Archaeology Best Sellers, In Three Parts. Part 1: Connolly

Every once in a while, I read a popularized archaeology book that catches my eye. Lately, for example, I've made my way through The Parthenon Enigma, by Joan Breton Connolly (New York: Knopf, 2014); The Secret of the Great Pyramid, by Bob Brier (New York: Harper Perennial, 2009); and 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed, by Eric H. Cline (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014).

And I mean "made my way." Except for the dramatic, thriller-style titles, these books, although well-reasoned, are not well-written. They are scholarly works, complete with heavy words and plodding arguments, dressed up as best sellers.

Maybe these works can get away with looking like--yes, even acting like--best sellers, because their main ideas are so great.

In the Parthenon Enigma, Connolly argues that the Parthenon frieze "tells" the founding myth of Athens, in which Athens's first king, Erechtheus, sacrifices his daughter to save the city. We had lost track, not of the myth itself but of its importance, until we recently recovered a play by Euripides that tells the tale.

Connolly debunks the idea that the frieze shows the procession of the Panathenaea, the great annual festival of the city, which is how we had been used to interpret the frieze.

As part of her argument, Connolly depicts all ninety-two marble metopes, or panels carved in bas-relief, from the Parthenon frieze. (In a typical Doric frieze such as this, metopes alternate with triglyphs, carved marble panels with three vertical lines, perhaps memorializing the beam ends of  ancient wooden structures.)

The British Museum holds most of the metopes as part of the Elgin Marbles. The new Parthenon Gallery of the Acropolis Museum and six other institutions hold the rest.

Connolly remarks that part of the problem in the misinterpretation of the frieze lies with the loss of Euripides's tragedy and part with the diaspora of the marbles themselves. Scholars could have looked at them as a single narrative, but, having to work with the same limitations as the rest of us human beings, they did not.

Phidias Showing the Frieze of the Parthenon to his Friends, by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, 1868, held by Birmingham Museums And Art Gallery. 

Part 2: Brier.
Part 3: Cline.

Return to Casino Royale

In On Her Majesty's Secret Service, James Bond returns to Royale-les-Eaux to visit the grave of Vesper Lynd, a yearly pilgrimage of his. On the road, he and the mysterious, and reckless, Contessa Teresa "Tracy" di Vicenzo race each other in their cars. Later they meet face to face in the casino, where Bond, even though he barely knows her, covers her gambling debt to save her from a dishonorable loss, un coup de deshonneur.

But Tracy is worse than reckless; she is suicidal. The next day, Bond interrupts her while she is trying to kill herself.

Bond finds himself talking alone to Tracy's father, Marc-Ange Draco, head of the Corsican Mafia and holder of the King's Medal for Resistance Fighters (so, even though a criminal, a good guy). Draco convinces Bond to make love to his daughter, to give her hope enough to stay alive, and admonishes him to keep their conversation herkos odonton, which, he says, is Greek for top secret.

Now according to Hank Prunckun, in Counterintelligence Theory and Practice, this Greek saying probably comes from a passage in the Odyssey in which Zeus asks Athena to be careful about letting information slip so easily through the barrier (herkos) of her teeth (odonton).

I am easily amused, and I have been having fun imagining the school boy, Ian Fleming, coming across this phrase and tucking it away in his mind. "Someday," he thinks, "I'll find a use for this wonderful phrase, herkos odonton; I just know I will."

Casino Royale

The time has come, I'll wager, for an annotated edition of Casino Royale (first published in London by Jonathan Cape Ltd in 1953).

Case in point:

Bond is at the roulette table. He has lost the money his government bankrolled him so that he could clean out the villain, Le Chiffre. He is despondent, with nowhere to turn. What can he do now?

His American spy friend, Felix Leiter, slips him a new stake, an envelope full of cash, and says, "Marshall Aid. Thirty-two million francs. With the compliments of the USA."

Note:

After the devastation of World War II, Europe struggled to rebuild. The Marshall Plan, named for Secretary of State George Marshall, provided $13 billion in economic grants and loans to the United Kingdom, France, and other European nations, including enemy combatants, Austria, Italy, and West Germany, over a four-year period from 1948 to 1951. The idea was that the slow start of economic regrowth in postwar Europe could make countries vulnerable to Soviet Communism and a little stimulus could help prevent this.

So Felix is joking with Bond. Just as the United States provided economic stimulus to Europe, so Felix helps Bond with the money he needs to beat Le Chiffre.