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| date | 2001-001-20:15:46 |
| Movies |
Up At The Villa is a very Aristotlian film. It's based on a story by Somerset Maughm, and set in pre-war (1939) Florence. It's about the relationship between men and women, and the theme is developed by presenting Mary, an English expatriat with rich friends but no longer any money of her own, three choices: a penniless Austrian refugee, a staid and proper elderly British official, and a married but separated American of considerably wealth but dubious reputation, who is played by Sean Penn. Penn is remarkably good as Rolly Flint, and you can clearly see why Mary is attracted to him. Why he's attracted to her is a little less clear--she's fairly good looking, but seems a bit timid to interest someone like Flint, who's clearly attracted to risk, uncertainty and adventure. Over the course of the film Mary has to ask herself what she wants and what she's willing to give up to get it. What sort of compromise or bargain is she willing to strike with a man to get a measure of security, social position and wealth? Or is it love that she's after? What's the point of a life without love? The threatening background of growing Italian Fascism makes the fragility of a woman alone in the middle years of the last century constantly present. Penn's character clearly loathes the fascists, to the extent that I wondered at times if we would learn at the end of the film that he was working for the American or British secret service. The Munich Accord, frequently mentioned, also helped emphasize the fragility of human promises--it turned out that "Our Time" turned out to be a very short time for there to be "Peace In". Mary does turn out to be resourceful and capable, but it would be a better film if we saw her with some ambition or life outside of the quest for a man. To an extent it was true of it's time, but many women of her age and station were looking beyond the boundaries of marriage at that time, so she could have been given some added depth without too much cost of plausibility. But even so, the film is full of characterization, with Derek Jacoby doing a wonderful rendition of an aging English homosexual bemoaning the drop off in the tourist trade. I was doubtful about renting Up At The Villa, but having seen it I'm more than likely to see it again. |
| Reading |
So here are my final notes on Grant's The Ancient Mediterranean. It really is a very good book--marvelous in both scope and depth, even if I think he is a little under-critical in his assessment of the role of irrigation in the formation of the early empires. He clearly loves the ancient Mediterranean world deeply, and that love shows through on every page. It's good to see that passion and desire so openly displayed in such an objective and careful work. The most valuable aspect of the book to me was the careful treatment of the times in between. We tend to get history in the form of few snapshots. "This is Periclian Athens", "This is Rome at the time of Civil Wars", "This is the later Roman Empire". What we miss are the transitions, the long, relatively undocumented streches of cloth that connect those snapshots together: the time between the fall of Mycenea and the rise of Athens and Sparta, the time between the fall of the Hittite Empire and the rise of the Persian, the time before Rome in Italy, full of Etruscans and Greeks. Grant has created an incomparable high-level picture of this world, showing with a light touch the probable influences of one culture upon another, drawing possible connections and telling of known associations. He isn't eager to draw conclusions, but is more than willing to estimate probabilities. It's clear, for instance, that the Etruscans influenced the Romans, and probable that the Greeks influenced the Etruscans via the many Greek colonies in southern Italy. It's clear that Babylonia probably had an influence, either directly or via Phoenicia, on early Greek thought. Within the portrait Grant paints, one can start to pick out patterns of probable influence, and grasp some sense of the whole course of historical development, particularly in the Eastern Mediterranean. The incidental facts are also fascinating. He mentions the silphium plant, grown only in Cyrenaica, which was exported as a seasoning and "for medicianl uses". I'm pretty sure this plant was a natural contraceptive, and was overharvested for that purpose and driven into extinction. Perhaps its power was a myth, or perhaps some clever genetic engineer will answer that question in a few years. Grant touches on such large issues as the role of slavery (Greece was never a slave society, although the difference between a slave and a serf might be hard for modern eyes to see, Rome depended on slavery increasingly throughout both the republic and the empire) and the role of Delphi in acting as a sort of cultural United Nations of the Greek world, an institution that had the power to influence but not control the behavior of individual city-states. Neither technical nor socio-economic discoveries are passed over--the extensive mining and metal-working industries in the ancient world are mentioned, and he suggests that the growth of Roman power was due in part to the wide-scale adoption of direct taxation of non-citizen subjects in it's provinces. This made a policy of continual conquest both practical and profitable. The Roman discovery of concrete was a great wonder, and Pliny describes its low origins and beneficial uses in a way that is remeniscent of today's pangyrics to lowly silicon. Grant concludes with an appendix in which he argues that while we can't ignore the context in which they worked, nor can we ignore the great individuals who were able to turn that context to their profit, and so discovered new things, new ways of thinking, new arts and ideas. It is true that the invention of civilization depended on people finding themselves in paricularly favorable geographical and biological circumstances, surrounded by plants and animals they could domesticate. But he reminds us that it is equally true that some one had to take advantage of those circumstances, and everything we know about invention suggests that progress was made by a relatively small number of people building in tiny steps on the work of others, while the populace at large adapted and benefitted from their creativity. This is certainly the best survey of the ancient world I've ever read, and I've found the context it provides for the presocratic philosophers its most valuable aspect. Last summer I bought a book of presocratic writings while travelling with Caro to the TOC advanced seminar, and it's clearly time to get it off the shelf and dive in. |