κατὰ ῥῆμα

My favorite part: 

“Socrates would teach young men, for over 50 years, things such as virtue, he’d teach them a method of thinking about their lives and the problems they encounter in their lives,” said Webb, who, unlike his fellow attorneys, maintained a serious tone throughout.

Owing to the recent reminder that, hey, I own Harry Potter in Ancient Greek, I decided to take it out and take another look. But, because I am a glutton for punishment, I decided I wasn't going to just sit there and muddle through reading it. No, I was going to sit down and re-translate it. 

So... I took my copy of the book, and the lexicon and commentary on Andrew Wilson's website, and soon enough the Perseus magic parser (and dictionary), and I translated Harry Potter back in to English.

By which I mean... the first page.

Because that one page took me... an hour and a half. 

Ugh. 

To be clear: I wasn't trying to magically re-create Rowling's prose out of the Greek. I was trying to treat it like it was a legitimate ancient text, and so to more-or-less accurately convey what the Greek is actually saying. 

Thus did this...

Mr. Dursley was the director of a firm called Grunnings, which made drills. He was a big, beefy man with hardly any neck, although he did have a very large mustache. Mrs. Dursley was thin and blonde and had nearly twice the usual amount of neck, which came in very useful as she spent so much of her time craning over garden fences, spying on the neighbors. The Dursleys had a small son called Dudley and in their opinion there was no finer boy anywhere.

...a fine example of Rowling-original prose, become, in my translation of Andrew Wilson's translation, this:

Master Doursleios made borers and augers of all sorts in a workshop called Grouningos. And great was his form, and supremely rotund; being stout, his neck was not easy to see, but you could see his mustache, as it was very thick. His wife, being not round at all, was blonde and long-necked; she had a double neck by nature and to great benefit, looking over the wall at her neighbors, watching them like a crane. And the Doursleioi had a son, still a boy, by the name of Doudlion; they considered him the finest of all men.

Passable, I guess? Certainly I'm not guaranteeing perfection. 

The Rise of Rome: The Making of the World's Greatest Empire

by Anthony Everitt

Okay, well... I did not enjoy this as much as I predicted. 

Everitt has a nice, easygoing, storytelling narrative style that serves him well when he's writing about the story of one man's life. I found, however, that it doesn't work quite as well when he's trying to write about hundreds of years. That's probably why he spends as little time as possible reporting history, and instead spends a lot of time doing essentially mini-biographies of various relevant men throughout the history of Rome. 

The problem with this approach--I mean from a writing standpoint, irrespective of any anti-Great Men History criticism--is that it's really hard to find that balance where you're giving just the right amount of information about each "character." To pull two more-or-less random examples, he spends an awful lot of time on the backstory of King Pyrrhus (of Pyrrhic Victory fame), and not nearly enough time on the political situation surrounding Tiberius Gracchus. That contributed to a lot of pacing issues--as much as a history book can have "pacing," really--but there were certainly others, too.

I mean, the book is still decent. But if somebody came up to me and said that they were totally ignorant about Roman history, but were interested in learning, so would I recommend they read this book... honestly, I'd have to hedge. 

Also, I was wrong about not learning anything at all from it, but my favorite bit of new information I found not in the text itself, but in those endnotes I keep harping on about: "Appius was a first name, or praenomen, that was exclusive to the Claudians." 

Hadrian and the Triumph of Rome

by Anthony Everitt

Wow, it's been forever since I wrote a book review. 

Anyway, I've wanted to read this for ages (ever since I knew it was a thing). The wait was entirely of my own making (at any time I could have walked over to Barnes & Noble and bought the thing), so it would be a bit silly to say "the wait was worth it," so... it was a good book.

I was already familiar with Everitt's style, but it's worth noting that he remains in good form here. He is very good at constructing a coherent narrative out of scarce evidence, and he's not afraid to admit when we really just have no idea what happened.

And, of course, he again included my favorite part: a very detailed breakdown of sources, assumptions, and relevant literature in the back. 

I would have preferred that he go on a little bit further beyond Hadrian's death, but I do understand why he didn't. Also, while he spent a lot of time on Hadrian's love of Greek culture and society, I think he could have done more to show how significantly Hadrian influenced Roman society so that Greek culture became fashionable again. As it stands, a casual reader could easily be forgiven for assuming that Roman attitudes towards Greek culture returned to their pre-Hadrian status quo after his death. 

Featuring the inimitable wisdom of one Vicki Lynn, "senior vice president of Universum, a global talent recruiting company that works with many Fortune 500 companies."

On Philosophy:

"In my opinion, these degrees are not at all marketable. I don't even know what people do with these degrees to be honest."

Doesn't that just inspire your confidence in her advice?

On Anthropology and Archaeology (because they're totally the same thing):

"[T]otally limiting. Except for on a faculty or doing tours to the Parthenon, I don't know what you would actually do with this."

Yes, I imagine you don't, Vicki.

Of course, we shouldn't forget this gem:

"Some degrees have really bizarre names."

Two reasons. Well, three. First, because 75 is a nice, even number, and seems as good a place to pause as any. Second, because I was going to have to stop soon anyway, because while I could carry on to the end of the west, I know practically nothing about the eastern emperors after that point. If I'm going to keep going, I have to do more research of my own!

And third, because I'm about to have my wisdom teeth taken out, which will be hilarious, and I don't want to have to worry about writing anything coherent for a few days. 

Wait I actually made it to 75 already? In my head it wouldn't be until this weekend... weird.

Anyway, Avitus! 

Avitus was Petronius Maximus's sort-of right-hand man, as much as someone who never really got to exercise power could have a right-hand man. When Petronius Maximus was killed and Rome sacked, Avitus was off befriending the Visigoths. That served him well, because Theodoric II, the king of the Visigoths, named Avitus as the new emperor.

It's very telling a Visigoth could determine such a thing. In the east, Marcian was busy not caring about the west, but even so, it's a blunt reminder of how much western Rome has already fallen.

For his part, Avitus had amibitions of trying to expand the empire back out a bit--the only truly Roman territy at this point was Italy, but Avitus wanted to take back some parts of Gaul, probably because he himself was Gallic. 

Because of his focus on Gaul, because he was foreign, because he was too friendly with the Visigoths, Avitus was not terribly popular among the Roman officials. It wasn't too long before a rebellion threw Avitus out of power--unusually, he was not killed immediately, but essentially shunted sideways out of politics into a position in the church. Then he was killed. 

So, things were starting to look up for the east. Not so for the west.

Patronius Maximus finagled his way into becoming emperor after Valentinian III, mostly by marrying Valentinian's widow, but he never had any real power. Not because there was someone pulling his strings--no, but because everyone was busy panicking about all those Germanic tribes, and he was only ostensibly emperor for a couple of months before he was killed for committing the crime of being in charge during a disaster. 

The disaster in question? The Vandals invaded Italy.

After Petronius Maximus was killed, the Vandals spent a couple of weeks sacking the city of Rome, and then went away, as if to prove the point that Rome was now so irrelevant it wasn't even worth occupying for any longer. 

The Roman empire was no longer the most important cultural entity in Europe. There were a whole lot of other people in the area who followed other rulers, other kings. The balance of power was teetering precariously. 

With Marcian, who became emperor of the east after Theodosius III died (hilariously by falling off a horse), we have the first emperor who really, truly believed in a hard divide between the Eastern and Western empires. 

While technically a member of the Theodosian dynasty, he was not related to his predecessor by blood. Instead, he was married to Theodosius II's sister at the behest of Aspar, the guy who was pulling the strings at the end of Theodosius's long reign. 

Aspar remaining in his position of prominence behind Marcian, but Marcian was no puppet-emperor, and he started the next wave of imperial authority that would be solidified by his own successor.

Perhaps the most important change Marcian brought to the table is that, as mentioned, he cared only for the east. To him, the west was not his concern, and he ignored requests for help against Attila the Hun. Considering Attila may well have conquered the entirety of the western Roman empire had things unfolded a little differently, there's no real way to interpret that beyond Marcian actually not caring if that happened.