Books by Philip Matyszak

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2015-01-04
Anno 2768 AUC
As we head into 2015 the year ahead looks busy. There's my various projects including two books I'm having too much fun with to finish, but have to get out of the door eventually, and a chapter on female archetypes in myth that I promised the International Psychological Association I would have ready by the end of the month. There's also the teaching schedule to keep me busy, and the fact that at the end of 2014 a truck (fortunately unoccupied) rolled down the mountainside we live on and went through our back garden wall before going on to wipe out the shed. Nothing can be done now as the snow is deep and the ground frozen but the chaos will need sorting out in spring.

Anyway, apart from all that, there's a parallel calendar I like to keep an eye on. It's for the year, but exactly 2000 years out of date. Thanks to Tacitus, Cassius Dio and friends I can follow the year AD 15 pretty closely, and that too promises to be busy. The main event is, of course, watching Tiberius settling down to his first year as sole emperor and watching imperial paranoia manifest itself in a set of new treason laws. Come spring I will follow the campaigns of Germanicus in the Rhinelands, and the capture of the pregnant wife of Rome's arch-enemy, the traitor Arminius. Later in the summer Germanicus will recapture lost Roman standards and visit the graves of the men of the 'lost legions'.

In autumn the Tiber will flood and leave the Roman forum awash, and Vitellius, the future short-lived emperor of Rome will be born. There's a couple of city foundations too, but I'll catch up with events as they happen by settling down at the end of each month with the 'Annals' of Tacitus. It looks like AD 15 was a full year, but lacking the extreme tension and drama of the one previous. After a hip operation, a sick cat and a demolished back garden, I'm hoping the same will be true of my year two millennia later.
 
2014-12-12
A (carefully edited) rant
'Never edit my writing. It's like vampirism, it sucks all the joy and spontaneity out of what I said and makes it into the dull and ordinary corpse of my original idea.'

Hmmm. Earlier this month I ended up browsing a writers' forum. Scrolling through the various posts (it was late, I had a glass of port and little else to do) I came across the above comment. Now everyone has their own ideas of how to write, and who knows, maybe the person who expressed this opinion will go on to become a best-selling author. Nevertheless, I beg to disagree with this viewpoint and to disagree strongly, simply because there are enough genuinely bad books out there without adding to their number.

Writing on ancient history often involves working with texts which were never meant to be seen by the non-specialist reader. They involve eye-watering phrases such as 'a dichronous eschatological epistemology' - to quote a gem from the book I am currently reading. However, even if unreadable, such material has at least been carefully worked over by the author who is truly unable to express his ideas more clearly, and possibly works in an environment where dichronous eschatological epistemologies are everyday items.

This is a type of bad writing I can live with because part of my job involves interpreting this stuff into something people will read for pleasure. What I find harder to stomach is the idea that tipping the contents of one's mind onto a page results in less of a jumble than tipping the contents of a sock drawer onto a bed. In fact the quote which started me on this expostulation does not deny that unedited text is a jumble, but points out that it is a joyous and spontaneous jumble. Quite possibly. However if it is to be readable, writing has to be organized. If it is to give the appearance of a jumble then it has to be even more carefully organized. (Joyce's 'Ulysses' is a good example.)

As for the 'joy and spontaneity' issue, I would argue that editing is a part of the writing process. If you can't enjoy turning a crude idea into polished prose, and doing so in a way that doesn't destroy spontaneity, then perhaps 'writing' doesn't exactly describe what you are doing. It's more the literary equivalent of dumping building material in a heap and announcing that you have built a house.

Shakespeare's folios show that he painstakingly rewrote his material over and over. So did Kafka, Hemingway and almost every other great author one might mention. Typos, repetition and poor grammar are not charming and idiosyncratic, they are signs of laziness and disrespect for the reader. Perhaps this is typical of how the arts are becoming a self-indulgent mess. Perhaps it's a sign that I'm getting old, grumpy and out of touch.

I do know though, that when my editors have allowed such errors to slip through, reviewers both professional and amateur are scathing about it. But then, I am writing about classical history and about ideas and events which are confusing and complex enough without involving 'literature'.
 
2014-11-04
Realism in pottery
Recently I wrote a review of Josho Brouwer's 'Henchmen of Ares'. (Which was a very good book, by the way). Although I like doing book reviews, these are somewhat time-consuming as I not only read the work from cover to cover, as any decent reviewer should do, but I also end up doing a lot of research to check some of the author's conclusions. So every book I review results in my learning a lot of new material. In this case, my research was directed at pre-classical Greek pottery, and the accuracy of the figures depicted. Early Greek pottery shows a huge variety of themes, especially military, so the question is - do the warriors on the pots look anything like the actual warriors who were around at the time?

Two examples will show that this need not necessarily be so. The first is from later Greek pottery. These pots often show naked cavalrymen in poses which, if realistic, would result in the horses' spines causing both acute discomfort and probably the end of each particular cavalryman's family tree. The second example is Medieval and Renaissance paintings depicting scenes from ancient Rome. While some of these paintings are doubtless great works of art, they are next to useless for giving factual information about ancient Rome, since dress, weapons and architecture are wildly out of date or from the wrong era altogether.

So a line of warriors on a 3000-year pot might be an accurate depiction of the warriors in that time and place. Or the picture might be the artist's wild concept of what Heracles and friends looked like a half-millennium before that, and the 'warriors' were as fantastical to the artist's contemporaries as they seem to us today. I am assured by those who have made a detailed study of the matter (including Dr Brouwers himself) that there are stylistic techniques which can be used to sort fact from fiction on pottery. Nevertheless, even these assurances can't clear up my uneasy suspicion that if a historian could get a time machine and travel back to ancient Greece or Rome, neither place would very much resemble the idea we have of them today.
 
2014-10-03
Winter is coming
It's going to be a busy month. There's two books coming to the final stages, a course and two magazine articles to write. I'll also be lecturing in New York next week, and immediately on my return checking into hospital for hip surgery.

Also it's well into autumn now, and that means preparing for winter. When you are one kilometre up a mountainside, this involves more than simply buying an extra set of woolies and turning up the thermostat. In fact we're doing what, before the modern era, peoples across the northern hemisphere have been doing for millennia. That is, stacking a tonne or two of firewood - which provides cooking, light and heat when the gas and 'leccy go down - and laying in potatoes and apples in the cellar. (At this time of year the local supermarket sells them in 50kg bags, so we are saved picking and digging for ourselves.)

The garden will soon be under several feet of snow for six months, so all vegetation needs to be cut back, and exterior walls checked for cracks and drafts. Winter coats and boots are being dragged out of storage, waxed and checked for any spiders - especially black widows - which might have taken up residence. Vulnerable plants such as our home-reared lemon trees are being dragged indoors, and others such as the walnut tree in the back yard are carefully denuded of edibles before the bears take an interest.

All the bother and bustle I find actually rather enjoyable. There's something about having distinct seasons and having to adapt one's life to match with each. It connects one more with the natural world around, which commuting to work through different shades of grey doesn't do. In the 'Game of Thrones' the stark pronouncement (excuse me) that 'winter is coming' is not merely an announcement of doom. In pre-modern Europe it was a call to action, a warning that the world was about to change, and its people must change with it.
 
2014-09-04
Sophisticated low-tech
There is a modern misconception that a low-technology society is an unsophisticated society, and societies with advanced technology are more 'advanced'. In reality possession of advanced technology does not equate with being advanced, or even with being civilized, as is being proven today by those self-propelled guns driving around Iraq and the Ukraine. On the flip side, we only need look at ancient Rome to see that that low-tech and sophistication - even engineering sophistication - can go hand-in-hand.

By modern standards the Romans were certainly a low-tech civilization, and they almost seem to have preferred it that way. For example, they knew of the steam engine and advanced cranes for building but chose not to use them. (The emperor Vespasian said to the inventor of the cranes 'You must allow me to give jobs to the poor.') When they did use technology, the Romans did it remarkably well. By definition, no modern urban infrastructure has lasted two thousand years, but many Italians routinely use water supply systems built by the Romans. In fact while I was last in Milan, a part of the city centre lost its water supply because builders broke an unrecorded underground ceramic pipe that had - without maintenance - been quietly supplying water for centuries. Rome's Pantheon (in use for two thousand years and counting) encloses a near-perfect 142ft diameter sphere that would exactly touch the ground if extended that far, and the dome is still the largest unreinforced concrete dome in the world.

Today I was reading about the Lycurgus Cup. This ancient drinking vessel was made around AD 250. Not only is it of superbly cut glass, but it is colloidal. That is, gold and silver nano-particles in the glass refract light differently. So the cup is green when light shines on it, but red when light shines through it. (Those in London can see the cup for themselves in the British museum.) The Lycurgus in question is portrayed on the cup being punished for trying to harm a follower of Bacchus, the god of wine - an agreeable theme for a drinking vessel.
Many aspects of Roman life appall us today. Yet while they would be amazed by our technology the Romans in their turn would probably not have a high opinion of our civilization. Barbarism is in the eye of the beholder.
 

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