I just came across these nice pictures from Stefan Radt’s new edition of Strabo. They have been taken by Michiel Thomas last November:

For further details, see:
Galerie de Michiel Thomas

I am just back from a nice trip to Baltimore that ended with a visit to the temporary exhibition on maps in the Walters Art Museum. The Museum displayed examples of maps coming from all over the world created through every ages and for very different reasons: itineraries from Japan, maps from China engraved on stones and reproduced for centuries, pieces of the Forma Urbis Romae , drawings from or for imaginary utopias such as Tolkien’s Middle-Earth, Da Vinci’s attempts to represent relief with colours and not to forget Ptolemy’s representation of the world.

I would like to highlight here two elements. One is an at first sight rather enigmatic Inuit map. It represents the contours and slopes of a coastal landscape.
Part of Greenland Coast
Greenland National Museum and Archives

This object raises some important questions as it is an interesting mixture of a hodological description with the curves on the wood rendering the coastal line as a traveler would see it and a representation from a bird’s eye view. But it does not share some of the inconveniences of other materials. It is not a flat surface as a piece of paper would be and does not need special conventions in order to render the relief.
My second thought is about distortion. In one of the section the exhibition emphasizes that maps sometimes represent something else than geographical features, for instance in modern times they may represent social realities. In these cases the distortion are wanted in order to illustrate a special point the creator of the map what to make. This attitude is not restricted to modern usage of maps and distortion was not always a consequence of a not-yet-accurate representation of a landscape on a flat surface. It could also be seen as resulting from assumptions, beliefs or certainties adopted by a distant civilisation and the creating techniques used for a maps often disclose these assumptions.

As my project on Demetrios is concerned I mainly thought about pictures as illustrations within the commentary written for each fragment. The previous posts are written from this point of view. There are however at least two extremely convincing examples using pictures at another stage of a scholarly work, more precisely at the very first stage of an edition.

CHS: Manuscripts from the Marciana Library

Corpus Medicorum Graecorum

The example I would like to present here comes from an entirely different field of research (Humanists from the Renaissance period). I however found the way they used the images in the presentation of a space very interesting. In opposition to what would be involved while dealing with Demetrios who focuses on outdoor spaces, the present example illustrates an indoor space. Indeed beyond the mere illustrative usage, this example seems also relevant to a study on Demetrios of Scepsis and his attempt to locate the Homeric topography because it raises the question of the similarities or – probably more numerous– differences between indoor spaces (e.g. rooms) and their descriptions and outdoor spaces (e.g. landscapes). The present example combines two important concepts involved in these issues. First it uses both the cartographic point of view (from above) and the hodologic one (from within the place) and with regard to descriptions of a space the analysis of the interaction of both of these points of view is often of great significance. Second, the example also illustrates a rather intuitive difference between outdoor spaces and indoor spaces, which should be verified as Antiquity is concerned. At first sight indoor spaces tend to be limited by clear boundaries whereas outdoor spaces seem to be experienced as more open and as going beyond the frame, let’s say, of a picture or rather beyond the piece of material it would be drawn on or which would be used to reproduce it.

Melanchthonhaus

Thinking of a way to illustrate the work of Demetrios of Skepsis, either by maps or photographs – or rather with maps and photographs –, the possibility flickr.com offers should be explored. I present here quickly two examples which both could give some ideas for the project I have in mind about Demetrios of Skepsis.

First there is the thematic use of flickr.com illustrated by the file from
Image . The illustrations are linked by the theme of the Trojan tale and are ordered in an album. For each image there is a comment also providing information about the provenance of the picture. Then flickr.com also provides the possibility of creating groups for a same file, as for instance in The Monastery .

As the project of the edition of Demetrios of Skepsis is concerned, I still have to make my mind up about the criterion of arrangement of the albums and to consider the gathering of a group.

Last week I was reading two interesting contributions.

The first was written on be-virtual 7.2.08 . It is about the usage of internet in Asia and is displayed as a summary of part of the LIFT08 conference. According to this review, young people in Asia use internet to be in touch with their peers and to present themselves, their activities, their interests quasi permanently and instantaneously. It is then, it seems, much about self-presentation through a personally created profile, whit its shape left entirely to the authors (with all the risk of excess).

The second is an ongoing discussion on the Ancient World Bloggers Group (i.e. PD(Q) from Comments to a Post: What are we blogging for? , but there are several other related comments). The points I would like to single out here are the notes on two issues: the question of citations in, and of, a blog and then the issues of how and wherefore differentiate blogs from scholarly writings. Among the interesting points about blogging, as different from scholarly writing, are mentioned, among others, the opportunity of instantaneous conversation and the thematic coherence of some of them.
Both of those issues seem to me to be surprisingly close to what has been described in the first blog. As there seems not yet to be well-established guidelines and rules about blogs (even if it is no longer as naïve as I am simplifying here and there are a great number of ways allowing to guide a reader through the mass of information available, as proves the mentioned discussion) it is still basically an empty space one can shape and use in accordance with one’s thoughts, or habits. It appears therefore again to be a way of self-presentation, of sharing thoughts and news or reading about, or following, a topic of interest in a shape and at a speed oneself chooses. On the other hand, while reading the discussion and writing this comment, I found myself thinking about scholarly writings as a standard in itself one tries to achieve for one’s researches.

I have just been told by the publisher of my PhD thesis that it has been published today. I am happy about the idea to have soon the BOOK in my own hands!

Schwabe Verlag

Many interesting details can be gathered about Demetrios’ hometown and it is surprisingly often mentioned in connection with outstanding scholars.

Most famously there is Neleus of Skepsis, pupil of Aristotle and Theophrastus. According to Strabo’s famous passage (13.1.54), he inherited the library of Aristotle and took it to Skepsis. A first (rather naive) question comes to one’s mind: Why did Neleus want to take the Library to Skepsis? Well, it is his hometown (as it is the hometown of Demetrios). But a second well-known details about the story is striking. Why did Neleus’ heirs want to hide Aristotle’s library from Pergamon? Why were the Skepsian not simply proud of helping the Library of Pergamon to become a rival to Alexandria? According to Strabo Skepsis was subject to the Attalic Kings then. Could this then be explained by some local pride, some claim, let’s say, for an own center of scholarship?

Further, our geographer and antiquarian is also a native of Skepsis and his work on the Trojan Catalogue was considered as a monumental contribution to Homeric scholarship even in Antiquity. It is also often quoted because he gives a very independent version or explanation of an Homeric problem. Most famous is, of course, his claim that Skepsis was the royal residence of Aeneias, who never left the Troad, and his own son Ascanius as well as Hector’s son Scamandrius were the heads of a long dynasty ruling over Skepsis (13.1.52-53). This statement too could well have been motivated by local pride.

But there is still more to be added. There is for instance a third scholar from Skepsis, who is even less known than our Demertios. His name is Metrodorus of Skepsis. He was, according to Strabo, a philosopher who changed to politics later (13.1.55). He is also known to have written a historical work, while being at the court of the anti-roman Mithridates. His History may have had a rather anti-roman touch but more interesting for us, he is linked to Demetrios of Skepsis by Diogenes Laertius (5.84: Μητρόδωρον προεβίβασε).

Moving from the people living there to the place itself, there are also two strange details to be mentioned. First, Strabo tells us at lenght the history of Skepsis, its previous location under the name of Palaeskepsis and the temporary forced migrations of its population. Second, several explanation for the name of Skepsis are given by different sources. The scholia (ΣD Il. 20.3) mention a link to the episode of Paris’ judgment, in Stephanus of Byzantium it is linked to the episode of Rhea hiding her children and giving stones to their father (σκήψασθαι). Strabo links it to περίσκεπτον (seen from far away, 13.1. 52). But Strabo’s comment following this explanation is more striking: he considers the name of Skepsis as being a barbarian name and wonders if Greek etymology can be applied in this case.

So the idea one gets from these evidences, is the one of a rather old native (maybe even prestigious) settlement, or at least one which has a history that could be believed by some as going back to the time of the Trojan War or beyond, so that the need was felt (because of its importance, its age or the pride of the local scholars) to find some explanation for its non-appearance in the Homeric text.

This is however in contrast with Cook’s archaeological description of the site…

see:

J.M. Cook, The Torad, Oxford 1973.

P. Pédech,”Deux Grecs face à Rome au 1er siècle av. J.-C.: Métrodore de Scepsis et Théophane de Mitylène”, REA 93, 1991, 65-78.

A few weeks ago, I received the advertisement of a new book by L. Canfora about the so-called Artemidorus papyrus:

I am looking forward to discovering this book and the Italian scholar’s argumentation about this exceptional text.

For more details about Canfora’s point of view, one may follow the discussion on the blog: What’s New in Papyrology? . In particular the following post gives the current discussion Artemidorus papyrus

Since the Library of Alexandria, and notoriously there, the main task for libraries was to collect as many book as possible in order to show the wealth, literary commitment and the political influence of a Hellenistic sovereign. Soon this huge amount of rolls became however difficult to handle and methods for storage and cataloging had to be found. Otherwise the rolls or the texts they contained were lost again as soon as they entered the library.

In our modern age of digitization, this problem remains relevant and it could become the major task for librarians, as suggests Greg Crane in a paper given at the APA in Chicago. In fact, in future the role of the libraries could shift from the one of acquiring and collecting books, journal and texts to the one of exporting the texts already in their institutions and making them available to a readership, which will no longer come to them but read the sources from their homes through their computer.

To come back to the comparison with the Alexandrian library, the community of scholars living in the buildings of the Library seems, in this modern perspective, also a reality that may disappear. The major question would then also switch from the one asking who is allowed to enter an institution in order to consult books, to the one of who the institution is able to reach.

For Greg Crane’s paper, see “Planning a Digital Library for Classics from Image Books” (Gregory Crane, Tufts University) at The Stoa Consortium