The Classicists email list is having one of its periodic flame wars; in classic horror movie style, a softly-spoken, genteel little email list, which normally spends its days politely relaying conference announcements and information about studentship opportunities, is provoked by a casual remark and transforms into a raging monster. Clearly some sort of mutant DNA was spliced into the discipline in its past, because this does keep happening in one way or another. “I’m getting pedantic. You wouldn’t like me when I’m pedantic…”
Archive for March, 2013
Foundational Myths and Archetypes
Posted in Musings, tagged classics, language, research on March 29, 2013 | 18 Comments »
Thoo-SID-a-dees
Posted in Musings, tagged reception, Thucydides on March 20, 2013 | Leave a Comment »
It is, I suppose, an example of the way that specialists come to take their topic entirely for granted, or at any rate develop certain blind spots: I realised this morning that I have never previously Googled ‘Thucydides’ without any qualifying terms. If I ever had, I’m pretty sure I would have clicked on the third result to show up in the list, which describes its contents as follows: “Thucydides is a tool that lets you use WebDriver-based unit or BDD tests to write more flexible and more reusable WebDriver-based tests, and also to generate …” I have no idea what that means, but was eager enough for an excuse to spend five minutes away from the book – okay, I know that playing on the internet on the PC doesn’t count as a proper break from the laptop – to ferret around in search of the rationale for the choice of name. I think it’s rather sweet…
Thucydides (Thoo-SID-a-dees) is a tool designed to make writing automated acceptance and regression tests easier. It provides features that make it easier to organize and structure your acceptance tests, associating them with the user stories or features that they test. As the tests are executed, Thucydides generates illustrated documentation describing how the application is used based on the stories described by the tests.
Thucydides provides strong support for automated web tests based on Selenium 2, though it can also be used effectively for non-web tests.
Thucydides was a Greek historian known for his astute analysis skills who rigorously recorded events that he witnessed and participated in himself. In the same way, the Thucydides framework observes and analyzes your acceptance tests, and records a detailed account of their execution.
Of course, the obsessive pedant in me now wants to start speculating about whether the Thucydides framework appears to provide a reliable record of the execution of acceptance tests, which can serve as a basis for future practices (kata to hupologistikon, so to speak), but is really manipulating the user according to its own hidden agenda…
Thucydides in Visual Art
Posted in Musings, tagged Clio, Samuel van Hoogstraten, Thucydides on March 13, 2013 | 1 Comment »
Yes, I know it’s been very quiet on here lately, and I can only apologise for the lack of discussion, but I really do have to get my book on Thucydides and the Idea of History finished by the end of the month, and so have to keep my head down and limit internet time – even resisting the temptation to explore the interesting mixture of ‘vague but interesting’ and ‘trite and rather annoying’ analogies between the Byzantine economy and the current European crisis offered by Peter Frankopan over on the Grauniad a few days ago.
However, as I’ve just finished another chapter, I thought I could spare five minutes to post the image that I.B.Tauris’ design people are going to be using for the cover. I’m delighted; much better than yet another variation on one of the busts of Thucydides of dubious provenance that appear on most books about him. This is an engraving by the C17 Dutch artist Samuel van Hoogstraten, about whom I now know rather more than I do about most C17 Dutch artists. He wrote a work on painting, Inleyding tot de Hooge Schoole der Schilderkonst, which was published by his brother in 1678; it’s divided into nine books, each dealing with a different aspect of painting and named after a muse, with an engraving of the muse in question at the start of each book. The third deals with history painting, and is introduced by Clio, who – though you can’t see it in this tiny image – is carrying a copy of Thucydides. Entirely appropriate, as according to the Iconologia of Cesare Ripa, a sixteenth-century work that was much used by artists in search of suitable allegorical and symbolic images, this is how Clio should be represented, but I haven’t found any other versions where the fact that the book is by Thucydides is visible (for example, not in Vermeer’s The Art of Painting, unfortunately, though that’s where I found a lot of this background information: http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/verm_2.shtm).
Any suggestions as to a source for a higher-res image would be greatly appreciated; currently hoping that the British Library, which has a copy of van Hoogstraten’s book, will be able to oblige…
More F****** Thucydides Quotes
Posted in Musings, tagged reception, Thucydides, military strategy, quotations on March 7, 2013 | Leave a Comment »
(This is a guest post from Andreas Stradis, one of the doctoral students on the Bristol Thucydides project)
In his bestselling, semi-autobiographical account of the Vietnam War, Karl Marlantes devotes much attention to the plain-speaking, hard-drinking Lieutenant Colonel Simpson, torn between the needs of his battalion and his promotion prospects. A Korean War veteran and true ‘field’ Marine, he is also an outsider. Despite his combat experience, he is phased by his much younger equal in rank, a suave, educated Annapolis graduate. He sits a world apart from the Ivy League elite, to which Marlantes himself belonged as a Yale graduate and Rhodes Scholar. At Georgia State University, taking the less prestigious route to a commission, Simpson ‘never had time to learn how to socialize’, or to ‘put pithy quotes into his reports the way he knew he ought to.’ After all he had done, ‘Why should he have to remember pithy f****** quotes?’ Quotes were incommensurate with the plain-speaking man, and otiose in the jungle.
