Pop archaeology

[robert_jones]

I seem to have been watching a lot of programmes about archaeology recently. I think the BBC must have decided that they're a rich seem: there was Lost Cities of the Ancients, and now we have Ancient Apocalypse, Meet the Romans with Mary Beard and Divine Women all running simultaneously. They're quite enjoyable: sensationalist, of course, but

Comments

[hairyears]

I blame Penguin for the stereotypical classicist's obsession with sex: their English edition of Juvenal's Satires has all the interesting bits left in the original Latin, with a comment in the footnotes "...and is best left untranslated".

I doubt that there could possibly be a more compelling incentive for a schoolboy (or girl) to master Latin.

Older translations of Ovid take a step into absurdity, with the finer points recorded in Greek (though I am told it's actually Latin, published using the Greek alphabet); I, and my fellow-benighted among the literarily- and linguistically-challenged, have reasons to thank Roz Kaveney for her full and frank translations into English.

[jamesofengland]

Checking with wiki... and, yes, she's worked with Jamie Oliver, one of the strongest examples of people who think that natural is good and essentially what we're like now, while foreigners (hence probably Romans) are/ were numinous. As such, it doesn't seem unusually ridiculous for her.

[whatifoundthere]

Without more context I can't be sure, but the "based in myths" and the "Whig view of history" parts of that sentence suggest to me that her point had nothing to do with technology. I think what she's saying might be something more like, "We think that we moderns respond totally logically and in an unmediated way to the world around us, while the Romans filtered all their experiences through myths."

You can disagree with that if you like (I actually think she's on to something) but it's definitely less preposterous than the idea that she thinks that we encounter no unnatural, constructed items in our daily lives.

[robert_jones]

Like you, I find the paragraph a little difficult to read confidently. The first sentence is of course Jeffries' paraphrase of Beard (and I generally don't get on well with him). That isn't an accurate characterisation of the Whig view of history, and if it were, it would be a reasonable position to hold: we certainly are healthier and possess better communication technology than the Romans (Beard points out in the programme how very unhealthy Rome was). I'm not sure what 'faster' means here, but certainly in some senses we are faster