Descent from Deucalion

The descendants of Deucalion, as listed in the Catalog of Women (which I haven't finished yet, so this may change).  Interesting that the geneographers mostly found men worth mentioning (the chart is colour coded). 

Persepolis

I had no idea Telemachus had a daughter. I had no idea he married Nestor's daughter.  Here is her ancestry:

Playing with family tree software and Hesiod's Catalog of Women

As a sideline to a digital project I've been putting together for years on geography and myth (myths.uvic.ca)  I have been experimenting with family tree software (MacFamilyTree 8), which allows one to put in locations of events and then generates a map.  I've decided to try to generate family trees for, and map, the fragments of Hesiod's Catalog of Women.  For example: 

Generating a family tree of "descendants of Proetus", as far as I've got so far, produces a map showing that the two places the family appears are in Lykia (birthplace of Proetus' wife) and Argos.  This pairing of families in Asia Minor and Greece shows up surprisingly often in Bronze Age myth.

However reading the fragments is rewarding in itself, and raises constant questions.  For example: about the daughters of Proetus Probus, in the scholia to Virgil, says that the Catalog tells us 

"These (the daughters of Proetus), because they had scorned the divinity of Juno, were overcome with madness, such that they believed they had been turned into cows, and left Argos their own country. Afterwards they were cured by Melampus, the son of Amythaon."

Okay, fine, but still I have a few questions.  How exactly did Melampus cure them of their belief that they were cows? 

"Ladies: look.  Over there.  Right there, yes. That's a cow."
"Moooo!"
"Right!  THAT is a cow.  Now look at each other. Each OTHER.  Do you look like cows?"
Pause. "M...mooo??"
"Right! You're different! That's because you are NOT cows.  YOU ARE NOT COWS. Got it?"
Silence. 
"NOT COWS."
Silence.  
One Proetid, hesitantly:   "Bahkkk buck buck bahhkk?""
"...Right. We'll try this from the beginning."

Study leave, again!

I finally finished the article on women in Hellenistic epigram, sent off the page proofs, and it is officially Off My Desk.   I have finished teaching my summer course. So I am off until the end of December, barring a little administrative work.

So, what to do?  Well, first, the administrative work. But next?

My study leave projects are:

• Article on Aristotle, The Two Plots, René Girard, and How Reading Good Fiction Cultivates Virtue.
• Commentary on Memorial.
• ?

That may be enough. I only have 7 months. 

Why write about poetry (very drafty draft)

Why Write About Poetry

I'm writing about female authors of ancient epigram.
Terrible things are happening in the world.
If I finish the paper no one will read it.
If anyone did, what difference does it make?
Terrible things are happening in the world.

I’m writing about a few long-dead writers
Most of whose work was not preserved
Because they were female so nobody cared.
There was a brief warm blip of time
In the intellectual-friendly Hellenistic period
When a few female authors
Actually had a bit of an audience
And their work was copied
Enough times that we still have a little of it now.

Then they were gone. Their day was done.
Roman men, later,
Saved nothing Roman ladies wrote*.
They complained that female poets existed at all,
And actually spoke up at dinner parties
Expecting you to listen to their wretched drivel,
Can you believe it?

Maybe it was wretched drivel.
We’ve got no proof it wasn’t.

I’m supposed to write about this. It’s depressing.

Terrible things are happening in the world.
In that same sea around which my poets lived and wrote
In that same sea, 3000 migrants drowned last week,
Men, women, children,
The death ahead worth risking to escape the horrors behind.

How does a paper on long dead minor female poets matter?
Female poets no one reads,
Lucky few survivors from the crowd of all the female poets
No one will ever read again
Because they were not preserved.
Because nobody cared. Because female.
Loud-mouthed cows
Who didn’t even know enough
To shut their traps at dinner parties.

Meanwhile off the coast of Greece
Where Anyte wrote about dead pets, and temple dedications,
And children playing with a goat
And a mother weeping for her dead daughter
And girls who killed themselves to avoid rape
     after their city was sacked by Gauls
And a father weeping for another daughter
And a brave young man who died in combat
And several beautiful statues,
     Aphrodite, Hermes, a pretty Bacchic goat,
And pleasant spots to sit and enjoy the breeze -
Off that coast, thousands are drowning

And washing up on the shores of the Greek islands
Where Erinna wrote about her dead childhood friend
And Sappho, maybe it was Sappho,
Told us about a dead fisherman
And about a stone that marvellously speaks
 The name of her donor
     whenever you look at it -
Washing up on those shores,
Thousands of nameless dead, fleeing horrors

And sinking off the coast of southern Italy
Where Nossis wrote of love
And paintings that look just like
The women who dedicated them
And prayed for Artemis
To give her friend an easy childbirth
And dedicated to Hera a cloak she wove
     with her mother and grandmother
And asked to be remembered, like Sappho -

Sinking off that coast with full cargoes of the dead
Boat after leaky boat, overloaded,
Boats that should never have been put in the water
But people were desperate,
     their choices were gone

And in Byzantium, 

 Where Moero wrote about a cluster of grapes
Dedicated to Aphrodite
As if it were a daughter
 Mourned by a loving mother
And where she gave birth, also,
To a famous male tragedian
 None of whose work survives -
Byzantium suffers under a ruler
Who is still better than those around him,
Refugees flock TO Byzantium, not away
     for now

It’s never been easy, life around that sea
And yet these poets thought it was worthwhile
To spend their time writing about dedications, and friends,
And daughters dead too soon,
And spots one can sit for a moment
     and enjoy the view

Even though the next poem is about a soldier
Or a soldier’s horse,
Dead in the omnipresent wars

Perhaps if it was worth their while to write
It is worth my while to write about them,
And not to hate the men
Who hated them and all their sisters
For opening their mouths.

Perhaps it is worth my while
To do my part to make them remembered,
Even though no one will read me either,
Even though terrible things are happening.

Sappho lived through war and exile
But never talked about it. For her
The face of who you loved
Mattered more than anything at all.


***
*well, maybe one

This week: Gender Bias in Academe, and other things

Monday: Ideafest; panel on 'Myths of the Good Mother", in which I presented "Medea, the Good Mother". Very lively discussion!

Gender bias in academe is alive and well, as this set of studies -  Gender Bias in Academe: An Annotated Bibliography - demonstrates.

More convalescent reading (last week of June)

The Mysterious Affair at Styles (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Bunn, D. and Oke, J. (2009) The Centurion’s Wife. United States: Bethany House Publishers.

• Another book given to me to read in hospital.  I confess that I read to scoff, but in the end enjoyed some aspects of the book. It was unfortunately written in the historical-romance genre, which rather got in the way of the book's intent, which was to tackle serious questions of faith. But it was well-researched, and except for the clumsy and bigoted depiction of Herod Antipas, not badly written.

Christie, A. (1970) The mysterious affair at Styles. Toronto: Bantam Books.

•  I have figured out why I didn't like Agatha Christie as an adolescent.  I hated the wooden characters acting in apparently inexplicable ways and then suddenly doing something else entirely, out of character and equally inexplicable.  But I now see that the reason the characters and their actions appear inexplicable is not because Christie couldn't write, but - on the contrary - because she is deliberately telling the story through the eyes of a creation of sheer comic genius - Mr. Hastings, Poirot's companion, who is a complete idiot. It's a miracle he can tie his own shoes.  There are all kinds of clues that Hastings is a moron and that we are expected to spot this.  Of course the characters are wooden and inexplicable - to Hastings, who is hilariously self-absorbed, doesn't notice other characters except as they impinge on him, and isn't much interested in them anyway.   The clues are given to the rest of us even as they go whizzing by, miles over Hasting's head. He is a comic tour-de-force. When I was 13 I did not grasp the notion of an unreliable narrator and I missed all this.  I shall go look for more Christie novels.

Heyer, G. (1976) Pistols for Two. London: Pan Books, and Heyer, G. (1988) These Old Shades. Signet.

• If you must read romances, read Heyer - anything except Footsteps In the Dark, which I think was her first and it was awful.  "Pistols for Two"is one of her Regencies, and is not quite as successful as most, because it's a collection of short stories that read pretty much like outlines for novels she never got around to fleshing out; still fun to read. "These Old Shades" is classic Heyer, equipped with everyone's favourite Villain Redeemed By The Love Of A Good Woman, the Duke of Avon.   Well-written, witty, and a pleasure to reread on a rainy afternoon.  And they always end happily, in that reassuring way romances have.

Related articles

• New exhibition reveals young Christie
• Georgette Heyer, queen of Regency romance, honoured with blue plaque