Duncan MacRae

From the New York Times’s coverage of the story behind the Games, comes this detail about a Brazilian police anti-drug operation in a Rio favela:

In a flare-up of fighting over the last week, more than 200 police officers stormed into Alemão’s labyrinth of alleyways. Calling their operation Germânia, the European region of warring tribes that was once largely subdued by the Roman Empire, the police fatally shot two men, while a top counternarcotics official was wounded.

Assuming that the newspaper’s explanation for the operation’s name apparently reflects the official justification, it is remarkable how inappropriate it is for their mission. Continue reading →

This post is a little research parergon. I became interested in the question of the title “Antiquitates” for ancient works. As far as I can tell, there are three ancient books that are given this title: the most famous one by Varro (verified by contemporary references) and two less famous, by Diophantus of Sparta and the Latin work on biblical history transmitted along with the works of Philo (and so, conventionally, Pseudo-Philo). But are these latter two books really called Antiquitates? Continue reading →

We all have the urge to throw a book across the room at some point or another. Some take it out in pen(cil) on the book itself. I just came across a particularly nice example in a paper by Tony Grafton. Jonathan Swift’s response to reading the Church History (Annales) by the Catholic historian Baronio: Continue reading →

Something caught my eye in yesterday’s New York Times story on the potential contested convention for the Republican presidential nomination. The story focused on the fight – which is already underway – for a select group of RNC delegates who will arrive at the convention “unbound”, not obliged by primary or caucus results to vote for particularly candidates. If the delegate count is close, these unbound delegates may be in a position to select the nominee. I was less interested in the nitty-grity of Republican party politics than a striking quote from a Republican official from American Samoa:

Almost all of them [the unbound convention delegates], after all, come from places that have had little or no influence in presidential elections, like American Samoa, Guam, the Virgin Islands and North Dakota.

“We want to be able to change our minds,” said Mr. Malae, the American Samoa Republican Party chairman.

Being uncommitted and unbound, Mr. Malae said, was precisely the point for a place like his territory, which has no vote in Congress or in the Electoral College. “We joke that this must have been what it was like being in an outpost of the Roman Empire,” he said.

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Not a good week for the uses of ‘ancient history’ in the mass media:

In an Atlantic piece, titled “Has 9/11 become ‘ancient history‘?”, we can read the following from Rep. Peter King (R-NY):

But the Congress of 2015 is not the Congress that locked arms and sang “God Bless America” on the Capitol steps in 2001—more than three-quarters of those serving in the House and Senate now were not in office on 9/11. “Much of that is diminished,” King said. “It’s like ancient history, like the Battle of the Bulge or Pearl Harbor.”

More alarmingly, in the Globe, Niall Ferguson compares the situation in Europe after the Paris Attacks with the late Roman Empire. Mark Humphries has an excellently written reply:

Peter Heather, one of the modern historians of Rome’s fall cited by Ferguson, allows for a more nuanced analysis of the empire’s collapse. He writes: “there is no serious historian who thinks that the western Empire fell entirely because of internal problems, or entirely because of exogenous shock.” I’ve often wondered what the obvious opposite of Heather’s “serious historian” – a frivolous one – might write. Having read Ferguson’s ill-judged and shallow analogies between 5th century Rome and 21st century Europe, I think I now know.

I’m trying to start a collection of uses of Cincinnatus as exemplum in Cincinnati, OH. From yesterday’s Cincinnati Enquirer:

Cincinnatus would be proud: Steve Lee raises millions for the USO

Steve Lee doesn’t think of himself as a hero. He doesn’t look like what he thinks of when he thinks of a hero. He doesn’t wear camouflage or carry an M4 carbine or raid suspected terrorist safe houses.

He’s a financial advisor for Wells Fargo in Kenwood. He wears a suit to work, watches stock tickers and tells his clients where they should invest their money to maximize their profits.

Lee knows where to find his heroes. Some are buried at Arlington Cemetery. Some have sustained traumatic brain injuries. Some have lost limbs. When their tours of duty were cut short, many were flown stateside and admitted to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.

…

The $6-plus million raised by Lee and company has made Cincinnati the nation’s USO fundraising capital. No one does it bigger, but Lee isn’t interested in taking credit. He believes it’s something the entire city should take pride in.

Cincinnati is a natural fit for the USO in the mind of Pops Conductor John Morris Russell. When Lee approached him with the idea of partnering and moving the fundraiser to Music Hall, Russell called it a “no-brainer.”

After all, Cincinnati is named for a Roman citizen-soldier.

 

“Antiquities, or remnants of history, are, as was said, TANQUAM TABULA NAUFRAGII [like a plank of a shipwreck], when industrious persons by an exact and scrupulous diligence and observation, out of monuments, names, words, proverbs, traditions, private records and evidences, fragments of stories, passages of books that concern not story, and the like, do save and recover somewhat from the deluge of time.”

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In the seedier neighborhoods of our cities, or along the unsightly strips leading into our smaller towns, you are likely to find signs advertising the services of diviners: palm and tarot card readers, astrologists and crystal gazers. Missing is the haruspex—in Roman times, a priest who practiced divination by inspecting animal entrails—and for obvious reasons. The ritual sacrifice of animals, except under carefully regulated conditions (sport-hunting, the slaughter of livestock, the euthanizing of pets) is strictly prohibited. And yet, perhaps there are other occasions in our daily lives that invite the attention of the haruspex.

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2015/apr/18/guts-spring/

I delivered the following remarks at an event on March 24th to commemorate Getzel Cohen. I hope that putting them up here will give them a less ephemeral existence.

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