Last year I read both the Iliad and the Odyssey, and along the way enjoyed the movie Troy, with Hollywood's special rendition of Trojan doom and disaster. In Homer and Hollywood (alright, I admit the latter got over the top at points) at least you've got flesh and blood beings to consider -- Defiant Achilles (Brad Pitt)
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or Dutiful Hector (Eric Bana), readying himself for oblivion in a battle with Achilles.
I concede that Homer was writing fiction (sort of) and Thucydides struggled to get down "the facts ma'am, just the facts" (a phrase I know Jack Webb never actually uttered on Dragnet, but seems appropriate in relation to General T.). But imagine a book full of these kinds of notations:
(Book 8, line 38) After this agreement Therimenes handed over the fleet to Astyochus. He sailed away himself in a small boat and was lost at sea.
Boom! That's it! No "search and rescue" launched to find him, no grieving widow or children, no tribute to how people regarded his untimely death. Nothing.
However,
unlike Homer whose quest wasn't for truth, per se, Thucydides probably had it
on good authority that that's what happened to Therimenes. Maybe that's
all he could discover. End of story.
I
guess reading some passages in Thucydides is like eating puffed rice, very
bland fare without something to give it a more human flavor. C'est la vie!
***
I mentioned a few posts back that I had picked through a very large accumulation of Chronicle of Higher Education issues. One of the subjects I was keeping an eye out for was the MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) movement. It's a new phenomenon, with Coursera.org in the lead, as far as offerings, but there is a growing list of MOOC providers.
Personally, despite my long association with Academe, I think MOOCs offer the potential for a huge transformation of our society. American librarians are credited (charged?) with breaking down the barriers surrounding access to information in the 19th century -- putting books in the hands of citizens whose meager incomes could never afford buying and accumulating books like the wealthy. And of course, publishers then were not so pleased to see potential revenue slipping away as library users happily charged out reading material for free.
I guess you can say I'm an early MOOC adopter. I heard about MOOCs on the way to work on National Public Radio last summer and decided to investigate Coursera.org. Ultimately I enrolled last September in the Greek and Roman Mythology course taught by Professor Peter Struck of the University of Pennsylvania. I should say, I and 55,000 other students signed up!
I had read the Iliad earlier in the year and this MOOC required, among other things, that we read the Odyssey in roughly three weeks. Good discipline, that. I enjoyed Professor Struck's lectures immensely. You can occasionally catch him on the History Channel and other cable programs. Also, his Ph.D. candidate graduate assistants who occasionally joined him on screen were like perfect Muses.
Trouble is, according to the reportage in the Chronicle of Higher Education, some faculty members are getting riled up about MOOCs. There are several reasons, but the most obvious is the threat to their economic security (not at all unlike the threat posed by free public libraries to publishers and to subscription libraries in the past).
At the present time MOOCs are searching for a secure funding mechanism. The course I took was free (except I paid for my books, owned my own computer, had home access to the Internet, etc.). Because it was free, there was a huge dropout rate. In fact, fewer than 1% of the students who enrolled actually finished watching the video lectures, took (and passed) the quizzes, and completed (and passed) the essay questions.
No doubt MOOCs are for people who are self-motivated and can handle the modality of instruction.
MOOCs? I like 'em!
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