According to Variety:

Fox 2000 has assembled a cast of Greek gods for the fantasy adventure “Percy Jackson.”

Uma Thurman, Pierce Brosnan and Sean Bean have signed on to play Medusa, Chiron and Zeus, respectively. Kevin McKidd (Poseidon) and Melina Kanakerides (Athena) are also joining the heavenly bunch in the Chris Columbus-helmed pic.

The studio is still looking to fill the roles of Aries, Hades and Persephone. Logan Lerman and Brandon Jackson have already signed on to topline.

Story centers on Poseidon’s half-human teenage son (Lerman), who embarks on a quest across modern-day America to save his mother, return Zeus’ stolen lightning bolt and prevent a deadly war between the gods.

Lensing begins next month in Vancouver, with the studio setting a February 2010 release date.

A student in one of my English classes recently asked about the endless references to drinking wine in “The Odyssey.” The question, which had nothing to do with my lesson, was a good one. Wine has a constant presence in the epic poem, whose most famous image is probably Homer’s evocation of the “wine-dark sea” that Odysseus sails in search of his native Ithaka. Sometimes it is mere tonic on an impossibly long journey home from the Trojan War, but on occasion wine is more powerful than the sword, as when Odysseus escapes from the Cyclops by getting him drunk. Homer may have been blind, but his taste buds were alive to wine, and he reserved his richest adjectives for it: heady, mellow, ruddy, shining, glowing, seasoned, hearty, honeyed, glistening, heart-warming, and, of course, irresistible.

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But my student’s question did engender a lively, if brief, conversation. Someone thought that it was unseemly for a hero to drink, while others figured that with his sights set on home, Odysseus didn’t have much time to nurse a hangover. There would be time for wine to flow, they argued.

I wasn’t quite satisfied, and the question continued to bother me until, days later, I found a passage in “The Odyssey” that succinctly captures the complexity of the Greek attitude towards alcohol. Odysseus is speaking to a sympathetic swineherd, and though he is in disguise, the words have the unmistakable ring of honesty:

[I]t is the wine that leads me on, the wild wine
that sets the wisest man to sing at the top of his lungs,
laugh like a fool – it drives the man to dancing…it even
tempts him to blurt out stories better never told.

After two decades away from home, there must have been so much to say, so many bottled-up tales of friends lost and battles won. Somebody get the poor guy another round.

Barack Obama’s election is a milestone in more than his pigmentation. The second most remarkable thing about his election is that American voters have just picked a president who is an open, out-of-the-closet, practicing intellectual.

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An intellectual is a person interested in ideas and comfortable with complexity. Intellectuals read the classics, even when no one is looking, because they appreciate the lessons of Sophocles and Shakespeare that the world abounds in uncertainties and contradictions, and — President Bush, lend me your ears — that leaders self-destruct when they become too rigid and too intoxicated with the fumes of moral clarity.

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As Mr. Obama prepares to take office, I wish I could say that smart people have a great record in power. They don’t. Just think of Emperor Nero, who was one of the most intellectual of ancient rulers — and who also killed his brother, his mother and his pregnant wife; then castrated and married a slave boy who resembled his wife; probably set fire to Rome; and turned Christians into human torches to light his gardens.

James Garfield could simultaneously write Greek with one hand and Latin with the other, Thomas Jefferson was a dazzling scholar and inventor, and John Adams typically carried a book of poetry. Yet all were outclassed by George Washington, who was among the least intellectual of our early presidents.

Yet as Mr. Obama goes to Washington, I’m hopeful that his fertile mind will set a new tone for our country. Maybe someday soon our leaders no longer will have to shuffle in shame when they’re caught with brains in their heads.

Tangentially related, the Telegraph observes that “Barack Obama Still Has Time for a Little Poetry”:

Three days after winning the presidential election, Barack Obama was spotted in Chicago carrying a book of poems by Derek Walcott, the West Indies Nobel laureate.

The Illinois senator was photographed holding the new-looking book, perhaps a gift he had just received, and reading a letter as he headed to his car with his wife, Michelle.

The 500-page volume, Collected Poems 1948-1984, is one of 20 collections by the poet, theatre director and playwright, who has also written more than 20 plays.

Walcott, who won the 1992 Nobel prize for Literature, is often described as the West Indies’ greatest writer and intellectual. He was born in St Lucia in 1930 and is best known for his epic poem Omeros, a reworking of the story of the Odyssey in a 20th century Caribbean setting.

Collected Poems 1948-1984 includes selections from all of Walcott’s previous seven books of verse, including the full text of Another Life, his 1974 autobiographical poem.

WITH its grand marble staircase, inner and outer peristyles and Roman gardens, the Getty Villa in Los Angeles seems a fitting backdrop for a small army of Greek gods, Roman warriors and Etruscan vases. But in two weeks visitors to the villa, which houses the antiquities collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum, will encounter a sculpture from a very different time and place.

With a nod to classical themes, the sculpture represents the head of a poet. But this particular head — a bald one with a scratchy beard and deeply creased brow — looms large at seven feet tall. It is made out of white plaster instead of clay or stone. It is modern in scale and feel.

And for many in the art world the monumental head is recognizable. It belongs to the American artist Jim Dine, who for the last 50 years has made his name as a highly successful painter, printmaker and sculptor while more quietly (and less lucratively) honing his skills as a poet.

The self-portrait will be the centerpiece of an installation called “Jim Dine: Poet Singing (The Flowering Sheets)” that opens at the villa on Oct. 30. Mr. Dine has also written out a poem in charcoal on the gallery’s white walls and recorded it on a soundtrack that will play on a loop in the gallery.

Read the rest here.

Archaeologists find tomb of the real hero who inspired epic film.

Italian archaeologists have discovered the tomb of the Ancient Roman hero who inspired Russell Crowe’s character in the film Gladiator.

Daniela Rossi, a Rome archaeologist, said that the discovery of the marble tomb of Marcus Nonius Macrinus, which has an inscription bearing his name, was “the most important Ancient Roman monument to come to light for 20 or 30 years”.
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Marcus Nonius Macrinus, born in Brescia, northern Italy, was a general and consul who led military campaigns for Marcus Aurelius, the Roman emperor in 161-180AD. He became part of the emperor’s inner circle and one of his favourites, serving as proconsul in Asia. His patrician villa at Toscolano Maderno on Lake Garda has been identified and partially excavated.

The character of Maximus also drew on accounts by Roman historians of a wrestler named Narcissus, who murdered the Emperor Commodus by strangling him, and the life of Spartacus, the leader of a revolt by slaves and gladiators in the 1st century BC.

When it continues on to note that, “the decline and fall of the American Empire echoes the experience of the Romans,” you know that your appreciation of classics and its relevance to the modern world is about to be validated.

And when the author of the column quotes Seneca and rejoices at the current boom in Latin enrollments across the country, you know that you’re part of this exciting resurgence.

But wait. There’s more…

In high school, I translated swatches of Julius Caesar’s “The Battle for Gaul” from Latin to English while nibbling cheese crackers. To boost the felicitous new trend toward Latin, I enlisted Gary D. Farney, an associate professor of history at Rutgers University, to translate (loosely and creatively) from English to Latin “The Battle of Gall,” my take below on why the hyperventilating Republicans are not veni, vidi, vici-ing.

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Bellum Gallium

Manes Julii Caesaris paucis diebus aderant — “O, most bloody sight!” — cum Ioannes McCainus, mavericus et veteranus captivusque Belli Francoindosinini, et Sara Palina, barracuda borealis, qui sneerare amant Baracum Obamam causa oratorii, pillorant ut demagogi veri, Africanum-Americanum senatorem Terrae Lincolni, ad Republicanas rallias.

Rabidi subcanes candidati, pretendant “no orator as Brutis is,” ut “stir men’s blood” et disturbant mentes populi ad “a sudden flood of mutiny,” ut Wilhelmus Shakespearus scripsit.

Cum Quirites Americani ad rallias Republicanas audiunt nomen Baraci Husseini Obamae, clamant “Mortem!” “Amator terroris!” “Socialiste!” “Bomba Obamam!” “Obama est Arabus!” “Caput excidi!” tempus sit rabble-rouseribus desistere “Smear Talk Express,” ut Stephanus Colbertus dixit. Obama demonatus est tamquam Musulmanus-Manchurianus candidatus — civis “collo-cerviciliaris” ad ralliam Floridianam Palinae exhabet mascum Obamae ut Luciferis.
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Read the whole thing here.

On the Fourth of July, a little group of Americans held a patriotic celebration in Rome’s Piazza Farnese. We chose a spot near one of the two monumental fountains, huge basins that were originally in the Baths of Caracalla, built around A.D. 212. In typical Roman fashion, some bigwig swiped them 500 years ago to use as ornamental gardenware in his front yard. It wasn’t our idea to use a 2,000-year-old bathtub as the backdrop for a celebration of America’s dubious performance in the War of 1812, it was our friends’, two teachers living in Rome. But our group of 10 (we were traveling with another family of four) happily went along with it.

You go to Rome to get high on history. But history speaks only in fragments. Once you realize you can’t get your arms around the Renaissance, let alone the classical and Christian eras, you give up trying to catch two thousand years of time and settle for moments.

Rome specializes in these surreal time tunnels, moments when the past suddenly undercuts the present. If you’re lucky enough to fall down one of those tunnels, you close your eyes and keep dropping as long as you can.

And in Rome, every street can open beneath your feet.

Sometimes, walking through a city, I imagine that it is a living organism, and that its streets are neural passageways, the frozen residue of thoughts. That dead-end alley in Chinatown is not a walkway to nowhere but a complex line in a poem, one written in an exquisite unknown grammar that you suddenly are able to comprehend. At such moments the city becomes a mirror that reflects your memories and desires. Space overpowers time: As you walk through its streets, you are walking through your own life. Every unknown building and bend in the road are chapters in a story that has already been finished yet is still beginning.

Novelists have always been drawn to the idea that great cities are themselves characters, personages so powerful they take center stage. In Georges Simenon’s Maigret novels, Paris is as important a character as the weary, burly detective. At the end of Balzac’s “Lost Illusions,” the hero looks down upon the “hive” of Paris and vows to conquer it. The fog of Dickens’ London is a living force. The apotheosis of this uncanny reversal of humanity and city is found in Paul Auster’s “City of Glass,” when a character’s erratic movements through the streets of New York are revealed to be a hieroglyph that must be deciphered. In Rome, the streets sometimes feel like animal trails in the great forest of human history — paths that are at once unutterably weighty and completely random.

Our last night in Rome, we wandered at dusk through the Ghetto. A coolness had fallen on the city and the shadows lingered on the piazzas. Passing the Portal of Octavian, we came to the end of a dead-end street. Below, in the shadow of the Theater of Marcellus, a pianist was playing Chopin. A few listeners were sitting on a railing; a woman was painting. Ahead of us rose up the three illuminated columns of the Temple of Apollo, built in 20 B.C., when the Roman republic, the glory of the world, had just fallen. The past touched us, a brief blast of trumpets and light, then receded into the gathering darkness, leaving only a faint echo, like the sound of the sea. It was one of a thousand corners in this unknowable city. We looked around to remember this fleeting and eternal moment. And then we walked on.

After a closer examination of the Antikythera Mechanism, a surviving marvel of ancient Greek technology, scientists have found that the device not only predicted solar eclipses but also organized the calendar in the four-year cycles of the Olympiad, forerunner of the modern Olympic Games.

The new findings, reported Wednesday in the journal Nature, also suggested that the mechanism’s concept originated in the colonies of Corinth, possibly Syracuse, in Sicily. The scientists said this implied a likely connection with the great Archimedes.

Archimedes, who lived in Syracuse and died in 212 B.C., invented a planetarium calculating motions of the Moon and the known planets and wrote a lost manuscript on astronomical mechanisms. Some evidence had previously linked the complex device of gears and dials to the island of Rhodes and the astronomer Hipparchos, who had made a study of irregularities in the Moon’s orbital course.

The Antikythera Mechanism, sometimes called the first analog computer, was recovered more than a century ago in the wreckage of a ship that sank off the tiny island of Antikythera, north of Crete. Earlier research showed that the device was probably built between 140 and 100 B.C.

Only now, applying high-resolution imaging systems and three-dimensional X-ray tomography, have experts been able to decipher inscriptions and reconstruct functions of the bronze gears on the mechanism. The latest research has revealed details of dials on the instrument’s back side, including the names of all 12 months of an ancient calendar.

Read the rest here.

Citing threats to public security and to the site itself, the Italian government has for the first time declared a yearlong state of emergency for the ancient city of Pompeii.

Nearly 2,000 years after Mount Vesuvius buried Pompeii under pumice and steaming volcanic ash, some 2.6 million tourists tramp annually through this archaeological site, which is on Unesco’s World Heritage list.

Frescoes in the ancient Roman city, one of Italy’s most popular attractions, fade under the blistering sun or are chipped at by souvenir hunters. Mosaics endure the brunt of tens of thousands of shuffling thongs and sneakers. Teetering columns and walls are propped up by wooden and steel scaffolding. Rusty padlocks deny access to recently restored houses, and custodians seem to be few and far between.

This month the government drafted a retired lawman, Renato Profili, the former prefect of Naples, to map out a strategy to combat neglect and degradation at the site. Mr. Profili has been given special powers for one year so he can bypass the Italian bureaucracy and speedily bolster security and stop the disintegration.

The hope is that many houses and villas now closed to the public and exposed to looting and vandalism will soon be opened and protected.

Read more here.