Class Book: The Catiline Conspiracy

For the final book of the quarter my History 111 class voted for The Catiline Conspiracyby John Maddox Roberts. The Catiline Conspiracy is a murder mystery novel and part of the SPQR series. The essential plot follows the attempted takeover of the Roman government by Lucius Catiline in 63 BCE. Hopefully this book should prove to match well with Robert Harris' Imperium, which we did earlier. While the two novels are part of different series, The Catiline Conspiracy begins right where Imperium ended. It should prove interesting to compare the different author's interpretations of the end of the Roman Republic and the leading figures of these events, particularly Marcus Cicero.

Blog readers should feel free to send their thoughts on the book and suggest other history books and novels for future use.   

Are the Greeks and Romans Just More Popular?

In my History 111 class we just finished Robert Harris' Imperium, a novel dealing with the life of Cicero. It proved to be a tremendous success. Harris deserves a lot of credit for crafting a suspenseful novel and making Cicero something more than just a giver of moralistic speeches. For the next book the class voted on The Spartans: The World of the Warrior-Heroes of Ancient Greece by Paul Cartledge. The Spartans ran over my other suggestions by an overwhelming majority. (The fact that a large percentage of the class has seen the movie 300 probably did not hurt.)

The book that I chose at the beginning of the quarter, Bart Ehrman's Peter, Paul and Mary Magdalene, received a respectful if unenthusiastic response. Students, though, were very enthusiastic about Cicero and ancient Rome and now there is a lot of interest in ancient Greece. So, as someone who specializes in medieval and early modern history, I raise the question: is Greco-Roman civilization really so much popular than anything else in Western History? Now do not get me wrong here. I have nothing against classical history. I try to interest students in history any way I can. If the Greeks and Romans intrigue students then I will teach an entire course about the Greeks and Romans.

Perhaps Greco-Roman history is more popular because of a perception that pagan Greeks and Romans were naughtier than medieval Christians. I am reminded of a political science teacher I once had who assured us that if we were offended by Aristophanes making jokes about farting gnats in The Clouds then we should wait till we get to the Church Fathers and the rate of such sophomoric humor will drop precipitously. As I see it, Christians are more interesting because they get to misbehave, feel guilty and be scared of going to hell all at the same time. Maybe the Greeks and Romans manage to avoid being controversial? It is possible that my Christian students do not want to do a class on Christianity out of a concern that I might start bashing their religion and secular students would just rather not hear about Christianity in the first place. Thus doing the Greeks and Romans avoids the problem for everyone.

So I put the question to my readers: in your experience is there a particular interest in Greece and Rome in our society above and beyond other areas of pre-modern history and if so what do you think is the reason for this?

Call it Midrash

Bart Ehrman's Peter, Paul and Mary Magdalene deals heavily in early Christian mythology. From early on in the book, Ehrman recognizes that there is very little of use that can be said about the historical figures of Peter, Paul and Mary Magdalene. Instead, Ehrman finds a far more fruitful line of discussion in using these figures to shed light on the early Christian communities; what stories did they tell about the founders of their religion and for what purpose. I find this to be a useful exercise for students in that it gets them past the trap issue of whether scripture is TRUE or not, begetting either a fundamentalist line of this is true and the academics no nothing or the New Atheist line of this is simply ridiculous and irrelevant. Both positions would render the whole study of history to be meaningless, the handmaiden of polemics.

Part of the problem here I think is that we lack a useful word for this entire process. Words like "myth" and "legend" connote something that is simply false, made up and therefore irrelevant. We need a word to cover a process of textual interpretation that fills in the narrative gaps in order to deal with weaknesses within the narrative, adds clarity and offers a final product that is useful and fits the present ideology. While the Christian tradition never produced a word for this process, the Jewish tradition has, it is called Midrash. (Islam has the concept of Hadith, but I think Midrash is the better fit here as it implies a process that is more informal and organic.)

Take the example of Abraham. Abraham enters the biblical stage at the age of seventy-five when God tells him to journey "to the land which [God] will show him" (ultimately the land of Canaan). The reader is struck by the fact that the Bible has failed to tell us anything about the first seventy-five years of Abraham's life, particularly how Abraham came to believe in God. Come the rabbis to the rescue and we are provided with the story. Little Abraham once saw a magnificent building; he concluded that something as complex as a building must have been created by a master craftsman, who was simply out of sight. Abraham looked out at the world and wondered who could have created something so unbelievably complex; the world must have a hidden designer. Abraham's father, Terah, owned an idol shop. Abraham, no longer a believer in idols, was put in charge of the shop and proceeded to dissuade customers from buying anything: why would an old person like you want to bow to something that was made yesterday? Why would you want to buy an idol to protect your home when the idol cannot even protect itself? Finally Abraham smashes all the idols in the shop, leaving only the largest in which he placed an ax. When Terah comes back, Abraham explains that the idols had gotten into a fight and the biggest one had smashed the rest. Terah smacks Abraham: what nonsense is this. Idols do not walk or talk. To which Abraham responds: then why do worship them? Abraham is taken in front of King Nimrod (just a name in the Bible, but now fleshed out into a useful villain). Nimrod throws Abraham into a fiery furnace, but God does a miracle and saves him. So here we have it, a really good story that improves on the biblical narrative, helps it make a lot more sense and on top of it all gives me useful talking points to use against my Hellenistic pagan neighbors. I should be able to prove the existence of God, refute paganism and tell an entertaining story all in under forty-five minutes. This back story about Abraham was so good that a version of it even ended up in the Koran. In looking at such a Midrash it is irrelevant as to how this story might relate to some theoretical historical Abraham. It is not really about Abraham; it is about Jews living in Classical times and interacting with their Hellenistic pagan neighbors.

Now we are doing Robert Harris' Imperium, a novel about Cicero. One can think of Harris as writing his own Midrash about Cicero, taking Plutarch's biography, Cicero's speeches and letters as the foundation material and filling the story in as a political thriller to suit a twenty-first century audience.

Catching Up on Things: History 111 Fall 2010

Sorry for being offline for the past two weeks. This past month, just in time for our string of three-day Jewish holidays, I moved back to Columbus and started teaching again at Ohio State. On top of all this, I did not have an internet connection at my apartment until last night. (While I might miss New York and Silver Spring, what I am paying for my half of a two-bedroom apartment goes a long way to making up for things.) I hope to be back posting on a regular basis, though likely a little less often than earlier in the year.

So to get things back on track, I would like to invite everyone on board my new teaching experiment. For this quarter I decided to run my History 111 class as a book club. Instead of using one textbook and doing a survey of European history from antiquity up until the Enlightenment, we will be doing a series of shorter books on specific topics. Ideally, I would like to do secondary sources, but I am open to doing primary sources and even good historical fiction. While I picked the first book, Bart Ehrman's Peter, Paul & Mary Magdalene: The Followers of Jesus in History and Legend, subsequent books are to be picked by the class. We have already voted for the next book, Robert Harris's novel Imperium, which deals with the life of the Roman orator Cicero as told by his servant Tiro. It is similar to Robert Graves' I, Claudius, though it is, I believe, more accessible to a general audience.

I was inspired to do this in part by the wonderful book club I have here in Columbus and in part by my desire to take Alfie Kohn seriously to see what might come about with implementing some of his ideas. (See The Book Club: or How to Destroy School.) If the Alfie Kohn model of education could work anywhere it should be in a college where there is at least some degree of self-motivation among students. By allowing students to pick what books we read I am allowing the opportunity to structure the class to suit them. I still will be maintaining graded assignments, including homework. For example, as in previous years, students are supposed to email me a question or comment about the reading before class. (An idea I took from Prof. Louis Feldman.) I then structure my talk around responding to these questions. That being said, this is a rather open-ended assignment and serves to further make room for student input.

What attracted me to Ehrman was, one, he writes about the historical Jesus and early Christianity, topics of popular interest. He writes in a balanced fashion which, while not openly hostile to orthodox religious sensibilities does a very effective job of explaining how an academic approach differs from an orthodox one and for its superiority. Two, Ehrman provides an entry into the historical method as he talks his way through texts and how to use them. What Ehrman does to the New Testament is what historians do to all texts, sacred or otherwise. Part of what is subversive about the historical method, a Pandora's Box so to speak, is that it is impossible to accept it partway. If you accept the historical method then you commit yourself to applying it to all texts, the Bible just as much as Julius Caesar. Regardless of how orthodox your eventual conclusions, the moment you agree to subject the Bible to the same cross-examination as any other text you have put a knife into orthodoxy, committing yourself to the Kantian charge of placing everything before the bar of reason. There can be no return to innocent belief.

So this experiment seems to be going well even if I seem to be speaking a lot more than I might have liked. If anyone has book recommendations, please feel free to post them.

Articles of Interest

Linda Baker, in Scientific American, has an article about getting Americans to bike more as is common in most European cities. Her suggestion is to get more women involved.

Peter Stothard reviews, for the Times Literary Supplement, Robert Harris’ new novel, Lustrum, about the life of Cicero and exams how Harris uses ancient Rome to comment on modern British politics. I have read the first book in the series, Imperium, and cannot wait for the sequel to come out here in the States. Lustrum continues the story of the Catiline conspiracy. This was a much-beloved topic in the classics courses of Dr. Louis Feldman. Dr. Feldman felt that Catiline was unfairly maligned by Cicero, upon whom we are completely reliant for our information about these events. Harris follows Cicero and turns Catiline into one really scary villain. So far I love every minute of it.

John Elder Robison asks why the Autism community cannot just get along.

Jessica Bennett writes in Newsweek about how the city of Oakland is leading the way for the legalization of marijuana.

Clayton Neuman interviews Eoin Colfer about continuing Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series. Colfer is best known for the Artemis Fowl series. Certainly not in Adam’s league, but he is talented enough that he should be able to produce a book that Hitchhiker fans can be proud of.