Sunday Fact Fest, Episode 05: "The Plague of Athens, Hippocrates and what they tell us about COVID-19," by Marty Rosen.

Riffing on the preceding post, Sunday Fact Fest, Episode 04: Robin's right. Some Louisville (and SoIN) restaurants are not taking the COVID-19 pandemic as seriously as they should," Marty Rosen's F&D column last week was brilliant.

Here is the beginning:

Letter from the Editor: The Plague of Athens, Hippocrates and what they tell us about COVID-19, by Marty Rosen (Food & Dining Magazine)

In the early days of the epidemic, a spate of newspaper and magazine pieces delved into classic literary works dealing with contagion. Writers tended to focus on a trio of books on the theme: The Plague (1947) by Albert Camus; A Journal of the Plague Year (1722); and The Decameron (1353) by Giovanni Boccaccio.

All of those are worth a read.

But as with nearly everything in Western culture, the seminal writings on plagues, pestilence, and epidemics have come down to us from Greek writers who lived 2500 years ago.

And the hard-hitting conclusion.

The coronavirus epidemic, like the Plague of Athens – and all such disasters – is a medical and scientific challenge that calls for cool, rational analysis and evidence by people who are wise and disinterested, and free of superstition. It’s a challenge that calls for leaders whose eyes are wide-open and whose only motivation is the health and safety of their people.

Social media – and plenty of official political discourse – is now running over with bogus “information,” some of it carefully curated to look like science, including excerpts from actual scientific papers to advance arguments that the authors never intended. Logic, evidence, and rational analysis – the stuff that Hippocrates called for – are confronted with conspiracy theories, superstition, and insane claims about cleaning fluid cures.

People with not a shred of actual scientific knowledge are pretending that they’ve discovered loopholes in the medical and scientific reality of the coronavirus.

Don’t fall for it.

Don’t share it.

Keep your eyes open.

Be a citizen.

Wash your hands.

Keep your distance.

Ask for citations.

Finally, something for me to binge-watch: “The Owl’s Legacy,” a 13-part documentary about the legacy of ancient Greece.

I will find this series, and I will watch it. One of these days, when I get around to reconnecting with Greece, it's going to be cataclysmic.

“The Owl’s Legacy”: delectations from an ancient Greek palate, by Prospero (The Economist)

The documentary series, produced in 1989 but little seen until now, explores the influences and interpretations of the classical world

THE PLAYS of Aristophanes, an ancient Athenian comedian, are scatological and lewd—anybody who cannot see that has simply failed to understand them. But when the cult of the classics was at its height in Victorian Britain, many a pupil did fail: the text was read in a bowdlerised version, one that skipped risqué lines or used footnotes to mask the meaning. In today’s more liberal climate works such as “Lysistrata”, which describes a sex strike by ancient Athenian women, are performed and enjoyed in all their bawdiness.

It is only one example of the way the legacy of ancient Greece, which is massive and diverse in itself, has been subjected to an even wider range of historical refractions and readings. That makes it maddeningly hard to figure out what the “real” classical Greece was, what it has meant for posterity, or whether such questions are even meaningful.

Still, these matters can be explored, and playfully. Such is the purpose of “The Owl’s Legacy”, a 13-part enquiry which was made for television in 1989 but was rarely seen before its release last month (the Onassis Foundation, the Greek funders of the series, were apparently unhappy with a contribution from George Steiner, a Franco-American literary critic, that questioned the link between modern and ancient Greece). The series is the work of Chris Marker, a French film-maker considered one of the best cinematographic essayists of his generation. Drawing on Plato’s account of the “symposium” as a wide-ranging, wine-fuelled discussion, he shows the contributors gathering round suitably laden tables in various settings: Athens, Paris, Tbilisi, Tokyo and Berkeley, California.

Each episode looks at one Greek-derived word or concept—democracy, nostalgia, amnesia, mythology, misogyny and tragedy, for example—and asks how it has played out in subsequent centuries. The series does not shy away from the fact that sinister uses have been made of the “glory that was Greece”. No regime made such a determined and ruthless attempt to monopolise the heritage of the Olympic Games as did Hitler’s Germany in 1936.

John Winkler, a classicist and queer theorist who died in 1990, memorably says that understanding ancient Greece is like finding a real person underneath a face which has been smeared with layers of makeup. But you could equally well, and perhaps more accurately, use the opposite image. Many of the statues of ancient Greece were covered with heavy pigmentation that has long since worn away. The white marble is probably more appealing to modern tastes, but Pericles and Plato beheld something much gaudier.

Perhaps the most coherent and forceful contributor is Cornelius Castoriadis (1922-1997), a Franco-Greek thinker who was one of the giants of the Gallic left. A psychoanalyst and sometime Marxist, he credits ancient Athens with the notion of autonomy—another Greek word—whether applied to a political unit or an individual. For him, to be autonomous is to have self-understanding and the ability to chart your future freely, as opposed to obeying the divine order.

But Castoriadis is intensely aware of the distorting lenses through which posterity has studied classical Greece. As he observes, modern admirers like to imagine ancient Athens as cool, deliberative and rational. This underplays the forces of chaos and elemental passion which were lurking in the background, and only just kept at bay.

How original are these arguments? “The Owl’s Legacy” is persuasive in asserting the Greek origins of speculative philosophy and depth psychology, perhaps less so in giving a Hellenic origin to mathematics and music. It must have occurred to many people that free-wheeling comedy, like that of Aristophanes, performed in the most public of arenas, is only possible in a fairly liberal democracy which can laugh at itself and at its powerful personalities. (Dictators are not known for their sense of humour.) But Castoriadis makes a more counter-intuitive point. In his view, tragedy is only possible in a democracy which has some sense of individual entitlement.

To view all 13 episodes in rapid succession, or even at weekly intervals, might be too much for many people. But in today’s YouTube age, when people can watch whatever they want, as long as they want, wherever they want, this series will enjoy greater success. Viewers no longer want to be told the meaning of civilisation, as Kenneth Clark, an art historian, did in a famous documentary series of the 1960s. They do need lots of variety and stimulation for jaded palates—and that is exactly what “The Owl’s Legacy” provides.

An afternoon at IU Southeast with Lysistrata, a timeless play by Aristophanes.

Borrowed from an IU Southeast cast member.

Lysistrata is a comedy written 2,428 years ago by the Greek playwright Aristophanes. The final performance of Lysistrata by the IUS Theatre Department was Sunday afternoon at the Ogle Center, and we richly enjoyed it.

It's 411 BCE and Athens is locked in the grip of a terrible war with Sparta. Although the war has been going on for years, things have recently taken a bad turn for Athens: they suffered a serious defeat in Sicily just two years before.

Peace is starting to look real good.

That, at least, is the opinion of Lysistrata, a middle-class housewife from Athens. The play begins on the day of a meeting organized by Lysistrata. In attendance at the meeting are women from Athens and other cities, including Sparta. At the meeting, Lysistrata announces her plan: the women should all refuse to have sex with their husbands until their husbands end the war. To make sure the sex-strike is effective, they will doll themselves up with makeup and put on their skimpiest clothes, to drive their husbands wild with desire.

The comedy Lysistrata was first performed in Athens in 411 BCE, and is still performed today to laughs, tears, and applause.

In director Ashley Wallace's program notes, the theme of resistance in Lysistrata is brought up to the present with the 2017 Women's March, then back-dated to the Vietnam War-era, and satiric political performances by the San Francisco Mime Troupe (1959 - present).

The San Francisco Mime Troupe does not do silent pantomime. We mean 'mime' in the ancient sense: to mimic. We talk, we sing, we make a lot of noise. We are satirists, seeking to make you laugh at the absurdities of contemporary life and at the same time, see their causes. We've done shows about most of the burning issues of our time, generally shows that debunked the official story. We perform everywhere from public parks to palaces of culture, aiming to reach the broadest possible audience.

Last summer, I posted YouTube links to a wonderful three-part documentary about theater in ancient Greece. Alas, the links are deceased, but if you can find these episodes, it's time well spent.

Ancient Greece: The Greatest Show on Earth

Classicist Dr. Michael Scott presents a three-part series looking at the power, influence and history of Ancient Greece, particularly Athens, through the prism of one of its most important cultural spaces - the theatre.

Flip a coin, select an ancient religion -- one's as good as the next.

Greet the summer solstice. What I want most of all is for a Return of the Helles, not Hellenes, but Greece is all right, too.

It's fascinating to read the words of experts intent to prove that ancient religions are irrelevant owing to an absence of values. In fact, it's all gibberish. What's the real difference between blood sacrifices and the blood of Christ?

The Greeks who worship the ancient gods, by Matthew Brunwasser (BBC News Magazine)

The summer solstice, 21 June, is one of the most important dates in the calendar for many followers of ancient religions, and it's a special time for people in Greece who worship the country's pre-Christian gods.

"I love the energy this place has," says Exsekias Trivoulides who has pitched his tent on what he considers to be the holy site of Mount Olympus.

Trivoulides is a sculptor who studied art history and classics, and these days, he is living his passion.

Along with a few thousand others he is taking part in the Prometheia festival, which celebrates the ancient Greek hero Prometheus, who helped humans by stealing fire from the gods.

R.O.C.K.'s chapter in Athens stocks up on petrol and Bics.

The Guardian talks sex lives of the ancient Greeks, and we can only hope that the exhibition described within eventually comes to rest across the street from the creation museum up in Kaintuck.

The ancient Greeks were never at a loss for words when it came to love and lust – and an exhibition that opened in Athens today laying bare the practice of sex in classical times through an unprecedented collection of eye-popping art partly explains why.

Eros, the god of love and the great loosener of limbs, was many things: irresistible, tender, beautiful, excruciating, maddening, merciless and bittersweet. There was no position, no touch, no predilection too outre to pay homage to him. From the affectionate embrace to group sex, love came in many forms.

"The Greeks were anything but prudes," said Nicholaos Stampolidis, director of the Museum of Cycladic Art, where the show will run for six months. "Theirs was a society of great tolerance and lack of guilt."