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WORK TITLE: A Cabinet of Ancient Medical Curiosities
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WEBSITE: http://www.jcmckeown.com/
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https://canes.wisc.edu/jc-mckeown.htm * https://global.oup.com/academic/product/a-cabinet-of-ancient-medical-curiosities-9780190610432?cc=us&lang=en&#
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LC control no.: n 86039611
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HEADING: McKeown, J. C.
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372 __ |a Classical languages |2 lcsh
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670 __ |a Ovid. Ovid, Amores, 1987- : |b v. 1, CIP t.p. (J.C. McKeown)
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PERSONAL
Male.
EDUCATION:Cambridge University, Ph.D., 1978.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Educator, writer. University of Wisconsin–Madison, professor of classics.
WRITINGS
Contributor of articles to journals.
SIDELIGHTS
J.C. McKeown is a classics professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he teaches courses in Greek and Latin language and literature, as well as on ancient medicine and Greek and Roman civilization. He is the author of a popular language textbook, Classical Latin: An Introductory Course. McKeown is also the author of popular works of nonfiction including A Cabinet of Roman Curiosities: Strange Tales and Surprising Facts from the World’s Greatest Empire, A Cabinet of Greek Curiosities: Strange Tales and Surprising Facts from the Cradle of Western Civilization, and A Cabinet of Ancient Medical Curiosities: Strange Tales and Surprising Facts from the Healing Arts of Greece and Rome. Additionally, McKeown is the editor, with Peter E. Knox, of The Oxford Anthology of Roman Literature.
A Cabinet of Roman Curiosities
With his 2010 work, A Cabinet of Roman Curiosities, McKeown serves up a collection of esoteric, oddball, eccentric facts and strange beliefs of the ancient Romans. He arranges such facts, beliefs, and opinions under themes including “The Army,” “Women,” Religion and Superstition,” “Family Life,” “Slaves,” “Medicine,” “Farming,” “Names,” and “Toilets,” among numerous others. His quotes come from writers including Juvenal, Galen, Pliny, and Justinian. Speaking with a contributor on the History Blog website, McKeown remarked on the origin of this book: “I have a tendency to enjoy and remember trivial facts and stories like these. The majority were gathered during my reading over the years. … I wasn’t originally setting out to write a book. I started using quirky facts in class to keep students interested in learning Latin and then, when I spun the Web site to accompany my textbook, Classical Latin, I incorporated interesting stories to appear randomly at the bottom of each page as an incentive for students to continue with the online exercises. It started with about ninety items and grew from there.”
A contributor in UNRV.com termed A Cabinet of Roman Curiosities a “collection of the exotic and the weird–stuff that you may not find in mainstream histories of Rome.” The contributor added: “One should probably read it a chapter at a time when one is in a whimsical mood. That way one can better absorb and appreciate the kernels of wisdom in it.” Daily Beast Website writer Alexander Nazaryan similarly observed: “What McKeown has done here, quite simply, is organize his favorite quotations, facts, and illustrations from Roman history into subjects like law, children, and, of course, the dazzling varieties of ancient passion. From the bricolage emerges an entertaining and sometimes disturbing vision of a society, beneath whose famously thorough organization lurked a profound undercurrent of superstitions, fears, and primal urges.” Similarly, a Niagara Escarpment Views website contributor noted: “The book is surprisingly entertaining and gripping, teaching new information as if by accident. There is no attempt to hide the nasty aspects of Roman culture.” A History Blog reviewer also had praise, commenting: “[T]his book is ideal for the history nerd/research monkey who loves following up on a good clue. I spent two whole weekends link hopping and Googling to find out more about an anecdote in the book. For anyone like me, A Cabinet of Roman Curiosities is just the beginning, the nucleus of a do-it-yourself network that you, the Internet, and your library can create.” Writing in Bryn Mawr Classical Review Online, Keely Lake also had a positive assessment, commenting: “This cabinet is as true to the Roman world as the highbrow history it eschews. Whether we use it as a gift to friends or light reading for ourselves, the readers’ understanding of the ancients will be enriched by the stories they take away from this treasure chest of curiosities.” Likewise, a Daily Mail Online reviewer concluded: “This charming tome is an ideal one for dipping into, and for that reason is probably best kept in the bathroom.”
The Oxford Anthology of Roman Literature
McKeown serves as coeditor on The Oxford Anthology of Roman Literature, an introduction to the literature of the Roman world from the second century BC to the second century AD. The illustrated volume provides genres including poetry, drama, philosophy, and satire, among others, and gathers writers such as Tacitus, Catullus, Ovid, and Virgil. The editors also broaden the perspective, including authors who wrote in Greek. In this regard, Rex Stem, writing in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review Online, commented: “Note that five of the authors included wrote in Greek (Polybius, Josephus, Plutarch, Lucian, Marcus Aurelius), for this is an anthology of Roman literature not Latin literature, a commendable editorial choice that increases the book’s completeness. Equally valuable is the inclusion of engaging selections from authors not frequently read in translation courses (e.g., Pliny the Elder, Quintilian), yet who represent genres and disciplines otherwise ignored in such courses.”
Library Journal reviewer Nerissa Kuebich noted that the editors of The Oxford Anthology of Roman Literature “provide a thorough overview of the history surrounding each epoch with a ‘headnote’ intended to supply each literary work with context in lieu of a text peppered with footnotes.” Stem also had praise for the anthology, noting: “Since each chapter stands on its own, this anthology can be accommodated to a wide array of syllabi. The somewhat hypothetical figure known as the general reader would also certainly profit from this book, but its most apparent value derives from its teachability. Thanks to Knox and McKeown, the power and range of Roman literature now opens more easily into the undergraduate classroom.” A Classics for All Reviews web site writer also commended this collection, observing: “The choice of texts seems to have been quite strongly influenced by a desire to make this book a useful companion to courses in comparative literature. … It is good, then, to have an impressive collection of material for a modest price.”
A Cabinet of Ancient Medical Curiosities
McKeown serves up more historical oddities in A Cabinet of Ancient Medical Curiosities, “delivering a frightening, puzzling, thoughtful, and surprisingly engrossing survey,” according to a Publishers Weekly reviewer. The emphasis on this collection is on medicine in ancient Western civilization, and the author organizes his findings under such themes as diet and nutrition, pediatrics, surgery, gynecology, and pharmacology, among other areas of medicine. The passages come from Greek and Roman writers and deal with the surreal as well as alarmingly real as compared with modern thought on the subject.
The Publishers Weekly reviewer felt that this “well-organized and erudite survey is fascinating and enlightening.” Times Higher Education Online writer Jane Draycott also had a positive assessment of A Cabinet of Ancient Medical Curiosities, noting: “McKeown is to be congratulated for endeavouring to utilise an incredibly wide range of sources covering all aspects of healing (as opposed to what we today would consider medicine) in classical antiquity. He does not simply stick to the famous doctors Hippocrates and Galen, but also highlights much less well-known figures.” In a similar vein, Bryn Mawr Classical Review Online contributor Winston Black observed: “If you are seeking entertainment, McKeown delivers: he has selected some eight hundred short quotations (usually only a sentence or two long, up to a page at most) from Greek and Roman works, which portray the most absurd, amusing, and nauseating aspects of ancient medicine.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Library Journal, September 1, 2013, Nerissa Kuebich, review of The Oxford Anthology of Roman Literature, p. 107.
Publishers Weekly, October 24, 2016, review of A Cabinet of Ancient Medical Curiosities: Strange Tales and Surprising Facts from the Healing Arts of Greece and Rome, p. 68.
ONLINE
Bookslut, http://www.bookslut.com/ (October 1, 2010), Elizabeth Bachner, review of A Cabinet of Roman Curiosities.
Bryn Mawr Classical Review Online, http://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/ (December 6, 2010), Keely Lake, review of A Cabinet of Roman Curiosities; (October 6, 2014), Rex Stem, review of The Oxford Anthology of Roman Literature: (April 5, 2017), Winston Black, review of A Cabinet of Ancient Medical Curiosities.
Classical and Ancient Near Eastern StudiesCollege of Letters & Science, http://canes.wisc.edu/ (June 20, 2017), “J.C. McKeown.”
Classics for All Reviews, https://classicsforallreviews.wordpress.com/ (April 7, 2015), Simon Squires, review of The Oxford Anthology of Roman Literature.
Daily Beast, http://www.thedailybeast.com/ (August 7, 2010), Alexander Nazaryan, review of A Cabinet of Roman Curiosities.
Daily Mail Online, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/ (August 27, 2010), review of A Cabinet of Roman Curiosities.
History Blog, http://www.thehistoryblog.com/ (June 1, 2010), review of A Cabinet of Roman Curiosities; (June 2, 2010) “Q & A with Author J.C. McKeown.”
Huffington Post, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ (June 20, 2017), “J.C. McKeown.”
Niagara Escarpment, http://www.neviews.ca/ (November 17, 2010), review of A Cabinet of Roman Curiosities.
Times Higher Education Online, https://www.timeshighereducation.com/ (April 13, 2017), Jane Draycott, review A Cabinet of Ancient Medical Curiosities.
UNRV.com, http://www.unrv.com/ (June 20, 2017), review of A Cabinet of Roman Curiosities.*
Professor McKeown has recently published (with Peter Knox) An Anthology of Roman Literature (Oxford 2013), and they now working on a companion volume on Greek literature. He has also published A Cabinet of Greek Curiosities (Oxford 2013), a companion to A Cabinet of Roman Curiosities (Oxford 2010). He is working (with Joshua Smith) on The Hippocrates Code, a medical terminology course, and (with Megan Dickman and Asa Olsen) on a commentary on Plautus’s Rudens, and (with Eric Cox) on a reader to accompany his introductory Latin course, Classical Latin (Hackett 2010). The fourth volume of his commentary on Ovid’s Amores is nearing completion, and will be published in the next few years. In addition to teaching courses in Greek and Latin language and literature, Professor McKeown teaches lecture courses in Ancient Medicine and in Greek and Roman Civilization.
J.C. McKeown
Author
J.C. McKeown is the author of The Cabinet of Greek Curiosities: Strange Tales and Surprising Facts From the Cradle of Western Civilization (Oxford University Press) and Professor of Classics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is also the coeditor of the Oxford Anthology of Roman Literature, and author of Classical Latin: An Introductory Course and A Cabinet of Roman Curiosities.
QUOTE:
I have a tendency to enjoy and remember trivial facts and stories like these. The majority were gathered during my reading over the years.
I wasn’t originally setting out to write a book. I started using quirky facts in class to keep students interested in learning Latin and then, when I spun the Web site to accompany my textbook, Classical Latin, I incorporated interesting stories to appear randomly at the bottom of each page as an incentive for students to continue with the online exercises. It started with about 90 items and grew from there.
THE HISTORY BLOG
« “A Cabinet of Roman Curiosities” by J.C. McKeownTintin makes $1.4 million at auction (and waves in court) »
Q & A with author J.C. McKeown
This is the full author Q & A that I quoted just a teeny portion of in my review of A Cabinet of Roman Curiosities by J.C. McKeown. I emailed him the questions and he kindly emailed me back his answers.
* * *
Q: I’d like to know more about your factoid collection process. Had you taken any notes as Aulus Gellis had (Preface, pg. VIII), by jotting down oddities as you casually encountered them in your personal and professional reading, or did you review the sources explicitly to collect items that would serve as incentives for your Classical Latin exercises? Maybe some of both? Did you go through the sources all over again when you decided to make a book of it?
A: I have a tendency to enjoy and remember trivial facts and stories like these. The majority were gathered during my reading over the years. I like to read Latin and Greek for a couple of hours every day, regardless of what else I am doing, and my texts have a lot of passages underlined or commented on in the margins, so it was easy to pick them out.
I wasn’t originally setting out to write a book. I started using quirky facts in class to keep students interested in learning Latin and then, when I spun the Web site to accompany my textbook, Classical Latin, I incorporated interesting stories to appear randomly at the bottom of each page as an incentive for students to continue with the online exercises. It started with about 90 items and grew from there.
For a lot of the stuff that appears in the book it would be hard to go looking for it specifically. For example, nobody would really set out to inquire how many testicles the dictator Sulla had or, if they did want to know, the problem would be where to look, but the answer comes out of the blue right at the end of Justinian’s Digest – the cornerstone of so much modern Western law.
Q: Aelian describes the Byzantines as living in taverns and renting their homes to strangers. (Foreigners, pg. 110) Leeds University’s Clare Kelly Blazeby recently advanced a theory that mainland Greeks 500 – 700 years before Aelian was writing used their homes as taverns and brothels. Could there be a kernel of truth rooted in a Greek practice that spread to the eastern Hellenic world over time? Do you ever follow up on something you’ve encountered in the literature, even something fairly outlandish to our sensibilities, to see if there might be a historical basis for it?
A: This is a good example of my really not know what someone else could
make of it. It only made it into the book because it was curious. For what it’s worth, although Aelian wrote in Greek and obviously had access to a lot of very interesting sources now lost to us, he probably lived his whole life in Italy so maybe he is not the best authority for this sort of thing, but again I am not making a judgement on my source, just quoting it.
Q: I found myself following up on many individual curiosities. Additional research, pursuing a tangent, is so easy to do in the Internet era. In fact, it took me much longer to read your book than the number of pages and easy pace would suggest just because I kept running after factoids. Did you include hyperlinks to additional reading and original sources in the Classical Latin online exercises?
A: There are no hyperlinks in the text of Classical Latin itself. Many of the sources are not, I suspect, available online. I really regret not having easy and full online access to e.g. the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, because it is so useful in lots of ways. On my Web site, www.jcmckeown.com, I did include links to interesting web sites under the tab Mundus Araneosus (a world full of webs).
Q: It seems to me A Cabinet of Roman Curiosities is a book that could become the pivot of a huge network of information if you had an online version. A companion DVD with links to online editions of the sources, for instance, or even a full digital version of the book where every reference, footnote and bibliographical credit is an active link. Can you envision putting together something like that even for a book that is also traditionally published? Would it increase your workload past the point of it being worthwhile?
A: I dare say this would all be possible, but I’m not the world’s greatest computer user and the idea of me being a spider at the center of a huge Web is improbable. In any case, my wife cannot abide spiders.
Q: Marcus Aurelius’ description (Medicine, pg. 70) of the public baths upended my long-held assumption that they were indicative of general hygiene. I never considered how dirty, stagnant, greasy and petri-dish-like these unchlorinated pools full of oiled down people must have been. Meanwhile, Pliny described the barbarian Gauls and Germans using soap. (Foreigners, pg. 104) Do you think we still carry biases about who is or isn’t “civilized” from the classical texts, even without consciously realizing it?
A: Good point. As an Irishman whose country the Romans did not consider worth conquering because the people would not even make good slaves, I’m glad to see there is an upsurge in interest in Celtic art, which really is powerful and beautiful in its utterly unclassical way. Rome must have been dreadful when, for example, three hundred oxen were sacrificed at one time. It’s appalling to think of the blood, esp. if they performed these rituals at the height of summer.
Q: There’s an exhibit at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia right now called “Ancient Rome & America” about the powerful influence Roman mythology, politics, ideals, art and literature exerted on the nascent United States. The Founding Fathers and early leaders would have all been far more familiar with the classical authors than most of us are today. They would have been more like you, in fact, in that respect. Do you encounter the legacy of Rome everywhere you go, or do the vast differences between the Roman mindset and ours stand out more than the commonalities?
A: My wife says that I generally go around in a fog with little or no interest in anything outside our personal life that has happened since about A.D. 300. There is an implication in this question that I am looking for or finding lessons to be drawn from the past for the present and I’m flattered if you would think I have such a high purpose. I really don’t. Every reader will have to make up their own mind about the implications of each item in the book, if indeed there are any.
Q: I’m curious to know more about the early imperial plague pit found in 1876 that still reeked after almost 2,000 years. (Medicine, pg. 75) Bill Thayer’s excellent website pointed me to Rodolfo Lanciani’s 1888 book for an account of the find. Lanciani said the human remains turned to dust as soon as the pit was opened, but that the whole Servilian Agger area smelled revolting once dug up several years later, not the pit itself. What was your source?
A: If this were an academic book, I would have quoted my source. I’m pretty sure this item was a late candidate for entry into the book and I jotted it down casually. I’m sorry that I cannot tell you where I found it. I do remember talking to an archeologist colleague of mine to confirm the accuracy of what I was saying.
Q: What exactly did the primitive liposuction procedure performed on Caesianus’ son entail? (Medicine, pg. 68)
A: Pliny says that fat is not sensate, because it has neither veins nor arteries, and that this is why mice can nibble at living pigs. Then he goes straight on to say merely that “fat was withdrawn [literally “detracted”] from Apronius, and his body was relieved of the weight that made it impossible for him to move”.
Q: Is that one anecdote from Suetonius about Claudius’ slip of the tongue in front of the fighters in the Fucine sea battle (Spectacles, pg. 145) really the only source for the widespread belief that gladiators hailed the emperor with “we who are about to die salute you”?
A: I believe it is.
Q: You include reactions to antiquity from post-Fall Rome and Italy along with your ancient source material. Do you have a general interest in Italian history and culture, and if so, which came first: a passion for the literature or a passion for the place?
A: When I was student I spent all my summers in Greece and was a late bloomer in appreciating Italy. You may be thinking particularly of the “Wedding Cake” [ie, the Victor Emmanuel Monument], that utterly spoils the Capitol. I think I said that just because I find it an appalling and quite inappropriate building. I’m mostly just interested in things that happened 2,000 years ago but I felt I could vent on this one since every modern day Roman seems to agree.
Q: Was the excellent pasquinade “quod non fecerunt barbari, fecerunt Barberini” (Buildings, pg. 180) actually posted on the Pasquino or on one of the other talking statues, or just published and passed around?
A: I don’t know. I used the word pasquinade as a general term for I was mostly just interested in the clever expression itself.
Q: Is there a greater name in the history of the world than Fabius Ululutremulus? (Pompeii and Herculaneum , pg. 182)
A: If you come across it, please let me know.
Q: I was delighted to see a whole chapter on toilets, in large part because I found A Cabinet of Roman Curiosities to be an ideal example of bathroom reading material: short, digestible items that you can read quickly or linger over at length and then easily pick up where you left off. We have to do something to keep us occupied in there, after all, now that convivial socializing during excretory functions is no longer in vogue. Do you find that disconcerting or complimentary? (I very much hope it’s the latter.)
A: One of my friends has told me that he is reading it “in the little room”. As long as people read it and enjoy it, it really doesn’t matter where they read it.
Q: You describe Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things as one of the greatest poems ever written in Latin. (Toilets, pg. 187) What other ancient authors and works would you rank as superlatives in their own genres?
A: Personal bias comes into this, though few would question Vergil and Ovid’s right to rank very high, and also Tacitus and Juvenal. I find it easier to demote people from the high pedestal they seem to be on these days. Martial’s Epigrams, for example, strike me as tedious and small-minded, and not particularly artistic. I keep meaning to read right through Demosthenes, but I simply don’t find his language very interesting – I know this is a defect in me, for he had such a reputation in antiquity. I think I would love Sappho’s poetry, if only it weren’t so depressingly fragmented.
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QUOTE:
provide a thorough overview of the history surrounding each epoch with a
"headnote" intended to supply each literary work with context in lieu of a text peppered with footnotes.
The Oxford Anthology of Roman Literature
Nerissa Kuebich
Library Journal.
138.14 (Sept. 1, 2013): p107.
COPYRIGHT 2013 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
The Oxford Anthology of Roman Literature. Oxford Univ. Oct. 2013. 640p. ed. by Peter E. Knox & J.C. McKeown. index. ISBN
9780195395167. pap. $35. LIT
Intended as an introduction to the literature of the Roman world between the second century BCE and the second century CE, this illustrated
anthology presents a variety of texts that exemplify the classic Roman and Greek literary forms (satire, drama, philosophy, poetry) taken from the
"Oxford World's Classics" series. Texts include Catullus's Poems, Virgil's Ecologues, and the Annals of Tacitus, to name a few. Editors Knox
(Univ. of Colorado, Boulder; A Companion to Ovid) and McKeown (Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison; A Cabinet of Roman Curiosities: Strange
Tales and Surprising Facts from the World's Greatest Empire) provide a thorough overview of the history surrounding each epoch with a
"headnote" intended to supply each literary work with context in lieu of a text peppered with footnotes. Although little is mentioned about the
translation process, the editors paint an intriguing portrait of the interdisciplinary challenges in harvesting history from a body of ancient
literature. VERDICT This anthology is recommended primarily for students of classic Roman literature, although readers attracted to ancient
Roman history and culture may also find it of interest.--Nerissa Kuebrich, Chicago
Kuebich, Nerissa
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Kuebich, Nerissa. "The Oxford Anthology of Roman Literature." Library Journal, 1 Sept. 2013, p. 107+. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA341127077&it=r&asid=7422bb2d51f863680ae83da4c10a1a0d. Accessed 8 July
2017.
7/8/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
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Gale Document Number: GALE|A341127077
---
QUOTE:
delivering a
frightening, puzzling, thoughtful, and surprisingly engrossing survey
well-organized and erudite survey is
fascinating and enlightening
7/8/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1499570666585 3/3
A Cabinet of Ancient Medical Curiosities: Strange Tales and
Surprising Facts from the Healing Arts of Greece and Rome
Publishers Weekly.
263.43 (Oct. 24, 2016): p68.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
A Cabinet of Ancient Medical Curiosities: Strange Tales and Surprising Facts from the Healing Arts of Greece and Rome
J.C. McKeown. Oxford Univ., $18.95 (288p) ISBN 978-0-19-061043-2
McKeown, professor of classics at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and compiler of A Cabinet of Roman Curiosities and A Cabinet of
Greek Curiosities, goes for a weird-but-true trifecta with this compilation of medical oddities from ancient Western civilizations, delivering a
frightening, puzzling, thoughtful, and surprisingly engrossing survey. As well organized as it is erudite, the compendium tilts toward classics
enthusiasts, but there's still plenty of material to amaze an audience outside the ivory tower. McKeown writes that his "chief aspiration is to
provide glimpses into the world of medicine in the distant past that offer entertainment rather than enlightenment." That isn't quite true, of course.
There is plenty of medical knowledge from antiquity recorded here that remains relevant in modernity. But those nuggets are far outnumbered by
data that boggles the mind, or at least phenomena that seems ridiculous in the world of 21st-century medicine: a prescription for donkey's milk;
the birth defect of a "hairy heart"; a disturbing catalogue of diseases outlined by Plutarch; and an astounding array of animal-based medicine
touted in Dioscorides's Medical Material, including goat dung plasters and boiled viper meat. McKeown's well-organized and erudite survey is
fascinating and enlightening, though best consumed in small doses. Illus. (Jan.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"A Cabinet of Ancient Medical Curiosities: Strange Tales and Surprising Facts from the Healing Arts of Greece and Rome." Publishers Weekly,
24 Oct. 2016, p. 68. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA468771845&it=r&asid=81411cdfdd15ffcc470e7f28738ecc21. Accessed 8 July 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A468771845
QUOTE:
collection of the exotic and the weird - stuff that you may not find in mainstream histories of Rome. one should probably read it a chapter at a time when one is in a whimsical mood. That way one can better absorb and appreciate the kernels of wisdom in it.
A Cabinet of Roman Curiosities by J.C. McKeown
Book Review by Ursus
Did you know that Romans believed that goats breathed through their ears? Well, that is just the sort of priceless information you can find locked away in A Cabinet of Roman Curiosities. This is a book that takes a lighthearted romp through Roman history to collect some of the more obscure but colorful bits of information.
J.C. McKeown is professor of classics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He has penned a book on Latin and is currently working on a commentary on Ovid's Amores. McKeown states in his introduction he has no higher purpose for offering this book. The Roman having left us more information about themselves than any other ancient Western society, he simply decided to jot down random nuggets of information from Latin and Greek texts he deemed odd or amusing.
The ordering of the information, admits the author, is superficial at best; the curious facts conveyed will be arrayed around a loose topic such as "food and drink" or "women" or "medicine." (One chapter even focuses on toilets, proving that even our stately ancestors could not get their minds out of the gutter). Beyond that, however, the book is simply a collection of the exotic and the weird - stuff that you may not find in mainstream histories of Rome. Each entry is usually only several sentences long, separated from the next entry with ample spacing. When the author quotes directly from an ancient text he italicizes the work, otherwise the information is presented in normal text. But always at the end of each entry he references a primary text, which assures us he is not simply fabricating the information. The beginning and end of each chapter has a choice Latin quote from a primary text, and there are enough photographs and illustrations to provide some visual entertainment. The book also ends with a perfunctory glossary on important Roman names and terms.
Fur purposes of writing a review, I tried reading A Cabinet of Roman Curiosities straight through as much as possible, giving it my upmost serious attention. This is probably not how the book should be enjoyed. Instead one should probably read it a chapter at a time when one is in a whimsical mood. That way one can better absorb and appreciate the kernels of wisdom in it. For instance, if you yourself are working on your third glass of Chardonnay, then you may be better able to sympathize with St. Isidore, who stated that "People who drink wine in which eels have been drowned lose their appetite for drinking wine." (Etymologies 12.6.41)
...more Book Reviews!
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The Roman Army by P. Southern
This work invites comparison to Philip Matyszak's A Classical Compendium, another attempt at detailing the weird and wonderful tidbits of the ancient world. But whereas Matyszak concentrated on both the Roman and Hellenic worlds, McKeown concentrates solely on Rome. McKeown's more focused study may appeal to Romanophiles who don't give a fig for Greece. However, to be honest I thought A Classical Compendium was done with a little more passion, wit and organization, making it the overall better read. Nonetheless I still sympathize with McKeown's goals in furnishing us this work. A Cabinet of Roman Curiosities, on the whole, is a cute read, to be enjoyed as a lighthearted Romanophile outing.
QUOTE:
What McKeown has done here, quite simply, is organize his favorite quotations, facts, and illustrations from Roman history into subjects like law, children, and, of course, the dazzling varieties of ancient passion.
From the bricolage emerges an entertaining and sometimes disturbing vision of a society, beneath whose famously thorough organization lurked a profound undercurrent of superstitions, fears, and primal urges.
Smart Summer Reads from Daisy, JC McKeown
Looking to get smarter while sitting on the beach? Alexander Nazaryan recommends four stimulating, engaging, but still fun new books on language, Roman history, and more.
Alexander Nazaryan
ALEXANDER NAZARYAN
08.07.10 6:30 AM ET
Is there an unspoken rule that dictates that serious reading must cease at Memorial Day, to be recommenced again only with the retirement of summer whites in the first week of September?
The notion of the so-called beach read—really, at its finest, little more than a summer blockbuster between two covers—has always confounded me. Forget that only a lucky few still enjoy the kind of drawn-out European social-welfare-state vacation that allows for a refuge from the intrusions of the workaday world. But if our escapes from the office grow ever more brief, and if reading remains one of the enduring pleasures of vacation, shouldn't the books we haul to the beach be worthy of our time?
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And so, hoping to avoid plodding through another dreary paperback with its predictable turns of climax and suspense, I've found four nonfiction books—from Roman history to the modern practice of fishing—that cover serious subjects without being overly serious about it. They're good reads; good enough for the beach and beyond.
Here's another misconception—along with "summer reading"—that has long bothered me: that the ancient world was somehow a centuries-long snooze, filled with Charlton Heston lookalikes given to excessive flights of pontification. I'm not sure how ancient and boring came to mean the same thing in the American imagination.
But as the esteemed classicist J.C. McKeown shows in his Cabinet of Roman Curiosities, the ancients were as passionate, opinionated, and curious as we are today—if not more so. Like us, they loved sex and craved status and both coveted and feared the world beyond their porous borders.
What McKeown has done here, quite simply, is organize his favorite quotations, facts, and illustrations from Roman history into subjects like law, children, and, of course, the dazzling varieties of ancient passion.
From the bricolage emerges an entertaining and sometimes disturbing vision of a society, beneath whose famously thorough organization lurked a profound undercurrent of superstitions, fears, and primal urges. Channeling no one quite like the sitcom malcontent Al Bundy, an official in 102 BC warns, "Citizens, if we could live without wives, we would all do without that trouble."
This is no comprehensive Gibbon-like history of Rome, but, rather, a madcap smorgasbord of the ancient world: a cure for baldness that involves mouse droppings, the great orator Cicero's relation to the chickpea, and the surprisingly lewd graffiti in Roman public restrooms, which might send a warm feeling through anyone who remembers the old Times Square.
***
As long as we're on the topic of misconceptions, can we retire the tired comparison of Romantic poets to '60s rock stars? Yes, both parties (at least the males) sported long hair, were indulgent in drink and other sybaritic pursuits, and practiced some version of free love. But what they preached was entirely different.
The likes of Mick Jagger reveled openly in their lifestyle, celebrating it unabashedly in songs like "Let's Spend the Night Together." But as Daisy Hay argues persuasively in her new Young Romantics, despite the earthly drama in which the Romantics were often embroiled, their eyes generally wandered toward the heavens. Of course they drank, cheated, and argued. But they could also compose poetry—like John Keats' Ode on a Nightingale—that showed the most tender of sensibilities, the sort of thing that by the coarse conclusion of the 20th century had long become too quaint for popular consumption.
Hay suggests, intriguingly, that Romanticism is predicated on a notion of friendship. "They loved each other and hated each other," she writes. "They were joined by shared ideals, but also by romance, sex and blood… The story of their tangled communal existence is, in many ways, as dramatic and as surprising as anything they ever wrote."
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Their lives were rife with drama and given the combustible mix of egos and passions, those friendships, however dear, were bound to fray. Hay is at her finest in the treatment of the tragic Italian summer of 1822, when Percy Shelley drowned in a boating accident (tellingly, with the plays of the ancient Greek tragedian Sophocles in his pocket), and Lord Byron's daughter succumbed to typhus at his dreary villa.
By then, Keats had already languished and died in Rome, in 1821, beneath the long shadows of the Spanish Steps. Byron would die in 1824, fighting for Greece's freedom from the Ottoman Empire. Thus the circle of poets and friends was dissolving once and for all. One of its central members, Mary Shelley, would later remark, "Why am I doomed to live on seeing all expire before me?... At the age of 26 I am in the condition of an aged person—all my old friends are gone." Many a guitar-toting veteran of Woodstock has surely struggled through a similar lament.
But while in the hands of poets language can be sublime, it first arose for the most mundane purposes: warning that, say, a mountain lion was lurking in the grass or, more recently, posting weekend plans on Facebook.
In his light and amusing A Little Book of Language, David Crystal treats the world's 6,000 tongues—which are disappearing at an alarming rate—as a natural resource no less precious than our oceans and forests. "Half the languages of the world are likely to die out during this century," Crystal writes, though he also adds a hopeful note: "Saving a language is possible if the public cares enough."
It is easiest to love that which we know, and to demystify the workings of language Crystal offers readers a lighthearted tour of linguistics. He takes us from the brains of babies—"language acquisition devices," he calls them—trying to make sense of their own inchoate articulations, to the story of Harold Williams, a journalist who learned all 58 languages of the League of Nations.
Much like McKeown, Crystal leavens his erudition with amusing observation. He notes, for example, in his analysis of text messages, that only 20 percent of the words in a sampling of average texts were "textisms" like LOL—far less than most of us would expect. Ever the optimist, Crystal believes that languages need not meet the fate of the dodo bird. "I hope you'll care enough about languages to want to learn as many of them as possible." A smattering of high-school Spanish will simply not do.
Speaking of the English language, it is not unfair to say that it has rarely had as poor a custodian as George W. Bush, who once remarked, "I know the human being and fish can coexist peacefully." As always, his pronouncement hid some deeper wisdom beneath its surface stupidity, especially in light of Paul Greenberg's Four Fish, which (unwittingly) acts as a qualified reinforcement of our beleaguered ex-president's words.
Much like Crystal's book, this is an act of preservation. Greenberg grew up with fish, first learning to sail along the coast of Connecticut. Later, when his peregrinations—Greenberg is a well-regarded travel writer—brought him back home to care for his dying mother, she suggested that he take up fishing again as relief from the grief she knew her death would bring. And so he did.
Fish frame not only Greenberg's history, but that of humanity, from our first forays into freshwaters (salmon), the holiday fish of the Mediterranean beloved by the Romans (branzino then, sea bass today), the rise of industrial fishing (cod, once plentiful along the continental shelf off the Eastern seaboard), and—as the appetite for sushi and the like has increased worldwide—forays into the "high seas" for the threatened tuna.
Greenberg avoids sentimentalizing the fish that he so clearly loves and knows so much about. Though he avoids eating whale in Norway, he later—against his own injunction—revels in tuna at an upscale New York restaurant. As he takes us through the history of fishing, from the industrializing farming of the 20th century to more recent attempts at localized operations that treat fish humanely, he advocates a most sensible approach: "Wild fish did not come into this world just to be our food... If we hunt them and eat them, we must hunt them with care and eat them with the fullness of our appreciation."
What makes this book so enjoyable is Greenberg's knowledge that the moral of his story—responsible eating—is best served wrapped in a well-told tale. At his best, he is a Michael Pollan of the high seas.
Plus: Check out Book Beast for more news on hot titles and authors and excerpts from the latest books.
Alexander Nazaryan is at work on his first novel and is on the editorial board of the New York Daily News.
QUOTE:
McKeown is to be congratulated for endeavouring to utilise an incredibly wide range of sources covering all aspects of healing (as opposed to what we today would consider medicine) in classical antiquity. He does not simply stick to the famous doctors Hippocrates and Galen, but also highlights much less well-known figures.
A Cabinet of Ancient Medical Curiosities: Strange Tales and Surprising Facts from the Healing Arts of Greece and Rome, by J. C. McKeown
An entertaining study covers everything from doctors to patients, diagnosis to treatment and sex to death, says Jane Draycott
April 13, 2017
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By Jane Draycott
Twitter: @JLDraycott
A painting showing Cosmas and Damian, the patron saints of medicine, replacing a patient’s infected leg with the healthy leg of a person who had died
Source: Wellcome Library, London
A small fraction of Sir Henry Wellcome’s vast collection of objects sourced from all over the world is on permanent display in the Medicine Man exhibition on the first floor of the Wellcome Collection in London. A visitor can wander happily past glass cases containing surgical instruments, anatomical models, votive offerings and even a mummy taken from a wide range of cultures, and gain an insight into the many things, seemingly both rational and irrational to a 21st-century viewer, that humans have done in the pursuit of health and healing over the centuries. It is a cabinet of curiosities for a contemporary audience, arranged not only intelligently but, perhaps more importantly, sensitively. Indeed, the Wellcome Collection advertises itself as “the free destination for the incurably curious”, implying that the entire building serves as one giant cabinet of curiosities.
As the title of the volume under review suggests, J. C. McKeown’s new book, the third in the A Cabinet Of… series following instalments on Greece and Rome, attempts something similar. But, unlike that of the curators of the Wellcome Collection’s Medicine Man exhibition, the balance that he strikes veers uneasily between the promotion and the denigration of ancient medicine. With his tongue placed firmly in his cheek, he presents ancient medical theory and practice as simultaneously advanced and absurd. In the preface, he is keen to trace the origins of many contemporary medical achievements back to classical antiquity but simultaneously foregrounds “the odd, the bizarre, and the downright weird”, and both there and throughout the book, not enough is done to connect or at least reconcile the two.
McKeown is to be congratulated for endeavouring to utilise an incredibly wide range of sources covering all aspects of healing (as opposed to what we today would consider medicine) in classical antiquity. He does not simply stick to the famous doctors Hippocrates and Galen, but also highlights much less well-known figures. He covers both what is likely to be familiar to the reader (eg, the healing god Asclepius, healing sanctuaries and anatomical votives) and what is likely to be less so (eg, magic, astrology and dreams). He is entirely correct when he says that ancient medical literature is not readily accessible to an interested reader, and he has done that reader a great service in his thoughtful translations of vignettes from an extensive range of Greek, Latin and Arabic texts. Simultaneously, however, he does that same reader a disservice in not seeking to contextualise and explicate this fascinating material more fully. He arranges it thematically over the course of 14 methodically organised and beautifully illustrated chapters covering everything from doctors to patients, diagnosis to treatment and sex to death, but something fundamental is lost, as it were, in translation, which renders ancient medicine more opaque than it really needs to be.
As McKeown says himself, his work is meant to be “entertaining but not really enlightening”, and it is my hope that he will entertain his readers enough to encourage them to seek enlightenment on the subject of ancient medical theory and practice elsewhere. The Wellcome Collection, not to mention any other specialist medical museum, is ready and waiting.
Jane Draycott is Lord Kelvin Adam Smith research fellow in ancient science and technology, University of Glasgow.
A Cabinet of Ancient Medical Curiosities: Strange Tales and Surprising Facts from the Healing Arts of Greece and Rome
By J. C. McKeown
Oxford University Press 288pp, £12.99
ISBN 9780190610432
Published 23 February 2017
QUOTE:
If you are seeking entertainment, McKeown delivers: he has selected some eight hundred short quotations (usually only a sentence or two long, up to a page at most) from Greek and Roman works, which portray the most absurd, amusing, and nauseating aspects of ancient medicine.
BMCR 2017.04.05 on the BMCR blog
Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2017.04.05
J. C. McKeown, A Cabinet of Ancient Medical Curiosities: Strange Tales and Surprising Facts from the Healing Arts of Greece and Rome. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. xiv, 268. ISBN 9780190610432. $18.95.
Reviewed by Winston Black, Assumption College (w.black@assumption.edu)
Preview
J. C. McKeown, an Ovidian scholar and author of several Latin textbooks, has compiled this volume, the third in his Cabinet series of classical lore intended for popular audiences. It follows A Cabinet of Roman Curiosities: Strange Tales and Surprising Facts from the World’s Greatest Empire from 2010 and A Cabinet of Greek Curiosities: Strange Tales and Surprising Facts from the Cradle of Western Civilization from 2013. Like his previous Cabinet books, this is not a scholarly work and makes no claims to be: McKeown’s goal is to provide “entertainment rather than enlightenment” (x). In this review I will briefly address the easier question of whether this book is entertaining, and the more difficult question of whether a bedside table book like this does more harm than good in avoiding “enlightenment”.
If you are seeking entertainment, McKeown delivers: he has selected some eight hundred short quotations (usually only a sentence or two long, up to a page at most) from Greek and Roman works, which portray the most absurd, amusing, and nauseating aspects of ancient medicine. Most of the translations are apparently new (he never says explicitly they are his own) and presented in engaging and colloquial English. They are organized into fourteen thematic chapters on topics such as the doctor in society, anatomy, sex, prognosis and diagnosis, and various treatments, culminating with ruminations on death. (Some of the quotations are recycled from a chapter on medicine in his Roman volume of 2010.) McKeown makes light of his own book and its organization by using ancient and modern medical language: he recommends reading only two chapters of the book each day, lest an excess of this literary medicine “cause drowsiness and, in rare cases, nausea” (xiv); and concerning the passages on “General Medicine” in Chapter XIII, he says “it seemed better to isolate them together here rather than to insert them ectopically somewhere else or excise them entirely” (229). Likewise, the blurbs on the back cover, which seem to be describing this book, are actually quotes from ancient authors about ancient books: Theophilus Protospatharius, for example, says, “Elegantly composed, but of little practical use.” While many individual passages are of a serious nature, the tone of the entire book is mocking, as McKeown skewers the credulity of ancient doctors and gullibility of their patients as well as the foibles of doctors to this day. Galen, in particular, is attacked repeatedly (and not undeservedly) for his arrogance and verbosity.
McKeown quotes abundantly from the usual suspects—the Hippocratic Corpus, Galen, Pliny the Elder, Celsus, Dioscorides —but also provides lesser known material such as inscriptions from Epidaurus and other temple complexes, the fourth- century CE Greek Cyranides, Firmicus Maternus, and medico-magical papyri from Egypt. One of McKeown’s strengths lies in bringing non-medical materials to bear on the subject of medicine and healing, including philosophical works of Plato and Aristotle, the plays of Aristophanes and Euripides, legal texts compiled under Theodosius and Justinian, histories by Polybius and Diodorus Siculus, and satirical observations from Martial, Lucian, and Menander. The inclusion of several quotes from Saint Augustine and the story of Cosmas and Damian is disconcerting, as McKeown does not otherwise engage with the rise of Christianity and its relationship with medicine.
The book is handsomely designed and visually pleasing. Each chapter begins with a Greek or Roman coin, most of which portray Asclepius, and which are explained at the back of the volume. A tiny silhouette of an ancient medical tool such as a mortar and pestle, forceps, or scalpel separates each passage. Most chapters include a small selection of images, often of ancient sculptures and votives, though some are of modern paintings and photographs, or are drawn from medieval Latin, Greek, and Arabic manuscripts. McKeown provides short commentary to just a handful of texts and images, usually humorous and anachronistic: to give a few examples, a Scythian warrior in a sculptural frieze is not “anxious about his capabilities, sexual or otherwise” (85); Seneca is “punching well above his philosophical weight” (125) when juxtaposed with Socrates; an image of Medea is “a very bad advertisement for foreign medicine” (202); and slaves or criminals are served as “meals on wheels” to wild beasts (215).
If you are seeking enlightenment about ancient medicine, however, then you should avoid this volume or handle it with extreme caution. McKeown disclaims any scholarly pretensions on the subject of ancient medicine and rather than being merely non-enlightening, he goes so far as to be anti-enlightening. He flaunts his ignorance of the topic of his book, and admits, “my modus operandi unabashedly makes no attempt to give a fair and balanced account of Greek and Roman medicine” (x). The reader in search of information about ancient medicine is guided only to “the odd, the bizarre, and the downright weird” and away from “the more rational and scientific aspects of ancient medical thought” (x). The structure of the book makes this agenda clear: he begins the book with a chapter on “Medicine, Religion, and Magic”, highlighting the most superstitious elements of ancient healing, but does not explain the ancient elements and humoral theory until nearly the end of the book (229-230), apparently as an afterthought, even though many quotations up to that point depend on understanding that medical framework.
Granted, no scholar is bound to serve as an apologist for premodern medicine and to make unrealistic claims for its rationality or efficacy, but McKeown has done a greater disservice by doing the very opposite in cherry-picking the most embarrassing passages from often lengthy sources. Nor is he obliged to write the sort of book that a professional historian of medicine would, but he should at least follow the Hippocratic standard that he often quotes: “at least do no harm”. What sort of harm does he do? McKeown intentionally, and quite happily, perpetuates popular misconceptions about ancient medicine and a Whiggish focus only on medical “progress” that has disappeared in the last half century except in the most salacious books written only to make money on horror stories masquerading as history. That attitude is made explicit in his brief comment on humoral theory: “Not many other beliefs so wholly lacking in any proper scientific foundation have impeded progress for so long.” (230) Furthermore, no quotations are given a date, nor are the works from which they come ever explained. There are no notes or bibliography, a policy McKeown chose to avoid “distraction” (xiii). References are not provided for any of the hundreds of texts for readers interested in pursuing a passage’s meaning and source. Even if McKeown imagines that his intended audience might consider such a list of references a “distraction”, many readers, this reviewer included, would appreciate its inclusion. Even though McKeown does provide an author and title for most quotations, he presents a millennium or more of ancient Mediterranean medicine as such a homogeneous and static mass of nonsense that “it very often does not greatly matter when or by whom something was said” (xiii). This is not simplified history for a popular audience; it is patently anti-historical.
Does A Cabinet of Ancient Medical Curiosities have any value, apart from providing a chuckle for modern practitioners who want to feel superior? McKeown has translated a wide variety of ancient sources on medicine and compiled them in an accessible and affordable book, which could benefit a student of ancient medicine who is not fluent in Greek or Latin. The only comparable collection of ancient medical sources in translation is James Longrigg’s more limited and significantly more sober Greek Medicine from the Heroic to the Hellenistic Age: A Source Book (1998), and it seems there is room for more such anthologies with the proliferation of university courses on the history of medicine. If used with care (by avoiding the preface and random comments), McKeown’s book presents a stimulating snapshot of the many visual and written sources available to the historian of medicine. It is all the more regrettable that McKeown, despite the scope of sources and quality of the new translations and images in his book, has so little respect for the history of medicine that he feels he can take those sources out of context solely for entertainment purposes. There is plenty of room for humor in the study of history, and there is much that is genuinely amusing in ancient literature, but the humor in this book is of a vicious sort, unmoored from the Greek and Roman cultures that produced these “curiosities”. Entertainment does not have to come at the expense of enlightenment.
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QUOTE:
this book is ideal for the history nerd/research monkey who loves following up on a good clue. I spent two whole weekends link hopping and Googling to find out more about an anecdote in the book. For anyone like me, A Cabinet of Roman Curiosities is just the beginning, the nucleus of a do-it-yourself network that you, the Internet, and your library can create.
THE HISTORY BLOG
« Private collection of Italian masters displayed for first timeQ & A with author J.C. McKeown »
“A Cabinet of Roman Curiosities” by J.C. McKeown
McKeown cover imageOxford University Press sent me some books to review (no money changed hands or influence was brought to bear, trust) and the first one I dived into was A Cabinet of Roman Curiosities: Strange Tales and Surprising Facts from the World’s Greatest Empire by J.C. McKeown. Much like actual cabinets of curiosities, the book collects all kinds of notable tidbits from ancient Roman authors. Some are precious gems, some colorful corals and some just sort of weird-looking rocks.
McKeown, a classics professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, makes it clear in the preface that he’s not making any historical or factual assessments. He’s just sharing the wealth that he’s encountered in his perusals, which is for the best, because to paraphrase Obelix, those Romans were crazy. As McKeown so felicitously puts it:
As it happens, I personally find it hard to believe that a six-inch fish could have held back Mark Anthony’s flagship during the Battle of Actium, or that Milan was founded because a woolly pig was seen on the future site of the city, or that the phoenix appears every five hundred years, or that touching the nostrils of a she-mule with one’s lips will stop sneezing and hiccups, or that fish sauce is an effective cure for crocodile bites, or that any Roman emperor was eight foot, six inches tall. I strongly suspect that goats do not breathe through their ears, and there are no islands in the Baltic Sea inhabited by people whose ears are so enormous that they cover their bodies with them and do not need clothes. I do not myself wear a mouse’s muzzle and ear tips as an amulet to ward off fever, nor do I know precisely how one might attach earrings to an eel. (Preface, pg. VII)
The chapters on medicine and religion are particularly replete with this kind of off-the-wall quasi-fact, and yes, they are all awesome, but even the entirely believable observations can be mind-blowing.
For example, Roman encyclopedist Celsus in his volume On Medicine counseled people with wounds to avoid the public baths because “bathing makes [the wound] moist and dirty, and that often leads to infection. (Celsus On Medicine 5.28)” Marcus Aurelius went even further in his Meditations where he called bathing “olive oil, sweat, filth, greasy water, everything that is disgusting (Meditations 8.24).”
I had always assumed that the Roman penchant for copious bathing was indicative of general hygiene, but those eye-witness comments made me realize that the baths couldn’t help but have been pools of nastiness. Most of them weren’t spring-fed but filled and emptied like any other pool, only there was no chlorine, no filter and not even any soap. Can you imagine the sheer quantities of dirt, oil left over from the scraping that stood in stead of washing, human excretions and secretions of every variety that must have been floating in those baths?
That wasn’t the only tidbit that sent me on a voyage of discovery. In fact, this book is ideal for the history nerd/research monkey who loves following up on a good clue. I spent two whole weekends link hopping and Googling to find out more about an anecdote in the book. For anyone like me, A Cabinet of Roman Curiosities is just the beginning, the nucleus of a do-it-yourself network that you, the Internet, and your library can create. It gave me visions of where digital books could go over the next few years: every source linked to, every footnote connected to further information.
I had an opportunity to ask the author some questions about the book and his process. McKeown can’t exactly picture himself as the “spider at the center of a huge Web” of networked links. He went about collecting these facts in a more traditional manner, and some sources may not even be available online. (Also his wife is apparently arachnophobic.)
I have a tendency to enjoy and remember trivial facts and stories like these. The majority were gathered during my reading over the years. I like to read Latin and Greek for a couple of hours every day, regardless of what else I am doing, and my texts have a lot of passages underlined or commented on in the margins, so it was easy to pick them out.
I wasn’t originally setting out to write a book. I started using quirky facts in class to keep students interested in learning Latin and then, when I spun the Web site to accompany my textbook, Classical Latin, I incorporated interesting stories to appear randomly at the bottom of each page as an incentive for students to continue with the online exercises. It started with about 90 items and grew from there.
For a lot of the stuff that appears in the book it would be hard to go looking for it specifically. For example, nobody would really set out to inquire how many testicles the dictator Sulla had or, if they did want to know, the problem would be where to look, but the answer comes out of the blue right at the end of Justinian’s Digest – the cornerstone of so much modern Western law.
Yes, I would enjoy feasting on this man’s tasty, tasty brains.
There is a downside to his approach, however. When he introduces a contemporary reaction to a classical anecdote, the facts can be hazy. It doesn’t happen often — the vast majority of the book cites Roman and Greek literature — but I did encounter two questionable claims. One is that our phrase “parting shot” comes from “Parthian shot”, after the famed archers of the Parthian cavalry who were so skilled that they could fire their bows over their shoulders as they rode away from the battle field. It seems, however, that the literal “parting shot” expression appears in English texts earlier than the Parthian version.
The second iffy claim was one that sent me on the most wonderful romp through archaeology in post-Unification Rome. While discussing plagues and the burial of the dead, McKeown says:
A pit one hundred and sixty feet long, one hundred feet wide, and thirty feet deep, containing an estimated twenty-four thousand corpses from the early imperial period, was discovered outside Rome in 1876; when it was opened, the stench was still intolerable. (Medicine, pg. 75)
You can see why I had to follow up on that kind of juicy tidbit. After some Googling and a trip to one of my favorite sites, LacusCurtius, I found a book called Ancient Rome in the Light of Recent Discoveries written in 1888, just 18 years after Rome joined a unified Italy, by Rodolfo Lanciani, the first official archaeologist of the new Italian capital. On pages 66 and 67 of chapter 3, he discusses finding that very pit on the Esquiline hill in 1876.
He found plenty of ooze and stench in his excavations of the area, but the actual 1876 pit wasn’t the locus of it. The bones turned to dust as soon they were exposed to air. It was in 1884 at a nearby spot that he and his diggers encountered the remains of a garbage dump (plenty of bodies, human and animal in that one too) which was so rank he had to give his team regular breaks so they could go off somewhere and breathe.
I asked McKeown if Lanciari was his source, and he said that it was a late entry into the book that he had jotted down casually. He couldn’t exactly recall the source but he did remember talking to an archeologist colleague to confirm the anecdote’s accuracy.
Obviously it’s no huge deal, but it’s a grain of salt to keep with you when you read the small portion of the book that isn’t a direct quote of an ancient source.
Final verdict: this book is awesome. It’s a fascinating glimpse into the ancient mind, life, culture, society. It’s a boon for anyone with a yen for chasing after historical details, and as I proudly told the author, it’s an outstanding bathroom book. It’s easily digestible, easy to follow, and easy to pick up where you left off. Throw out your cheesy magazines and leave this on the tank. Your guests are sure to thank you, not to mention bring up far more interesting lines of conversation at the dinner table than they would have if they’d just put down last year’s fall shoe issue of Cosmo.
After all, we don’t have community toilets that we all sit on together to socialize during excretory functions. Vacerra, that friend of Martial‘s who spent all day in the community latrine hoping to scrounge a dinner invitation from one of his fellow crappers (Toilets, pg. 190), would have to find a new way to freeload.
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OCTOBER 2010
ELIZABETH BACHNER
FEATURES
READING A CABINET OF ROMAN CURIOSITIES
Today I started crying a bit on the walk home from the library. I was carrying heavy bags, I hadn�t eaten enough, I was watching slow-moving tourists plod down Fifth Avenue in the heat, and I wondered if they were in love with each other, and I wondered if they were happy with their visit to my city, and then suddenly I was all weepy about some dead unicorn. Well, it wasn�t a unicorn, really. It was a delicate, forest-dwelling Laotian ox, with two horns. A saola, known to scientists for less than twenty years. Yesterday I was watching YouTube videos of weird Japanese commercials over someone�s shoulder, and then there it was, a news item about the pseudoryx nghetinhensis, with a picture of the bummed-out looking little creature tied to a wooden fence. Some locals found it, captured it, and then it died. In a best case scenario, there are a hundred of these animals left in the wild. It�s just as likely that there are only twelve left. �
I was reading Lori Gottlieb�s Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough, with all its different kinds of wrongness, and then I opened up Durs Gr�nbein�s Ashes for Breakfast right to that poem, �To an Okapi in the Munich Zoo,� but it was only near 37th street that I burst into unexpected tears. I was thinking, What kind of human life do those tourists have?, and, Why can�t we just leave the okapis and soalas and oryxes alone?, and I was thinking how no human being, no rare animal, no common animal, is an �8� that will eventually turn into a �6� when it gets older -- there is no �top one percent.� So I don�t have to just face that I am not in the �top one percent of women� -- we are all tens out of ten. Each unique! Each important! Really, people of all kinds fall in love! And really, there are unicorns out there! It�s just that they have two horns. And we keep killing them.
And I thought, Shit, why am I ranting to myself? A close friend instructed me to get the Lori Gottlieb book out of my apartment and then burn some sage. But she can�t protect me from the world of bad news out there -- from all the wrong definitions and faulty premises and pernicious �facts� and sketchy statistics, from what some stranger has picked out to write down and tell me. It�s not that deterministic thinking doesn�t function like truth. The problem is that it does -- pseudofacts function just like facts in our minds when we believe them. And there are so many more beautiful, exciting, varied ways to look at the world.
Among the many excellent reasons to study history -- natural history, unnatural history -- is to remind ourselves that prevailing beliefs in any given culture at any given moment are usually batshit crazy. At best, they are optional, but they are almost never harmless. They often delude us and limit us. They usually serve to fit us into the herd, like Procrustes� unfortunate visitors who got their limbs hacked off or stretched out so they�d fit into his iron bed. When I was reading Marry Him, I thought about a letter from the famous seductress Natalie Barney to her lover: �Yesterday I rode twenty-eight kilometers looking for something of beauty, tired of my surroundings. I saw pipes, stones, old women, cows and sheep. One sheep refused to walk with the herd and was beaten. Am I like that sheep? Yes.� Natalie wasn�t just talking about being a lesbian, although of course homosexuality was falsely classified as a mental disorder until decades after she died. She was talking about her persistent, threatening refusal to settle, her belief that life should be art.
I also thought about Queen Medb in the T�in B� C�ailnge, who tells her husband how she rejected marriage proposals from the envoys of a whole bunch of kings and their sons: �I turned them all down. I asked a more exacting wedding-gift than any woman ever before me -- a man without meanness, jealousy, or fear� I never had one man without another waiting in his shadow.� There�s another great scene where a beautiful woman poet prophesies Medb�s defeat, and Medb just keeps arguing against the prophesy and repeating the same question, like a teenager shaking a Magic 8-Ball over and over again until she sees �Without a doubt.� Medb was a bit much -- she wanted a bunch of her allies killed off just because they pitched their tents faster than she could, and it irked her -- but I wish I could be more �powerful in warfare, fight, and fray� than I am. It would be pretty scary to tell Queen Medb that she was �not exactly Angelina Jolie.� Even Medb, though, lived in a world shaped and confined by her own beliefs, her own ideas of what was true or what mattered, her own iron bed to fit into.
In a culture of whacked-out theories and bad advice, we�re probably happiest relying on our own intuition. In a thousand years, if we haven�t gone the way of the saolas, how will the literary relics of our own empire look to readers?
�I am not an expert on ancient history and have rarely presumed to express an opinion on the validity, intention, or importance of the Roman or Greek writers quoted or cited in [this] book,� writes classicist J.C. McKeown in his introduction to A Cabinet of Roman Curiosities: Strange Tales and Surprising Facts from the World�s Greatest Empire. �As it happens, I personally find it hard to believe that a six-inch fish could have held back Mark Antony�s flagship during the battle of Actium, or that Milan was founded because a woolly pig was seen on the future site of that city, or that the phoenix appears every five-hundred years, or that touching the nostrils of the she-mule with one�s lips will stop sneezing and hiccups, or that fish sauce is an effective cure for crocodile bites, or that any Roman emperor was eight foot, six inches tall. I strongly suspect that goats do not breathe through their ears, and that there are no islands in the Baltic Sea inhabited by people whose ears are so enormous that they cover their bodies with them and do not need clothes. I do not myself wear a mouse�s muzzle and ear tips as an amulet to ward off fever, nor do I know precisely how one might attach earrings to an eel.�
Pliny the Elder, author of Natural History, is always one of my favorites. He tells us that if a person whispers in a donkey�s ear that he has been stung by a scorpion, the affliction is immediately transferred to the donkey; that hyenas imitate human speech and can learn to pronounce a shepherd�s name, so they can call him outside and tear him to pieces; that putting goat dung in their diapers soothes hyperactive children, �especially girls.� I don�t know whether anyone ever tested this wisdom, but original readers of Natural History must have thought about it. Pliny reports on manticores, basilisks, and a �one-horned Indian animal with the head of a deer, the body of a horse, the feet of an elephant, and the tail of a wild boar.� He had one thing right about the unicorn, I guess -- �it cannot be taken alive.� All eleven of the captured saolas, apparently, have been dead on arrival. Scientists will have a look at this last one�s corpse. Pseudoryxes will die, pseudofacts will live on, and how can we protect ourselves from phony information -- the idea that we are sick, defective, ripe for a beating because of who we are or what we want? Keep being curious, I guess. Keep hope alive. Keep being unique. Ignore the facts, maybe, or rewrite them, or see them in a new way. Keep letting rare things live.
McKeown tells a �wonderful, but apocryphal� anecdote about Ovid. His father was beating him for persisting in writing poetry when there was no money in it, and Ovid cried out, �Parce mihi; numquam versicabo, pater!� (�Spare me, father, and I�ll never write verses again!�) Which scans as iambic pentameter.
So many of the facts we have left -- Pliny�s facts, other facts -- are accidental or purposive lies, however entertaining. But living, breathing ungulates are true, whatever we call them. And living, breathing human beings are true, however someone rates them. And Ovid�s poems are true, the way all poems are true, and maybe love is a little bit true too, like the saola, like a misnamed creature that dies when it�s trapped.
"To an Okapi in the Munich Zoo"
by Durs Gr�nbein (trans. Michael Hofman)
The clank of a steel door, and the ignominious entrance
Of the heraldic beast, trembling, because it�s feeding time,
And the keeper wants to knock off, and the beastly onlookers are laughing�
These are things not writ in any unicorn legend. Okapi�
The word is from jungle languages, now themselves extinct,
Insufficiently tall for the savannah, this patient, rust-colored
Throat merits its pellets of straw, and its locked stall at night.
Because the free range world will be strange to him,
As strange as to the bemused visitor
This combination of giraffe and zebra,
Equally remote from the familiar childhood cutout of either.
One more ruminant from the olden days, a sentry
Planted along the zoological roadside, as though to warn
Against the pathos of the exotic throwback.
QUOTE:
The book is surprisingly entertaining and gripping, teaching new information as if by accident. There is no attempt to hide the nasty aspects of Roman culture.
A Cabinet of Roman Curiosities by J.C. McKeown
November 17, 2010
The subtitle gives a perfect description of this book: “Strange Tales and Surprising Facts from the World’s Greatest Empire.” Bits and pieces of quotations, graffiti, legends and sayings are presented in short chapters that deal with family life, women, medicine, slaves, spectacles, buildings, emperors and much more. There is a whole chapter, including a photograph, on toilets! Another chapter presents details and photographs that are sexually explicit.
You probably need some knowledge of ancient Rome or Latin in order to appreciate this book. When at least some of the names of writers and historical figures are familiar, the information gives insight into their lives and times. Some examples: a man boasted about a wound to his face received while fighting for Caesar, but Caesar responded with “You should never look back when you’re running away.” One of the reasons that a conspiracy was formed to assassinate Caesar, was that he didn’t show respect by standing up when Senators told him that they were going to bestow honours upon him; at dinner one day, Caesar said that the best way to die is suddenly and unexpectedly, and he was murdered the next day. These examples are about Julius Caesar, but there are references to Antony, Cleopatra, Octavius, Claudius, Nero and countless others.
The book is surprisingly entertaining and gripping, teaching new information as if by accident. There is no attempt to hide the nasty aspects of Roman culture. Life seems to have been of little value and there was widespread, horrific cruelty to humans as well as animals, with apprently no objection or opposition.
There is even a fascinating account of a UFO sighting given, which suggests time travel or space ships! Our current civilization may not be so far removed from ancient Rome after all.
QUOTE:
This cabinet is as true to the Roman world as the highbrow history it eschews. Whether we use it as a gift to friends or light reading for ourselves, the readers’ understanding of the ancients will be enriched by the stories they take away from this treasure chest of curiosities.
Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2010.12.60
J. C. McKeown, A Cabinet of Roman Curiosities: Strange Tales and Surprising Facts from the World's Greatest Empire. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. Pp. xiii, 243. ISBN 9780195393750. $17.95.
Reviewed by Keely Lake, Wayland Academy (klake@wayland.org)
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Preview
James McKeown has written a lighthearted miscellany that will serve as a wonderful gift for anyone who is fascinated by the Romans. The humor with which he has approached this book is evident in the book cover, which contains glowing blurbs such as “Greater than the Iliad.” The quotation is not from a lofty collegiate colleague about McKeown’s own book, however, but by Sextus Propertius about Vergil’s Aeneid. There is no pretence in the preface either, where McKeown describes his efforts as a mere collection of observations about ancient Rome. He has not cited some sources “to ensure that the reader does not suppose that this book has academic pretensions” (ix), and he has chosen among multiple versions of other stories as suited his fancy, either using the best-known source, or the most coherent, or simply wherever he happened to note it first. McKeown is a natural teacher with an ear for an engaging anecdote. He knows how to sift through his vast knowledge of the ancients to present a story that will entertain and educate those listening. As such, this interesting volume will amuse the amateur and provide the expert with grand fodder for their classes; our students will enjoy hearing of these odd little facts and tales in the spare minutes after a lesson is done.
McKeown has not pulled punches in his choice of anecdotes. Death, suffering, cruelty, and base human vanity and foolishness are all here—he has not whitewashed the Romans for those with prudish sensibilities, and there is much suffering evident in the treatment of people of every status, gender, and nationality. Indeed nothing has been sanitized: there is a section on medicine and another on toilets; one section warns off the faint of heart altogether with the title “Not for the Puritanical.” The reviewer must admit that she was frequently troubled by the brutal treatment of human life, natural resources, and the animal kingdom portrayed by ancient writers as a matter of course. There are enough funny bits, on the other hand, including McKeown’s own occasional commentary on the stories included—such as in Polybius’ seeming description of the Romans as eighteen inches tall (42-43) and the reason that enjoying the smell of burning papyri does not constitute glue sniffing (183)—to keep one going through what one might find the more depressing pieces. It is an easy book to keep reading, just as it is an easy book to lay aside and return to later without a loss of continuity.
The book is, of course, a nice source for some of those tidbits which we might remember from our own school days, ones which we could not find later or which we had simply forgotten over the years. This book does not ask for a long review where one scours for errors or technical arguments; how does a reviewer take issue when grandeur and pretension are so studiously avoided? The modesty with which the material is presented, however, hides an important truth amongst the wild facts and anecdotes sometimes difficult for a tender heart to read: ancient life was not all Ciceronian discourse and Vergilian polish. Those in the Roman world lived as dirty and as dangerous, as deadly and as perverse a life as we do today. McKeown’s book is honest about this darker side, and his relaxed tone allows us to work our way through many things we may have forgotten, perhaps intentionally in our reverie for the Romans, but which we should not forget. The human world is on display here with its faults and its progress, its sadness and its humor. This cabinet is as true to the Roman world as the highbrow history it eschews. Whether we use it as a gift to friends or light reading for ourselves, the readers’ understanding of the ancients will be enriched by the stories they take away from this treasure chest of curiosities.
QUOTE:
This charming tome is an ideal one for dipping into, and for that reason is probably best kept in the bathroom.
How to outsmart a lion and other handy Roman tips
A CABINET OF ROMAN CURIOSITIES: STRANGE TALES AND SURPRISING FACTS FROM THE WORLD'S GREATEST EMPIRE BY J.C. McKEOWN (OUP £10.99)
UPDATED: 12:51 EDT, 27 August 2010
Frankie Howerd in Up Pompeii
What have the Romans ever done for us? So ask the Monty Python team in one of the most famous scenes from The Life Of Brian. J.C McKeown's charming compendium of life in the world's greatest civilisation suggests a full and thorough answer would be enough to fill several feature films.
Anyone dipping into this serendipitous book, culled wherever possible from the ancient texts themselves, will find enough surprising facts and strange tales to satisfy the most voracious pub quizzer.
There are sections on every aspect of daily existence, from family and the law through to decadence and education. In the section on entertainments we learn that enthusiasm for games was instilled at an early age: a terracotta baby's bottle found at Pompeii was decorated with the figure of a gladiator.
For any combatant uneasy about his chances in the Coliseum, Pliny mentions that sprinkling copper into the mouths of bears and lions would ensure they were unable to bite (although he fails to expand on how you'd get near enough to administer the dose in the first place).
Food and drink also merits its own chapter, with some useful tips for successful dinner parties today.
According to a house rule inscribed on a wall in Pompeii: 'Men should turn their lustful looks away from other men's wives', while visiting couples are admonished to 'postpone disputes and wrangling - otherwise, turn your steps back to your own house'.
The section on animals is also probably best left alone by anyone with a tender heart, although Plutarch records a memorable incidence of a performing elephant who couldn't learn a particular trick and which was later spotted practising by itself in the moonlight.
This charming tome is an ideal one for dipping into, and for that reason is probably best kept in the bathroom.
Speaking of which, a section on sanitation could teach the modern city planner a thing or two. According to a 4th-century catalogue, ancient Rome had no fewer than 144 public toilets. Boris, please take note.
QUOTE:
Note that five of the authors included wrote in Greek (Polybius, Josephus, Plutarch, Lucian, Marcus Aurelius), for this is an anthology of Roman literature not Latin literature, a commendable editorial choice that increases the book’s completeness. Equally valuable is the inclusion of engaging selections from authors not frequently read in translation courses (e.g., Pliny the Elder, Quintilian), yet who represent genres and disciplines otherwise ignored in such courses.
Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2014.10.59
Peter E. Knox, J. C. McKeown (ed.), The Oxford Anthology of Roman Literature. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. Pp. xii, 633. ISBN 9780195395167. $35.00 (pb).
Reviewed by Rex Stem, University of California, Davis (srstem@ucdavis.edu)
Preview
This book presents an overview of Roman literature , providing introductions to and excerpts from 28 major Roman authors in English translation. The translations are of high quality, the selections well chosen, and the introductions informative and substantive, with an appealing dash of humor. I have desired such a book for years. At my large, public American university, I regularly teach survey courses on Roman civilization and Roman literature courses based on English translations, stitching together the literary elements of the syllabus through selections from various primary sources because no better option was available. But Peter Knox and Jim McKeown have now provided an impressively inclusive anthology that expertly serves student audiences at an affordable price.
The editors express their intention “to stand behind the curtain as much as possible” so that the texts “be allowed to speak for themselves” (p. viii). The editors’ voice is regularly heard in the lively introductions and afterwords to each selection, but in such a way as to introduce the readings without overshadowing them. The collection thus succeeds as a smartly annotated anthology of Roman literature through its avoidance of presenting itself as a literary history.
The structure of the book is straightforward. It opens with an overall introduction of ten pages, entitled “The Roman World of Books,” discussing the integration of Greek culture into Roman culture, the technology of the ancient book, and where and how a Roman might hear or read texts. There are then five chronological sections, each with a two-page introduction devoting a chapter to each author included from that period. The specific selections for each author, which are not conveniently listed in any one place, are as follows. Early Republic: Plautus, Menaechmi; Polybius 3.57-59, 77-94, 106-118. Late Republic: Lucretius 1.1-634, 3.830-1094; Catullus 1-60; Cicero, First Catilinarian, Pro Caelio; Caesar, Gallic War 4.20-5.23; Sallust, Catiline 1-33, 50-61. Age of Augustus: Virgil, Eclogue 4, Georgics 1, Aeneid 4; Horace, Odes 1; Propertius 1; Ovid, Amores 1, Metamorphoses 3; Livy, Preface, 1.1-16, 22-28, 57-60. Early Empire: Seneca, Medea; Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 19.1-19; Lucan 7; Petronius 16-47, 83-90, 110-113; Pliny the Elder 7.1-32, 73-132; Statius, Thebaid 12; Quintilian 1.1-3, 12.1; Martial, over 50 selected epigrams. High Empire: Tacitus, Annals 1.1-54, 60-71; Pliny the Younger, Letters 3.5, 3.21, 5.6, 6.16, 6.20, 10.96-97; Suetonius, Nero 1-13, 20-57; Plutarch, Antony 1-13, 23-31, 71-87; Juvenal 1, 10; Apuleius, Metamorphoses 2.15-3.29; Lucian, True History 1.1-29; Marcus Aurelius 1, 4.
The chronological span is limited to 200 BCE through 200 CE (the end date of 200 CE is defended in a four page Postscript), but within that period a wide range of authors and genres is represented. Internal summaries introduce each text within a selection and bridge excerpted gaps. The primary texts are printed in two columns per page, while the contributions of the editors are printed fully across the page, hence the reader has a constant visual cue as to whether s/he is reading ancient or modern material. At the back of the book is included a helpful chronological table (with dates down the middle, political history on the left and literary history on the right) and a glossary of terms, names, and places (many of which are keyed to the four maps at the front of the volume). There are no footnotes.
The English translations are drawn from those already published in the Oxford World’s Classics series, with the exceptions of Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue, translated by the editors, and Josephus, Quintilian, and Martial, where the Loeb translations are adopted (see pp. 632-33, where it would have been helpful to list exactly which passages from each work are included in this anthology). One may not prefer the Oxford translation for a particular author, but they rarely disappoint, and relying upon a corpus that Oxford University Press already has under copyright is what makes this book possible at such a reasonable price. Moreover, the prudishness of earlier translations is avoided: these selections include frank sexual language (Catullus, Martial) and direct descriptions of sexual acts (Petronius, Apuleius).
The quality of the selections is the great strength of the book. The texts selected are appropriately representative, undoubtedly significant, and, most important of all, long enough to provide a sense of the achievement of each author. One gets a complete play (Plautus, Seneca), a whole book of poetry (Horace, Propertius, Lucan, Statius), or a reasonable equivalent (the first 60 poems of Catullus; Lucretius 1.1-634, 3.830-1094). Selections from prose authors have equal presence and coherence, though they have often undergone tactical abridgement. Chapters 14-19 are excluded from Suetonius’ Nero, chapters 55-59 are dropped out of the first book of Tacitus’ Annals and chapters 72-81 trimmed from its end. Was space at such a premium that these texts could not be included in their entirety? It could perhaps be argued that the missing chapters would not significantly change a reader’s response to the whole, but in some cases the abridgement clearly has interpretive consequences. Plutarch’s Antony is largely reduced to those sections that feature Cleopatra (1-13, 23-31, 71-87), which meets popular interest but greatly simplifies Plutarch’s portrait. Omitting chapters 34-48 of Sallust’s Catiline causes the reader to be unaware of the central digression in which Sallust directly characterizes the politics of his own day (chapters 36-39).
Many authors and texts have been omitted altogether, sometimes surprisingly. A second example of a genre within the same chronological period rarely makes the cut. Thus we get Plautus but not Terence, Propertius but not Tibullus, Statius’ Thebaid but not Valerius Flaccus or Silius Italicus. If an author spans genres, usually only one of them is represented: two of Cicero’s speeches but none of his letters or treatises, Seneca’s Medea but none of his prose, Horace’s Odes but no Satires. The exceptions are Virgil and Ovid, but even with two books each in their case, you might well be left wanting more. The most likely complaint about this volume, despite the fact that it is already an oversized and heavy book, with small print, is that it does not contain even more than it does.
The choices the editors made are always defensible, however, and there is undeniable value in offering a wider range of what Roman literature comprises than in assembling large quantities of those regarded as greatest. Note that five of the authors included wrote in Greek (Polybius, Josephus, Plutarch, Lucian, Marcus Aurelius), for this is an anthology of Roman literature not Latin literature, a commendable editorial choice that increases the book’s completeness. Equally valuable is the inclusion of engaging selections from authors not frequently read in translation courses (e.g., Pliny the Elder, Quintilian), yet who represent genres and disciplines otherwise ignored in such courses.
The strength of the editors’ introductions also merits praise. These introductions average 4-5 pages and convey an impressive amount of contextual information and critical perspective without strain or opacity. They highlight especially famous passages of the author, and they seed the reader’s mind with several topics for consideration as s/he continues on to read the primary text. A few of the editors’ claims struck me as undeservedly speculative (e.g., “It seems likely that Caesar would have managed to bring about the almost universal peace and stability that Augustus eventually bestowed on the empire,” p. 141) or as a bit heavy-handed (e.g., the final assessment of Virgil on p. 215), but my much more frequent response was appreciation for the dexterity of their coverage. The afterwords at the close of each selection comment on the author’s reception, in antiquity and since. These mini-essays are often light-hearted but learned sketches of the trends in an author’s popularity, providing a gratifying coda to each chapter while demonstrating the ongoing relevance of Roman literature.
My pedagogical desire for a book of this type and quality caused me to adopt it for my courses in Spring 2014, and my satisfaction in teaching the book led to my solicitation of this review. Students across a wide spectrum expressed appreciation for the presentation of the texts, and I found that my own presentation of material was rendered more efficient yet more detailed because of the strength of the foundation offered by this anthology. Challenging some of the claims found in the editors’ introductions both provoked discussion and revealed how well individual students could connect the texts to the introductions. Since each chapter stands on its own, this anthology can be accommodated to a wide array of syllabi. The somewhat hypothetical figure known as the general reader would also certainly profit from this book, but its most apparent value derives from its teachability. Thanks to Knox and McKeown, the power and range of Roman literature now opens more easily into the undergraduate classroom.
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QUOTE:
the choice of texts seems to have been quite strongly influenced by a desire to make this book a useful companion to courses in comparative literature. It is good, then, to have an impressive collection of material for a modest price,
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THE OXFORD ANTHOLOGY OF ROMAN LITERATURE
Posted on April 7, 2015 by jatimney
ed. by Peter E. Knox and J. C. McKeown
OUP (2013) p/b 633pp £22.99 (ISBN 9780195395167)
The title of this bulky collection does not perhaps make immediately clear just what it contains: ‘Roman literature’ turns out to include not just authors who wrote in Latin, but certain other texts in Greek (e.g. Polybius). Secondly, it is a collection of literature entirely in translation: these versions are taken mainly from the Oxford ‘World’s Classics’ series, although a few come from the Loeb Library; the poetic texts are rendered in verse.
There is naturally always going to be disagreement about what should be included in an anthology. A total of 28 authors is represented here, of whom 12 are writers in verse, and they range from the second century B.C. to Marcus Aurelius. As you would expect, the obvious candidates are duly present: Virgil is here, and so is a generous helping of Ovid, together with Tacitus’ Annals; possibly less obvious ones are Statius, from his Thebaid, Josephus, and a large chunk of Lucan. The absence of Terence is a disappointment (but there is Plautus’ Menaechmi—complete). Indeed, the editors have made a particular point of presenting their extracts mostly ‘in full or in substantial unbroken passages’. Hence the Aeneid appears in the form of one extract, the whole of book 4, and no others; you do, however, get all of Eclogue 4 and book 1 of the Georgics also for your money. I am not sure whether it was a wise decision to follow their principle so firmly that they print the whole of book 1 of Horace’s Odes but nothing from (say) book 3. Likewise, the Catullus selection consists of all the poems 1–60 but offers none of the elegiacs in the collection (apart from a very few included in the introduction to the author), nor any of poem 64. This determination to adhere to the ‘substantial unbroken’ principle does strike me as unduly rigid and makes this book rather less satisfactory as an anthology than it could have been. It is really only in the case of Martial’s epigrams and Pliny the Younger (and to some extent Petronius) that a genuine range of passages is picked out for inclusion.
In fact, the choice of texts seems to have been quite strongly influenced by a desire to make this book a useful companion to courses in comparative literature. The editors have been careful to provide an extensive and valuable introduction to each author, and to set the extracts firmly in context; in addition, each author’s section is followed by an ‘afterword’, which sets out the subsequent fate of his work and in particular traces its influence on later writers. Four maps are provided, in ascending order of scale, all in a severely plain black and white format: the first one which shows the whole Roman Empire unfortunately suffers from a determination to include so many place-names in Greece that it is sadly difficult to make them out at that scale amongst the clutter.
It is good, then, to have an impressive collection of material for a modest price, but a more judicious use of the space would have improved it.
Simon Squires
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