® A publication of the American Philological Association Vol. 5 • Issue 2 • Fall 2006 CROSSING THE STYX: THE Shadow Government: AFTERLIFE OF THE AFTERLIFE HBO’s Rome by Alison Futrell by Margaret Drabble ince the box office success of Gladiator hades from the underworld walk in also the name of a Finnish pop group, unexpected places in contempo- founded in 1992, Styx is an American S(2000), television networks have been S trying to find a way to bring the glory and rary culture, and of late I’ve been pop group, Artemesia’s Ashes is a Russ- encountering them everywhere. New ian pop group, and Tartarus is an inter- corruption of ancient Rome to the small moons are still named after old gods. net war game. Charon has also given his screen. HBO’s long-anticipated miniseries The International Astronomical Union name to organizations like Charon Rome (2005) succeeds hugely, presenting approves this practice and discourages Cemetery Management, which boasts a richly visualized and sophisticated work astronomers from calling asteroids after that it has “user friendly software for the their pets or their wives. Pluto’s moon, death care industry.” The imagery of that takes the ancient evidence seriously. discovered in 1978, was named Charon, the ancient underworld has a long and Focusing on the period between 52 and and on All Souls Eve 2005, I heard that adaptable afterlife. 44 B.C., the series dramatizes the deterio- the discovery of two new moons of And classical learning infiltrates con- ration of the Republic into civil war and the Pluto had just been announced. They temporary literature in many ways. establishment of autocracy under Caesar. have not yet been named. (Pluto is Detective and ghost stories frequently called Pluto because he is the darkest, feature professors and detective-profes- smallest, and most remote of the planets sors, epitaphs and inscriptions, Latin – not really a planet at all, some have tags and Greek riddles. English writers always said, and indeed in 2006 he was of the Golden-age of detective fiction, demoted.) Astrophysicists, positing the like Dorothy Sayers and Margery existence of spectral stellar bodies, have Allingham, display a reader-flattering given them names such as Vulcan and familiarity with the classics: the texts of Nemesis – Vulcan is an unseen and Sayers are encrusted with epigraphs and hypothetical planet, Nemesis an imagi- quotations from Elizabethan and nary and deadly twin to our sun. Jacobean literature and from Latin The names of ships echo classical verse. In Gaudy Night (1935), her Fig. 1. Atia (Polly Walker) sits on the themes. Erebus and Terror, last seen in Oxford-based thriller, one of the clues is podium at Caesar’s triumph with Baffin Bay in August 1845, were all too a poison-pen letter quoting Book 3.214- Antony (James Purefoy) in the back- aptly named, and Nelson was familiar 218 of the Aeneid, a passage about the ground. Rome, episode 1.10 with Agamemnon, Theseus, Medusa, Harpies, lines of which a full literal “Triumph,” HBO, 2005. and the French Pluton. Musicians are translation is never given, though it is just as loyal to the classical: Charon is easy enough from the context to pick up From the opening credits, in which continued on page 2 ancient mosaics and graffiti come to ani- mated life, Rome is a feast for the eyes, a Book Review: “The Shadow The Reimagined Getty Villa . 12 squalid, vivid reconstruction of the ancient Thieves” . 3 Book Review: “Harrius Potter et ambience that has clearly paid much atten- Rome in Prime Time Panel . 5 Philosophi Lapis”. 15 tion to the details of Roman material culture, WHAT’S NEW IN ANCIENT ROMAN PLATO’S “SYMPOSIUM”: A FILMMAKER’S as well as the small elements of social and MAGIC: RECENT ARCHAEOLOGICAL PERsPECTIVE . 16 DISCOVERIES . 6 political behavior. Best of all, the series Book Review: “The Lock,“ “The Key,” A Pair of Pieces from Book Four of and “The Door in the Wall”. 18 offers a complex presentation of power rela- “The Gardens of Flora Baum” . 8 tions in Rome, one in which class and the Book Review: “Till We Have Faces: National Endowment for the A Myth Retold”. 20 economics of empire shape competition on Humanities Grant . 9 many levels. There is much emphasis on Inside Ask A Classicist . 21 IT WAS THEIR DESTINY: ROMAN POWER perception, on the management of public AND IMPERIAL SELF-ESTEEM . 10 The World of Neo-Latin . 22 image to create legitimacy in the eyes of a Did You Know . 11 Guidelines for contributors. 24 targeted audience, whether that audience is APA Speakers Bureau . 11 continued on page 4 CROSSING THE STYX: THE AFTERLIFE OF THE AFTERLIFE continued from page 1 a sense that these creatures are foul overtly displayed. Anthony Burgess’s class, public-school-educated readers female monsters of unnatural habits. first novel, A Vision of Battlements, writ- were far more likely to have had a classi- This poison pen letter is also a mislead- ten about 1949 but not published until cal education than now. (Latin ing clue in that it leads heroine Harriet 1965, and set in Gibraltar, is based on remained an entrance requirement for Vane to pronounce, “I’m afraid we can’t the journey of Aeneas – his hero is the older universities until well after my suspect Emily or any of the scouts of called Ennis, and Turnus becomes day.) Harvey’s first edition was full of expressing their feelings in Virgilian Turner – and in his foreword, Burgess references to myth and fable – refer- hexameters” (116) – a sentiment that owns, modestly, “The use of an epic ences which we reduced to save space neatly summarizes the social cachet or framework, diminished and made for contemporary writers. But here was a snob appeal of the Latin tag. comic, was not merely pedantic wanton- dilemma. Because classical allusions (At the end of this novel, addicts will ness, nor was it solely a tribute to James were less current, that did not mean that recall, Lord Peter Wimsey proposes to Joyce; it was a tyro’s method of giving a reference book could omit them, for Harriet in the words, Placetne, magistra, his story a backbone. .” Burgess, as a one of the reasons why we need refer- to which she replies Placet: this oblique recent biography by Andrew Biswell ence books is to inform ourselves about approach added for us schoolgirls a revealed, was not a good Latin scholar: the things that our culture may have for- deeper sexual thrill, all the more gotten. So we aimed to include those thrilling for being clothed, as Gibbon major names that are woven through the put it, in the decent obscurity of a fabric of English Literature and to try, learned language.) where possible, to relate them to their One might have expected the con- Classical learning influence, their major translators, and nection between detective fiction and their history in the English-speaking the classics to wane with the teaching of infiltrates contemporary world. We also included brief defini- classics, but it persists, with great suc- literature in tions of terms such as Hellenistic and cess, in novels like Donna Tartt’s The many ways. Augustan, and we cross-referred to the Secret History (1992), which achieved Horatian Ode. These were not easy worldwide popularity and assumes a links or decisions (Senecan drama and familiarity with Greek myth and Lucan are not very elegantly connect- Dionysian ecstasy. Carol Goodman’s The ed), and we were aware that while you Lake of Dead Languages (2001) has a simi- can look up Ovid anywhere, it is not so lar background of death and the school- at Manchester University he passed his easy to find the provenance of legendary room. And classical detective fiction courses in English, History, and French, figure Hermes Trismegistus. isn’t wholly an English language obses- but failed the subsidiary but compulsory The selection of classical entries was sion: in the year 2000, Cuban writer José General Latin paper. He was granted a overseen by Dr. Robert Bolgar, editor of Carlos Somoza published The Athenian respectable Upper Second class degree Classical Influences on European Culture, Murders (originally in Spanish entitled in his Finals, thanks to the grace of a A.D. 1500-1700 (1976), whom I never La Caverna de Las Ideas, or The Cave of viva (an oral examination, or interview) met, though I enjoyed our copious cor- Ideas), which involves the mysterious – so we know that his Virgil came to respondence. I had one letter from him, death of one of Plato’s pupils, a plump him in translation, and courtesy of the which has given me much thought over detective called Heracles, and many inspiration of Joyce. the decades, about the survival of litera- scholarly jokes about textual misinter- The tradition continues: the South ture. He said that while he could specu- pretations, defective manuscripts, foot- African born novelist Lynn Freed uses late with reasonable confidence about notes, and translator’s errors. The novel the Demeter-Persephone myth in House which classical authors would still be is presented as an authentic Greek text, of Women (2002), a lyrical, female explo- familiar in two or three hundred years, written shortly after the Peloponnesian ration of the story. Here, a daughter at least as names and in translation, he Wars, and baffled and delighted even struggles to free herself from her over- could not begin to imagine what the those who knew the period. protective mother, only to find herself human race, if it survived, would be Classicists have always been good trapped in another form of hell and sex- reading in two to three thousand years.