The New Roman Empire

At New Years, a friend gave me a copy of The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium by Anthony Kaldellis. Having read through it, I have a considerably clearer notion of that empire, as regards its periodic contraction and growth, the dynasties that ruled it, and the management of the church councils that established dogma. Considerably clearer, but only so clear: the alternation of Palaiologos and Kantakouzenos, the despots of Epeiros and the Morea, and many other details remain vague. I suppose that a second reading would clear this up, but since the book has 918 pages, not counting end matter, a second reading will have to wait for a while.

I wonder about a number of points, including the account given of theological developments. To take an example from late in the book, Kaldellis makes Gregory of Palamas sound less serious than Jaroslav Pelikan does in The Spirit of Eastern Christendom.

 And Kaldellis is out to vindicate the eastern empire against the sins and biases of the West. No doubt the West has much of it coming. Still, he writes

The Latinization of Greek names ("Comnenus") and worse, their Anglicization ("John") is an offensive form of cultural imposition. It is practiced for no other culture except the "Byzantines," whose very name as a people ("Romans") has been deemed inadmissible for centuries.

(page 7). Here one recalls Frederick the Great, Philip II, the Archduke Charles, assorted Saints Francis and so on among those with Anglicized names. Didn't the Romans use the term "Scythian" rather loosely?

The index is imperfect, which is not surprising in a book of this length, but can be confusing. As an example, consider the entry for "Scholarios, Georgios Gennadios". The first four entries are for pages 327, 332, 898, and 901. Pages 327 and 332 refer to a magister militum and an exarch in sixth-century North Africa, who I suppose could be the same person. Page 898 speaks of "Gennadios, the first patriarch of Constantinople after the fall". Page 901, more satisfactorily, has "Georgios Scholarios (the later patriarch Gennadios II)".

 

 But most of this is quibbling. I am grateful to have received the book and glad to have read it. I will certainly read at least parts of it again.

Damnatio Memoriae

A friend sent me a copy of Latin Inscriptions: Ancient Scripts by Dirk Booms, a guide to reading the Latin on old grave markers, public buildings, and so on. It includes a photograph and explanation of the dedication of a bridge in Egypt, with two erasures: first of the prefect of Egypt who oversaw the building, then of the late emperor Domitian. Such erasure is called "damnatio memoriae", removal of someone's name from official records and monuments. It is not known why the official suffered this; Domitian's damnatio memoriae followed on his assassination.

I had heard of the practice, but never seen an example in stone. The penalty has no place in American law, but variants of it have been applied now and then. The aqueduct over Cabin John Creek in Maryland, now the Aqueduct Bridge on McArthur Boulevard, was built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, begun when Jefferson Davis was Secretary of War. By the time the aqueduct was finished, Davis was president of the Confederate States of America, and the federal government removed his name. About forty years later, President Theodore Roosevelt had it put back.

Something like damnatio memoriae was applied to Benedict Arnold. He is remembered on the battlefield at Saratoga by an empty niche beside three with statues of the other American commanders, and by a boot with the epaulets of his rank--Arnold was shot in the leg on the field. At Saratoga there was no inscription or statue to remove, his treason having followed so soon after his services.

Keeping One's Books

In the New York Times this week, Roger Rosenblatt urgess\ us to keep our books. For me, and no doubt for many readers to the Times, this is like counsel to exercise, eat well, and get enough sleep: what else would we wish to do? However, it is not wholly practical.

This past Christmas, I received about 2500 pages of reading matter, say 60% biography and 40% history. I will keep most of this, if only because of who gave it. But it takes up space on the shelves, and shelves are finite. Something else will have to go, sometime. We have only so much space to put up bookshelves.

And how many books are "your" books? If you bought it for a college class or for the neighborhood book club and disliked it, is it "yours" in more than a legal sense? If you can't say how it came to be under your roof, and in any case there is a better edition on another shelf, is it yours? I think that Rosenblatt might have explored the imperfect match of ownership as recognized by the law, and possession as measured by one's engagement with a book.

Rosenblatt concludes by quoting from one of Theodore Roethke's poems. I thought that I had a copy of Roethke's collected poems, but apparently not. Did we give it away or lose it in a move? Or was it a library's and so not mine?

Ain't

In Allen Tate's novel The Fathers, a use of "ain't" gets a footnote:

I may as well say here that my father did not speak dialect but the standard English of the eighteenth century. In pronunciation the criterion was the oral tradition, not the way the word looked in print to an uneducated school-teacher. For example, though he wrote ate, he pronounced it et, as if it were the old past tense, eat. He used the double negative in conversation, as well as ain't, and he spoke the language with great ease at four levels: first, the level just described, conversation among family and friends; second, the speech of the "plain people abounding in many archaisms; third, the speech of the negroes, which was merely late seventeenth or early eighteenth English ossified; and fourth, the Johnsonian diction appropriate to formal occasions, a style that he could wield in perfect sentences four hundred words long. He would not have understood our conception of "correct English." Speech was like manners, an expression of sensibility and taste. This view no longer holds in an era of public schools and state universities.

The conversation would have been in the early 1850s, the speaker a man born about the turn of the century, resident in Fairfax County, Virginia.

State universities go a long way back in the upper south: there is "Mr. Jefferson's university" in Charlottesville, of course, but the University of North Carolina is older still. The attitude towards the state universities if not the schools seems much more of Tate's time than his narrator's.