@8:47 and 9:16 Jumping on the conversation. I have a similar problem but in my case, it's not a personality flaw per se. I have Asperger's and some people who don't know me think I'm just anti-social or somehow unpleasant to be around. Do I disclose this info to SC committee before interview?
Lets take our colleagues' words at face value: maybe they are admitting that they didn't read Horace, not saying that Horace wasn't assigned for a class. In grad school I knew people who skated by for certain classes, subjects, or time periods. Not all of them finished their degrees, but some did. I'm sure I'm not alone in having had classmates of such ilk.
I wouldn’t disclose that to a SC, it could alter their view of you. Though, if your particular version of Asperger’s is often seen by others as being indicative of a bad personality, it *may* be worth saying something. However, even if they would be nice about it, they may see it as an issue that could effect your job performance (e.g., undergrads having issues with you and your perceived disinterested attitude towards them; grad students having a difficult time working with you, etc..). We have a prof in our department who also has it and the grad students avoid his classes and undergrads take his offereinngs as a last resort. It’s a shame because he’s a great guy and is a very respected figure in the field for his scholarship, but everyone I meet and mention his name to all callously say he’s “odd” or “awkward” or “creepy” and many tend to avoid him at conferences.
I’m not saying that you fall into the same category as he does, but only that disclosure of your condition may be more harmful than it ever should be. It’s a tough situation to be in, but I’d talk to friends and advisors about this, since they know you far better than anyone on FV and they can let you know with much better accuracy if your case of Asperger’s poses a potential problem for you in an interview.
Horace was not on my reading list (Chicago) either. I think, if memory serves, he was on an additional “recommended” list but not on our required. Needless to say, I’ve never read him either. Since this is an anonymous forum I can also say that I honestly don’t care to either.
Holy crap I don't give a shit about Horace either but I appreciate that the good people at my PhD program shoved it down my piehole whenever students have asked me blue moon questions involving Horace. What do you tell yours when they ask? "Penn PhD, Sorry... {insert emoji}"?
I'm an ancient historian (Ivy) and we were forced to read a lot of Horace in our survey class and for exams... and I actually ended up enjoying him and would say that I now care to read him even more.... *there goes my history vs philology inferiority complex out the window (for a brief moment)*
8:17, can you please identify the grad program you went through, so that the rest of us will know not to send our students there? (I realize that you can't tell us where you might be teaching, so that we can make sure that no one we know ever studies with you.)
I am no poetry expert, and I have only taught about a half-dozen Horace poems in my Roman Civilization course, and yet even I know that his country vs. city poetry is among his most famous.
I'm struck by the level of snobbery and smugness amongst those here who feel the need to talk down to Classicists who've never read (or care to read, as noted above) Horace. How narrow a worldview do you have (e.g., 2:04) that you feel justified in stating that if one has not read or does not engage with Horace, they ought not ever teach future Classicists??
...Just when I think that FV cannot possibly top itself with regards to exposing the painfully pedantic, asinine, and narcissistic nature of our field, it does again and again.
Just to put this out there, it's not as if Horace is really that integral to the study of the ancient world, Latin literature, or even Latin poetry. Let's not pretend that if one is lacking in familiarity of a single author they are then inadequate as a Classicist. Get over yourselves. We all cannot be experts (and none are) or experienced with everything or everyone.
Other (pedantic) reasons that one is a worthless classicist:
1.) You are unaware of the Sigma dating debate amongst epigraphists 2.) You are unaware of Luttwak's thesis and do not hold a viewpoint on the matter 3.) You have not read (aside from Horace, of course): A.) Silius Italicus B.) Menander Rhetor C.) Procopius D.) Decimus Laberius, etc...
Feel free to add any other items to the list that may be omitted so that the rest of us can know that we ought to leave the field.
"it's not as if Horace is really that integral to the study of...Latin poetry."
What does that even fucking mean? One of the greatest classical poets, one of THE major school authors in late antiquity and the Middle Ages, widely read from the time of Augustus to, well, now.
it's over folks.
I say this in full sympathy with 3:05. i keep asking if people are not 'lit' people. i don't care if a philosophy person or a historian hasn't read horace (unless they happen to work on the period in which horace lived and wrote!). but how is horace not integral to the study of latin poetry and the classical literary tradition over 2 millennia more broadly, up through wilfred owen and dead poets society?
Since I know a bunch of young scholars, I'm not surprised that someone can get a phd in philology and still have big gaps in their knowledge... but who cares if someone doesn't know Horace, unless they are a specialist in 1st c. literature. The days of everyone knowing everything are long gone.
It's nice that you have an impartial view on all of this; that is very refreshing.
...Joking aside, can we stop pretending that there is a cookie-cutter approach to academia, that if anyone deviates from what one considers 'essential' then it is a disaster?
Diversity, folks. If we keep shoving the same authors down the throats of undergrads all while telling them "they're important because people have always said they're important" the our field cannot grow or adapt. And it's not as if we're talking about entry-level Latin that serves a purpose for 100/200 level courses, as does Caesar or Cicero, we're talking about Horace for fuck's sake.
Let's bemoan how our field is a rigid and inflexible relic of the 18th century academy that cannot appeal to non-white non-elites, all while insisting that we maintain the same approach and pedagogy of the 18th century.
In short, who gives a shit about Horace and who gives a shit even if 90% of Classicists have only the narrowest familiarity with him?
Chicago PhD from many moons ago here. I cannot honestly recall if Horace was on the list back then (late '80s), but I do seem to remember that faculty and grad students would often laugh about what was included and what was not included.
If some schools don't have Horace on their reading lists, it's not really a big deal. I mean, if you focus on golden age poetry then you'll read him anyway. Imagine if Harvard chose to omit Virgil and Homer from their reading lists; would that mean that no Harvard PhDs would know who they are or could not focus their dissertation on them? Of course not. Stop equating a grad program's reading list with anything at all. It simply serves to be a (deliberate) hurdle for grad students to ensure that they are well-read and very comfortable in a variety of genres and authors.
Personally, I've always felt that Horace is highly over-rated and I fail to see the appeal in anything of his. I've also never much cared for Dave Matthew's Band or Nickelback though many people have. Also, if I may, 3:21, you seem to be equating popularity with importance, which is not always wrong to do (of course) but it can be a false positive.
I'm not even referring to people reading Horace in Latin. In grad school I had to read some for the reading list, and if I never again do so that's fine with me. But are so many of you saying you haven't even read him in translation, and therefore have no familiarity with him, and therefore cannot and do not make an effort to include him in your syllabi? If so, that's just professional negligence, plain and simple. And let's not pretend that Horace is part of some 19th-century canon that we can redefine for the 21st century, replacing him with Silius Italicus or the three-barred sigma or whatever. (And yes, not only do I know that controversy, but I have dined with the late Harold Mattingly!)
If you don't believe me that Horace should be considered of great significance, just Google something called the "Saecular Hymn" ("Carmen Saeculare," for those of you who didn't bother to learn Latin in grad school, either) and you will learn that Horace was chosen by Augustus to compose this hymn for an extremely important religious festival that was held every 100 years or so, which seems proof enough that Horace was thought by Augustus to be one of the greatest, if not the greatest, poets of his day.
Yes, some authors are indeed optional, and I could list some I've not read or have barely read (including Italicus, I am not ashamed to say), but certain authors must be read by anyone who claims to be a classicist, and using rationalizations to explain not having done so reflects rather poorly on the semi-classicist, not the rest of us.
I find this whole conversation quite surprising. On the one hand, people who are offended that others haven't read some Latin author. On the other, people who are offended that others expect them to have read some Latin author. I thought the whole point of what "we" do as Classicists is to become intimately familiar with the culture of Greece and Rome - some more Greece, some more Rome, perhaps - in order to contribute meaningfully to the body of shared intellectual thought and, more importantly (in my view, anyway), to contribute meaningfully to the education of The Future. People who have never read any Horace, in Latin or in translation, what HAVE you read? Maybe those who think you should read Horace will be less shocked (and offended) if you're working on Kamares wares or something similar. Or maybe you've read all of the Fasti and Metamorphoses, then back translated Cicero into Greek, so you just couldn't make the time to engage with silly old Horace. As someone who's interested in daily life issues of antiquity, I've often found Horace to be an interesting source. I've never had much use for Sophocles or Aristotle or even Plutarch, but I've still read them. I don't think I spend more time working than other people, nor do I read exceptionally quickly or write particularly brilliantly. So I'm curious to know what other things fill people's work time (or filled their work time as grad students, maybe). Maybe it's better phrased as an entirely open question: what ancient authors do you consider valuable - to you and to your students - and why?
That's easy to answer, 5:35: What's important to me is spam, spam, spam, Horace and spam; spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, Horace, spam, spam, spam. And no, you can't have anything that hasn't got Horace in it.
Hmm. On second thought, it's funnier as "Horace, Horace, Horace, egg and Horace; Horace, Horace, Horace, Horace, Horace, Horace, baked beans, Horace, Horace, Horace..." Can I have a do-over on that joke?
I'm actually super curious as to how many people in this insane discussion actually have jobs? I'm honestly imagining a bunch of bitter, armchair elitists engaging in this conversation
Just popping in to point out that 5:35's conception of "the culture of Greece and Rome" is an intellectually incoherent one that makes sense only from the perspective of what Roman elites in the late Republic and early Imperial period liked about the world that they conquered, and that knowledge of Roman culture or history is logically irrelevant to the study of the ancient Greek world before the third century except as part of the story of transmission (in which it is rather less important than what happened after the end of antiquity, which somehow practically no classicists know the first thing about, except maybe who John Tzetzes was and a few particularly famous manuscripts), and that as a consequence of these considerations many American academics have spent the past half-century trying to change the whole way the field thinks about the ancient world, only for a surprisingly large number of "Classicists" to persist in thinking that any one particular author is such a sine qua non that no one's initiation into the finishing school of philology could possibly be complete without reading his corpus, while, no doubt, knowing little and caring less about ancient Egypt or Mesopotomia or the Ugaritic Baal cycle or ....
Part of the Great Again Agenda will be mandatory Horace reading.
But oh, whate'er the sky-led seasons mar, Moon upon moon rebuilds it with her beams; Come we where Tullus and where Ancus are And good Aeneas, we are dust and dreams.
I read Horace in undergrad as part of a required course in the Latin sequence, and I can't say that the experience has dramatically affected my work. I think I assign a bit of Horace as part of a class session on Augustan lit and propaganda, but not every time. Ammianus Marcellinus, Apuleius, Tacitus (who is a deathly boring writer who just happened on some interesting material), Strabo, Plutarch, and, gasp, Jordanus have been much more important to my work. Not all of these normally appear in graduate coursework so I read them on my own. Nobody died.
What some of you seem willingly blind to is that one doesn't have to work on Horace, one doesn't have to have one's life changed by Horace, one certainly does not have to read all of Horace, but one should at least have enough familiarity with Horace to know when to include him in an undergraduate course and what to include (which is what we are all paid for, if/when we have a job). If your attitude is that you've never read Horace, don't agree with the dead white guys who decided he's important, and therefore you're not going to bother to teach him because obviously if you've lived without knowing about Horace that's proof it can be done then I hope like hell you don't get a job, and that if you have one you lose it.
If this opinion makes me an elitist then I am proud to be an elitist. But I also suspect that many of you would be glad to have me as a colleague instead of one of these Horaceless mofos.
One could easily take your argument "one should at least have enough familiarity with Pindar, Herodian, Procopius, Menander Rhetor, Silius Italicus, etc,.. to know when to include him in an undergraduate course" and just chance Horace for any of the names here (or any other for that matter.
Your essentially arguing that Classicists should be familiar enough with all ancient texts to know what that is written by whom may be applicable for an undergrad class. Your still arguing for an outdated approach that sees "real" Classicists as those who have read everything from everyone and can magically pull from them all when applicable. Or, even if you don't intend it to be limitless, but confined to the "greatest hits of Classical philology" your still arguing for regurgitation of the same old shit; we've already mined all the "greatest hits" to death, and we have countless sourcebooks to scan for when Cicero talks about X, Y, or Z. There is little need to actually read all of the Loebs (in fact one can now search them all!) to find data worth including in an undergrad class.
Is Horace important? Kind of. Is he a must read for all Classicists? Certainly not. Surely his inclusion on a list of the top 20 Latin authors to be familiar with wouldn't make anyone laugh or be shocked, but neither would his absence from said list.
..Also, I'd personally not care if a "Horaceless mofo" was my colleague. Especially if they had a deeper understanding of other sources that others in the Dept were less familiar with. Imagine how bland and wasteful a Dept would be if all that it had in its halls were specialists on Virgil and Homer.... Wait, that's already a thing; and we wonder why our field is decaying--we've maintained the same focus of scholarship since the Renaissance.
This argument is actually reminding me of a valuable bit of advice for those starting Ph.D. programs. Developing strong language skills is important, but don't over-emphasize that at the expense of developing as a critical reader, thinker, and writer. At the end of the day, you will only get a TT job if you can publish articles and books that are interesting, coherent, ground-breaking, and relevant to current debates in the field. Nobody is going to publish an article on how well you've memorized Smyth or how beautifully you translate in seminar. I've seen faculty and students both over-hype language skills as the true test of a classics scholar, and I think it really does a disservice to students who graduate with perfect language skills but no idea how to write an article.
No word for me either. I’d expect that they’ll contact their person by this weekend. I don’t hold high hopes, it is Harvard, but little else (if anything else) remains for this cycle.
Also, I wouldn’t be surprised if they’ve already made an offer to someone. The Wiki tends to be less and less central in folks’ minds during the summer.
Re: Harvard, there is no way to be certain that it will be the case this time, but I do know of one occasion when the department notified all applicants within 24 hours of an offer being accepted. If that is their standard m.o. then nothing is final yet.
Waking up to find a series of riffs on Horace made my day. Seeing the post from @5:11pm may have made my week!
@5:11pm, since you're hopelessly lost, let me help you. @3:23pm was mocking the earlier poster for using "your" instead of "you're" three times. In an argument about language and the influence (or lack thereof) of reading an author, it's humorous to see errors in grammar, spelling, syntax, etc. The same is true for @1:45pm (likely the same person as 3:23pm) mocking an earlier poster for using "effected" instead of "affected."
The other posts you mention, as well as a couple of others, are riffs on Horace's poetry, mostly Odes 3.30, but with a little Satires 1.1 thrown in for fun—those are two of his most famous works. That was not an incoherent, one-sided conversation; it was beautiful, literary trolling, which I have in some ways ruined by explaining it to you. All the same, now you have an emotional connection to the material, so you can think of this exchange every time you read or ignore Horace, whichever you prefer.
Some of us have lives outside of our work and don’t spend our free time memorizing Horace. You sound like a Trekkie who’s laughing at someone else because they don’t get an odd reference to some line that Captain Kirk said in Season 2 episode 5 during a dialogue with a Romulan ambassador.
Many people here need to watch this SNL clip to see how they sound here on FV. In short, get a life.
For anyone who can't watch the video at the link above, it's a piece of satire in which William Shatner tells a bunch of trekkies that they shouldn't waste their short lives and should instead seize the day.
I don't know what this has to do with the Horace discussion, however.
What it has to do with the Horace discussion is that referencing a well-known 30-year-old sketch is totally OK (and makes you kinda a macho Shatner type, actually), but referencing well-known Latin poetry makes you a nerd.
@8:47--I interviewed for the APSU job (as it sounds like you did) and from some hints dropped by the committee I got the impression that faculty salaries there are quite low. I am on a 3x3 right now, so I comfort myself that it sounds like the job would be more work (4x4 load!) for not very good money. Cold comfort, I know, but better than nothing!
I think it’s saying that understanding obscure references from Horace and mocking those that don’t “get it” equates one with the loser Trekkies who have no life outside of focusing on the smallest minutiae of the Star Trek TV show.
Just so I'm clear, we've just asserted that knowing some of the really really well-known (and not in any way even a little bit obscure) bits of Horace - and mocking other aspiring or professional Classicists for not recognizing clear references to Horace *in a Classics-themed anonymous blog* - is equivalent to a Trekkie mocking a random member of the public for not knowing some tiny detail about some episode of one of the TV shows. I can't be the only one who sees the flaw in the comparison.
No, 5:10, you are not. I've gotta say I'm gobsmacked to see people claiming to be classicists who not only ignorant of Horace but seem proud of the fact that they are ignorant of Horace. As a many-time SC member, I would not hire these people with a ten foot pole. It has nothing to do with the sacred white male canon. I specialize in non-canonical authors and periods myself and heartily encourage others to do so, but if I were ignorant of Horace I would not know what I was talking about when I talked about my authors, because they read Horace. Even if you specialize in archaic and classical Greek poetry you don't know what you're talking about if you're ignorant of Horace, because Horace read a lot more of that poetry than you can possibly read and is one of our chief witnesses for the reception of it. Jeebus, people, it would take a Saturday afternoon, stretching into Sunday morning, maybe, to familiarize yourself with the slender Horatian corpus. The "nobody these days knows everything" argument just doesn't cut it. Get a clue!
Ancient historian here. I was an undergrad at a large prestigious state school, went to an Ivy for a terminal MA, finished off at a top-5 for my PhD. I don’t think that my experience was that common, but I can say beyond a shadow of a doubt that at no point, during any of my course work was Horace ever assigned as a reading. I’ve heard the name, of course, and I know what he wrote but I’ve never read him.
Don’t jump at me here and claim that I’m a sub-par classicist, but let me explain how my experience unfolded, which may, I hope, shed some light on how one can do 12 years of schooling as a Classicist, get a TT job, and a publishing deal all while having very little familiarity with Horace.
1.) my undergrad.
Greek courses, obviously, won’t cover Horace. My Latin courses were (post 101/2 and 201/2) Quintus Curtius Rufus; Virgil; Cicero/Caesar; Seneca. For my classical civ courses, I took Hist of Greece; Alexander; Roman Republic; Roman Empire; Ancient Technology; 5th Century Athens; Myth; Roman Arch; Greek Arch. The text we used for the 2 Roman history courses had no snippets of Horace and the Lewis & Reinhold sourcebooks assigned for them never were utilized to read any included Horace.
The Roman historian there had little/no respect for Poetry, often making jokes about it, so he was not about to assign it to any of us. Add to this that we all were so busy with what WAS assigned that we didn’t have time to read extra.
2.) my terminal MA
Again, Greek doesn’t matter for this discussion Latin saw Reading courses of Livy; Tacitus; Caesar; Velleius Paterculus; Virgil As an historian, the other coursework was all very specific topics related to Greek/Roman history. None of which warranted any reading of Horace.
The reading list we were given included Horace, but, the graduate advisor told us (which he shouldn’t have) which particular authors they always draw from—Horace was not one of those, so, again, we all were too busy to do additional readings.
3.)My PhD
Greek, see above. Latin, all prose since the historians there told us all that we all should only take prose courses; none of us dared to sign up for a poetry course and face the wrath of our advisor (!) Again, all other history specific courses had VERY narrow themes, and again (sadly) readings of Horace just did not make sense to be included. Our reading list consisted ONLY of prose Latin/Greek historians.
...post PhD I had a long list of works and authors that I never had the chance to read and wanted to get to one day. I’ve made a great deal of professs, but Horace still remains on that list. Time, again, remains an issue. Having read through all the posts here I’ve come to realize that my very unique combination of schools/programs which led me to be Horace-less needs to come to an end.
So, to all of you proud Horace lovers, be happy that I’ll find the time this weekend to run through some Horace. But, remember that one can be a competent classicists while having not been made appropriately familiarity with Horace.
because Horace read a lot more of that poetry than you can possibly read and is one of our chief witnesses for the reception of it
Thank you for this point. This is exactly why I hate to see classicists squandering their energy by taking sides in the tired, simplistic canon-defenders-versus-canon-busters debate. This isn't the English department. What we call a canon rests upon an incomplete corpus. Do you consider Heracles, for example, an important character in Greek lit? Well, don't forget that we have a mere handful of lines from the Geryoneis. The bulk of Sophocles has been lost!
So, we can't take for granted what did survive, even when it's not our favorite genre. (I myself read some Oppian once and found it dull. But would I be better off not even knowing of him?) All scholars, in all disciplines, always need to be mindful of what they don't know, even if we can't do justice to it all.
8:29 and all the other spelling/grammar nazis here need to remember that unless one comments on a computer errors will pop up. We all have or are working on a PhD. Obviously we all know how to spell and when to use your/you’re, etc..
Stop being pedantic dicks.
If the only comment you can think to add is to correct a blog commentor’s grammar (which most likely was composed on a phone), clearly you have nothing worthwhile to say, so go back to 4chan’s /b where the rest of the childish fools of the internet reside.
As an ancient historian I can say that I find it infuriating. Imagine if a good number of Greek Archaeology positions went to Silver Latin Philologists.
Also an archaeologist at for the Roman history position at Princeton. At Princeton and Chicago, hiring an archaeologist for a history position might make sense to the departments. Both institutions already have a stable of senior historians, and its possible that bringing in an archaeologist/material culture person might round out coverage. At Princeton, Classical Archaeology is slotted in the Art and Archaeology Department, so hiring an archaeologist for an advertised history position essentially gives their Classics Department an in-house specialist. In Chicago's case, they may have needed a speciality that created no possibility for a clash with a notoriously un-collegial senior Roman historian already in the department.
Hiring is not "fair," and the archaeologists hired for history positions are quite accomplished in their field. But, I can see from an ancient historian's perspective why its frustrating that the top jobs this year in Ancient History went to archaeologists.
I haven't heard yet who the Chicago hire is, but given how text-based and theoretical the current Roman historian is it sounds like the department made a very logical decision to get a counter-weight. Personality might have been a factor, but need not have been.
The definition of ancient history has not become suddenly more elastic this year, but, rather, familiarity with material culture has been becoming more and more of a basic expectation for at least twenty or thirty years.
Time for a sweeping generalization: As an ancient historian, if you're not very well acquainted with material culture and archaeology, you're not an ancient historian. You're just a philologist that works on historiography.
Sorry to bring us back to this tedious discussion, but it was too apt a comparison to let it lie. No, 5:10, the SNL link was not comparing the pro-Horace folks to Trekkies mocking members of the public for not knowing Star Trek minutiae. The joke is that even an author of the artistic phenomenon that the Trekkies are obsessed with finds their narrowly-focused devotion to every last detail of the show sad and pathetic. So, what do you think Horace would say about people who have spent hours, years, careers analyzing and reading a lot into every word he ever wrote? Jesus, it wasn’t that hard to get the joke, even if you don't agree with the point. Try to have a little self awareness.
Signed,
An archaeologist who has actually read a decent amount of Horace and enjoys it, but knows that life would go on without him.
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge, Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs, And towards our distant rest began to trudge. Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots, But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind; Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.
Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time, But someone still was yelling out and stumbling And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.— Dim through the misty panes and thick green light, As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams before my helpless sight, He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace Behind the wagon that we flung him in, And watch the white eyes writhing in his face, His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin; If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,— My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori.
I can't even imagine doing my project on the Middle Republic's own 'lost generation' without a basic working knowledge of Horace. This will maybe identify me with some, but damn... who cares. I'm an ancient historian. Read a book.
And as the same poster as @9:31, I was just in Marsh's Library in Dublin and loved seeing centuries of volumes of Livy and Horace - both as integral as Plutarch or Lucretius, and far more impactful than Menander Rhetor. Give it a rest - classics is as classics does.
As one who’s read Horace, I can say that his work is rather ‘meh’
Neither significant or exciting, it’s importance only lies in that it survives and that it was an integral piece of elite education for centuries, not because any of it is insightful or even good Latin for that matter. Boring and dry best sums up Horace’s dribble. Sure, there may be a few quote-worthy lines and a rare bit that makes one not fall asleep, but isn’t that the case with literally everything ever written? I’m sure that one could read through one of those God awful romance novels with Fabio on the cover and, somewhere inside, find something interesting or reflective of our present age that historians in 4018 may one day read and say how wonderful this or that it happens to be.
Just because Horace’s works may be the Fabio-laden books of Latin Philology doesn’t mean that it’s ok to be ignorant of his existence or his work’s impact.
I, for one, despise Foucault (and all people who quote or reference him!) but I still have a basic understanding of what he said and what his impact may have been. I think Andy Warhol was one of the shittiest “artists” who’s ever lived, but I still recognize his work when I see it.
Horace may be unimportant stuff and real bad Latin but since so many folks do work on him it really is “on us all” to at least be semi familiar with his work.
A great way for all of this to come full circle would be for there to be a T-T job for a Horace specialist somewhere in North Dakota. Please, let this happen.
A couple of schools recently announced plans to make getting tenure more difficult, more rigorous, etc. (depending on the wording of the school and specific article you read). I know that the number of tenure-track positions has been shrinking overall for a little while, leading to a rise in adjunct positions. I have not until the past couple of weeks, however, seen it in the press that universities are actually advertising their initiatives to make tenure harder to get (even if one is first lucky enough to have a tenure-track job as an option). Did I just not pay attention before or is this a relatively new development?
For at least the past 10-12 years schools have reduced the number of T-T jobs while increasing the number of VAPs and Adjuncts who will teach more (4-4) than the lucky few who have a T-T job (2-2).
It really began to pick up speed during the Wall Street crash in 2006/7, when all institutions saw massive drops in funding (public from state funds and private from wealthy alumns who no longer had as much money to donate).
It’s plateaued, however, and just remains as shitty.
Today the biggest problem isn’t that tenure is “harder to get once an Asst Prof” (that’s not changed much at all), but that the administration at schools is more hesitant to allow a Dept to hire T-T faculty.
It’s no longer a “3 retire so 3 new T-T lines are created” ; today it’s much closer to “3 retire so 1 new T-T line and 1 perpetual VAP position is created and 1 adjunct position to play clean up is created”
...as bad as the market happens to be, take a look at the Wiki and count just how many T-T jobs there were this year for us all; it’s actually not quite as bad as some of us like to think. FWIW, I’m not saying this from the perspective of a being a tenured prof somewhere, but a (still unemployed) PhD barely hanging on to a few threads from this year’s job cycle.
Uhm, 11:32, I think you completely misread the post, which appears to be about tenure being more difficult to get, not the number of tenure-stream lines.
If some schools are raising their standards it could be a good thing. At the University of Arizona, for example, someone was able to rise to full professor and department chair (back when Classics was an independent department) with a handful of articles and three books, none of them a monograph: an edition/translation of an obscure Latin text, a textbook, and being the editor of someone else's translation. If the Arizonas of the world raise their standards that cannot be bad.
Actually, TT jobs are so competitive, that it makes sense that tenure should be more competitive. Anyone offering a TT job can easily get someone with a monograph in the chute and slew of articles in the pipeline. Ideally, one tiny advantage of the miserable job market, and the suffering caused to applicants, would be that the overall quality of faculty increases.
Unfortunately, this is not always the case. Many senior scholars on search committees are hesitant to hire junior scholars whose research agendas are much more aggressive than theirs was in the 1990s. My rule of thumb has been if you have more publications than the SC chair, that is a good sign you are not going to get the job. And there is always the fear at many institutions, that a hotshot hire will jump ship to a higher ranked institution as soon as they can.
I just think it's great that everybody who comes in hot about Horace manages to work in a little subliterate flourish. Affect or effect? You're or your? Drivel or dribble? Are they different? Who knows? Who cares? I don't need your fancy book learnin'.
Not OP here, but so remember that most of us use our phones to comment. If you’ve ever drafted an email or sent a text I’m sure you’re aware that the algorithm ‘smart’ phones use to auto-correct is far from perfect. I can’t possibly tell you how many times I’ve failed to go back and re-read a text and managed to send one that said something completely different than I’d intended. You see, on a mobile, the phone guesses what word you’re trying to write if it’s mid-typed and doesn’t have the courtesy to put a red squiggle under it as does word and let you chose the replacement.
I’m sure if you applied your critical eye to posts outside of the Horace discussion you’d find just as many oopses.
***in this comment alone, I had to go back multiple times to edit “fixes” since I type quick. The previous sentence kept wanting to change “alone” to “skins” 3x even though it was mis-typed as “alome” and “oopses” (which is not a proper word) it wanted to chance to “oozes it”
In summary, be aware of the medium that we all are using here and it’s technological pitfalls before jumping to conclude that a poster may have a PhD in philology yet does not know when to use “your/you’re” ...*you* come off as a the dimwit.
jumping to conclude that a poster may have a PhD in philology
I think we're probably not talking about folks in that category.
on a mobile, the phone guesses what word you’re trying to write
Whoa, whoa, whoa. Slow down. You're getting me all confused and turned around.
Honestly, though, don't you think it's pretty easy to tell the difference between a ducking autocorrect typo and the kind of mistakes that are common in native speakers who nonetheless have limited facility with written English? Really, though, if you can look at the "dribble" comment and conclude that the person is probably great at communicating in written English and probably really did know the difference between "drivel" and "dribble" but was betrayed by autocorrect, I don't know what to tell you.
On the other hand, "not because any of it is ... even good Latin" is so brilliant that maybe the person is just trolling. The declaration not simply that Horatian poetry is bad/boring/dumb as literature but that Horace was also actually just bad at Latin is so wonderful that I want to believe that an artist is behind it.
I think that the high number of classicists without jobs for the fall and with little else to do are collectively having fun with the more upright folks on FV.
Though, not that I defend the autocorrect excuse I have accidentally posted an incorrect word or two here on account of using my phone to reply. Nevertheless, a good number of the sillier mistakes might be faultless still. If a non native speaker of English got confused by dribble/drivel I could excuse it. Also, for that matter, is “drivel” even used often enough that most people would know how to spell it? I can’t recall the last time before all of this I’ve seen/heard it used.
Hey now. As a still unemployed classicist I take great offensive at your besmirkment of us all. To presuppopose that any of us here are deliberately putting in our comments misspelled words or the wronger usage of words just to troll the uppity folks here is quite apropos of you, sir. Quite apropos indeed.
I'm late to the game, but does nobody realize that what someone may or may not have read in grad school doesn't mean squat about what that person will or won't then go on to teach and assign during the course of their career? The content of reading lists doesn't matter. Reading lists are there to beat grad students into a pulp and make them work for an unachievable bar, and/or force them to get really good at sight reading, and/or have a familiarity with multiple genres. (And I say this while also having great respect for them and their role in a Classics program). But reading lists are absolutely not a good way to get people familiar with all authors ever (even all "important" authors ever), and it's laughable that anyone thinks that students trying to get through massive quantities of Greek and Latin will remember what they've read. I read a lot for my comps, and I can tell you that as soon as I passed them I basically forgot everything I read. That's the nature of these exams. They're good at getting people to read well, not for learning content.
I also *now* think that I was frightfully ignorant of a lot of things upon earning my PhD (from a very well respected program). Sure, I knew some things in depth, but there were a lot of gaps to my knowledge, too. But it's not like one's knowledge is reified at the end of the PhD program - good professionals, in *any* profession, will continue to learn throughout their careers. An important part of pre-professional programs, including PhD programs, is to give students the tools to be able to continue to develop throughout their careers; the point is not to have them come out of the program as full-fledged senior or even mid-career practitioners.
To get to the specific point, I don't recall reading Horace as an undergrad or grad (maybe I read some for comps, but as I said, most of my reading for that was done in a sleepless haze that I couldn't tell you about a week afterward), but that definitely didn't prevent me from assigning him when I got tasked with a Latin class for which he was pretty much unavoidable. And it was fine. I still knew a lot more about him than the undergrads there, because I could read, and I know about the Augustan culture he was a part of, even though I'm not a Latinist. Would the students maybe have gotten more had I been a Latinist who specializes in Horace? Undoubtedly. Would they have gotten more out of it had I remembered reading his poetry for comps? Nope.
And for the record, my reaction to his poetry was and is that he's a misogynistic twat who takes himself way, WAAAAY too seriously and whose poetry I would gladly exchange for pretty much anything else. And for those who think the way he was revered in the Middle Ages and beyond means he's important, I would reply that it just shows that the cannon created during the Middle Ages and beyond (and especially 18th-19th century Britain, who are we kidding!) was also the product of a bunch of misogynistic twats.
Admiring a particular Latin poet; knowing his entire corpus in and out, so that the slightest of reference to a single line of it should make us all chuckle; never questioning an age old list of ‘essential’ authors; being just one more cookie cutter classicist whose background is exactly the same and whose interests and focus could very well fall in with scholars of Medieval Europe?
“Classics dies” implies that it is presently or under condition ‘x’ would/will die.
In fact, Classics is already dead. We’re all playing Weekend at Bernie’s trying to convince ourselves that such isn’t the case. Rigidity and arrogance were the causes of death.
@10:09 what are you referring to? My assumption is that there are many arguments being made here for not having to read, in depth, every author considered part of the canon, and that is why you believe Classics is dying?
You are wrong. Classics is dying because, despite years of trying, we haven't come up with a clear and effective argument for why Classics programs need to exist. Do you think a first year student in an intro course which is taught in translation is going to give a shit whether you assign Horace or not? No, they are going to care about how Classics courses are benefiting them as learners. What skills are we teaching them?
The traditional argument has been that you should study Classics (and the Humanities in general) because it 'helps you become part of a wider world' or that you 'explore the depths of human society.' Those arguments of course sound great to us, because those are all things we believe, but we wouldn't be professional classicists if we didn't find enrichment in our work.
We need to break out of this idea that we are training future versions of ourselves, because we are not. In fact, if any academic actually read research from our colleagues in Education (and it is rare that I meet Classicists who do), you would know that the first rule of teaching is 'Your students are not the student you were.' So now we have to come up with things to argue that we, as teachers, are adept at instilling in our students. What hard skills can Classics courses teach?
Critical thinking is an obvious one. You can back this up by saying that Classics (along with history) is fairly unique in its ability to force students to assess and integrate varying forms of evidence (material, literary, etc.) into a coherent narrative. It's a skill that is particularly challenging in Classics, but has wide-ranging applications. All these articles that people share about how CEOs want to hire Humanities majors isn't because they've read Horace, it is because they've spent considerable time becoming critical thinkers.
Establishing that coherent narrative means we need to place an emphasis on writing and developing our students' communication skills. This means that we actually need to assign extended writing in our classes, and, more importantly, put significant effort into providing feedback that students can use to improve on the next assignment. Yes, you need to assign more than one writing assignment. It drives me nuts when I see a syllabus that involves no writing assignments. I can't help but think that these types of syllabi arise from anything other than laziness on the part of the instructor. 'I don't want to have to grade essays when they aren't any good.' Tough shit. Teaching isn't easy, and if you don't think its the most important thing most of us do then I suggest you go out and try to find a job where you can focus solely on research in the private sector. Good luck.
Anyway, rant over. It just drives me a bit bonkers to see people bemoan the 'Death of Classics' because 'the academics just aren't as well versed anymore.' Classics is dying because it is no longer the discipline it was even 20 years ago. The sooner we realize that, the better chance we have of keeping our programs (and our careers) afloat.
This is 11:41. I'm less down to Make Classics Great Again and more down to Make Classics Relevant Again. MCRA. We could also use the same abbreviation for Make Classics Realistic Again.
Either way, I'm fed up with this nonsense about our research mattering to anyone other than ourselves. A focus on research at the expense of quality teaching got us where we are. As for the languages, they are obviously important to those who wish to major in Classics, but in-translation courses need to become a huge focus. Make sure they fulfill university requirements. Get enrollment up in those classes, and no one is going to care whether you only have 5 students in Greek and Latin IV.
so that the slightest of reference to a single line of it should make us all chuckle
To be fair, it was Odes 3.30 that was the main point of reference, maybe his most famous poem and one influential in later poetry (look for example at Ovid's Amores 1.15 or the end of Met. 15). It's not like people were pulling random, esoteric lines out of their butts.
Now, if you want to say it's dumb and pointless to know any Latin poetry at all, that's fine, and a different question. And if you want to say Horace sucks, that's also fine, and a different question. My point is just that this poem is really, really not obscure if you have anything at all to do with Latin literature.
11:41 makes a good point that to most of the students we educate, the by-products of studying the classics (critical thinking, communication skills, etc.) will have far more impact in their lives than the facts and the content. Of course, one of the things we hope they learn is that facts are better than alternative facts, but the specific facts they learn that lesson with are less the issue. If a Classics major goes on to law school and has a stellar legal career without ever having heard the name of Horace, well, I for my part would still say that's a pity, but not one of the more consequential pities.
But the other audience we are speaking to, however small, are the future classicists sprinkled throughout our classrooms. For them I feel we have a responsibility to represent the state of thinking in our profession as fully and accurately as possible, and this conversation, in which many participants seem to be recent or prospective PhDs, is a clear an indication as I've seen recently that we're just not doing that. We have, as an example, the curious education that 8:24 pm (6/21) received at allegedly top-tier institutions (which, to his/her credit, 8:24 seems to recognize the limiatations of). We have people who will apparently pass on to their students (amongst other bullshit, no doubt) the hilariously fatuous notion that Horace wrote bad Latin, and others who seem to have no clue why Horace might be kind of important to know about even merely to the study of the Augustan age. Since we've produced so many PhDs who have clearly lost the thread, those threadless PhDs will produce future PhDs who are even more clewless. If there are still Classics students for those future PhDs to teach, they may still be honing their critical and communicational skills like there's no tomorrow, but will be doing so over a corpus (corpse) of primary and secondary material that will be petrified where it is not decaying.
Actually, this may be good news for the job market in time. If Armageddon doesn't intervene, in maybe a hundred years or so the general public will once again come around to thinking that antiquity is kind of important/interesting to know about. When that happens, an army of intrepid new scholars will be needed to sweep away the garbage that has accumulated and recover the elementary knowledge that has been lost over the feckless generations of our immediate future. I only hope that at least one copy of Horace, Vergil, Lucretius, Sophocles, Homer, etc., will have survived to the end of that dark age.
'But the other audience we are speaking to, however small, are the future classicists sprinkled throughout our classrooms.'
I'd love to see the actual numbers of majors vs. people who take a few Classics courses. I was specifically referring to our high enrollment, introductory courses. We can serve the future classicists in upper level classes. Let's be honest, if someone is a Classics nerd, they are going to major in Classics. Yes we obviously have a responsibility to the future of the profession, but that group alone cannot sustain us.
"Let's be honest, if someone is a Classics nerd, they are going to major in Classics."
Are you kidding? I agree with a lot of the general tenor of the 11:41 post, but this sentiment is awful. I guess if you think everyone who rolls into college is already either a "Classics nerd" or not, it could make sense. I don't know how many people enter our profession from the ranks of the graduates of fancy prep schools in Manhattan where the ambitious children of white-collar parents get the chance to study ancient Greek, but I don't think it's a particularly great idea to assume that our classes serve two totally unrelated groups: "Classics nerds" (born to the purple, not made, baby!) and the unwashed masses who are just there to fulfill a gen-ed requirement and won't ever give a shit.
@11:36: 11:19 here. Absolutely agree with your concluding sentence, but the point is not that civilization will crumble if we don't teach Horace to the engineering and chemistry majors in our Greek & Roman Civ surveys, but that civilization is a step closer toward crumbling if one can go through years of a Classics-y curriculum up to the phd and believe some of the utter dribbly drivel that's been spouted on this thread.
civilization is a step closer toward crumbling if one can go through years of a Classics-y curriculum up to the phd and believe some of the utter dribbly drivel that's been spouted on this thread
Seriously? Civilization is a step closer to crumbling on account of some academics holding opinions that differ from yours? Holy shit. Holy fucking shit.
If the opinion is whether or not Horace is important or if one has elected to not read him, that is an opinion. Surely most of us have heard of Zonaras but have chosen to not read him.
"As for the languages, they are obviously important to those who wish to major in Classics, but in-translation courses need to become a huge focus. Make sure they fulfill university requirements. Get enrollment up in those classes, and no one is going to care whether you only have 5 students in Greek and Latin IV."
Hate to burst your bubble. I am retiring in 2 more years, from a very small dept. at a high-ranked SLAC. We have already been told that my position will not be renewed, and that the dept. will lose the line. I'm not saying more because I don't want to identify myself, but this will cripple our program.
Our in-translation courses are always full, with waiting lists. They fulfill college distribution requirements. They are among the most popular courses at the college. Until about 5 years ago, it was true that we "bought" the right to teach our very small language classes with those high-enrollment in-translation classes. Then the administration changed, and now their reaction is "The small enrollment in your language classes proves that our customers, er, students don't want those languages. The high enrollment in your in-translation classes proves that they DO want those. Since it is inefficient and expensive to teach small classes, you should discontinue those boring old languages entirely and teach extra in-translation classes." They wrap it all up in "thinking outside the box" and "stretching beyond disciplinary structures" and other such blah-blah-blah, but basically, the only thing that matters is economics. Far from protecting our language classes, our success in our in-translation classes is being used against us, to kill the languages. And, in case you're wondering, I have compelling family reasons to retire so I've already signed the agreement to do so, and can't now change my mind.
It's a different game now, folks. If the administration is dead-set against small classes, NOTHING will save your language program.
Can you please clarify your situation? Will your tenure line not be renewed or will they not be hiring any additional department members at any level? It's common across all disciplines to replace tenure lines with strings of VAPs. Its the difference between following a trend in higher education and trying to kill off the department.
I believe that what was meant was that if someone is of the opinion that Horace doesn’t matter and therefore chooses to not read him, it’s their prerogative and they are just exercising their opinion.
...don’t strain yourself too hard trying to think.
Dear all: this is a reminder from the Servii that FV will be functional only for a few more days. If anyone is planning on setting up FV 2.0, now is the time to do it.
Is there really no chance of leaving FV up? There were more nasty comments than normal this year, but with 4,533 comments here what percentage are we really talking about that are deleted. I may be off, but I’d guess that 50 (max) were deleted, that’s 1.1% if the whole, which really is about as good as an online forum could really ever be.
Current servii here. The decision to close FV was made together with the founder of this space: to use the sandbox metaphor-- this is Ur-Servius' sandbox that we've all been playing in for the last decade. Those of us currently moderating are in full agreement with the decision to close. We feel that the comments deleted this year, whatever percent they were, represent a level of incivility that shouldn't be accepted. It was the nature and degree of the comments, not their number, and we are sorry that they have caused the responsible majority of participants to lose this forum.
We have suggested a number of future directions that we feel could make the situation better, and have offered to communicate with anyone interested in facilitating the creation of such a space. We have also pointed out that, in the absence of anyone stepping up to create a healthier environment, it would also be eminently possible for a new version of FV to spring up on a platform identical to the current one. We we have offered to post links to any such communities, to ease the transition from this space to the next version.
As of the writing of this message, we have not received a single inquiry about these possibilities.
While reiterating that the blog will close, we also invite people who want to take on the project of creating a next version to be in touch, if they wish: archwhat@gmail.com
12:33 here -- sorry not to reply earlier. I'm traveling, don't have a smartphone, and have been away from computer internet access all day.
My tenure line is not being renewed and no adjuncts or VAPs will be hired. The Adminstration's plan is to permanently reduce the staffing of our already very small department and thus to force us to cut several "inefficient" classes (i.e., languages) from the curriculum . We will no longer be able to offer a major because we will no longer be able to offer sufficient language classes. We strongly suspect that the goal is to shut the department down entirely and to move the remaining faculty into other departments.
This is happening at other places as well -- retiring faculty are not being replaced at all, not by adjuncts or temporary appointments or anything. *The whole point* is to shrink and probably eventually eliminate departments.
I think there is value in FV, and in the absence of any alternative I will get in touch with the Servii soon about creating an FV clone (Novae Famae?). That said, I certainly don't want to get in the way of anyone else's ambitions.
Whoever wants to create a new FV should go ahead and contact the Servii, imo. If it needs to initially be a clone then that's fine, a refined version can also be set up at some point. Personally I find nothing wrong with the current platform.
Well, if none of us wants to start a new FV, perhaps we should track down Renie Plonski and ask her to run things?
(Note: Not only is that a funny concept for those who can remember the Placement Service of yesteryear, but in a sort of ring composition we get to have at least one more mention of Renie Plonski before FV breathes its last. And I get to use my old nickname -- well, one of them -- one last time.)
Has anyone heard anything regarding the Harvard ancient history fellowship?
Long time lurker and first time poster. Given how much it was discussed here I don’t see myself having much of a chance, but would appreciate any intel on this.
I'm going to go ahead and make a clone site on blogger. Not sure how difficult it is, but I intend to have something up today with a link posted. I'll also send the Servii a message for pointers on running things.
Hi all, 8:32 here. I've created a clone site at http://novaefamae.blogspot.com and emailed the Servii earlier today, but haven't heard back from them yet. Please do email me (us) at novaefamae@gmail.com if you would like to be involved.
4,546 comments:
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Jumping on the conversation. I have a similar problem but in my case, it's not a personality flaw per se. I have Asperger's and some people who don't know me think I'm just anti-social or somehow unpleasant to be around. Do I disclose this info to SC committee before interview?
@8:20,
UPenn PhD. Never read Horace either.
Was there not a latin lit survey at penn?
Lets take our colleagues' words at face value: maybe they are admitting that they didn't read Horace, not saying that Horace wasn't assigned for a class. In grad school I knew people who skated by for certain classes, subjects, or time periods. Not all of them finished their degrees, but some did. I'm sure I'm not alone in having had classmates of such ilk.
@8:23,
I wouldn’t disclose that to a SC, it could alter their view of you. Though, if your particular version of Asperger’s is often seen by others as being indicative of a bad personality, it *may* be worth saying something. However, even if they would be nice about it, they may see it as an issue that could effect your job performance (e.g., undergrads having issues with you and your perceived disinterested attitude towards them; grad students having a difficult time working with you, etc..). We have a prof in our department who also has it and the grad students avoid his classes and undergrads take his offereinngs as a last resort. It’s a shame because he’s a great guy and is a very respected figure in the field for his scholarship, but everyone I meet and mention his name to all callously say he’s “odd” or “awkward” or “creepy” and many tend to avoid him at conferences.
I’m not saying that you fall into the same category as he does, but only that disclosure of your condition may be more harmful than it ever should be. It’s a tough situation to be in, but I’d talk to friends and advisors about this, since they know you far better than anyone on FV and they can let you know with much better accuracy if your case of Asperger’s poses a potential problem for you in an interview.
Horace was not on my reading list (Chicago) either. I think, if memory serves, he was on an additional “recommended” list but not on our required. Needless to say, I’ve never read him either. Since this is an anonymous forum I can also say that I honestly don’t care to either.
Holy crap I don't give a shit about Horace either but I appreciate that the good people at my PhD program shoved it down my piehole whenever students have asked me blue moon questions involving Horace. What do you tell yours when they ask? "Penn PhD, Sorry... {insert emoji}"?
If you guys are 'philologists,' that is sad. Makes me wanna Make Classics Great Again.
is penn known to have a lackluster phd program?
Y'all should read some Horace. At the very least the carpe diem poem (Ode 1.11)! It's short and not difficult Latin. Come on. There's no excuse.
I'm an ancient historian (Ivy) and we were forced to read a lot of Horace in our survey class and for exams... and I actually ended up enjoying him and would say that I now care to read him even more.... *there goes my history vs philology inferiority complex out the window (for a brief moment)*
8:17, can you please identify the grad program you went through, so that the rest of us will know not to send our students there? (I realize that you can't tell us where you might be teaching, so that we can make sure that no one we know ever studies with you.)
I am no poetry expert, and I have only taught about a half-dozen Horace poems in my Roman Civilization course, and yet even I know that his country vs. city poetry is among his most famous.
Re: Horace
I'm struck by the level of snobbery and smugness amongst those here who feel the need to talk down to Classicists who've never read (or care to read, as noted above) Horace. How narrow a worldview do you have (e.g., 2:04) that you feel justified in stating that if one has not read or does not engage with Horace, they ought not ever teach future Classicists??
...Just when I think that FV cannot possibly top itself with regards to exposing the painfully pedantic, asinine, and narcissistic nature of our field, it does again and again.
Just to put this out there, it's not as if Horace is really that integral to the study of the ancient world, Latin literature, or even Latin poetry. Let's not pretend that if one is lacking in familiarity of a single author they are then inadequate as a Classicist. Get over yourselves. We all cannot be experts (and none are) or experienced with everything or everyone.
Other (pedantic) reasons that one is a worthless classicist:
1.) You are unaware of the Sigma dating debate amongst epigraphists
2.) You are unaware of Luttwak's thesis and do not hold a viewpoint on the matter
3.) You have not read (aside from Horace, of course):
A.) Silius Italicus
B.) Menander Rhetor
C.) Procopius
D.) Decimus Laberius, etc...
Feel free to add any other items to the list that may be omitted so that the rest of us can know that we ought to leave the field.
"it's not as if Horace is really that integral to the study of...Latin poetry."
What does that even fucking mean? One of the greatest classical poets, one of THE major school authors in late antiquity and the Middle Ages, widely read from the time of Augustus to, well, now.
it's over folks.
I say this in full sympathy with 3:05. i keep asking if people are not 'lit' people. i don't care if a philosophy person or a historian hasn't read horace (unless they happen to work on the period in which horace lived and wrote!). but how is horace not integral to the study of latin poetry and the classical literary tradition over 2 millennia more broadly, up through wilfred owen and dead poets society?
Since I know a bunch of young scholars, I'm not surprised that someone can get a phd in philology and still have big gaps in their knowledge... but who cares if someone doesn't know Horace, unless they are a specialist in 1st c. literature. The days of everyone knowing everything are long gone.
FWIW, there's a 130 pages of Horace on the reading list at Chicago.
I have to hop in now..
@3:21,
It's nice that you have an impartial view on all of this; that is very refreshing.
...Joking aside, can we stop pretending that there is a cookie-cutter approach to academia, that if anyone deviates from what one considers 'essential' then it is a disaster?
Diversity, folks. If we keep shoving the same authors down the throats of undergrads all while telling them "they're important because people have always said they're important" the our field cannot grow or adapt. And it's not as if we're talking about entry-level Latin that serves a purpose for 100/200 level courses, as does Caesar or Cicero, we're talking about Horace for fuck's sake.
Let's bemoan how our field is a rigid and inflexible relic of the 18th century academy that cannot appeal to non-white non-elites, all while insisting that we maintain the same approach and pedagogy of the 18th century.
In short, who gives a shit about Horace and who gives a shit even if 90% of Classicists have only the narrowest familiarity with him?
Chicago PhD from many moons ago here. I cannot honestly recall if Horace was on the list back then (late '80s), but I do seem to remember that faculty and grad students would often laugh about what was included and what was not included.
If some schools don't have Horace on their reading lists, it's not really a big deal. I mean, if you focus on golden age poetry then you'll read him anyway. Imagine if Harvard chose to omit Virgil and Homer from their reading lists; would that mean that no Harvard PhDs would know who they are or could not focus their dissertation on them? Of course not. Stop equating a grad program's reading list with anything at all. It simply serves to be a (deliberate) hurdle for grad students to ensure that they are well-read and very comfortable in a variety of genres and authors.
Personally, I've always felt that Horace is highly over-rated and I fail to see the appeal in anything of his. I've also never much cared for Dave Matthew's Band or Nickelback though many people have. Also, if I may, 3:21, you seem to be equating popularity with importance, which is not always wrong to do (of course) but it can be a false positive.
The apparently smug 2:04 p.m. here again.
I'm not even referring to people reading Horace in Latin. In grad school I had to read some for the reading list, and if I never again do so that's fine with me. But are so many of you saying you haven't even read him in translation, and therefore have no familiarity with him, and therefore cannot and do not make an effort to include him in your syllabi? If so, that's just professional negligence, plain and simple. And let's not pretend that Horace is part of some 19th-century canon that we can redefine for the 21st century, replacing him with Silius Italicus or the three-barred sigma or whatever. (And yes, not only do I know that controversy, but I have dined with the late Harold Mattingly!)
If you don't believe me that Horace should be considered of great significance, just Google something called the "Saecular Hymn" ("Carmen Saeculare," for those of you who didn't bother to learn Latin in grad school, either) and you will learn that Horace was chosen by Augustus to compose this hymn for an extremely important religious festival that was held every 100 years or so, which seems proof enough that Horace was thought by Augustus to be one of the greatest, if not the greatest, poets of his day.
Yes, some authors are indeed optional, and I could list some I've not read or have barely read (including Italicus, I am not ashamed to say), but certain authors must be read by anyone who claims to be a classicist, and using rationalizations to explain not having done so reflects rather poorly on the semi-classicist, not the rest of us.
“semi-classicist” “the rest of us”
Sigh. Can our field ever not be so overwhelmingly elitist?
I find this whole conversation quite surprising. On the one hand, people who are offended that others haven't read some Latin author. On the other, people who are offended that others expect them to have read some Latin author. I thought the whole point of what "we" do as Classicists is to become intimately familiar with the culture of Greece and Rome - some more Greece, some more Rome, perhaps - in order to contribute meaningfully to the body of shared intellectual thought and, more importantly (in my view, anyway), to contribute meaningfully to the education of The Future. People who have never read any Horace, in Latin or in translation, what HAVE you read? Maybe those who think you should read Horace will be less shocked (and offended) if you're working on Kamares wares or something similar. Or maybe you've read all of the Fasti and Metamorphoses, then back translated Cicero into Greek, so you just couldn't make the time to engage with silly old Horace. As someone who's interested in daily life issues of antiquity, I've often found Horace to be an interesting source. I've never had much use for Sophocles or Aristotle or even Plutarch, but I've still read them. I don't think I spend more time working than other people, nor do I read exceptionally quickly or write particularly brilliantly. So I'm curious to know what other things fill people's work time (or filled their work time as grad students, maybe). Maybe it's better phrased as an entirely open question: what ancient authors do you consider valuable - to you and to your students - and why?
That's easy to answer, 5:35: What's important to me is spam, spam, spam, Horace and spam; spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, Horace, spam, spam, spam. And no, you can't have anything that hasn't got Horace in it.
Hmm. On second thought, it's funnier as "Horace, Horace, Horace, egg and Horace; Horace, Horace, Horace, Horace, Horace, Horace, baked beans, Horace, Horace, Horace..." Can I have a do-over on that joke?
I'm actually super curious as to how many people in this insane discussion actually have jobs? I'm honestly imagining a bunch of bitter, armchair elitists engaging in this conversation
Just popping in to point out that 5:35's conception of "the culture of Greece and Rome" is an intellectually incoherent one that makes sense only from the perspective of what Roman elites in the late Republic and early Imperial period liked about the world that they conquered, and that knowledge of Roman culture or history is logically irrelevant to the study of the ancient Greek world before the third century except as part of the story of transmission (in which it is rather less important than what happened after the end of antiquity, which somehow practically no classicists know the first thing about, except maybe who John Tzetzes was and a few particularly famous manuscripts), and that as a consequence of these considerations many American academics have spent the past half-century trying to change the whole way the field thinks about the ancient world, only for a surprisingly large number of "Classicists" to persist in thinking that any one particular author is such a sine qua non that no one's initiation into the finishing school of philology could possibly be complete without reading his corpus, while, no doubt, knowing little and caring less about ancient Egypt or Mesopotomia or the Ugaritic Baal cycle or ....
(Sorry for the rant. I love this field and all of you.)
RE: Horace, Kamares Ware, and the Ever-Shifting Canon That Is Classics
Maybe making a list of what Classics "should be" is a great job for we the people here on this blog! Here, I'll go first:
1.) Great Again
Parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus
Part of the Great Again Agenda will be mandatory Horace reading.
But oh, whate'er the sky-led seasons mar,
Moon upon moon rebuilds it with her beams;
Come we where Tullus and where Ancus are
And good Aeneas, we are dust and dreams.
I read Horace in undergrad as part of a required course in the Latin sequence, and I can't say that the experience has dramatically affected my work. I think I assign a bit of Horace as part of a class session on Augustan lit and propaganda, but not every time. Ammianus Marcellinus, Apuleius, Tacitus (who is a deathly boring writer who just happened on some interesting material), Strabo, Plutarch, and, gasp, Jordanus have been much more important to my work. Not all of these normally appear in graduate coursework so I read them on my own. Nobody died.
woah Woah WOAH. @3:46, NO ONE likes Nickelback.
You missed not one, Not Two, BUT THREE chances to get that right.
I’ve never read a single line of Horace and (egad!) it hasn’t effected my life in the slightest.
Thank you, this is beautiful.
What some of you seem willingly blind to is that one doesn't have to work on Horace, one doesn't have to have one's life changed by Horace, one certainly does not have to read all of Horace, but one should at least have enough familiarity with Horace to know when to include him in an undergraduate course and what to include (which is what we are all paid for, if/when we have a job). If your attitude is that you've never read Horace, don't agree with the dead white guys who decided he's important, and therefore you're not going to bother to teach him because obviously if you've lived without knowing about Horace that's proof it can be done then I hope like hell you don't get a job, and that if you have one you lose it.
If this opinion makes me an elitist then I am proud to be an elitist. But I also suspect that many of you would be glad to have me as a colleague instead of one of these Horaceless mofos.
@2:30,
One could easily take your argument "one should at least have enough familiarity with Pindar, Herodian, Procopius, Menander Rhetor, Silius Italicus, etc,.. to know when to include him in an undergraduate course" and just chance Horace for any of the names here (or any other for that matter.
Your essentially arguing that Classicists should be familiar enough with all ancient texts to know what that is written by whom may be applicable for an undergrad class. Your still arguing for an outdated approach that sees "real" Classicists as those who have read everything from everyone and can magically pull from them all when applicable. Or, even if you don't intend it to be limitless, but confined to the "greatest hits of Classical philology" your still arguing for regurgitation of the same old shit; we've already mined all the "greatest hits" to death, and we have countless sourcebooks to scan for when Cicero talks about X, Y, or Z. There is little need to actually read all of the Loebs (in fact one can now search them all!) to find data worth including in an undergrad class.
Is Horace important? Kind of. Is he a must read for all Classicists? Certainly not. Surely his inclusion on a list of the top 20 Latin authors to be familiar with wouldn't make anyone laugh or be shocked, but neither would his absence from said list.
..Also, I'd personally not care if a "Horaceless mofo" was my colleague. Especially if they had a deeper understanding of other sources that others in the Dept were less familiar with. Imagine how bland and wasteful a Dept would be if all that it had in its halls were specialists on Virgil and Homer.... Wait, that's already a thing; and we wonder why our field is decaying--we've maintained the same focus of scholarship since the Renaissance.
Your essentially arguing ... Your still arguing for an outdated approach ... your still arguing
Yes, please. More. I love it. I need it.
Nobody died.
Most importantly, Horace didn't completely die.
I don't know about you all, but now feels like the time for drinking.
A great part of him actually lived on, in a sense.
Horace's work is of monumental importance. After all, it's lasted longer than most bronze from antiquity.
Any rumors about the Harvard college fellow position?
I bet it will outlast the pyramids.
There will come a time when it's just the Carmina and Trump Tower, and people will argue about which is the greater monument.
^^Agreed. You could try to chase Horace out of the canon with a pitchfork and he would still come running back in.
Wow - if you change the names, this whole story seems to be about us modern-day folks.
MCGA!
A lot of weird posts here.
@3:23,
You love it when OP talks about a previousl poster’s argument? Not sure what’s up with that.
@3:39,
The hell does that even mean?
@3:58,
??
@4:33,
?????
I’d bet that all those mentioned here are the same poster having an (incoherent) conversation with himself.
This argument is actually reminding me of a valuable bit of advice for those starting Ph.D. programs. Developing strong language skills is important, but don't over-emphasize that at the expense of developing as a critical reader, thinker, and writer. At the end of the day, you will only get a TT job if you can publish articles and books that are interesting, coherent, ground-breaking, and relevant to current debates in the field. Nobody is going to publish an article on how well you've memorized Smyth or how beautifully you translate in seminar. I've seen faculty and students both over-hype language skills as the true test of a classics scholar, and I think it really does a disservice to students who graduate with perfect language skills but no idea how to write an article.
Re: Harvard Ancient History Fellowship
No word for me either. I’d expect that they’ll contact their person by this weekend. I don’t hold high hopes, it is Harvard, but little else (if anything else) remains for this cycle.
Also, I wouldn’t be surprised if they’ve already made an offer to someone. The Wiki tends to be less and less central in folks’ minds during the summer.
Re: Harvard, there is no way to be certain that it will be the case this time, but I do know of one occasion when the department notified all applicants within 24 hours of an offer being accepted. If that is their standard m.o. then nothing is final yet.
Does anyone know who got the APSU job? That was my last TT app this year and I’ve been wondering. TIA!
@5:11 PM
Nope, I'm 3:39 PM and none of the other ones.
5:11 must be one of those who has (proudly) not read any Horace. mutato nomine de te / fabula narratur, indeed.
Waking up to find a series of riffs on Horace made my day. Seeing the post from @5:11pm may have made my week!
@5:11pm, since you're hopelessly lost, let me help you. @3:23pm was mocking the earlier poster for using "your" instead of "you're" three times. In an argument about language and the influence (or lack thereof) of reading an author, it's humorous to see errors in grammar, spelling, syntax, etc. The same is true for @1:45pm (likely the same person as 3:23pm) mocking an earlier poster for using "effected" instead of "affected."
The other posts you mention, as well as a couple of others, are riffs on Horace's poetry, mostly Odes 3.30, but with a little Satires 1.1 thrown in for fun—those are two of his most famous works. That was not an incoherent, one-sided conversation; it was beautiful, literary trolling, which I have in some ways ruined by explaining it to you. All the same, now you have an emotional connection to the material, so you can think of this exchange every time you read or ignore Horace, whichever you prefer.
@9:56,
Some of us have lives outside of our work and don’t spend our free time memorizing Horace. You sound like a Trekkie who’s laughing at someone else because they don’t get an odd reference to some line that Captain Kirk said in Season 2 episode 5 during a dialogue with a Romulan ambassador.
Many people here need to watch this SNL clip to see how they sound here on FV. In short, get a life.
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xmagzq
^^^
@12:51,
Oh, man. That SNL clip is going to hit so many here on FV so close to home. Yikes.
mostly Odes 3.30, but with a little Satires 1.1 thrown in for fun
Also Odes 1.37 and a bit from the Epistles!
For anyone who can't watch the video at the link above, it's a piece of satire in which William Shatner tells a bunch of trekkies that they shouldn't waste their short lives and should instead seize the day.
I don't know what this has to do with the Horace discussion, however.
What it has to do with the Horace discussion is that referencing a well-known 30-year-old sketch is totally OK (and makes you kinda a macho Shatner type, actually), but referencing well-known Latin poetry makes you a nerd.
@8:47--I interviewed for the APSU job (as it sounds like you did) and from some hints dropped by the committee I got the impression that faculty salaries there are quite low. I am on a 3x3 right now, so I comfort myself that it sounds like the job would be more work (4x4 load!) for not very good money. Cold comfort, I know, but better than nothing!
@4:25,
I think it’s saying that understanding obscure references from Horace and mocking those that don’t “get it” equates one with the loser Trekkies who have no life outside of focusing on the smallest minutiae of the Star Trek TV show.
Re: Harvard,
Inside source has told me that they’re running behind but will be notifying candidates some time next week.
Just so I'm clear, we've just asserted that knowing some of the really really well-known (and not in any way even a little bit obscure) bits of Horace - and mocking other aspiring or professional Classicists for not recognizing clear references to Horace *in a Classics-themed anonymous blog* - is equivalent to a Trekkie mocking a random member of the public for not knowing some tiny detail about some episode of one of the TV shows. I can't be the only one who sees the flaw in the comparison.
No, 5:10, you are not. I've gotta say I'm gobsmacked to see people claiming to be classicists who not only ignorant of Horace but seem proud of the fact that they are ignorant of Horace. As a many-time SC member, I would not hire these people with a ten foot pole. It has nothing to do with the sacred white male canon. I specialize in non-canonical authors and periods myself and heartily encourage others to do so, but if I were ignorant of Horace I would not know what I was talking about when I talked about my authors, because they read Horace. Even if you specialize in archaic and classical Greek poetry you don't know what you're talking about if you're ignorant of Horace, because Horace read a lot more of that poetry than you can possibly read and is one of our chief witnesses for the reception of it. Jeebus, people, it would take a Saturday afternoon, stretching into Sunday morning, maybe, to familiarize yourself with the slender Horatian corpus. The "nobody these days knows everything" argument just doesn't cut it. Get a clue!
Ancient historian here. I was an undergrad at a large prestigious state school, went to an Ivy for a terminal MA, finished off at a top-5 for my PhD. I don’t think that my experience was that common, but I can say beyond a shadow of a doubt that at no point, during any of my course work was Horace ever assigned as a reading. I’ve heard the name, of course, and I know what he wrote but I’ve never read him.
Don’t jump at me here and claim that I’m a sub-par classicist, but let me explain how my experience unfolded, which may, I hope, shed some light on how one can do 12 years of schooling as a Classicist, get a TT job, and a publishing deal all while having very little familiarity with Horace.
1.) my undergrad.
Greek courses, obviously, won’t cover Horace.
My Latin courses were (post 101/2 and 201/2) Quintus Curtius Rufus; Virgil; Cicero/Caesar; Seneca.
For my classical civ courses, I took Hist of Greece; Alexander; Roman Republic; Roman Empire; Ancient Technology; 5th Century Athens; Myth; Roman Arch; Greek Arch. The text we used for the 2 Roman history courses had no snippets of Horace and the Lewis & Reinhold sourcebooks assigned for them never were utilized to read any included Horace.
The Roman historian there had little/no respect for Poetry, often making jokes about it, so he was not about to assign it to any of us. Add to this that we all were so busy with what WAS assigned that we didn’t have time to read extra.
2.) my terminal MA
Again, Greek doesn’t matter for this discussion
Latin saw Reading courses of Livy; Tacitus; Caesar; Velleius Paterculus; Virgil
As an historian, the other coursework was all very specific topics related to Greek/Roman history. None of which warranted any reading of Horace.
The reading list we were given included Horace, but, the graduate advisor told us (which he shouldn’t have) which particular authors they always draw from—Horace was not one of those, so, again, we all were too busy to do additional readings.
3.)My PhD
Greek, see above.
Latin, all prose since the historians there told us all that we all should only take prose courses; none of us dared to sign up for a poetry course and face the wrath of our advisor (!)
Again, all other history specific courses had VERY narrow themes, and again (sadly) readings of Horace just did not make sense to be included.
Our reading list consisted ONLY of prose Latin/Greek historians.
...post PhD I had a long list of works and authors that I never had the chance to read and wanted to get to one day. I’ve made a great deal of professs, but Horace still remains on that list. Time, again, remains an issue. Having read through all the posts here I’ve come to realize that my very unique combination of schools/programs which led me to be Horace-less needs to come to an end.
So, to all of you proud Horace lovers, be happy that I’ll find the time this weekend to run through some Horace. But, remember that one can be a competent classicists while having not been made appropriately familiarity with Horace.
@3:56, by the way, was beautifully conceived and flawlessly executed 10/10. Bravx!
"one can be a competent classicists while having not been made appropriately familiarity with Horace"
Another 10/10!
Again, Bravx!
because Horace read a lot more of that poetry than you can possibly read and is one of our chief witnesses for the reception of it
Thank you for this point. This is exactly why I hate to see classicists squandering their energy by taking sides in the tired, simplistic canon-defenders-versus-canon-busters debate. This isn't the English department. What we call a canon rests upon an incomplete corpus. Do you consider Heracles, for example, an important character in Greek lit? Well, don't forget that we have a mere handful of lines from the Geryoneis. The bulk of Sophocles has been lost!
So, we can't take for granted what did survive, even when it's not our favorite genre. (I myself read some Oppian once and found it dull. But would I be better off not even knowing of him?) All scholars, in all disciplines, always need to be mindful of what they don't know, even if we can't do justice to it all.
@8:29,
8:24 here
My comment was written on my IPhone, which often times autocorrects to the incorrect word.
8:29 and all the other spelling/grammar nazis here need to remember that unless one comments on a computer errors will pop up. We all have or are working on a PhD. Obviously we all know how to spell and when to use your/you’re, etc..
Stop being pedantic dicks.
If the only comment you can think to add is to correct a blog commentor’s grammar (which most likely was composed on a phone), clearly you have nothing worthwhile to say, so go back to 4chan’s /b where the rest of the childish fools of the internet reside.
Even among us, there are people who use technology as an excuse to make mistakes. Fortunately for them, those who notice become "pedantic".
Interesting how certain searches went this year... has the definition of "ancient historian" become more elastic?
E.g. Oregon History: went to an art historian; Chicago History: went to an archaeologist (prior to that a philologist, if fama be true)
Maybe, as usual, it just came down to the perceived prestige/buzz around the candidates and/or fit.
@9:49,
As an ancient historian I can say that I find it infuriating. Imagine if a good number of Greek Archaeology positions went to Silver Latin Philologists.
@9:49, @12:04 it's obviously because ancient historians did not read enough Horace
Also an archaeologist at for the Roman history position at Princeton. At Princeton and Chicago, hiring an archaeologist for a history position might make sense to the departments. Both institutions already have a stable of senior historians, and its possible that bringing in an archaeologist/material culture person might round out coverage. At Princeton, Classical Archaeology is slotted in the Art and Archaeology Department, so hiring an archaeologist for an advertised history position essentially gives their Classics Department an in-house specialist. In Chicago's case, they may have needed a speciality that created no possibility for a clash with a notoriously un-collegial senior Roman historian already in the department.
Hiring is not "fair," and the archaeologists hired for history positions are quite accomplished in their field. But, I can see from an ancient historian's perspective why its frustrating that the top jobs this year in Ancient History went to archaeologists.
I haven't heard yet who the Chicago hire is, but given how text-based and theoretical the current Roman historian is it sounds like the department made a very logical decision to get a counter-weight. Personality might have been a factor, but need not have been.
The definition of ancient history has not become suddenly more elastic this year, but, rather, familiarity with material culture has been becoming more and more of a basic expectation for at least twenty or thirty years.
Time for a sweeping generalization: As an ancient historian, if you're not very well acquainted with material culture and archaeology, you're not an ancient historian. You're just a philologist that works on historiography.
This is coming from an ancient historian btw
Sorry to bring us back to this tedious discussion, but it was too apt a comparison to let it lie. No, 5:10, the SNL link was not comparing the pro-Horace folks to Trekkies mocking members of the public for not knowing Star Trek minutiae. The joke is that even an author of the artistic phenomenon that the Trekkies are obsessed with finds their narrowly-focused devotion to every last detail of the show sad and pathetic. So, what do you think Horace would say about people who have spent hours, years, careers analyzing and reading a lot into every word he ever wrote? Jesus, it wasn’t that hard to get the joke, even if you don't agree with the point. Try to have a little self awareness.
Signed,
An archaeologist who has actually read a decent amount of Horace and enjoys it, but knows that life would go on without him.
Then maybe you missed the part where Horace actually talks about hoping people read and appreciate his poetry forever...?
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.
Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
I can't even imagine doing my project on the Middle Republic's own 'lost generation' without a basic working knowledge of Horace. This will maybe identify me with some, but damn... who cares. I'm an ancient historian. Read a book.
Read a book AND know about archaeology?? That's not fair!!
And as the same poster as @9:31, I was just in Marsh's Library in Dublin and loved seeing centuries of volumes of Livy and Horace - both as integral as Plutarch or Lucretius, and far more impactful than Menander Rhetor. Give it a rest - classics is as classics does.
As one who’s read Horace, I can say that his work is rather ‘meh’
Neither significant or exciting, it’s importance only lies in that it survives and that it was an integral piece of elite education for centuries, not because any of it is insightful or even good Latin for that matter. Boring and dry best sums up Horace’s dribble. Sure, there may be a few quote-worthy lines and a rare bit that makes one not fall asleep, but isn’t that the case with literally everything ever written? I’m sure that one could read through one of those God awful romance novels with Fabio on the cover and, somewhere inside, find something interesting or reflective of our present age that historians in 4018 may one day read and say how wonderful this or that it happens to be.
Just because Horace’s works may be the Fabio-laden books of Latin Philology doesn’t mean that it’s ok to be ignorant of his existence or his work’s impact.
I, for one, despise Foucault (and all people who quote or reference him!) but I still have a basic understanding of what he said and what his impact may have been. I think Andy Warhol was one of the shittiest “artists” who’s ever lived, but I still recognize his work when I see it.
Horace may be unimportant stuff and real bad Latin but since so many folks do work on him it really is “on us all” to at least be semi familiar with his work.
A great way for all of this to come full circle would be for there to be a T-T job for a Horace specialist somewhere in North Dakota. Please, let this happen.
gmail logo icon
Well, I had a hot date with Canidia last night.
A couple of schools recently announced plans to make getting tenure more difficult, more rigorous, etc. (depending on the wording of the school and specific article you read). I know that the number of tenure-track positions has been shrinking overall for a little while, leading to a rise in adjunct positions. I have not until the past couple of weeks, however, seen it in the press that universities are actually advertising their initiatives to make tenure harder to get (even if one is first lucky enough to have a tenure-track job as an option). Did I just not pay attention before or is this a relatively new development?
11:04,
Old news.
For at least the past 10-12 years schools have reduced the number of T-T jobs while increasing the number of VAPs and Adjuncts who will teach more (4-4) than the lucky few who have a T-T job (2-2).
It really began to pick up speed during the Wall Street crash in 2006/7, when all institutions saw massive drops in funding (public from state funds and private from wealthy alumns who no longer had as much money to donate).
It’s plateaued, however, and just remains as shitty.
Today the biggest problem isn’t that tenure is “harder to get once an Asst Prof” (that’s not changed much at all), but that the administration at schools is more hesitant to allow a Dept to hire T-T faculty.
It’s no longer a “3 retire so 3 new T-T lines are created” ; today it’s much closer to “3 retire so 1 new T-T line and 1 perpetual VAP position is created and 1 adjunct position to play clean up is created”
...as bad as the market happens to be, take a look at the Wiki and count just how many T-T jobs there were this year for us all; it’s actually not quite as bad as some of us like to think. FWIW, I’m not saying this from the perspective of a being a tenured prof somewhere, but a (still unemployed) PhD barely hanging on to a few threads from this year’s job cycle.
Uhm, 11:32, I think you completely misread the post, which appears to be about tenure being more difficult to get, not the number of tenure-stream lines.
If some schools are raising their standards it could be a good thing. At the University of Arizona, for example, someone was able to rise to full professor and department chair (back when Classics was an independent department) with a handful of articles and three books, none of them a monograph: an edition/translation of an obscure Latin text, a textbook, and being the editor of someone else's translation. If the Arizonas of the world raise their standards that cannot be bad.
Actually, TT jobs are so competitive, that it makes sense that tenure should be more competitive. Anyone offering a TT job can easily get someone with a monograph in the chute and slew of articles in the pipeline. Ideally, one tiny advantage of the miserable job market, and the suffering caused to applicants, would be that the overall quality of faculty increases.
Unfortunately, this is not always the case. Many senior scholars on search committees are hesitant to hire junior scholars whose research agendas are much more aggressive than theirs was in the 1990s. My rule of thumb has been if you have more publications than the SC chair, that is a good sign you are not going to get the job. And there is always the fear at many institutions, that a hotshot hire will jump ship to a higher ranked institution as soon as they can.
Boring and dry best sums up Horace’s dribble.
I just think it's great that everybody who comes in hot about Horace manages to work in a little subliterate flourish. Affect or effect? You're or your? Drivel or dribble? Are they different? Who knows? Who cares? I don't need your fancy book learnin'.
Thoughts on the creation of teaching track permanent jobs?
1:56,
Not OP here, but so remember that most of us use our phones to comment. If you’ve ever drafted an email or sent a text I’m sure you’re aware that the algorithm ‘smart’ phones use to auto-correct is far from perfect. I can’t possibly tell you how many times I’ve failed to go back and re-read a text and managed to send one that said something completely different than I’d intended. You see, on a mobile, the phone guesses what word you’re trying to write if it’s mid-typed and doesn’t have the courtesy to put a red squiggle under it as does word and let you chose the replacement.
I’m sure if you applied your critical eye to posts outside of the Horace discussion you’d find just as many oopses.
***in this comment alone, I had to go back multiple times to edit “fixes” since I type quick. The previous sentence kept wanting to change “alone” to “skins” 3x even though it was mis-typed as “alome” and “oopses” (which is not a proper word) it wanted to chance to “oozes it”
In summary, be aware of the medium that we all are using here and it’s technological pitfalls before jumping to conclude that a poster may have a PhD in philology yet does not know when to use “your/you’re” ...*you* come off as a the dimwit.
2:55 here
^^^again, first line should read “do remember”
...just saw that. Sincerely hate the auto-correct function
2:55 one last time
^^Wanted to “change to”
There is someone tenured at one of the holy trinity who doesn't have a monograph. Not just Arizona.
What is the "holy trinity"?
I'm not the poster, but it should be pretty obvious: just think of schools often grouped together as a triad.
Harvard, Princeton, and Yale for those who’ve never heard the term “the big three.”
Again, I love when people blame their phones for their own mistakes.
jumping to conclude that a poster may have a PhD in philology
I think we're probably not talking about folks in that category.
on a mobile, the phone guesses what word you’re trying to write
Whoa, whoa, whoa. Slow down. You're getting me all confused and turned around.
Honestly, though, don't you think it's pretty easy to tell the difference between a ducking autocorrect typo and the kind of mistakes that are common in native speakers who nonetheless have limited facility with written English? Really, though, if you can look at the "dribble" comment and conclude that the person is probably great at communicating in written English and probably really did know the difference between "drivel" and "dribble" but was betrayed by autocorrect, I don't know what to tell you.
On the other hand, "not because any of it is ... even good Latin" is so brilliant that maybe the person is just trolling. The declaration not simply that Horatian poetry is bad/boring/dumb as literature but that Horace was also actually just bad at Latin is so wonderful that I want to believe that an artist is behind it.
I think that the high number of classicists without jobs for the fall and with little else to do are collectively having fun with the more upright folks on FV.
Though, not that I defend the autocorrect excuse I have accidentally posted an incorrect word or two here on account of using my phone to reply. Nevertheless, a good number of the sillier mistakes might be faultless still. If a non native speaker of English got confused by dribble/drivel I could excuse it. Also, for that matter, is “drivel” even used often enough that most people would know how to spell it? I can’t recall the last time before all of this I’ve seen/heard it used.
My father has occasionally used the word "drivel," especially when talking politics at the dinner table. You should come over sometime, 8:57!
@8:57,
Hey now. As a still unemployed classicist I take great offensive at your besmirkment of us all. To presuppopose that any of us here are deliberately putting in our comments misspelled words or the wronger usage of words just to troll the uppity folks here is quite apropos of you, sir. Quite apropos indeed.
RE: Horace.
I'm late to the game, but does nobody realize that what someone may or may not have read in grad school doesn't mean squat about what that person will or won't then go on to teach and assign during the course of their career? The content of reading lists doesn't matter. Reading lists are there to beat grad students into a pulp and make them work for an unachievable bar, and/or force them to get really good at sight reading, and/or have a familiarity with multiple genres. (And I say this while also having great respect for them and their role in a Classics program). But reading lists are absolutely not a good way to get people familiar with all authors ever (even all "important" authors ever), and it's laughable that anyone thinks that students trying to get through massive quantities of Greek and Latin will remember what they've read. I read a lot for my comps, and I can tell you that as soon as I passed them I basically forgot everything I read. That's the nature of these exams. They're good at getting people to read well, not for learning content.
I also *now* think that I was frightfully ignorant of a lot of things upon earning my PhD (from a very well respected program). Sure, I knew some things in depth, but there were a lot of gaps to my knowledge, too. But it's not like one's knowledge is reified at the end of the PhD program - good professionals, in *any* profession, will continue to learn throughout their careers. An important part of pre-professional programs, including PhD programs, is to give students the tools to be able to continue to develop throughout their careers; the point is not to have them come out of the program as full-fledged senior or even mid-career practitioners.
To get to the specific point, I don't recall reading Horace as an undergrad or grad (maybe I read some for comps, but as I said, most of my reading for that was done in a sleepless haze that I couldn't tell you about a week afterward), but that definitely didn't prevent me from assigning him when I got tasked with a Latin class for which he was pretty much unavoidable. And it was fine. I still knew a lot more about him than the undergrads there, because I could read, and I know about the Augustan culture he was a part of, even though I'm not a Latinist. Would the students maybe have gotten more had I been a Latinist who specializes in Horace? Undoubtedly. Would they have gotten more out of it had I remembered reading his poetry for comps? Nope.
And for the record, my reaction to his poetry was and is that he's a misogynistic twat who takes himself way, WAAAAY too seriously and whose poetry I would gladly exchange for pretty much anything else. And for those who think the way he was revered in the Middle Ages and beyond means he's important, I would reply that it just shows that the cannon created during the Middle Ages and beyond (and especially 18th-19th century Britain, who are we kidding!) was also the product of a bunch of misogynistic twats.
You people put forward such an overwhelming argument against doing the right thing.
The rest of us give up.
Classics dies.
@10:09,
So, “the right thing” is what exactly?
Admiring a particular Latin poet; knowing his entire corpus in and out, so that the slightest of reference to a single line of it should make us all chuckle; never questioning an age old list of ‘essential’ authors; being just one more cookie cutter classicist whose background is exactly the same and whose interests and focus could very well fall in with scholars of Medieval Europe?
“Classics dies” implies that it is presently or under condition ‘x’ would/will die.
In fact, Classics is already dead. We’re all playing Weekend at Bernie’s trying to convince ourselves that such isn’t the case. Rigidity and arrogance were the causes of death.
@10:09 what are you referring to? My assumption is that there are many arguments being made here for not having to read, in depth, every author considered part of the canon, and that is why you believe Classics is dying?
You are wrong. Classics is dying because, despite years of trying, we haven't come up with a clear and effective argument for why Classics programs need to exist. Do you think a first year student in an intro course which is taught in translation is going to give a shit whether you assign Horace or not? No, they are going to care about how Classics courses are benefiting them as learners. What skills are we teaching them?
The traditional argument has been that you should study Classics (and the Humanities in general) because it 'helps you become part of a wider world' or that you 'explore the depths of human society.' Those arguments of course sound great to us, because those are all things we believe, but we wouldn't be professional classicists if we didn't find enrichment in our work.
We need to break out of this idea that we are training future versions of ourselves, because we are not. In fact, if any academic actually read research from our colleagues in Education (and it is rare that I meet Classicists who do), you would know that the first rule of teaching is 'Your students are not the student you were.' So now we have to come up with things to argue that we, as teachers, are adept at instilling in our students. What hard skills can Classics courses teach?
Critical thinking is an obvious one. You can back this up by saying that Classics (along with history) is fairly unique in its ability to force students to assess and integrate varying forms of evidence (material, literary, etc.) into a coherent narrative. It's a skill that is particularly challenging in Classics, but has wide-ranging applications. All these articles that people share about how CEOs want to hire Humanities majors isn't because they've read Horace, it is because they've spent considerable time becoming critical thinkers.
Establishing that coherent narrative means we need to place an emphasis on writing and developing our students' communication skills. This means that we actually need to assign extended writing in our classes, and, more importantly, put significant effort into providing feedback that students can use to improve on the next assignment. Yes, you need to assign more than one writing assignment. It drives me nuts when I see a syllabus that involves no writing assignments. I can't help but think that these types of syllabi arise from anything other than laziness on the part of the instructor. 'I don't want to have to grade essays when they aren't any good.' Tough shit. Teaching isn't easy, and if you don't think its the most important thing most of us do then I suggest you go out and try to find a job where you can focus solely on research in the private sector. Good luck.
Anyway, rant over. It just drives me a bit bonkers to see people bemoan the 'Death of Classics' because 'the academics just aren't as well versed anymore.' Classics is dying because it is no longer the discipline it was even 20 years ago. The sooner we realize that, the better chance we have of keeping our programs (and our careers) afloat.
@ 11:41, hear hear!
11:41 is definitely down to MCGA!
MCGA is a big tent. 11:41 seems opposed to the Fake News/Deep State Classics elite. Good for them!
This is 11:41. I'm less down to Make Classics Great Again and more down to Make Classics Relevant Again. MCRA. We could also use the same abbreviation for Make Classics Realistic Again.
Either way, I'm fed up with this nonsense about our research mattering to anyone other than ourselves. A focus on research at the expense of quality teaching got us where we are. As for the languages, they are obviously important to those who wish to major in Classics, but in-translation courses need to become a huge focus. Make sure they fulfill university requirements. Get enrollment up in those classes, and no one is going to care whether you only have 5 students in Greek and Latin IV.
so that the slightest of reference to a single line of it should make us all chuckle
To be fair, it was Odes 3.30 that was the main point of reference, maybe his most famous poem and one influential in later poetry (look for example at Ovid's Amores 1.15 or the end of Met. 15). It's not like people were pulling random, esoteric lines out of their butts.
Now, if you want to say it's dumb and pointless to know any Latin poetry at all, that's fine, and a different question. And if you want to say Horace sucks, that's also fine, and a different question. My point is just that this poem is really, really not obscure if you have anything at all to do with Latin literature.
11:41 makes a good point that to most of the students we educate, the by-products of studying the classics (critical thinking, communication skills, etc.) will have far more impact in their lives than the facts and the content. Of course, one of the things we hope they learn is that facts are better than alternative facts, but the specific facts they learn that lesson with are less the issue. If a Classics major goes on to law school and has a stellar legal career without ever having heard the name of Horace, well, I for my part would still say that's a pity, but not one of the more consequential pities.
But the other audience we are speaking to, however small, are the future classicists sprinkled throughout our classrooms. For them I feel we have a responsibility to represent the state of thinking in our profession as fully and accurately as possible, and this conversation, in which many participants seem to be recent or prospective PhDs, is a clear an indication as I've seen recently that we're just not doing that. We have, as an example, the curious education that 8:24 pm (6/21) received at allegedly top-tier institutions (which, to his/her credit, 8:24 seems to recognize the limiatations of). We have people who will apparently pass on to their students (amongst other bullshit, no doubt) the hilariously fatuous notion that Horace wrote bad Latin, and others who seem to have no clue why Horace might be kind of important to know about even merely to the study of the Augustan age. Since we've produced so many PhDs who have clearly lost the thread, those threadless PhDs will produce future PhDs who are even more clewless. If there are still Classics students for those future PhDs to teach, they may still be honing their critical and communicational skills like there's no tomorrow, but will be doing so over a corpus (corpse) of primary and secondary material that will be petrified where it is not decaying.
Actually, this may be good news for the job market in time. If Armageddon doesn't intervene, in maybe a hundred years or so the general public will once again come around to thinking that antiquity is kind of important/interesting to know about. When that happens, an army of intrepid new scholars will be needed to sweep away the garbage that has accumulated and recover the elementary knowledge that has been lost over the feckless generations of our immediate future. I only hope that at least one copy of Horace, Vergil, Lucretius, Sophocles, Homer, etc., will have survived to the end of that dark age.
'But the other audience we are speaking to, however small, are the future classicists sprinkled throughout our classrooms.'
I'd love to see the actual numbers of majors vs. people who take a few Classics courses. I was specifically referring to our high enrollment, introductory courses. We can serve the future classicists in upper level classes. Let's be honest, if someone is a Classics nerd, they are going to major in Classics. Yes we obviously have a responsibility to the future of the profession, but that group alone cannot sustain us.
"Let's be honest, if someone is a Classics nerd, they are going to major in Classics."
Are you kidding? I agree with a lot of the general tenor of the 11:41 post, but this sentiment is awful. I guess if you think everyone who rolls into college is already either a "Classics nerd" or not, it could make sense. I don't know how many people enter our profession from the ranks of the graduates of fancy prep schools in Manhattan where the ambitious children of white-collar parents get the chance to study ancient Greek, but I don't think it's a particularly great idea to assume that our classes serve two totally unrelated groups: "Classics nerds" (born to the purple, not made, baby!) and the unwashed masses who are just there to fulfill a gen-ed requirement and won't ever give a shit.
@11:36: 11:19 here. Absolutely agree with your concluding sentence, but the point is not that civilization will crumble if we don't teach Horace to the engineering and chemistry majors in our Greek & Roman Civ surveys, but that civilization is a step closer toward crumbling if one can go through years of a Classics-y curriculum up to the phd and believe some of the utter dribbly drivel that's been spouted on this thread.
civilization is a step closer toward crumbling if one can go through years of a Classics-y curriculum up to the phd and believe some of the utter dribbly drivel that's been spouted on this thread
Seriously? Civilization is a step closer to crumbling on account of some academics holding opinions that differ from yours? Holy shit. Holy fucking shit.
"One tiny step..."
@10:36, there's a difference between "jaw-dropping ignorance" and "holding opinions that differ".
If the opinion is whether or not Horace is important or if one has elected to not read him, that is an opinion. Surely most of us have heard of Zonaras but have chosen to not read him.
if one has elected to not read him, that is an opinion.
Yes, you're absolutely right, a fact is an opinion. WTF is even going on in people's brains out there?
"As for the languages, they are obviously important to those who wish to major in Classics, but in-translation courses need to become a huge focus. Make sure they fulfill university requirements. Get enrollment up in those classes, and no one is going to care whether you only have 5 students in Greek and Latin IV."
Hate to burst your bubble. I am retiring in 2 more years, from a very small dept. at a high-ranked SLAC. We have already been told that my position will not be renewed, and that the dept. will lose the line. I'm not saying more because I don't want to identify myself, but this will cripple our program.
Our in-translation courses are always full, with waiting lists. They fulfill college distribution requirements. They are among the most popular courses at the college. Until about 5 years ago, it was true that we "bought" the right to teach our very small language classes with those high-enrollment in-translation classes. Then the administration changed, and now their reaction is "The small enrollment in your language classes proves that our customers, er, students don't want those languages. The high enrollment in your in-translation classes proves that they DO want those. Since it is inefficient and expensive to teach small classes, you should discontinue those boring old languages entirely and teach extra in-translation classes." They wrap it all up in "thinking outside the box" and "stretching beyond disciplinary structures" and other such blah-blah-blah, but basically, the only thing that matters is economics. Far from protecting our language classes, our success in our in-translation classes is being used against us, to kill the languages. And, in case you're wondering, I have compelling family reasons to retire so I've already signed the agreement to do so, and can't now change my mind.
It's a different game now, folks. If the administration is dead-set against small classes, NOTHING will save your language program.
Can you please clarify your situation? Will your tenure line not be renewed or will they not be hiring any additional department members at any level? It's common across all disciplines to replace tenure lines with strings of VAPs. Its the difference between following a trend in higher education and trying to kill off the department.
@12:29,
I believe that what was meant was that if someone is of the opinion that Horace doesn’t matter and therefore chooses to not read him, it’s their prerogative and they are just exercising their opinion.
...don’t strain yourself too hard trying to think.
Dear all: this is a reminder from the Servii that FV will be functional only for a few more days. If anyone is planning on setting up FV 2.0, now is the time to do it.
I'm still unsure what the point of shutting down FV is if we're expecting to appear again elsewhere...
The point every snowflake who's ever packed their toys and exited the sandbox with a harrumph has ever made...?
Will what is here remain for archiving purposes with just additional commenting disabled?
There was a lot of good information/advice here that I’d like to be able to access
@10.13: Everything will remain up, we will just disable commenting. The wiki will also continue to run next cycle.
Is there really no chance of leaving FV up? There were more nasty comments than normal this year, but with 4,533 comments here what percentage are we really talking about that are deleted. I may be off, but I’d guess that 50 (max) were deleted, that’s 1.1% if the whole, which really is about as good as an online forum could really ever be.
Current servii here. The decision to close FV was made together with the founder of this space: to use the sandbox metaphor-- this is Ur-Servius' sandbox that we've all been playing in for the last decade. Those of us currently moderating are in full agreement with the decision to close. We feel that the comments deleted this year, whatever percent they were, represent a level of incivility that shouldn't be accepted. It was the nature and degree of the comments, not their number, and we are sorry that they have caused the responsible majority of participants to lose this forum.
We have suggested a number of future directions that we feel could make the situation better, and have offered to communicate with anyone interested in facilitating the creation of such a space. We have also pointed out that, in the absence of anyone stepping up to create a healthier environment, it would also be eminently possible for a new version of FV to spring up on a platform identical to the current one. We we have offered to post links to any such communities, to ease the transition from this space to the next version.
As of the writing of this message, we have not received a single inquiry about these possibilities.
While reiterating that the blog will close, we also invite people who want to take on the project of creating a next version to be in touch, if they wish: archwhat@gmail.com
12:33 here -- sorry not to reply earlier. I'm traveling, don't have a smartphone, and have been away from computer internet access all day.
My tenure line is not being renewed and no adjuncts or VAPs will be hired. The Adminstration's plan is to permanently reduce the staffing of our already very small department and thus to force us to cut several "inefficient" classes (i.e., languages) from the curriculum . We will no longer be able to offer a major because we will no longer be able to offer sufficient language classes. We strongly suspect that the goal is to shut the department down entirely and to move the remaining faculty into other departments.
This is happening at other places as well -- retiring faculty are not being replaced at all, not by adjuncts or temporary appointments or anything. *The whole point* is to shrink and probably eventually eliminate departments.
I bet if 5:00’s school had more Horace courses this wouldn’t be happening.
I think there is value in FV, and in the absence of any alternative I will get in touch with the Servii soon about creating an FV clone (Novae Famae?). That said, I certainly don't want to get in the way of anyone else's ambitions.
"Famae (Etiam Nunc) Volent"?
Whoever wants to create a new FV should go ahead and contact the Servii, imo. If it needs to initially be a clone then that's fine, a refined version can also be set up at some point. Personally I find nothing wrong with the current platform.
Well, if none of us wants to start a new FV, perhaps we should track down Renie Plonski and ask her to run things?
(Note: Not only is that a funny concept for those who can remember the Placement Service of yesteryear, but in a sort of ring composition we get to have at least one more mention of Renie Plonski before FV breathes its last. And I get to use my old nickname -- well, one of them -- one last time.)
Has anyone heard anything regarding the Harvard ancient history fellowship?
Long time lurker and first time poster. Given how much it was discussed here I don’t see myself having much of a chance, but would appreciate any intel on this.
Farewell, FV.
I'm going to go ahead and make a clone site on blogger. Not sure how difficult it is, but I intend to have something up today with a link posted. I'll also send the Servii a message for pointers on running things.
MFVGA!
Hi all, 8:32 here. I've created a clone site at http://novaefamae.blogspot.com and emailed the Servii earlier today, but haven't heard back from them yet. Please do email me (us) at novaefamae@gmail.com if you would like to be involved.
1:09am again here,
Excellent, NovaeFamae! I'll nix creating a clone site since you've beat me to it. I'll be sending an email your way shortly.
NEW BLOG IS UP AND ALREADY VERY ACTIVE....
MAKE YOUR MIGRATION, FOLKS!!
FV is closing for reasons articulated on the thread 'You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome.'
A new group of moderators has created a replacement, Novae Famae, http://novaefamae.blogspot.com/
Thanks to everyone who participated here over the last years.
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