Encore
Learning Course
10 VARIABLE length
sessions (some in
excess of three hours,
depending on movie
duration).
Dates and times will
appear here when
known.
During
each session, we
will watch one of
ten ancient Rome
movies selected on
the following bases
(my personal
biases): action
should take place in
Rome; type of
movie - comedy,
tragedy, ancient
literary origin (Plautine plays, Satyricon);
actual or presumed
accurate history
(perhaps via Shakespeare);
revenge play in the
manner if Senecan
Odes as
dramatized by
Shakespeare
and modernized by Julie Taymore
(Titus);
or in one case a
blatant Fascist
propaganda film
produced by Mussolini's
son (Scipio
Africanus, etc.)
Use the
following link to
find more
information about
the Movies and
further links:
All
education
experiences are
based on the
movement of
information in some
form. In organized
course work, the
assumption is that
the instructor (an
encoder) shares
their interpretation
of information based
on experience or
research (and
influenced by their
biases). In
courses about media
that concerns or
portrays historical
events or
conditions, there
can be multiple
layers of encoding,
starting from the
real or fictional
events that are
portrayed, and
continuing through
the original
historian or author
(possibly a writer
of fiction, plays
(comedies,
tragedies), poetry),
to later
interpreters (e.g.,
with Ancient Roman
subjects, "secondary
source historians"
and/or dramatic
interpreters (like,
for example,
Shakespeare and his
contemporaries).
As the
stories of ancient
Rome progressed
through layers of
translation they
might have also been
subject to errors of
interpretation,
dropped lines, and
biased or
interpretive
marginal notes or
even stage
directions added
into text.
In some cases
political/ideological biases and whole
sections of fictional material have been
added to the ancient stories by
literary and film interpreters.
Some of our films were
fiction from the start. but they
portray important aspects of ancient Roman
life. A
Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the
Forum is based on several "new
comedy" plays by Titus
Maccius Plautus. "Plautian
genre" comedies were extremely popular
from his own time, 220s BC, throughout the
Roman period and were essentially
situation comedies using earlier Greek
archtypal characters -- wily tricky
slaves, young lovers, termagant wives,
braggart soldiers, procurers, horny old
husbands, foreigners (perhaps
Carthaginians), and, of course, rumors of
ghosts. Howard
Fast, an avowed Communist and winner
of the Stalin Peace Prize (1950) wrote the
Spartacus
historical novel (about 375 pages)
while imprisoned during the MaCarthy era,
using material that amounted to fewer than
15
pages about Spartacus by ancient
historians including Herodotus. (And
none of the short references were
contemporary with the actual slave
Spartacus) The 1960
Stanly Kubrick film gave the story a
Christian tilt -- voice-over intro and
conclusion -- and added a thinly disguised
homosexual reference in the middle (which
sometimes was removed by local
authorities.
Fellini's
Satyricon is based on
surviving fragments of a satyrical work by
Gaius
Petronius Arbiter (supposedly
Nero's "Master of the Revels" in which he
wrote about the overblown lifestyle of
some Roman freedmen. Part of the
Satyricon story is that, by the 20th
century, many people had come to believe
that Petronius wrote actual descriptions
rather than the academically accepted idea
of his writing satire.
The Caligulafilm(s) is perhaps the most
controversial ever produced about ancient
Roman events. Even its ancient
sources are problematical because modern
academia questions the veracity of stories
about him that started circulating after
his death. What was said of Caligula
may or may not be true, but it became part
of the Caligula canon. The original
screenplay, by Gore
Vidal, was rejected by Hallmark
Hall of Fame which had commissioned
it. The rights were bought by Larry
Flint of Hustler
Magazine, and he commissioned and
added in many additional minutes of
gratuitous sex and gore, which, together
with the Vidal material compise the "Blue"
edition of Caligula (available at
Amazon.com). The "Red" edition
(also available) is a newer version that
was re-edited to take out all the Hustler
stuff and get back to the Vidal
version. We'll see the Red
edition. (A
chronicle of the many reworkings of the
Calgula film materials to meet the demands
of censors, critics, producers (with an
eye for profits), and audiences is at: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080491/alternateversions/)
Renaissance
Rome -- Fall Semester 2004 -- Course has been
completed
Ancient Rome
Study Trip -- September 2004 -- Trip to Rome has
been completed -- For
links to papers that were prepared for the trip and for
pictures of the trip, click here
Ancient Rome -- Spring
Semester 2004 -- Course has been completed. For course description, click
here.
Medieval Rome -- Fall
Semester 2003 -- Course has been completed
Ancient Rome -- Spring
Semester 2003 -- Course has been completed .
For course description, click
here.
Textbooks -- none are needed But, if you feel that you simply must have a
book or three or more,
For Ancient Greece 1 and 2, the following are available from internet
booksellers:
(1) Ancient Greece: A Political, Social,
and Cultural History, 3rd Edition, Dec 16, 2011
by Sarah B. Pomeroy and Stanley M. Burstein
(2) The Oxford Illustrated History of
Greece and the Hellenistic World (Oxford Illustrated
Histories), May 24, 2001
by John Boardman and Jasper Griffin
(3) The Oxford History of Greece &
the Hellenistic World, Mar 2002 by John Boardman
and Jasper Griffin
(4) Ancient Greece: From Prehistoric to
Hellenistic Times (Yale Nota Bene), Aug 11, 2000
by Thomas R. Martin
(5) Introducing the Ancient Greeks: From
Bronze Age Seafarers to Navigators of the Western
Mind, Jul 13, 2015
by Edith Hall
(6) The Greco-Persian Wars (With a new
foreword by Peter Green), 1998 edition by Peter Green
(7) The classic: The Greek Way, March 9, 2012 printing by
Edith Hamilton (or many
earlier printings - copyright 1930))
For the Ancient
Rome course,
Richardson's A New Topographical Dictionary of
Ancient Rome is a great source, but it costs
about $80 through on line booksellers. It was
published in 1992, so it does not include the
excavations of Rome's Imperial Forums which were
accomplished after that time. Large parts of the
"old" -- 1929 -- topo dictionary, which Richardson
revised and updated, are available free on the
Internet at http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Gazetteer/Places/Europe/Italy/Lazio/Roma/Rome/_Texts/PLATOP*/home*.html.
Also
for
the
Ancient
Rome
course,
Cary
and
Scullard's
A History of Rome Down to the Reign of Constantine
is the textbook of choice for many university courses
(about $70 on the Internet), and one of the
great book bargains on the internet is the Oxford
Archeological Guide to Rome (for only $14). The
most commonly used book on how Romans lived is Daily
Life of the Ancient Romans by David Matz (about
$50 from online booksellers), but I prefer the older
-- and free! -- The Private Life of the Romans
by the Johnstons, on the Internet at http://www.forumromanum.org/life/johnston.html
.
For the Rome/Movies
course, the
usual handouts will be provided for each unit, but
if you really think you must have a book, try one of
these:
Copyright,
"Fair Use", and Plagiarism Courses
listed do not involve student writing or
multi-media projects, but everyone should be as
aware as I am of the rules about copyright, "fair
use" and plagiarism. Attribution has become
a particularly thorny problem in the Internet age:
as unattributed copies of the same
information/pages appear on multiple sites, it
becomes increasingly difficult to find the owner
of intellectual property. (I've seen some of
my own stuff presented as original material on
other web sites.) Complicating an already
difficult situation is the fact that copyright
laws and regulations have not yet been updated to
address current issues. There have been
numerous court cases in various countries, but the
decisions have been inconsistent.
And then there is the problem of
"unconscious plagiarism": certain phrases
and ways of writing about subject matter
have become engrained in the literature.
After long years of reading and study on any
particular subject, apt phraseology, which might
well have originated in the writings of others,
will almost certainly pop back into your head as
"original" thoughts. For me,
sixty+ years of notes and sometimes
unsorted and unsourced note cards (some of which
date back to my early teens) have also been a
problem. Sometimes I frankly don't know
whether "what is written" is original thought or
cribbed from some "source". I've tried not
to let plagiarism creep onto these pages, but if
you do see it, let me know at mmd.tkw@verizon.net
.
Use the three links immediately below
to find more information on Copyright, "Fair Use", and Plagiarism.
The
following contains links to pages that are available on
the Internet. Please
note that links on the Internet are notoriously
volatile. I can not predict or prevent "broken
links" due to changes in other folks' Internet
sites. If you don't find what the link calls
for, you can always search using Google
or some other search engine.
Roman
Britain
Roman personal names,titles, tribal
and place names had mostly stabilized by th e time
Rome started to interact with Britain. The same can't
be said for the British Celtic culture: in fact some,
if not all, British Celtic nominations were merely
Greek and/or Roman approximations. Modern
academia has somewhat stabilized the spellings .
http://mmdtkw.org/RB8000-ConstantineOfYork.html Constantine succeeded his father, one of the
four Tetrarchs, in York, England, and his father's
troops quickly declared him Emperor. In a few
years he had taken the whole Empire and became "the
Great".
Unit 9 UrbanityCivilization
http://mmdtkw.org/RB9000-CivilizingBritonCelts.html Romans "Civilized" the Briton
Celts. Most Celts still lived in farm centered
conurbations (that Romans called an oppidum)
but some Briton elites joined Roman settlers in
"arts and crafts centered towns, settlements, and Colonia,
all of which had aspects of Roman style civis
or cities..
Unit 10 Economy Exports
http://mmdtkw.org/RB10000-OccupationEconomy.html Why would the Romans want to go
to a place called "prytania"? What did
the Empire, as well as its private citizens hope
Britain would yield? Could the whole endeavor
ever turn a profit? Did It ever? And at
what cost?
The
Crusades -- Wars Among
Christians and Muslims
(Why
"among" rather than "between"? In many of these wars, shifting alliances meant
that Christians and Muslims fought on both
sides. There were also "Crusades" that didn't
involve Muslims at all.)
If
you use your Internet search engine to search for
the word crusades, you
will find more than 14 million entries. The
pages linked below along with links on those pages
will give you a start in wading through what's on
the web.Note that in
the files that I have used for the Crusades course
there are many more links to Wikipedia than I have
used in the past. The reason for this is that
I have found nothing particularly wrong or
misleading in thepages accessed
through these links. On this subject, Wikipedia
seems to be fairly accurate.
Spelling and
transliteration of names and places
Spelling in European
languages had not yet stabilized in medieval
times so names of persons and places might
have been spelled several different ways.Middle
Eastern languages are even more of a problem
because they were/are written in different
alphabets which have to be transliterated into
ours.I
have made absolutely no effort to straighten
out this mess, so yew’l sea difrent spellin
fer da saym peeple, locayshuns, etc.
Coriolanus is set in the early
Roman republic period. The Roman struggle with
the Volscii (a mountain tribe southeast of Rome) is
complicated by the Plebeian struggle for power
within the Roman government. War hero
Coriolanus is embroiled in both, and, after being
expelled from Rome for his rants against the
Plebeians, changes sides and leads a Volscii army
against the city.
Shakespeare’s final tragedy
is also considered one of his greatest. This
powerful political drama tells the
story of the great Roman general whose arrogance
leads to his own downfall.
One of Shakespeare’s most provocative plays,
Coriolanus is a mesmerizing tale that
unfolds as both personal tragedy and political
thriller. From exalted war hero –
to heavy handed politician to finally, exile –
Coriolanus is manipulated by his power
hungry mother Volumnia (one of Shakespeare’s great
female roles) and his unwillingness to compromise
his principles as his world
spirals out of control in his crusade for
vengeance.
Titus
Andronicus, one of Shakespeare's earliest plays, is
certainly his most violent. It was written, before Shakespeare found
his own more mellow style,for an Elizabethan
audience already inured to violent "revenge plays"
modeled after the nine Senecan tragedies.
Our movie is Julie Taymor's production, in which she
fearlessly shows all of Shakespeare's violence.
It is set during the reign of a fictional emperor,
Saturninus, in the period of "military anarchy"
beginning with Maximus Thrax and ending with the
formation of the Tetrarchy by Diocletian (235 - 285
AD). Shakespeare's and Taymor's bloody story
accurately reflects the violence of that time.
Something to consider: Who commits the first
violent act that provokes revenge?
A note on spelling of
ancient Egyptian names and words: All Egyptian names
and words are transliterations from ancient Egyptian
phonetic scripts. So modern spellings are dependent on how we
think the ancient word sounded. This can lead to
different spellings, and there is no "correct"
way to spell any Egyptian word or name. One
tries for
consistency, but some variation is inevitable. Please
patiently
accept the sometimes variant spelling of Egyptian names
and words you may find in the Egyptian section of the
this Internet site.
Unit
1: Introduction, Pre- and Proto-Dynastic Egypt
Note that some of the links
below are from Wikipedia, "the free encyclopedia
that anyone can edit".
Like much other information on the Internet, what
appears in Wikipedia should be taken cum
grano salis.
A very fictitious
story of Rome's Third Servile War (73 - 70 BC), this
is the movie that really broke the Hollywood
blacklist. Kirk Douglas, producer as well as
star of the epic, brought in the blacklisted
screen-writer Dalton Trumbo and insisted that he be
credited with the authorship of the screenplay.
Trumbo drew his story from Howard Fast's 1951 novel
and, like Fast, portrayed Spartacus as a popular
revolutionary. Many scholars disagree, saying
that Spartacus was just a wily escapee with no grand
revolutionary agenda. It's impossible to say who
was right: the historical evidence is extremely
sketchy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spartacus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Fast http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalton_Trumbo
Historical evidence -- pretty much all that survives
about the Third Servile War: http://www.mmdtkw.org/HistorySpartacus.html
Julius Caesar is the name of the
production, but he dies early on.
Shakespeare's story is really about Marc Antony's
destruction of the liberatori who had
assassinated Caesar. This film is recognized
as one of Brando's greatest performances, and it is
acclaimed by Shakespeare specialists as well as by
the Hollywood crowd. Time period covered is 44
and 43 BC. http://www.sparknotes.com/shakespeare/juliuscaesar/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_Caesar_(1953_film
Not
Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. It is an
ITV television
production
of Trevor
Nunn's stage
version performed by London's Royal Shakespeare
Company, which was shown in the United States to great acclaim in 1975. Most critics agree that it's the best mass
media A and C ever produced. The time period is
from 41 BC through 29 BC, but the action is much
compressed by Shakespeare. http://www.sparknotes.com/shakespeare/antony/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antony_and_Cleopatra
"....equal
parts
historylesson and soap opera, and thoroughly engaging
at all levels". Peter O'toole is Augustus
on his death bed and remembering/retelling his
life. The film is surprisingly accurate, and
also, surprisingly, the multiple flashback (and even
flashbacks within flashbacks) form holds the film
together. The only really jarring note is the
gratuitous inclusion of Jesus in the last words of
the film, supposedly spoken by (the ghost of?)
Augustus in what appears to be a parody of his Res
Gestae DiviAugusti (= Deeds of the Divine
Augustus). The movie covers the life of
Augustus from 45 BC until his death in 14 AD. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperium:_Augustus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustus
https://duckduckgo.com/?kl=us-en&q=caesar+augustus&t=seamonkey&ia=web
7. Caligula
(1979, reworked several times, ours is essentially the
R rated 1981 version
which was finally issued in 1999.) Click
for larger image
101 Minutes
This
is an attempt to return to the Gore Vidal Caligula
screenplay. Penthouse Magazine operatives had
inserted almost an hour of gratuitous explicit sex
and gore, which was removed for this "R" rated (cleaned up)
version of the notorious Penthouse production.
Caligula was undoubtedly evil and perhaps insane,
but most of what we "know" about him was written
by"historians" in the pay of his enemies after his assassination, and most of that is
suspiciously similar to what had been written about
previous tyrants in the ancient world. The
action takes place between 31 AD when Caligula was
summoned to the Villa of Tiberius in Capri and
Caligula's death in 41 AD. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caligula_%28film%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caligula A chronicle of the many reworkings of the
Calgula film materials to meet the demands of
censors, critics, producers (with an eye for
profits), and audiences is at: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080491/alternateversions/
Satyricon (Fellini Satyricon) is a 1969 film by Federico Fellini that is loosely based on
the Petronius novel Satyricon, a series of bawdy and
satirical episodes written during the reign of the
emperor Nero and set in imperial
Rome. Many literature "experts" call the
Petronius work the world's first novel. The original
text survives only in large fragments, and instead
of trying to connect the fragments which survived,
Fellini presented the material in a series of
somewhat disjointed and dislocated scenes.
Petronius, usually identified with Petronius
Arbiter, is thought to have been Nero's "master of
the revels". The date of the "events" in the
Satyricon is unclear, but the work most likely dates
from Nero's reign 54 - 68 AD http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satyricon_%28film%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satyricon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petronius http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federico_Fellini
A
fiction set in the reign of Commodus, the film,
nonetheless, is very good on Roman architecture,
costume, life style, and general ambiance -- good
enough for the film to become a staple of university
ancient
history and archeology courses. The
history of Commodus, like that of Caligula 120 years
before him, was written by historians in the pay of
his erstwhileenemies. Commodus was named
Caesar by
his father, Marcus Aurelius, at age 5 in 166 AD and
was made co-Augustus in 178 AD. He reigned
alone from his father's death in 180 AD until 192
when he was assassinated -- he was not killed in the
arena as shown in the movie.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gladiator_%282000_film%29 http://www.mmdtkw.org/VCommodus.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gladiator
Titus
Andronicus, one of Shakespeare's earliest plays, is
certainly his most violent. It was written, before Shakespeare found
his own more mellow style, for an Elizabethan
audience already inured to violent "revenge plays"
modeled after the nine Senecan tragedies. Our movie is
Julie Taymor's production, in which she fearlessly
shows all of Shakespeare's violence. It is set in
the period of "military anarchy" beginning with
Maximus Thrax and ending with the formation of the
Tetrarchy by Diocletian (235 - 285 AD) during the
reign of a fictional Emperor Saturninus.
Shakespeare's and Taymor's bloody story accurately
reflects the violence of that time. Something
to consider: Who commits the first violent act
that provokes revenge? Taymor had staged Titus
in New york in 1995 before her Lion King success and
returned to it for her first movie. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titus_Andronicus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titus_Andronicus_%28ballad%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titus_%28film%29 https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/titus-andronicus/read/
Ancient
Greece 1 -- through the
Persian Wars
Internet
links are notoriously volatile. I'll try my
best to keep my own links alive and up to
date. I can't speak for other folks' links
in this course or elsewhere on this site.
Note that Internet links
are notoriously volatile -- the page to
which an Internet link is attached can disappear at any time.
I have no control over whether a page to which I link will
be
there tomorrow or the next day. If you come
upon a
blank or
missing page, the easiest remedy is to use a search
engine (e.g., Google) to look for your
topic.
Internet links
are notoriously volatile and therefore may
change or disappear without warning.
To the extent possible, links on the
following pages are kept up to date, but if
something is missing searching with a modern
Internet search engine should find you what
you need.
Textbooks:
None are needed. There will be no
hard copies of the handouts for this course. They
are available on the Internet at links
below.
Only if you feel you must have a hard
copy book for the
Renaissance
Rome course, there
are:
(1)
The Renaissance in Rome, by
Charles L. Stinger (about $18 from
Amazon.com); (2)
Renaissance Rome 1500 - 1559, A portrait of
a Society, by Peter Partner ($20);
and (3)
The Art of Renaissance Rome, by Loren
Partridge ($12). The
free full text of Jacob Burckhardt's classic,
The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy,
is available on the internet at http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2074.
Latin
Language --
Church Latin --
Church Latin Pronunciation --
Classics - Latin Resources --
Electronic Text Center - Latin --
Labyrinth Medieval Latin --
Latin and the Vernaculars --
Latin Background Essays --
Latin Language Resources --
Latin Place Names --
Latin Pronunciation (UGa) --
Latin Pronunciation (UTexas) --
Latin Resources Collection --
Latin Resources (CSUS) --
Latin Web Resources --
Orbis Latinus --
Perseus Latin Dictionary ----
Latin Dictionary Mirror (Oxford) ----
Latin Dictionary Mirror (U of C) --
Vulgar Latin
Chronological
Pope List -- bios, with pictures and links, from
Wilipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_popes (Note
that "Wikipedia" is an "on-line encyclopedia" to
which anyone can
contribute and which can be edited by anyone.
It has no peer review
and, thus, must be taken "cum grano salis".)
mmd.tkw@verizon.net .
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