorum (CTC) and the I Tatti Renaissance Library (ITRL), the first led by Professor Virginia Brown of the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, Toronto, the second by Professor James Hankins of Harvard University.

With the generous support of the Cassamarca Foundation, the UCLA Department of Italian and CMRS present a conference to discuss and celebrate the work of Professors Brown and Hankins. The program explores the implications for humanist scholarship of the CTC, the ITRL, and the texts and authors illuminated by them.

[...]

Professor Hankins is the series editor of the I Tatti Renaissance Library, a dual-language text series that aims to make available to a broad readership the most significant literary, historical, and philosophical works of the Italian Renaissance written in Latin. If you want to know more, the I Tatti series statement is a good place to start.

Mary Beard interview--Part 2

BLDGBLOG has posted Part 2 of the interview with Mary Beard, editor of the Wonders of the World series and author of the forthcoming The Roman Triumph. Also, don't miss Mary's Times Online blog "A Don's Life."

The Rosetta Stone

In Sunday's Washington Post Book Review, Jonathon Keats reminds us of what the Rosetta Stone meant to the generation that discovered it while reviewing John Ray's new HUP book on the subject, The Rosetta Stone and the Rebirth of Ancient Egypt.

Ciceronian Controversies

James Gardner in the New York Sun on the recently-published Ciceronian Controversies--the latest addition to our I Tatti Renaissance Library--and why we should care about the sixteenth-century literary dispute chronicled therein.

Religious studies gets hip

HUP author and all-around intellectual whirlwind Mary Beard talks about the "new" religious studies at her Times Online blog. Staid analysis of theological problems seems to have given way to topics like "Sex in the Acts," "Gender politics and martyrdom," "Surveillance in the New Testament," "Cultural identity in the Talmud," and so on. "Not Religious Studies as I imagine it to be," says Beard.

In October HUP will publish The Roman Triumph, Beard's exploration of the magnificence--and the dark side--of that enduring ritual.

The real story of the Persian Wars

Moviegoers will know that "300", a graphic retelling of the Battle of Thermopylae, has topped the box office charts for several weeks now (although it's apparently now been replaced by the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie). While "300" was lauded more for dazzling visual effects than solid storytelling, it at least has the virtue of inserting one of history's great stories back into the popular consciousness.

The "great story," of course, is that of the Persian Wars. If the movie and/or the comic book it was based on intrigued you, why not go straight to the source for the "real" story? Herodotus' The Persian Wars, available in our classy green Loeb Classical Library© edition, is one of the first and most famous accounts of military conflict ever written.

Other Loeb volumes that deal in some way with great wars of the ancient world include:

• Aeschylus, Suppliant Maidens. Persians. Prometheus. Seven Against Thebes
• Aristophanes, Acharnians. Knights and Clouds. Wasps. Peace
• Arrian, Anabasis of Alexander
• Caesar, The Gallic War, The Civil Wars, and Alexandrian War. African War. Spanish War
• Euripides, Trojan Women
• Josephus, The Jewish War
• Livy, History of Rome
• Lucan, The Civil War
• Sallust, War with Catiline. War with Jugurtha. Selections from the Histories. Doubtful Works
• Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War
• Virgil, Aeneid
• Xenophon, Anabasis

See also Robin Waterfield's recent Xenophon's Retreat: Greece, Persia, and the End of the Golden Age, a look at Xenophon's famous account of ill-fated expedition of a band of Greek mercenaries who traveled east to fight for the Persian prince Cyrus the Younger in his attempt to wrest the throne of the mighty Persian empire from his brother.

RIP Frank Snowden

Sad news from Washington--Frank M. Snowden, influential scholar of ancient history and the author of two HUP books--has died of congestive heart failure at 95. I still remember picking up Snowden's Blacks in Antiquity long before I ever worked here and being wowed by both the substance and style of his scholarship. Others took notice, too--Snowden was awarded a National Humanities Medal in 2003 for his contributions to our understanding of the ancient world.

Medicine in the Days of the Pharaohs

Via Reuters, we see that "Egyptian archaeologists have discovered the funerary remains of a doctor who lived more than 4,000 years ago, including his mummy, sarcophagus and bronze surgical instruments." This news made us think of a book we published last year called Medicine in the Days of the Pharoahs, a comprehensive account of pharaonic medicine illuminated by what modern science has discovered about the lives (and deaths) of ancient Egyptians from all walks of life--farmers, fishermen, miners, soldiers, scribes and priests, embalmers, construction workers, bakers, prostitutes.

Suffice it to say that you'd be surprised at just how sophisiticated, medically-speaking, ancient Egyptians actually were.

||| Read an excerpt from Medicine in the Days of the Pharoahs.