Author Archives: Pedar W. Foss

I am professor of Classical Studies at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana

  • Translating Pliny’s letters about Vesuvius, pt. 9. Shuddering to Remember

    16 January, 2014

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    Relief from the House of L. Caecilius Iucundus (V.1.26) at Pompeii depicting the earthquake of AD 62

    The world turned topsy-turvy: detail of a relief from Pompeii depicting the earthquake of AD 62/3 toppling the Temple of Jupiter (see below for details)

    6.20.1-3: Shuddering to Remember

    This post belongs to a serialized translation and commentary of Pliny the Younger’s letters (6.16 and 6.20) to the historian Tacitus about the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79. This is the first installment for letter 6.20, and the ninth overall.

    I  provide the Latin (using Mynors’ 1963 Oxford Classical Text [OCT]), and then work through it with a translation, dissection of grammatical constructions, and discussion of what the letters tell us. Other pages in the series detail the manuscript tradition and the cast of characters in the two letters. The Codex Laurentianus Mediceus for letter 6.20 can be viewed here Plut. 47.36, p. 186.

    The Latin is in italics; English translation follows in Roman text, indented, and then commentary in brown text. Parentheses indicate (‘understood’) words that are not explicit in the Latin. My purpose here is as much to look at the process of translating as to provide another translated product. So I tend to err on the side of a technical rather than a fluid English translation.

    The Younger Pliny has already written one account of the eruption (6.16) in order to describe the death of his uncle, Pliny the Elder. He now pens a follow-on to Cornelius Tacitus about his own, and his mother’s, flight from the volcanic storm.

    C. PLINIUS TACITO SUO S.

    Gaius Plinius greets his dear (friend) Tacitus.

    ‘C‘ is the abbreviation for the common name ‘Caius‘, or ‘Gaius‘. ‘S‘ is short for ‘salutem‘, and goes with the gapped verb ‘dicit‘ to mean ‘says greeting’. ‘Suo‘ is a term of affectionate familiarity often used to denote ‘one’s own’ (i.e., family and friends) This address is identical to that of 6.16.

    1 Ais te adductum litteris quas exigenti tibi de morte avunculi mei scripsi, cupere cognoscere, quos ego Miseni relictus (id enim ingressus abruperam) non solum metus verum etiam casus pertulerim. ‘Quamquam animus meminisse horret, …incipiam.’

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  • Castel Rigone, Week 18: True Grit

    7 January, 2014

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    Re-blogging from Shades of Umbria, 7 Jan. 2014. This is the 12th in a series of posts on the ethics of competition, focusing on Castel Rigone Calcio, and part of the ‘Ethics of Combat‘ category on quemdixerechaos. This blog series completes a DePauw University Faculty Fellowship that examines how and why rules and customs develop for, and in, combat and competition.

    Pedar W. Foss's avatarShades of Umbria

    There’s a quality to players that coaches love to see here; they call it “grinta,” or “grit” — the will to focus one’s attention and energies towards a task despite all obstacles and conditions. Simon’s coach constantly talks to his team about playing with grinta. Castel Rigone showed it after the holiday break and earned three points in their fifth straight win, 1-0 over Chieti (who had beat them 3-1 in the very first game of the season back in August).

    I took Simon to see the match; it had poured that morning, and the pitch was full of water puddles; the grounds crew worked with squeegees and augers to try to drain the water and dry the mud. The all-white kit of the home side was brown almost immediately, however. In those first minutes, Chieti launched a direct assault, putting through-balls between defenders who were slow to…

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  • ROMARCH: 2014 Classical Summer School, American Academy in Rome

    6 January, 2014

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    IMG_0093Now Accepting Applications for the 2014 Classical Summer School at the American Academy in Rome

    This six-week program is designed to provide qualified graduate students, mature undergraduates, and middle school, high school, and two-year college teachers with a well-founded understanding of the growth and development of the city of Rome through a careful study of material remains and literary sources.

    The program will run June 16 to July 25, 2014. For the 2014 program year, the organizers have made every effort to reduce costs to participants and to enhance their interaction with the intellectual community of the Academy. The overall cost of the program represents a 15% decrease from the previous program year. The application deadline is January 20, 2014. Scholarship opportunities are available from both the Academy and numerous Classical societies (CAAS, CAMWS, Eta Sigma Phi etc.). 

    For more information, go to http://aarome.org/apply/summer-programs or email the Director of the Summer School Dr. Genevieve Gessert at gessert.aarcss@gmail.com

  • Castel Rigone, Weeks 15-16-17: Card Games

    6 January, 2014

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    Re-blogging from Shades of Umbria, 24 Dec. 2013. This is the 11th in a series of posts on the ethics of competition, focusing on Castel Rigone Calcio, and part of the ‘Ethics of Combat‘ category on quemdixerechaos. This blog series completes a DePauw University Faculty Fellowship that examines how and why rules and customs develop for, and in, combat and competition.

    Pedar W. Foss's avatarShades of Umbria

    All last week, the Giornale dell’Umbria published stories on Castel Rigone going for a ‘poker’. A ‘poker’ in Italian means a hand with four aces. In sporting terms, this indicates either scoring four goals in a game, or a string of four successive wins. On Sunday, the team earned that club-record fourth win in a row. A 1-0 victory away at Sorrento Calcio, after defeating other strong opposition (first-place Teramo and seventh-place Vigor Lamezia), vaulted Castel Rigone into fifth place at the midway point of the season, firmly within the survival zone of the top eight teams. (In Italian soccer, tiebreakers for teams level on points are: first, head-to-head record; second, overall goal difference.)

    The victory at Sorrento was achieved without their top striker, Dario Tranchitella, who was on the bench with the flu. Two other first-team strikers (Di Paola and Cappai) have either been transferred or are about to…

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  • ROMARCH: Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World iPad app; Review

    9 December, 2013

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    20131031-075153.jpg

    Barrington Atlas App splash screen

    Princeton University Press has launched its iPad app version of the Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World, as we noted here on Oct. 31. The app has been made available for $19.95 on iTunes. The Barrington Facebook page includes recent news and reviews about the release. Princeton provided a copy of the app for this review. Testing was done on a 4th-generation 128 GB iPad running iOS 7.0.4 after a clean restart.

    When the print version of the Barrington Atlas was published in 2000, the fruit of a multiyear international collaboration, it redressed a problem that had bedeviled the latter 20th-century: a lack of up-to-date, accurate, and visually informative/attractive (yes, I link those two attributes) maps for the classical world. Murray’s Small Classical Atlas, a short but distinguished accomplishment of Victorian cartography popular in schools, had seen its last update in 1917 (though reprints appeared through the 1950s).

    Hammond’s 1981 Atlas, from eBay

    The efforts of van der Heyden and Scullard (1962) and Hammond (1981) were useful as references, but their visual qualities (too few maps, and those reduced to atopographic colored line-drawings in the former; sepia monochrome in the latter) left much to be desired. The Facts-on-File Cultural Atlases released from 1980-1990 (“Greek World,” “Roman World,” “Egypt,” and “Mesopotamia and the ancient Near East”) were examples of the encyclopedia-style that prevailed in that decade, with lots of insets, photos, short descriptions, timelines and essays — an integrated approach that had many merits, but which were ultimately limited in sheer cartographic utility.

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  • Castel Rigone, Weeks 13-14: Bad Spirits and Good Spirits

    4 December, 2013

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    Re-blogging from Shades of Umbria, 3 Dec. 2013. This is the 10th in a series of posts on the ethics of competition, focusing on Castel Rigone Calcio, and part of the ‘Ethics of Combat‘ category on quemdixerechaos. This blog series completes a DePauw University Faculty Fellowship that examines how and why rules and customs develop for, and in, combat and competition.

    Pedar W. Foss's avatarShades of Umbria

    With three penalties missed in a row and three games in a row with a player dismissed for a red card, Castel Rigone was looking for their fortunes to change in week 14 vs. Aprilia.

    The previous week had brought on a strong performance away vs. ACD Foggia, but a missed penalty (this time by Di Paola, who had just substituted for Tranchitella) and a red card had squashed a comeback from 2-0 for the white-and-blues from Umbria (video highlights for both matches below).

    Much of the week’s papers concentrated on the maledizione, or “curse” that seemed to befall the club’s strikers from the penalty spot, a place where about 75% of penalties are normally successful (the figure drops to 69% under the pressure of an end-of-match penalty shootout and (eek) to 14% when a player has to score to keep a team alive in a shootout). Pressure matters…

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