What Terrorism Means to Me
I've read some books that imply that the massacre of the schoolboys at Mycallessos was one of the lowest of the low points of the Peloponesian War. Recently, when I would hear mentions of terrorism in the media, I would think of Mycallessos. My grasp of the situation was that it was a small, no-where town, and the massacre served no tactical purpose, it was just senseless violence.
I decided I needed to know more details, so I dug out my copy of Thucydides in English.
So maybe people don't know what I'm even talking about. Around 400 B.C., Greece was pretty evenly devided between Athens, and her ally cities, and Sparta, and her allies. A war broke out between the two groups which dragged on for almost thirty years.
About fifteen or twenty years into the war, Athens, for some ungodly reason, decided to send a force to attack Greek colony cities in Sicily. They hired a bunch of Thracian mercenaries to fill out their numbers. Thrace was up north, just south of where Bulgaria is today, but back then this was not part of Greece. Greeks thought everybody who wasn't Greek was a barbarian, and these people actually lived up to the name.
It took a while for the Thracians to get to Athens, and the fleet got impatient and left without them. Athens was having to get all of the city's supplies sent in by sea, and this, on top of financing the war, was straining the city's finances. When the Thracians finally arrived the Athenians didn't want to pay them to stick around, so they sent them up north along the coast to cause trouble there.
The Thracians sailed into Spartan-allied territory, landed, and attacked the first town they found. It was Mycallessos. The townspeople thought nobody would bother to attack them because they were in the backside of beyond, and didn't have much in the way of defenses. In fact they were still in the habit of leaving the gates open at night. So one day at dawn, the Thracians had no problem barging in. They killed every living thing they encountered. They came across the school, and brutally slayed every student.
The big city of Thebes was nearby, and heard what was going on, and sent help -
And, sorry, I can't "help" but break to say that I learned just today in my Greek class that the Greek verb for "to help" is a combination of the smaller verbs, "shout" and "run around." So when you help somebody you shout and run around.
- but the Thebans were too late for Mycallessos. They caught up with the Thracians at the shore as they were about get back on their ships, and as Thracians couldn't swim, there was quite a panic. A lot of the Thracians still escaped.
There Thucydides wrote, "So the town of Mycallessos suffered a calamity as brutal as any encurred during the war . . ." and then he jumps back to describing what happened to the Sicilian expedition. No rumination, no commentary. I don't really get how this got the reputation of being one of the lowest of the low points of the war - after reading the passage it appears it was just one atrocity out of very many, perpetrated by both sides. The Germans bombed Coventry. The Americans bombed Dresden.
This is a good example, though, of why people should study about Greeks. For possibly the first time in the existance of humanity, a man wrote a description of war, which was not set in a glorious, semi-mythological past, but in his own lifetime, and one in which there were no good guys. Everybody were bastards. The Germans bombed Coventry. The Americans bombed Dresden.
Oh, and hate to spoil it for you - eventually, Athens lost.

Something really cool just happened to me. I went to the student union to find something to eat for lunch and I ran into my Greek professor. He had gone to Italy for fall break and had been to Herculaneum, and I asked him about that, and then I said I had to go find something to eat. He invited me to go to a table outside the building where the classics department is, where they were having a free pizza picnic. It turns out it's Grad School Day. They were having the pizza picnic to promote the graduate program in the classics department. There were two other people from my class there, but they didn't seem interested in talking to me. I spent my time speaking to a very pretty petite Englishwoman. She looked so young I thought she had to be a grad student herself, and I asked, and she said, "Oh no, I'm a professor." I made, or tried to make, a good-natured sheepish face, like Samantha Stevens when she says, "Well?" We managed to overcome my faux-pas. I spoke about being interested in the post-baccalaureate program in classics at UNC, and she asked what that was. She said she was from "a different state" and she didn't really understand . . . . Post-bacc programs haven't been around very long, so it's really not surprising someone even in the business themselves wouldn't know about it.
We had a nice chat - it was great to be around people who weren't law students. Poeple who are in what I think of as "real" academics - the pursuit of knowledge, not learning to practice a trade. So much education is geared towards a specific occupation these days.
And I got a free lunch.

[10/23/2002 3:42:37 PM | Lee Cloninger]
I love mushrooms.

"Half-inanimate himself, he is only happy when dealing with inanimate things. For these he has endless sympathy. To mushrooms alone he consecrates ten pages of print and six coloured plates, and the only human being to whom he makes sympathetic reference is a certain Mr. Worthington Smith, 'who is able to testify that he has partaken of every known variety of edible mushrooms with only one mishap (very nearly fatal however), but his immunities should not be made an example to others without their acquiring an equal amount of knowledge, which however he is always ready to impart, being an enthusiastic in this particular study.' Which of the edible mushrooms is almost fatal? Without telling us, the author passes on to anchovies, of which he approves 'when not personated by sardines,' and to nuts, which receive summary dismissal. 'Though relished by all classes, they require the stomach of an ostrich to digest them, and should never be eaten in large quantities.' The monstor who 'ate a peck of filberts at a sitting with impunity' is an exceptional case, and 'no one should presume to imitate so bad an example.' Meat is of course in favour, and when hashed beef is not followed by roast mutton, hashed mutton is followed by roast beef. These with potatoes - very large and wet; one can imagine them - and vegetable marrow - 'a delicious vegetable,' one can imagine that too - and cabbage, form the basis of the midday meal, and for breakfast we have had the edible mushrooms. It is odd how foods fall into bad company The mushroom today is continental in its associations - almost demimondaine. One classes it with the omelette, which no moral person can make properly, or with macaroni, which no moral person can eat properly. Yet the mushroom was Victorian, and swam unashamed in torrents of grey hot water once; or lay stranded, a relict, on sodden rounds of toast; there used to be these two ways of cooking mushrooms. Mr. Walsh is alive to their importance, and to his six coloured plates the reader is urged to refer, whenever his memory of the epoch grows dim."
- E. M. Forster, "Mr. Walsh's Secret History of the Victorian Movement," 1911

I love mushrooms.

"Half-inanimate himself, he is only happy when dealing with inanimate things. For these he has endless sympathy. To mushrooms alone he consecrates ten pages of print and six coloured plates, and the only human being to whom he makes sympathetic reference is a certain Mr. Worthington Smith, 'who is able to testify that he has partaken of every known variety of edible mushrooms with only one mishap (very nearly fatal however), but his immunities should not be made an example to others without their acquiring an equal amount of knowledge, which however he is always ready to impart, being an enthusiastic in this particular study.' Which of the edible mushrooms is almost fatal? Without telling us, the author passes on to anchovies, of which he approves 'when not personated by sardines,' and to nuts, which receive summary dismissal. 'Though relished by all classes, they require the stomach of an ostrich to digest them, and should never be eaten in large quantities.' The monstor who 'ate a peck of filberts at a sitting with impunity' is an exceptional case, and 'no one should presume to imitate so bad an example.' Meat is of course in favour, and when hashed beef is not followed by roast mutton, hashed mutton is followed by roast beef. These with potatoes - very large and wet; one can imagine them - and vegetable marrow - 'a delicious vegetable,' one can imagine that too - and cabbage, form the basis of the midday meal, and for breakfast we have had the edible mushrooms. It is odd how foods fall into bad company The mushroom today is continental in its associations - almost demimondaine. One classes it with the omelette, which no moral person can make properly, or with macaroni, which no moral person can eat properly. Yet the mushroom was Victorian, and swam unashamed in torrents of grey hot water once; or lay stranded, a relict, on sodden rounds of toast; there used to be these two ways of cooking mushrooms. Mr. Walsh is alive to their importance, and to his six coloured plates the reader is urged to refer, whenever his memory of the epoch grows dim."
- E. M. Forster, "Mr. Walsh's Secret History of the Victorian Movement," 1911

(Aside) What have I done? A bloggspot is a responsibility, like a pet - am I ready? I don't know. I'm uncertain.
I am most trepidatious.
A-hem.
(Loudly, with forced enthusiasm) Welcome. Here in this place, I expect you will discover nothing of interest, much that is mundane, and little that is completely original.
I work in a library in a law school. Isn't that fun? It will provide me with countless anecdotes to fill this space.
And as I see I'm running out of time, I think I'll just flesh this out with a few quotes.

"Okay, what did we agree to? That's right, 'No leader.' So shut up and do what I say."
- "Time Bandits"

"Poverty can strike suddenly, like influenza!"
- Graham Greene, Travels with My Aunt

"I don't want to die now, I still have a headache. I don't want to go to heaven with a headache, I'll be all cross and won't enjoy it."
_Douglas Adams, The Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy