“Imagining the Ancient World”
“I so enjoyed this process because it was a conversation throughout—like a little classroom or think tank.”
Associate Professor of Classics Bronwen Wickkiser is talking about her latest book and her work with her co-authors—an art historian, a philologist, an architect and archaeologist, a classicist who specializes in ancient music and music archaeology—not to mention an acoustical engineer, a 3D modeler, and a Greek archaeologist.
The Thymele at Epidauros: Healing, Space, and Musical Performance in Late Classical Greece takes a look at a particular building in Greek antiquity located in the healing sanctuary at Epidauros. It attempts to answer an age-old question: What did they do there?
The Thymele was a “sumptuously decorated” round building in the center of the sanctuary adjacent to the temple. The building contained a substructure unique in Greek architecture and only accessible from a hole in the center of the main level—essentially a labyrinth.
Was it a healing space? A performance venue?
As with much that dates back to the 4th Century BCE, there is very little that can be said with absolute certainty.
“That’s all we’re doing as scholars of classics, really,” Bronwen says. “We’re imagining the ancient world. Do we have any certainty that we have it figured out correctly? I don’t think so. As long as we’re getting more people to talk about this building or spark more ideas, that’s a good thing. We want to get people thinking.”
Much of the writing and research were completed during the last academic year when Bronwen was on sabbatical and supported by the McLain-McTurnan-Arnold Research Scholarship. The grant allowed her to spend a good portion of the fall in Greece. In addition to completing her research, she also put together a proposal for an immersion course she is teaching this semester. “I’m always thinking, ‘How am I conveying this information to my students?’ I’ve always felt that the best teachers have active scholarship going on. The best scholars are also teachers and have an active life in the classroom. Those two branches of what we do feed off each other very, very well.
“That’s the luxury of a sabbatical, not just to write but to let your mind come to some new thoughts and realizations,” she says. “It’s also good fodder for future projects. You take notes and file them away. It’s planting some seeds for the next few years.”
The new book is the bloom from seeds that were planted nearly 14 years ago. Two of the collaborators on the project are based in Greece, two more in England, one in Denmark, the remaining three hail from the U.S., forming an international web of scholarship that was lauded by Professor of Classics Emeritus Joe Day at the book release on campus: “Bronwen does not do this work alone. This book offers us, but maybe most importantly Classics students and beginning Classical scholars, an example of collaborative scholarship. She breaks the old mold of the lone scholar toiling away in her study.”
—Richard Paige
Bringing the Past Alive
In his remarks at Professor Wickkiser’s book release, Professor Emeritus Joe Day added that this new work has “a focus squarely on reconstructing the experiences of actual, historical Greeks. What was it like to hear music here? What did that experience— combining music, song, prayer, sacrifice, and dance—do? Could it heal your physical or mental ailments?”
A similar imagining of the ancient world— or, as she calls it, "wresting meaning out of the most apparently insignificant details of architecture and pottery”—infuses Professor Emeritus Leslie Day’s writing on her excavations at Kavousi on Crete. Her third book from her work on that site was celebrated on campus in November.
The book is Leslie’s seventh published book, an extraordinary accomplishment by the woman who put Wabash on the map in archaeological circles.
Five Things We Didn’t Know About …
Reading
1. When reading took hold in Germany in the late 1700s, a group of German intellectuals warned that it endangers your body and mind. They believed that books, particularly works of narrative fiction, have the power to immobilize their audience. Reading renders people inactive, lazy, and practically useless.
Reading was described as an addiction. The philosopher Johann Fichte wrote: “Reading, like any other narcotic, lulls one into a sweet oblivion.”
2. The notion of “invisible movement” was invented around 1800 as a way to counter the accusation that reading is a debilitating narcotic. Sure, the argument runs, books can seem to make people passive, lethargic, and isolated. But inwardly, books involve a great deal of effort and concentration. Though it appears that the reader is still and passive, the mind is moving all the time.
3. Sigmund Freud’s theories of psychoanalysis weigh into the reading debate in the late 1800s. Freud does not locate that movement [of the mind] in the reader. He locates it in the author, be it the author of a poem, a dream, or a traumatic symptom. He describes desires, thoughts, and associations moving back and forth in the mind.
4. In the 20th century the Canadian poet Anne Carson described poetry as “an action of the mind captured on a page.” For Carson, when you engage with a poem, you’re set in motion: “You are moving with somebody else’s mind through an action.’’
5. When we trace the movement of meaning in a poem or photograph, when we follow the movement of an author’s train of thought, when a book sets our understanding in motion and our faculties to work, this is when reading moves us. This is how we allow ourselves to be moved by reading—by letting the movement of language move us.
Quotes from Associate Professor of German Brian Tucker ’98 and his LaFollette Lecture, “The Invisible Movement That Reading Is.”
An Experience Like Nowhere Else
“An absolute dream come true for me.”
Aaron Boyd ’20 is being interviewed on the Wabash podcast about Universal Robots, the Wabash Theater Department’s winter production.
“I love everything about this play. It asks, ‘What is life?’ It has a beautiful set, and the most beautifully written ending I’ve ever read.”
But what he loved most were the puppets.
“I spent so many hours with them,” says Boyd, who served as stage manager for the play and also designed and carved the hands for the puppets. “I love them dearly.”
Everyone else in the studio laughs, and Boyd smiles. But he’s only half-kidding. In a place where you do so much with your mind and your hands are usually constrained to tapping on a keyboard, designing, drawing, carving, and painting throws more of who you are into your education. And Boyd enjoyed it so much he spent part of his Christmas break doing it.
That work was under the supervision of costumer Andrea Bear, who designed and carved the puppets with assistance from the students and her partner, Todd Handlogten. Bear spent the past two summers in Prague, in Czech Republic, learning the art of marionette carving. This fall she’ll lead a theater class on an immersion experience there.
“The script didn’t really call for puppets, but there are a couple of scenes I read and it just clicked—these could be made into puppet shows,” says Bear, noting these sorts of plays within the play are a Czech tradition. “This is based on a Czech play, is set there, and when I talked with [director and professor] Jim Cherry about it, he said yes.”
Bear and her team’s creations were in the style of the traditional Czech wire puppet, which, unlike most marionettes, is able to sit and kneel, giving puppeteers more freedom during performances.
Just one problem: the puppet-carving techniques Bear had learned were meant for wood, and wooden puppets of that size would be far too heavy and difficult for puppeteers to control.
The solution: foam insulation board.
Bear, Handlogten, and their students cut the boards into squares, glued those together in layers, then carved the foam blocks with a hot knife.
The team’s work proves a striking addition to a play that Jim Cherry says asks so many big, philosophical, moral, and ethical questions.
“It’s a perfect play to do at Wabash because these are questions of the liberal arts; these are enduring questions.
“It’s work that I can teach from, work that I can learn from, work that challenges the actors, the community, everyone who works on it.”
Boyd agrees.
“I don’t know where else I could have had an experience like this.”
Universal Robots by Mac Rogers was adapted from a 1920 play by Karel ?apek called R.U.R., the first time the word “robot” was used. It was derived from an old Slavic word, “robota,” which means servitude.
A Morally Harrowing Question
When Associate Professor of Political Science Ethan Hollander was researching his most recent book, he interviewed a Nazi co-conspirator from World War II who made an outrageous claim: By serving the Nazis, he’d actually been able to save Jewish lives, and therefore had done the right thing.
That claim and the book—Hegemony and the Holocaust: State Power and Jewish Survival in Occupied Europe— earned Ethan an invitation from The Story Collider podcast in January.
So during the same week in January that he was at the Jewish Museum of Florida in Miami delivering a lecture about the book, he was telling the story of his 2004 interview with Maurice Papon to an international podcast audience.
Here’s an excerpt from that podcast:
In 2004, I interviewed a Nazi war criminal. His name was Maurice Papon and he had been convicted of crimes against humanity for being an accomplice to the Nazis in German-occupied France during World War II. He had been on trial for his crimes during the war, and I wondered what he was going to say in his defense. There were papers that unambiguously connected Papon with the deportation, so he couldn’t say he didn’t do it.
Papon admitted to deporting 1,500 Jewish people from Bordeaux to Auschwitz but said there were 10,000 Jewish people in Bordeaux at the time, and had he deported nobody at all, the Germans would have fired him and replaced him with somebody who would have deported everybody.
He claimed that by helping the Germans a little bit, he was able to serve the lesser of two evils and save over 8,000 Jewish lives.
This was a morally harrowing question. Papon’s claim opened up the possibility that maybe there were circumstances, hard as it was to believe, in which by helping, say, Nazi Germany, someone could have been doing something morally defensible, that collaborators were serving a greater good.
After nearly two years of digging in the archives of Berlin, I discovered on the national level that there was something to Papon’s story. In Vichy France, where there was a collaborationist government, the survival rate of local Jews was 75 percent, compared to about 20 percent elsewhere in Europe. In fact, across Europe in places where a local government stayed in power and collaborated with Nazi Germany, Jewish survival rates tended to be higher.
I wrote to the law firm that represented Papon and, surprisingly, a few months later I was told he would sit for an interview with me. Papon at this point was living in a villa outside of Paris. He had served a few years in prison, but because of his age, 93, he was released and spent the remainder of his prison sentence under house arrest.
I wanted to know his side of the story, but I didn’t want to come off as an apologist. I asked about his work during the war and he very quickly turned to the issue at hand. By serving in the collaborationist regime during World War II, he was actually able to serve the resistance.
His claim was particularly radical and striking. The fact that Papon had these stories opened up that possibility—that maybe there was some truth to these claims; somewhere in the collaborationist bureaucracy someone collaborated with the right intentions and used their position and power for the right reasons.
People ask if I believe Papon and I realize now they don’t actually want to know if he was telling the truth. They want to know if people like Papon were doing the right thing.
That’s the question I started with, that’s the question that I’ve written a book on, and that’s the question to which even now I don’t really have an answer.
Listen to Professor Hollander discuss his book and the interview on the Wabash On My Mind podcast or during his Chapel talk on the College's YouTube channel.