The Shield of Achilles--Again!

Many artists have created their own image of the shield of Achilles so that we can see it the way Homer did and understand its meaning in the Iliad. We are also to understand, I think, that the shield belongs with us now as much as it did twenty-seven-hundred and some years ago.

W. H. Auden, in his poem "Shield of Achilles," gives us a glimpse of the armor of an immortal Achaean hero going to his destiny and compares him with our latter-day anti-heroes. (On this theme, I highly recommend the graphic novel, Watchmen, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. New York: Warner Books, 1987.)

Cy Twombly, in his painting Shield of Achilles, shows us the passion that drove Achilles to absent himself from the fight as well as the resolution that led him to return. Now he can take up the battle and triumph over Hector.

And my friend Todd, reference librarian, artist, and Bronze-Age reenactor, will soon present us with a
 a bronze replica of the shield as Homer describes it in Richmond Lattimore's translation of the Iliad of Homer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951). He has created a sketch similar to the diagram Malcolm  M. Willcock gives in A Companion to the Iliad (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1976) and has drawn the figures that will populate each round of the shield.  He plans to incise the figures in the bronze.

Diagram of the shield of Achilles as shown in Malcolm M. Willcock's work.

Pride and Prejudice

So one of my favorite examples of ekphrasis is the shield-of-Achilles passage in the Iliad. By the way, I didn't tell you in the last post, but "ekphrasis," from the ancient Greek, means to call out or draw attention to.

My other favorite example of ekphrasis is in Chapter 43 of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. Darcy's miniature, his portrait, his gallery, his housekeeper and his sister, his home, his pond, his estate, indeed, the whole of Pemberley, show Darcy's excellent character. Entirely in his absence, his handsome, moderate, reasonable self is revealed. In the negative, as it were.

But then, in a moment of stunning drama, and to Elizabeth's great confusion, he appears unexpectedly from the outer edge of the estate. And he turns out to be as charming as his world, Pemberley, has suggested.

Elizabeth's visit to Pemberley is a turning point in the story. Elizabeth thinks with longing, in support of the satirical theme of the novel to marry well, "And of this place . . . I might have been mistress!" Elizabeth's visit is also in support of the deeper theme, of finding balance in marriage and in life, which in this case will consist in finding an excellent husband for the heroine, who by now has become our Elizabeth, and an excellent wife for Darcy.

The Shield of Achilles

"Ekphrasis" is a literary description of a beautiful object or work of art. In the greatest epic poem of Western civilization, Homer's Iliad, the shield of Achilles is the most famous and best example of ekphrasis.

Achilles's circular bronze shield depicts the cosmos in miniature in bands from the center out (Book Eighteen, lines 478 to 608). We understand from Homer's description that Achilles longs for the restoration of peace and the sweetness of everyday life, even as he takes the battlefield to restore these things to his people. (Of course, I am simplifying like crazy, and, if you think classical scholars don't argue over every one of these points, I am sorry to say that you are mistaken.)

In Homer's Iliad, Book Sixteen, Achilles's best friend Patroclus requests permission to lead the Myrmidons into battle wearing Achilles's armor. By disguising himself as Achilles, Patroclus hopes to surprise the enemy into stopping the fight and giving his men a break. Achilles agrees to the plan even as he himself sets aside his anger with Menelaus and so will soon return to the fight himself.

Far from calling for a temporary truce, Hector kills Patroclus, gloats over the body, puts the armor on himself, and rallies his troops around Patroclus. The Greeks and Trojans fight over the corpse all day long. At last, the Greeks take Patroclus off the battlefield and Achilles and the others spend the night in deep morning back at camp.

Achilles's armor, which had belonged to his father, is now in the enemy's hands, and so Achilles needs new armor for the duel he must engage in with Hector. Achilles' mother Thetis asks the god Hephaestus to forge this new armor. Ironically, because we are supposed to be familiar with Achilles' one weakness, his Achilles' heel, we know that when he was a baby, Thetis held him by the heel when she dipped him into the River Styx to protect him, but the heel itself, her handhold, remained un-dipped.

Look at this genius plotting! Everything that happens in the story seems to come naturally from what has gone before, even to the point of Achilles being in some measure responsible for Patroclus's death, because Patroclus was disguised as Achilles when he was killed.

The god Hephaestus (the Roman Vulcan) makes Achilles his own armor. Preparing for battle, Achilles puts on his greaves and helmet and picks up the shield, and the shield is described in a remarkable simile, in which we are once again poignantly reminded of the loveliness of ordinary life:

"Like the glow of a blazing fire from a lonely upland farm seen by sailors whom a storm drives over the plentiful deep far from their friends, so from Achilles’ splendid richly-ornamented shield the sheen rose to heaven (Book XIX in the section comprised of lines 338 to 424)."

Predictably, I guess, I cannot say everything I want to say about the shield of Achilles in one post. Let this be the start of a small series of posts.

Taken from http://aclassicaday.blogspot.com.

The Keystone Arch

"The Romans were the first builders in Europe, perhaps the first in the world, fully to appreciate the advantages of the arch, the vault and the dome." This statement, attributed to D.S. Robertson, author of Greek and Roman Architecture, 2nd edn., Cambridge 1943, p.231, is cited in Wikipedia's entry entitled "Arch."

Note, in this quotation, the correct use of an un-split infinitive, "fully to appreciate." Colloquially we may say, "to fully appreciate," but, if we have old-school training ("never split an infinitive"), we remember, somewhere in the back of our mind, that this usage is often seen as incorrect.

So, moving on.

A post-and-beam span, that is, an opening framed by two posts with a beam across the top, supports itself by distributing the weight of gravity from the center of the beam to the two sides and down the posts.

The keystone arch cannot support itself until the keystone, the wedge-shaped puzzle piece at the apex, is put into place. The arch is first built on top of a framework, called a "centering." The centering is removed when the arch becomes a true compression form with the placement of the keystone.

The arch supports itself by distributing the weight of gravity from the wedge-shaped keystone to the next wedge-shaped voussoir and the next, on down to the springers at the spring line. The spring line is defined by the two points at the base of the arch and the theoretical center point, "drawn" from the two lower points of the keystone and crossing at the spring line. The springers have trapezoidal tops and level bottoms to continue spreading the weight of gravity down the posts.

We have an example of an early keystone arch in the northern gate, one of seven, in the walls encircling Perugia, the capitol city of Umbria. The walls were built of limestone block between 600 and 300 BCE to protect the city from the enemy, Rome, about a hundred miles away.

The original settlers of Perugia, or in Latin, Perusia, were the Umbri, an ancient--and perhaps the most ancient--tribe in Italy.  They spoke Umbrian, an Italic language related to Latin and Oscan. But their neighbors in Etruria, the Etruscans, spoke an unrelated language, which some scholars now believe may be a Tyrsenian language like the Raetic language of the Alps and the Lemnian language of Lemnos.

By the time the Roman general Fabius Maximus Rullianus led a successful expedition against Perugia in 310 or 309 BCE, the Umbrians had intermingled with the Etruscans and Perugia counted itself as one of the twelve cities of the Etruscan League. According to Livy, our source in this matter, the Perugians lost the battle and were accorded a thirty-year truce with Rome.

In a rebellious move, Perugia took part in the Second Samnite War against Rome in 295 BCE and had to renegotiate the treaty. By 216 and 205 BCE, the city found it prudent to help Rome in the Second Punic War.

Then the city fell a third time, when Mark Antony's younger brother and supporter Lucius sought refuge there in 40 BCE. Octavian, the future emperor Augustus, besieged the city and Lucius was compelled to surrender. The city was burned to the ground, but, based on archaeological evidence, rebuilding began almost immediately.

Soon thereafter, as part of a public-works program, Octavian repaired the wall and the ancient northern gate of Perugia, whose Umbrian or Etruscan name, as far as I can tell, we do not know. He rebuilt the keystone arch that the Perugians had originally built and this gate soon became known as the Augustan Gate, Porta d'Augusta.

So, as they often did, the Romans adopted the keystone arch from the people they conquered and used it widely in bridges and aqueducts, triumphal arches and gates, vaults and domes.

Keystone Cops (or Kops)

The Keystone Cops starred in silent movies made by Canadian-born and American-based director and actor Mack Sennett (1880-1960) between 1912 and 1917. Sennett's company in 1912 was called Keystone Pictures Studio; hence, "Keystone Cops."

Slapstick--humor involving someone who, by his or her own clumsiness or ineptitude, becomes the butt of the joke--is as old as comedy. Someone on stage or film slips on a banana peel or takes a custard pie in the face or gets a whack on the rear end and we laugh uproariously. If we have gone out of our way to refine our sensibilities, we laugh uproariously, but still feel bad about making fun of our hapless victim.

The term "slapstick" comes from the battachio of Italian Commedia dell'Arte, a wooden prop of two slats held together at one end so that when one player smacks another player, the battachio makes a loud noise that sounds like it hurts, but does not.

To show slapstick in movies, Sennett used some special effects. He filmed at slow speed so that the action looked faster than it was, and he had every fourth frame of film edited out so that the action looked jerky. I ran into a YouTube clip of a remastered Sennett film, which remastering in part involved fixing filming speed. But if these editors took out Sennett's special effects, I'm thinking that Sennett would not have wanted fixes like that.

In the Keystone-Cop version of slapstick, uniformed policemen chase a bad guy, but instead of calm thinking, quick action, and speedy resolution, they run off in all directions in disarray. The Keystone Cops first appeared in a comedy short, Hoffmeyer's Legacy, 1912 and became popular after their appearance in another short, the Bangville Police, 1913. Starting 1914, they no longer played starring roles, but became a background troupe for Charlie Chaplin and other silent-film stars.We know the names of the actors who played the first Keystone Cops, but the cast changed from movie to movie.

Here is the logo for Sennett's company in 1912:

As for the significance of the keystone in the logo, I will take that up in a later post. For now, let me just remark that Sennett probably chose "keystone" because it is a weighty term from classical architecture. The keystone is the final piece that allows a keystone arch to stand alone, without the scaffolding needed to construct it.

OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder)

First, a joke, told by my friend Beth:

"I have CDO."

"What's that?"

"OCD with the letters in the right order."

The other day I was working on creating a bad-guy character for the thriller I'm writing. The story is set in 1952. I decided to make Del read every piece of writing that came his way, which is something I find myself doing. As if he, and I, could put together the meaning of the universe by assembling a complete book of these scraps.

For example, here is Del before he assassinates one of our heroes:

In the bathroom, he filled the hotel glass with tap water and dropped in two Alka-Seltzer tablets. “Keep tightly closed in a cool, dry place,” admonished the label on the bottle. When the drink had almost stopped fizzing, he chugged it down. Maybe that would take the edge off this hangover. 

He shaved, showered, parted and combed his hair, and put on a suit and tie.

Some breakfast couldn’t hurt either, he thought.

He went downstairs to the hotel restaurant and sat in a red leatherette booth at the window looking onto the street.

His waitress, “Dodie,” according to her nameplate, came over with the menu and the coffee pot. He turned over his coffee cup so that she could fill it for him. On the bottom of the cup, it said, “Buffalo China.”

Dodie poured his coffee. “What can I get for you, sir?” she said.

He looked at the menu. “I’ll have two eggs over easy, two pieces of buttered white toast, hash browns, sausage links.” He kept the menu so that he could read the whole thing while he ate.

Dodie brought his breakfast, kept his coffee cup full, and without a word replaced the heavy white napkin—embroidered in blue with the words “Colonial Inn”—that he had dropped.

And, after the assassination:

Now it was time to call Chaz and let him know that General Brink was dead, the fixers could clean up his office, and the Pentagon press staff could release their version of the story.

He dialed nine to get outside the hotel switchboard and then zero to get a telephone operator.

“I want to place a long-distance call to Saigon, the U.S. Embassy. I’m calling for Chaz Darnell.”

“Yes, sir. I’ll put you through.”

He lit a Lucky Strike. He listened to a succession of clicking noises as operators connected him from Washington, D.C. to Los Angeles, Los Angeles to Honolulu, Honolulu to Saigon. He picked up the first cigarette from the ashtray and lit another one from the first.

He idly read the package. “Lucky Strike—It’s Toasted—Cigarettes.” He always bought himself a couple of packs of Lucky Strikes when he visited the states. These cigarettes were so much milder than the cigarettes he could get in Saigon.

“Chaz Darnell here.”

“It’s Del.”

“Hail the conquering hero!”

“It’s done.”

“I’ll take care of everything else, then.”

Maybe I've reached a sort of pact with my own quirks and oddities. My new motto: make my own idiosyncrasies work for me.

Zero

Leonardo Bonacci (c. 1170 to c. 1250) also known as Fibonacci (or Filius--son of--Bonacci), was an Italian medieval mathematician. First, he introduced Arabic (originally Indian) numerals to the West. Second, he described the "Fibonacci number sequence," a beautiful and naturally-occurring spiral progression found in shells and flowers, even galaxies, and reproduced by artists from ancient Greek to post-modern as an ideal of proportion, the Golden Mean.

In 1202, Fibonacci published Liber Abaci (Book of Calculation), the first section of which introduces the Hindu–Arabic numeral system that he had encountered in the North African city, Bejaia. He tells us that the numerals 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9 come to us by way of India. The sign 0, he says, which "the Arabs call zephyr," صِفْر ‎(ṣifr, “nothing, cipher”), was originally śūnya in Sanskrit: शून्य.

Disclaimer: the first time I learned about the Fibonacci sequence was on February 25, 2005, when I watched the first season, sixth episode, "Sabotage" of a TV show called Numb3rs. Consider yourself  warned: I "understand" math, in a wordy sort of way, and I love the concepts, but I am not a mathematician. I hope you will check out this page about the Numb3rs episode, in which Charlie, the math-geek hero, explains more about the Fibonacci sequence.

If you had to learn to read and write Roman numerals, and, as a proponent of Western culture I really hope you did, you can imagine how difficult it would be to perform simple mathematical operations like addition and multiplication without the concept of zero or the idea of a numeral for a place-holder with no value of its own.

The first known English use of the word zero was in 1598, from French zéro, Italian zero (a contraction of zefiro), and Old Spanish cefr.

I promise nothing, but, in my research, I have run into a book by Charles Seife, Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea (Viking, 2000) and a Scientific American article, "The Origin of Zero," by John Matson, August 21, 2009.

The Hanging Gardens of Babylon

The Greek historian Herodotus (484-425 BCE), the Alexandrian scholar Callimachus (ca. 305-240 BCE) and other classical writers list the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, the great accomplishments and tourist attractions of known civilization at the time. All are within a 1000 x 1300 square-mile-area in the Eastern Mediterranean.

• The Great Pyramid of Giza
• The Hanging Gardens of Babylon
• The Statue of Zeus at Olympia
• The Temple of Artemis at Ephesus
• The Mausoleum at Halicarnassus
• The Colossus of Rhodes
• The Lighthouse of Alexandria

Although the pyramid of Giza is the only wonder still in existence today, we know the locations of all the wonders except the hanging gardens of Babylon. (I discuss the pyramid of Giza in two posts from August 2014.)

Dr. Stephanie Dalley, Research Fellow (retired) in Assyriology at the Oriental Institute at Oxford University, published the Mystery of the Hanging Garden of Babylon (Oxford: Oxford University Press) in 2013 and wrote and hosted the TV show for the series, Secrets of the Dead, "The Lost Gardens of Babylon," in 2014. She has uncovered evidence that would place the hanging gardens not in Babylon, present-day Hillah in central Iraq, but a little over three hundred miles to the north in war-ravaged Mosul.

Ever one for the figurative properties of language, I learned that her deduction is based in part on the metaphorical use of a word in the Assyrian cuneiform writings of Sennacherib, king of Assyria (705-681 BCE). The word refers to the distinctive spiral markings of the date palm to describe Sennacherib's feat of engineering, the so-called Archimedean screw.

Along with a sophisticated system of canals and aqueducts, the screw, turned by men or animals, raised an estimated 300 tons of water a day from the Euphrates to the hanging gardens, which, like the city walls, were about forty feet above river level.

Until now, we had thought that Archimedes of Syracuse (ca. 287-212 BCE) discovered the screw, which makes it possible to lift water, grain, and the like mechanically and in quantity from lower to higher ground. Now, thanks to Dr. Dalley, we are thinking that a king from 400 years earlier dreamed up this machine by musing on the spiral pattern on the date trees growing in his garden.

Tempest in a Teapot

In my post of April 18, 2015, I leveled a criticism at Helena Hamerow for a footnote in her book, Rural Settlements and Society in Anglo-Saxon England, and another at myself, for inexact wording that did not fully explain the uses of the moldboard plow in agriculture. If we are going to understand our history, we need to be specific and exact about the technological advances that shaped it.

Well, Hamerow returns to the moldboard plow later on in her book. (And serves me right for writing a post on a book I hadn't finished yet.) She says, "The greater frequency of certain arable weeds indicates . . . that heavier soils were increasingly being brought under cultivation in the Mid to Late Saxon period, something which could not have been readily achieved without the use of heavy ploughs pulled by teams of oxen . . . This implies the use of mouldboards and strip fields . . . At Drayton (Oxfordshire), 'broad, parallel stripes of clayey material'--dated archaeomagnetically to the Late Saxon period--were recognized as representing furrows created by a moldboard plough, producing 'a very distinctive sandwich of inverted alluvial clay, gravel and redeposited soil.'"

Too boring for you? Sorry, but I needed to exonerate Hamerow and set the record straight.

The Ice Palace

My new heroine, Rosalie, readily told me several things about herself, and I think she could do that because she is "born," so to say, to live out the story I am creating for her. (My old heroine, Mrs. Shepard, would not even tell me her first name.)

Rosalie was born in Michigan, moved to Washington, D.C., with her parents and sister, and graduated from a good women's college nearby. In 1950, she applied for a job in the diplomatic corps and ended up working for Edmond A Gullion, the U.S. Chargé d'affaires at the American embassy in Saigon.

Soon after she moves to Saigon and finds an apartment near her office in Cholon, Saigon's Chinatown, Rosalie's parents are killed by a drunk driver in a head-on car crash in Washington, D.C. Rosalie returns home for the funerals and takes her sister Penelope, known as Pen, back to Saigon with her. Pen is only 19, not independent enough to live by herself in the states.

Do you hate it when fiction writers start talking about their characters as real people? Me, too. But I'm pretty sure it's an authentic experience, and in this case I'm going to take it as a good sign. Rosalie is going to help me tell her story.

Rosalie spent her early years in Michigan, where it was snowy and icy in winter and hot and muggy in summer. Now she lives in Saigon, where the summer monsoon season takes the weather to a whole new, tropical, level of hot and muggy.

In one scene I am thinking about, she feels especially hot and sticky, so she imagines an ice palace like the people in her home town in Charlevoix used to build in the winter. She thinks about dressing for the cold, stomping on the floor to pack it down, and putting the ice blocks into place for the foundation. Later, in her mind, she walks around inside the ice palace until she becomes deliciously chilled.

I looked up Ice Palace in Wikipedia and came up with this wonderful old bit of Russian history. In 1739 to 1740, during a particularly cold winter in St. Petersburg, the Empress Anna Ivanova (1693-1740) was celebrating Russia's victory over the Ottoman Empire. She called for an ice palace to be built. She ordered a prince, now widowed, who had angered her by marrying a woman of a different faith, to become one of her court jesters and an ugly maidservant to become the other; the two were married.

On the wedding night, the empress sealed the newlyweds up in a bedchamber in the ice palace. The couple would have died overnight of the cold, except that the bride had managed to trade her pearl necklace for a guard's sheepskin coat.

According to the Wikipedia article, we know that the architect was Pyotr Yeropkin and the construction manager was Georg Kraft, and we still have Kraft's detailed description of the ice palace (only in Russian, as far as I can see).

Unfortunately, I probably won't be able to tell the story in the book I am writing about Rosalie. So I am regaling you with it here.

Mansion

In the novel I've been working on, my heroine lives in 1940 London in a mansion block of flats. That is, if I can be said to be working on something involving ten years of research, many fits and starts, a partial outline, and one first chapter.

The word "mansion" has its root in the Latin word manere, to remain. In later Latin (my source is vague on the point of how much later, but I'm going to guess that the time is after 410 CE, when the Romans left England), mansio came to mean a place to stay during a journey.

Every twelve miles or so--the distance an ox-drawn cart can cover in a day--a large wayside inn or mansio provided food, lodging, and respite for the animals. Sometimes it also served as a government checkpoint, requiring travelers to show proper identification and pay road taxes. At least six sites have been identified as mansions in Great Britain; for one, the excavated mansion at Godmanchester on Ermine Street near Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire.

In Old French and late Middle English, mansion took on an additional meaning, a large, impressive house for an important person. The French word for house, maison, comes from mansion.

Lately, on a kind of journey of my own, if you will allow a lame play on words to help me tie this post together, I gave up on the novel I was working on and created a new heroine. I thought, what if I have somehow constrained myself with the old story and that is why I am having so much trouble moving forward? What if I set the work aside, or even pretend I've finished it and learned everything I can from it, and move on to something I can outline and write?

So I've started a story about a young woman, Rosalie, who, in 1952, works as a secretary in Saigon for the Military Assistance and Advisory Group, MAAG--I. This team of officers and enlisted men from Army, Navy, and Air Force, established in late 1950 under Brigadier General Francis G. Brink, supervises our handing over of World-War-Two-surplus weapons, trucks, and airplanes to the French Expeditionary Corps: the United States' first involvement in Viet Nam.

The French requested our aid in early 1950 and the MAAG--I is President Truman's response to that request. But, in fact, the French are working at cross-purposes with us. They do not want to build a nation resistant to Communism; they simply want to take Indochina back as a colonial power. Yes, this is the theme of Graham Greene's the Quiet American: the old theme of American innocence and naiveté up against European greed and corruption.

Except that, in my story (and in fact) the corruption has now spread to the Americans as well. The CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) helps the French restore the opium trade to finance covert ops. On a visit to the United States to attend a conference on Southeast Asian affairs, General Brink tells a friend at a party that he is worried about his own safety: he knows too much about what is going on in Saigon. On June 24, 1952, while sitting at his desk in the Pentagon, he shoots himself three times in the chest with a revolver. The coroner rules his death a suicide brought on by depression.

My story begins here, as Rosalie and the Army Chief Warrant Officer Tom try to figure out why General Brink was murdered and what to do about it.

"Serves You Right"

A favorite saying in my family: "Well, it serves you right!" I should never have posted a criticism on a book I hadn't finished. (See my post from April 18, 2015, "The Moldboard Plow," which referred  back to another post from August 3, 2013, "Monticello Soup.")

On page 127 of Rural Settlements and Society in Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2012), Hamerow clarifies the uses of the moldboard plow: "[H]eavier soils were increasingly being brought under cultivation in the Mid to Late Saxon period . . . . This implies the use of moldboards and strip fields, direct evidence for which is slowly but surely increasing. At Drayton (Oxfordshire), 'broad, parallel stripes of clayey material'--dated archaeomagnetically to the Late Saxon period--were recognized as representing furrows created by a moldboard plough, producing in section 'a very distinctive sandwich of inverted alluvial clay, gravel and redeposited soil.'

She cites another archaeologist, Booth, but I will spare you the details, just as I spared you the [sic]s that should have accompanied the English words, "moldboard plough."

Don't care about moldboard plows or agricultural technology? Or me annotating myself? Fine. Blame it all on Thomas Jefferson.

"Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing"

Right now I go to two churches, depending on who can give me a ride to church on Sunday. Christ Church, a liturgical Episcopal church, is my "old" church and Nexus Portland, a non-denominational Christian church, is my "new" church.

In either church, we might, on any given Sunday, sing one of the hymns I love, "Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing." It is Hymn 686 in the Hymnal (1982), found in pews in every Episcopal Church as well as, most likely, every other Protestant church; and it is a favorite also of Julianne's, Nexus's pastor's wife, who performs our music and includes at least one old hymn among the new praise and worship selections we sing.

Jeff Taylor and Buddy Greene give a lovely performance of the song in a youtube video, in case you want to listen to or remind yourself of the song.

Robert Robinson (1735 to 1790) wrote the lyrics for "Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing" in 1757, when he was 22 years old. He was a wild young man, given to drinking and mocking the Lord. In maturity he became a Baptist minister. Late in life--at least by his own lights--he wandered into sin again.

In researching the hymn, I ran a cross a charming story sometimes told about it. One day, Robert Robinson was riding in a stagecoach with a young woman he did not know. She began humming, "Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing" and told him what a comfort the song had been for her.

He replied, "I am the poor unhappy man who wrote that hymn many years ago, and I would give a thousand worlds, if I had them, to enjoy the feelings I had then." She told him that the streams of mercy were still flowing and he returned to a state of grace.

The Moldboard Plow

One of the books I am reading right now is called Rural Settlements and Society in Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2012) by Helena Hamerow, Professor of Early Medieval Archaeology at the School of Archaeology, Oxford University. Reading? Well, in truth, it's pretty dry, and I am in fact skimming it.

At any rate, a footnote on p. 90, says, "To gain maximum yields from bread wheat, the crop must be kept dry; for this, the ridge and furrow achieved by the use of a moldboard plough was needed (see Banham 2010)."

Now the moldboard plow (American spelling, vs. English spelling plough) appears in Small Talk in my post, "Monticello Soup," August 3, 2013. There I said "With his son-in-law the plantation manager, Jefferson invented the mouldboard plow for the hilly ground of Albemarle County. As you plow a furrow, the topsoil lifts up and over the mouldboard, falling in a strip to one side only. The mouldboard plow made faster work of plowing a field on a hill and left ridges deep enough to help drain off snowmelt and heavy winter rain."

Not bad, as far as it goes, and, like Banham, my explanation does mention that a moldboard plow helps keep the seed dry. But, first, Jefferson may have invented a moldboard plow that worked well in Albemarle County, but he certainly did not invent the moldboard plow, and my writing does not make that clear enough. And, second, the moldboard plow does more than keep the seed dry or let you plow hilly soil more easily, and my writing hints at that, but again does not make it clear.

The moldboard plow also helps, as Wikipedia remarks in the entry Plough, to "grow crops . . . in less fertile areas" by bringing nutrients to the surface, burying weeds, and incorporating the remains of the previous harvest.

The technological advances of the Industrial Revolution, Machine Age, and Computer Age seem monumental to us, and so they are, but earlier ground-breaking technology (sorry, couldn't resist a joke in the midst of stating the obvious) in agriculture, warfare, industry, knowledge, and other fields is what we have built on.

And speaking of Internet research and book research, both of which I do a lot of, it drives me crazy when an explanation of technology is not exact and complete--because often, being a poet rather than a physicist, I cannot tell the difference. But, when I start to pick the words apart and get at the meaning, the explanation does not hold, and I have yet another loose end to try and find more details on.

Florence Nightingale's Little Owl

My post of July 23, 2014, titled "Athena's Little Owl," mentioned Athena noctua, an owl known to frequent the Athenian Acropolis from at least the Archaic Era (and so presumably much earlier) to the present day. The image of the owl was imprinted on the silver tetradrachm, first minted in 526 BCE.

For a work of fiction that I am writing, I recently did some research on Florence Nightingale (1820 to 1910), founder of the modern nursing profession.

In 1850, she traveled to Italy, Greece, Egypt, and Germany. During her visit to the Parthenon in Athens, she rescued an Athena noctua owlet from mischievous children. She hand-fed it, trained it to bow and curtsy, and kept it as her pet for the next five years. While she was in Germany, she visited Pastor Theodore Fliedner’s hospital and observed his school for deaconesses at Kaiserswerth near Dusseldorf.

In 1851, she returned to the German school for three months' training. Afterward, she began her nursing career in England.

In 1854, she was recruited to train nurses for duty in Turkish hospitals during the Crimean War. She was getting ready to leave with her nurses the following year, and the owl, left in her attic in the care of unreliable family members, died of neglect. Heartbroken, Nightingale had the owl stuffed and kept it in her home ever after. You can see the stuffed owl today in the Florence Nightingale Museum in London.

(To us, stuffing the owl may seem like a rather ghoulish way of honoring her pet, but it was in keeping with the sensibilities of the Victorian Era.)

In the Crimea, she became known as the "Lady with the Lamp," for she made nightly rounds to check on her patients.

Nightingale laid down the principles and practices of modern nursing. No longer were nurses untrained in sanitation, nutrition, wound care, and other important health fields; they became professional, knowledgeable caregivers. In 1859, she wrote Notes on Nursing and, in 1860, she founded the Nightingale Training School for nurses at St. Thomas Hospital in London.

Within five years, Nightingale Nurses took over the nursing duties in workhouse infirmaries in England and Ireland and, within seventeen years, Nightingale Nurses headed up wards as Matrons all over the United Kingdom.

In the following years, she undertook studies in public health and the health of men in military service and won membership as the first woman in the Royal Statistical Society for her use of modern graphics, such as the pie chart, to present her data. In 1883, she earned the Royal Red Cross. In 1904, she was appointed a Lady of Grace of the Order of St John (LGStJ). In 1907, three years before her death, she became the first woman to win the Order of Merit.

"Bare Ruin'd Choirs"

In 1534, Henry VIII (1491 to 1547), King of England, broke with the Church of Rome, ostensibly because the Pope refused to grant him an annulment of his 24-year marriage to Catherine of Aragon. (The marriage had given him no male heirs.) That same year, Parliament declared him the Supreme Head of the Church of England. To this day, Queen Elizabeth II holds the title, "Defender of the Faith and Supreme Governor of the Church of England."

Between 1536 and 1541, Henry enacted the "Dissolution of the Monasteries," which called for Roman Catholic church lands, monasteries, priories, convents, and friaries in England, Ireland, and Wales to be forfeit to the crown. Some of the properties Henry sold for ready cash; some he granted to his favorites; and a few he gave to the Church of England to be used as churches or cathedrals.

In the course of this process, many of the buildings were plundered for building materials and fell into ruin.

Now, as I happen to know from a footnote or commentary for Sonnet 73 that I read in college, "Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang," is, among other things, a reference to the Dissolution of the Monasteries, for the choir is the part of the church where the choristers sat or stood during Mass.

Curiously, I can find no reference to this, which I take as a valid interpretation, in internet commentaries on the sonnet. A valid interpretation, and possibly a poignant one, if Shakespeare (1564 to 1616) did in fact have Roman Catholic roots or beliefs, as some scholars think.

Sonnet 73

That time of year thou mayst in me behold,
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou seest the twilight of such day,
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou seest the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourished by.
This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well, which thou must leave ere long.

  William Shakespeare

Francis Towne, Netley Abbey, 1809. Tate Britain.

A Word Nerd's Idea of Fun

I've been planning to write a post about the word "moat" for a while now.

The word "moat" comes to us from the medieval Latin word "mota," meaning mound. (The word "mota," whose etymology is lost in time, may come from the Gaulish word "mott" or "motta.") In the mid-fourtheenth century, medieval Latin "mota" became Old French "mote," the mound on which a castle is built, or, with the part standing in for the whole, the ditch dug around the castle and often filled with water for an added line of defense.

Hmm, I thought, digging a moat to help protect a castle seems like a pretty basic idea, right up there with building a wall. I wonder whether moats were used for defense in ancient times.

Well, yes, they were, and I must have encountered this fact in college, because I read my Herodotus. In his Histories, Herodotus (484 to 425 BCE) describes of the ancient city of Babylon as surrounded by a "broad and deep moat."

Just for fun, I thought some more, let's see if I can find out when Babylon, founded circa 2300 BCE, first included a moat in its plans. I may need to cite this information in passing.

Well, the answer is, no, I cannot find out when Babylon first had a moat. This after a couple of hours of research on the Internet. The answer may be there somewhere, but I cannot find it.

However, I did find something absolutely wonderful.

Go to this website for SOAS, University of London: http://www.soas.ac.uk/baplar/recordings/. Now listen to someone read a poem to Ishtar, in Babylonian, from the Old Babylonian Period, 1900 to 1500 BCE.

And that is my idea of fun.

In Praise of Coffee

One good thing about being a writer is that you get to leave the dishes in the sink when it's time to write. Or, maybe I should say, you get to make another cup of coffee and then leave the dishes in the sink.

I love looking forward to my morning coffee the night before, dreaming about it while I am sleeping, and, against all reason, even leaving my warm bed to get it started. I love smelling the grounds and measuring them into my filter and pouring (or, in my case, if your teakettle has lost its lid and you are using a soup ladle for the moment, scooping) boiling water over it. I love watching the water drip over the grounds into my cup--which, by the way, is glass, so that I can see the magical process--and turn into coffee or, in Turkish, kahveh, from the Arabic قهوة, qahwah.

From what I can find out, coffee came to us from Yemen: according to Wikipedia, the "first credible evidence" we have of people drinking coffee dates from the mid-fifteenth century at a Sufi Muslem monastery in Mocha, Yemen. From there, coffee spread to the rest of the Middle East, Persia, Turkey, and northern Africa; to Venice, the trade-route link between East and West; and then to the rest of Europe.

Pope Clement VIII, instead of banning the "Muslim drink," wisely blessed coffee--in Italian, caffè--in 1600. Or maybe I should say that he "allowed," instead of "blessed," coffee. The first European coffee house began serving coffee to Romans in 1645.

A now-discounted tale claims that, in 1683, Viennese bakers, who as a matter of course stayed up all night to make pastries for breakfast coffee, heard the Ottomans tunneling under the besieged city and sounded the alarm, thus saving the citizens. In celebration of the victory of Christendom over the Turkish Empire, the bakers formed their pastries into the shape of the crescent on the Islamic flag.

Of course, as a writer newly restored by coffee, I would just as soon reinstate this story to the canon. What could be more perfect than freshly brewed coffee and newly baked croissants?

"Lie" and "Lay"

A promise is a promise, and I promised a friend I would write a post about the distinction between "lie" and "lay." Even at the risk of sounding like his mother--one of the last things I want to do--who apparently was a stickler for the correct use of "lie" and "lay."

So I've dredged up the grammar lessons I remember, read a lot of stuff in the grammar books and on the internet, and revisited my childhood frustration with teachers who irrevocably linked words that sound alike but otherwise have no reason to be linked: "lie" and "lay," "there" and "their," "sit" and "set," "its" and "it's." My eight-year-old self thought that this linking would clutter up my mind with meaningless associations between words so paired. And it did.

Now that my mind continues, with the passage of time, to declutter itself, I find that I do not want to write a post about this topic. Just know this: The grammatically correct command to the well-trained dog who understands some English is, "Lie down."

Beyond that, I, your trustworthy grammatical guide, would have to enter into the labyrinth of transitive and intransitive verbs, subjects and objects, present and past tense, and a whole lot of other technicalities that you can readily look up. I don't have enough string for that.

I am more interested in the romance of language. Sometimes words can do things that cannot be done any other way. Sometimes words bring to mind civilizations and ideas past. Sometimes words carry within them the tune that they sing.