Plato’s Final Hours
Also: A new neolithic monument in France, Proust’s Seventy-five Folios, remembering Paul Auster, and more.
The use of subatomic physics to read the charred scrolls of Herculaneum, which were buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79, continues to amaze. The latest discovery is an account of Plato’s final hours. The Guardian reports:
In a groundbreaking discovery, the ancient scroll was found to contain a previously unknown narrative detailing how the Greek philosopher spent his last evening, describing how he listened to music played on a flute by a Thracian slave girl.
Despite battling a fever and being on the brink of death, Plato – who was known as a disciple of Socrates and a mentor to Aristotle, and who died in Athens around 348BC – retained enough lucidity to critique the musician for her lack of rhythm, the account suggests.
The decoded words also suggest Plato’s burial site was in his designated garden in the Academy of Athens, the world’s first university, which he founded, adjacent to the Mouseion. Previously, it was only known in general terms that he was buried within the academy.
What will they discover next?
In other archeological news, a new neolithic monument has been discovered in France: “Researchers from the French National Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research (INRAP) unearthed the monument while excavating a prehistoric site in the eastern commune of Marliens . . . From above, the structure resembles a wonky, incomplete bowtie, outlined in lines of raised, shaped earth. Its middle is a complete circle, measuring 36 feet across. Horseshoe-shaped lines protrude from either side of the circle. One of these enclosures is complete—measuring 26 feet across—while the other is dashed and gapped.”
Also, what was this 12-sided Roman object used for? No one knows: “At first glimpse, the dodecahedron looks more like a sci-fi illustration than it does an ancient Roman relic. Each of its pentagon-shaped faces is punctuated by a hole, varying in size, and each of its 20 corners is accented by a semi-spherical knob. Since 1739, some 130 of these objects have been discovered across Northern and Western Europe. While archaeologists have dated the relics to Roman times, they have been baffled by the objects for centuries, with no consensus ever emerging on what they were for.”
The American novelist Paul Auster has died. He was 77: “Famously prolific, Auster averaged a book annually until his final novel Baumgartner, about an octogenarian author, was published at the end of last year (he also wrote the text for a book of photographs, Bloodbath Nation, about mass shootings in the US, published at the beginning of last year). He was as versatile as he was prodigious – able to turn his hand as elegantly to non-fiction, translation, poetry and screenplays.”
Andrew Ferguson reviews Ed Zwick’s memoir Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions: My Fortysomething Years in Hollywood:
It’s a rare book that opens with the writer admitting he’s an asshole, and different readers will, of course, respond differently to this unique authorial strategy. Do we hurl the book across the room? Toss it on the Weber and set it on fire? Drown it in the bath tub? Or do we, Looney Tunes-like, clip our nose with a clothespin, pour a stiff one, and continue reading with an exalted sense of what the comic writer Alex Heard called “hathos,” a portmanteau of hatred and pathos: “A pleasurable sense of loathing, aroused by certain schlocky, schmaltzy, or just-plain-bad show biz personalities.”
To readers of Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions: My Fortysomething Years in Hollywood, the new memoir by the movie and TV director Ed Zwick, I recommend the hathos option . . . Sure, he can appear to be a good guy—helping his subordinates the way a camp counselor would—but before long they witness the unhappy truth. “I morph into a muttering Napoleon determined to bend the world to my will.” He thus reveals his true self: “a heartless son of a bitch.” Zwick repeats and rephrases this same confession throughout his memoir; it’s a leitmotif. He even compares himself to the monster in Alien—even worse than Napoleon, I think. Give him marks for candor, if that’s what it is.
Marion Turner reviews Zrinka Stahuljak’s Fixers: Agency, Translation and the Early Global History of Literature: “Chaucer’s Treatise on the Astrolabe, written in the 1390s for his ten-year-old son, Lewis, is an English translation of a Latin version of an Arabic text written by Mashallah ibn Athari, an eighth-century Persian Jew. In the prologue, Chaucer says that Lewis only knows a little Latin, but is good with numbers, and so the treatise will teach him how to use the astrolabe he has just been given as a present. After all, Chaucer says, the facts remain the same whether Hebrew, Arabic, Latin, Greek or English is used; he himself is a compiler, bringing together the work of old astrologers into ‘naked words in englissh’ . . . One of the structures that underpinned medieval European culture was multilingualism. Petrarch, Dante and Boccaccio all wrote in both Latin and Tuscan. In later medieval England, educated men were trilingual, fluent in French, Latin and English, and some knew more (Chaucer, for example, was proficient in Tuscan). At the Council of Constance, in 1417, the English cleric Thomas Polton reported that the English spoke five different native languages: English, Welsh, Irish, Gascon and Cornish. In medieval Burgundy, too, trilingualism was the norm, with French, Flemish and Latin all in common use. Bureaucrats and poets alike used different languages for different purposes, translating according to audience, and borrowing and coining words across their linguistic competencies . . . Zrinka Stahuljak’s Fixers seeks to ‘denationalise and decanonise the Middle Ages’. The ‘fixer’ is a slippery figure: Stahuljak, who used to work as an interpreter in war zones, uses the term by analogy with the local interpreters-guides-brokers who make it possible for modern journalists to function in alien terrain.”
21st-century Paris: Andrew Martin reviews Simon Kuper’s Impossible City: Paris in the Twenty-First Century: “Kuper’s Parisian experiment turned out well in the end, but I am haunted by the title of his book, most of which I read in a cafe in Genoa. Whereas Kuper reports that his neighbours reproached him for overindulging his sometimes-noisy children, I turned the pages of Impossible City while Italian children raced each other across the cafe floor on mini scooters, with the proprietor beaming down at them. In Genoa, I didn’t care about the missing button on my coat or how I pronounced grazie, because I always got a cheerful prego in return. This is by way of saying that while I admired and enjoyed Kuper’s depiction of Parisian society – as merciless and revealing as an X-ray – it has, at least for now, quelled my own vague dream of moving to Paris.”
Andrew Stiles reviews Jim VandeHei’s Just the Good Stuff: “Are you a loser? Jim VandeHei, the founder of two successful media startups, has some advice: Don’t be. Do you constantly fantasize about crushing your enemies? Don’t do that, either. Unless they’re a bunch of toxic jerks who really deserve it, which they totally are. These are just a few nuggets of wisdom from VandeHei’s forthcoming self-help guide for humble geniuses with rippling abs who win at life.”
What does the LIV-PGA battle in golf show us about who owns sports? Ed Smith reviews Iain Carter’s Golf Wars
Players are the stars, but without fans to entertain they are all dressed up with nowhere to go. Administrators “run” sport and sometimes act like entrepreneurs, but are they really “bosses” or more akin to union representatives?
Broadcasters write huge cheques, wanting stories as well as constant entertainment in return. Which is why, from an investment perspective, sport is now a “media property” – a fact worth remembering when you see football managers railing (however understandably) at the television-led match schedules. They are pointing the finger at the sources of their own wealth.
And now nation states have got involved, especially the Gulf states. Manchester City’s majority owner is the UAE’s deputy prime minister, Sheikh Mansour, meaning that Abu Dhabi is only just out of view whenever we thrill to Pep Guardiola’s exquisite football.
The biggest beast of all is the Public Investment Fund (PIF) of Saudi Arabia, which has been buying sports properties around the world in support of its government’s “Vision 2030”, which seeks to diversify the Saudi economy away from oil-based industries.
Joshua Cohen introduces Elias Canetti’s posthumous Book against Death:
Quixotic is a word that comes to mind when thinking of Elias Canetti, not just because Cervantes’s novel was his favorite novel but because Canetti, too, was a man from La Mancha. His paternal family hailed from Cañete, a Moorish-fortified village in modern-day Cuenca Province, Castile-La Mancha, from which they were scattered in the mass expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492. Having fared better under Muslim rule than Catholic, the Cañetes passed through Italy, where their name was re-spelled, and settled in Adrianople—today’s Edirne, Turkey, near the Greek and Bulgarian borders—before moving on to Rusçuk, known in Bulgarian as Ruse, a port town on the Danube whose thriving Sephardic colony supported itself by trading between two empires, the Ottoman and the Austro-Hungarian.
Elias, the first of three boys, was born to Jacques Canetti and Mathilde Arditti in Ruse in 1905 and in childhood was whisked away to Manchester, UK, where Jacques took over the local office of the import-export firm established by Mathilde’s brothers. In 1912, a year after the family’s arrival in England, Jacques died suddenly of a heart attack, and Mathilde took her brood via Lausanne to Vienna and then, in 1916, in the midst of the First World War, to neutral Zurich. It was in Vienna that Canetti acquired, or was acquired by, the German language, which would become his primary language, though it was already his fifth, after—in chronological order—Ladino, Bulgarian, English, and French. Following a haphazard education in Zurich, Frankfurt, and Berlin, Canetti returned to Vienna to study chemistry and medicine but spent most of his energies on literature, especially on writing plays that were never produced, though he often read them aloud, doing all the voices . . . Canetti’s singular study of collective behavior, published in 1960, stands at the center of his corpus, along with his remarkable series of memoirs, each named for a single sense: The Tongue Set Free, The Torch in My Ear, The Play of the Eyes. Five volumes were projected, but the series went unfinished: no volume connected to smell or touch was ever completed, and the final year of his life covered in the memoirs is 1937, the year Canetti’s mother died and he began to conceive of a book “against” death.
Paul Dean on Proust’s Seventy-five Folios: “Devotees of Proust have had much to celebrate recently. 2021 and 2022 were significant years, the first marking the 150th anniversary of his birth, the second the centenary of his death. His publishers, Gallimard, rose to both occasions. In 2021 they issued a fully-annotated edition, by Proust’s great-grand-niece, Nathalie Mauriac Dyer, of the previously unpublished Les soixante-quinze feuillets et autres manuscrits inédits. The ‘seventy-five folios’ (in fact seventy-six), dating from 1908 and long believed to be lost, were found in 2018 among the papers of the recently deceased Bernard de Fallois, who had referred to them in his edition of Contre Sainte-Beuve (1954) (hereafter CSB) and had published two extracts . . . The reappearance of 75F further complicates an already Byzantine chronology.”