Also scheduled for production is Agora, a film about Hypatia, starring Rachel Weisz and directed by Alejandro Amenábar.

The film focuses on one of the most impressive female figures in history – Hypatia, a leading thinker in the Rome-governed Alexandria, considered to be the first notable woman of mathematics. She studied philosophy and astronomy, and both pagan and Christian students from far and wide came together to study under her. “For all men on account of her extraordinary dignity and virtue admired her the more.”

“We’re capable, but not practiced, in the art of thinking,” says Phil Terry, CEO of Creative Good, a business consulting company, and the founder of a web-based reading and lecture organization called Reading Odyssey. “We’re all endowed with curiosity, but a lot of us, for very good reasons, stop using it after a certain point. After a certain age, we tend to substitute opinions for thinking.”

…According to Terry (and Berkshire-Hathaway vice-chariman Charlie Munger, among others), the answer lies in the classics. Why the classics? First, to gather a broad base of knowledge about the “big ideas” across all the major academic disciplines. And second, to develop the ways of thinking and the “habit of wisdom” Aristotle believed were critical to good decision-making.

…Wisdom, according to Aristotle, isn’t an object anyone acquires. It’s a habit; something that emerges from a particular way of processing information and engaging with others and the world. And a habit that’s essential for us to develop to make better decisions in business and life. That theme is prevalent …in Terry’s Reading Odyssey teleconference-based lecture and discussion groups–which he set up to help curious adults explore and debate classics and “big ideas” from thinkers ranging from Homer, Aristotle and Herodotus to Darwin.

…perhaps, after years of hubris born of steadily rising stock markets, we’re suddenly, post-crash, a bit more open to the idea that we might not know all there is to know–and that we might even need to develop new ways of learning what there is to know. The Greeks knew something about that, too. After all, they’re the ones who coined the term “hubris.” And anyone who paid attention in history and literature class knows that it was almost always followed by a fall.

The upcoming Starz drama series Spartacus: Blood and Sand will include both gay and lesbian characters, executive producer Rob Tapert told TheTorchOnline.com today.

The drama stars Andy Whitfield and Lucy Lawless in a retelling of the story of the legendary rebel Roman gladiator-slave who lived in Rome from 109 BC to 71 BC and led a slave rebellion that eventually included 140,000 escaped slaves. The first season leads up to Spartacus’s escape from the slave prison.

Tapert is co-executive producing the series along with Sam Raimi, with whom he executive-produced Xena: The Warrior Princess.

Spartacus’s showrunner is Steven DeKnight, who told IGN recently, “I come from the Joss Whedon camp, so I love strong women, and I love big sweeping romantic arcs that will probably end badly, just like Joss always does.”

Each of the 13 episodes in the first season — which debuts on the premium network in January — reportedly cost over $2 million, and will include more graphic sex and violence than 300, says Tapert. “[The network] has given us quite a bit of rope with which to hang ourselves,” he says. Filming for the series is currently taking place in New Zealand.

Lawless (who is married to Tapert) plays Lucretia, the owner of the gladiator school where Spartacus (Whitfield) is imprisoned. John Hannah will play her husband, and Erin Cummings (Bitch Slap!, Dante’s Cove) has been cast as Spartacus’s wife.

Cleopatra died more than 2,000 years ago, at the age of 39. Before she was a slot machine, a video game, a cigarette, a condom, a caricature, a cliché or a synonym for Elizabeth Taylor, before she was reincarnated by Shakespeare, Dryden or Shaw, she was a nonfictional Egyptian queen. She ruled for 21 years, mostly alone, which is to say that she was essentially a female king, an incongruity that elicits the kind of double take once reserved for men in drag.

From her point of view there was nothing irregular about the arrangement. Cleopatra arguably had more powerful female role models than any other woman in history. They were not so much paragons of virtue as shrewd political operators….Cleopatra’s great-grandmother waged one civil war against her parents, another against her children. These women were raised to rule.

Cleopatra has gone down in history as a wanton seductress. She is the original bad girl, the Monica Lewinsky of the ancient world. And all because she turns up at one of the most dangerous intersections in history, that of women and power.

…

Granting that the double standard has outlived Cleopatra by at least 2,000 years, what are we doing today on that Egyptian hill, under the ruins of the temple of Taposiris Magna? “This could be the most important discovery of the 21st century,” says Egypt’s antiquities director, Zahi Hawass, of the dig. Certainly it would be a relief to cross Cleopatra off our list of objects we have lost, or believe we have lost: Atlantis, Jamestown, an entire tribe of Israel, good manners, Jimmy Hoffa.

If we find Cleopatra’s tomb — and certainly we will find something relevant, as Dr. Hawass seems determined to make a discovery to rival the 1922 one of King Tut — we may well be able to solve the mystery of Cleopatra’s death.

In a few opening remarks, Simon repeatedly cited Greek tragedy’s influence on “The Wire,” explaining that in the place of the meddlesome Greek gods who randomly ruined people’s lives he subbed in modern institutions. In what seemed a preemptive nod toward any outraged [...] fans in the audience, Simon also leaned on the same source to explain the fate for some of his show’s most popular characters. “Those who want to know why [...] had to die, why [...] had to die,” he said, “Strap on a helmet, get in the game and read Antigone. Read Medea. It had to happen.”

A lot of work has been done recently on the Western as America’s version of Homeric myth, there’s a scene toward the end of season 3 depicting a tense stand-off between two charismatic urban gunslingers, if you will, who meet in the shadows of a dark alley rather than at high noon in the town square.  The Iliad’s codes of male conduct and the rituals of combat always seem to hover in the background of any form of warfare, whether it takes place in another country, in the Wild West, or in the streets.

Structural resonances aside, there are a couple of sly allusions to the show’s Greek tragic inspiration–a reference to Ares and a mysterious Greek drug smuggler who sends text messages in, not surprisingly, modern Greek.

Also, I wonder if the show’s title, “The Wire” has some significance. As a tool for trying to access the truth, the wiretap kind of functions like the poet, who expresses the engimatic words of the Muses.  It’s not a perfect analogy, but the parties on both ends of the wire (the drug dealers and the cops) are to some degree defined by their ignorance because the drug dealers don’t know they’re being tapped, and the cops have to decode and interpret their verbal transmissions.  But even when the whole situation comes to light and goes to trial, neither side really knows what will happen and what significance the wire and the communications it records will have for their respective cases.

In any case, stuff to think about.  (Click here to see what Obama thinks.)

My own travels and talks for PBK have persuaded me all is not lost.

…Professors who are devoted to PBK are active all across the country. They teach their students with contagious enthusiasm, as I have seen firsthand at the University of Arkansas, Eastern Illinois University and Jacksonville State University in Alabama, and at smaller jewels like Hendrix College in Arkansas, Gustavus Adolphus and St. Olaf in Minnesota, and Roanoke College in Virginia.

…Let’s get out of the way of teachers at all levels who believe what Phi Beta Kappa stands for: “Love of learning will captain the ships of our lives.” Their students will do the rest. All of our boats will rise.

New members of Eta Sigma Phi include: Dan Barthell, Katie Jorgensen, Katie Webster, Jericho Westendorf, Harry Youngvorst, Colleen Javorina, Emily Kuenker, Brad Abell, Karl Boettcher, Emily Johnson, Carissa Keith, Molly McBride, Rachel Peters, and Tanya Rupp.