Migration and movements of peoples has been a constant ever since Australopithecus set up camp in a more advantageous spot one day four million years ago. This photo by Christian Sinibaldi, posted on the Guardian U.K. website, shows the boat graveyard on the Italian island of Lampedusa, where North African migrants abandon their vessels on their flight to more advantageous spots in Europe. In my constant quest to see the ancient world in our everyday modern lives, I encourage you to consider the current explosive uprisings throughout North Africa & the Middle East as an overlay onto your understanding of the events that precipitated the Greek Dark Ages.
Award ceremony and podcast and taxes, oh my! An overwhelming number of factors contributed to my missing our last podcast. Hope you can forgive me! To make up for it, in today’s podcast I am trotting out a new theory on the destruction of Mycenaean civilization. Michael Shanks and Gary Devore, archaeology professors at Stanford University, discussed their own theory in last week’s Archaeology of Greece class.
For many years now I have been on the children’s book committee for the Northern California Book Awards. Each year for the past 30 years, committees have gathered together from October to April to review the year’s published books from Northern California’s authors. There are dozens and dozens of books to read for each category: fiction, general non-fiction, creative non-fiction, poetry, children’s literature, and translation for poetry & fiction. In the spring I do NCBA work and in the fall I do work for Litquake, the annual literary festival in San Francisco. I am honored to be a part of these organizations and my volunteer work is one of the many ways I contribute my creative energy to the Bay Area writer’s community. As I was writing this, we had a little earthquake! Felt like a truck hit the building. It disturbed the cats (including Achilles, my tuxedo warrior) and we all fled to different parts of the house! And today is the anniversary of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake! Yet another ancient world connection: ancient earthquakes. Think Crete, Delphi, Sicily, and Alexandria, to name a few.
The Medea—why does Euripides add the article “The†to his play about Medea? A play called “Medea†would simply be about the character Medea, like Euripides’s play Alcestis or Hippolytus. But a play titled The Medea elevates the story from the personal to the universal. The Medea is about the rage of woman. If you have not experienced it, consider yourself lucky! Notice I did not say “a woman”. I left out the article—and what a difference it makes, n’est pas?
Medea was a princess of the Black Sea area called Colchis. But more than that, she was a powerful sorceress and granddaughter of Helios. One day a ship called the Argo came to Colchis and its captain was a man named Jason. The Argonauts included such well-known heroes as Orpheus, Castor and Polydeuces, Peleus, and the great Herakles (Hercules). Long story short: Medea helps Jason get the fabulous Golden Fleece, runs away with him, settles down and bears his children—and when Jason dumps her and sets himself up to marry a young princess, Medea exacts vengeance. Virgil had Medea in mind when he was writing of Queen Dido in The Aeneid, but Dido turned her rage inward and destroyed herself, while Medea gave new meaning to the phrase “Come to momma”! What was that song that came out a few years ago…Carrie Underwood’s Before He Cheats: “I took a Louisville slugger to both head lights. Slashed a hole in all 4 tires. And maybe next time he’ll think before he cheats…” That guy got off lucky!
The story of Jason and the Argonauts is older than The Iliad and in Homer’s time, it was universally known. Like all these great tales, there are numerous versions and side-stories. Thanks to Apollonios Rhodios, we get the many strands woven together. Today I will read to you from the 1898 edition of Bulfinch’s Age of Fable or Beauties of Mythology, which will set us up for next week’s Episode which delves into the Euripides’s play The Medea. Bulfinch merely glosses over the revenge sequence, but Euripides takes a magnifying glass and makes us look at the dark side of humanity until it bursts into flames! Euripides is the go-to man if you want to understand the noir ways of your fellow humans. It’s all about suffering with him! Just check out the daily news stories to see how what it is is what it was.
Queen Dido of Carthage. Dead. Built her own funeral pyre and as the flames whipped around her, plunged a dagger into her heart. So thoroughly had she humiliated herself for love of Aeneas, that she could no longer bear to go on. She cursed Aeneas and all of his descendants as she lay dying. Legend has it that her curse was the seed of hatred between Rome and Carthage that lead to the Punic Wars (264-146 B.C.E). Children in Rome were taught from an early age to hate the powerful north African state and all Roman children knew the Latin phrase “Carthago delenda est” or “Carthage must be destroyed”. When Rome finally did destroy Carthage, Roman soldiers were instructed to sow the land with salt so that nothing could grow there. Carthage was abandoned. Later, however, she was rebuilt and became a glorious and influential Roman colony. Some of the best preserved Roman mosaics and ruins are found in Carthage. And to think it all began with a mighty and righteous queen who had her heart broken by a no-good two-timing transient!
Another amazing story of Carthage might is that of Hannibal (no, not the psychopath) and his war elephants, but you have to listen to the podcast to find out! Enjoy!
Today we begin The Aeneid byVirgil, who actually wrote it at the request of Augustus Caesar to link the citizens of Rome to the heroes of yore.  Enjoy the first of three installments of the epic, The Aeneid. Next week, you’ll learn all about this famous tale and why Queen Dido of Carthage is one of my favorite female warrior queens of all-time!
Spent 5 days in L.A. at the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) convention, and can honestly say it was the most magical five days of my writing career. I met so many wonderful career writers it was amazing. I went to 8 workshops given by authors such as Jon Scieszka (of Stinky Cheese Man fame), M.T. Anderson, Gordon Korman, and Gennifer Choldenko (Al Capone Does My Shirts). I went to a booksigning with 44 kidlit authors. I attended a show for children’s book illustrators. I heard 13 keynote addresses. I listened with great interest to 4 panel discussions by industry insiders.
Gwen Minor with Author Paul Fleischman 2010
Seven years ago or so, I read aloud to my classes Paul Fleischman’s 1996 book Dateline: Troy. This remarkable book narrates scenes from The Iliad while including newspaper clippings of modern events that mirror the issues addressed in that most famous epic. If you’ve ever read aloud to anyone, you know how exhausting it can be. Multiply that by three classes for a week and a half and you see what I went through. I desperately wanted my students to know the story of the Trojan War, and they loved the story and Paul’s book, but it took so long to read it out loud! As I looked around at their tired faces, I knew I had to find a better way. So, that summer, I broke my leg roller-skating, and while I was laid up in bed for 3 weeks after surgery, I wrote a 40-minute play of The Iliad so that my students could act it out. I modeled it on some Shakespeare adaptations I had used from an old Scholastic book. Back to school that fall, I knew I had a hit on my hands as the kids showed their enthusiasm for all things Homeric and we started to collect plastic swords, shields, and helmets for the productions! If you look in my book, Read Aloud Plays: The Iliad, The Odyssey, and The Aeneid, I dedicated the book to that first class who made my work come alive onstage and make a special note of thanks to the first boy who played my Achilles. I took my copy of Paul Fleischman’s book Dateline: Troy to L.A. with me this past weekend and had him sign it. I told him how his book inspired my book because I had to get the kids involved in the story. He was amazed to see his book and told me no publisher would take it and that he was rejected over and over again. He said the only reason he got it published was because he sent it to Candlewick Press, a new kid on the block in the publishing world, and they were willing to take a chance on it. I gave him a copy of my book and signed it with gratitude. You undoubtedly know Paul’s father—the famous children’s book author Sid Fleischman. Here is a treasured photograph of me with Paul. Thanks to Peter Linenthal for being there with his camera!
Special thanks to Mac McCool, graphic novelist extraordinaire for giving me a copy of Herakles, the graphic novel made by his college students. Mac has published a bunch of kids’s books and he teaches illustration and sequential art at a university in California. I am sending him a copy of my book in return for his generous gift.
I met so many amazing people. I’ve never been to a professional gathering that was so supportive. I met the children’s author June Sengpiehl and her husband Paul Sengpiehl. Over lunch one afternoon, Paul recounted his years learning Latin in high school with his Latin teacher Lois Fischer, who taught her students this mnemonic for remembering the stages of Roman history: K-R-E-2-5-4. That is: Rome was a kingdom for 200 years, a republic for 500 years, and an empire for 400 years! How exciting! Thank you to Paul for sharing that memory device. I will certainly pass it on to my students and our 6th grade ancient history teacher.
And the best part about the whole weekend, I let go of a project that had hit some serious walls and was keeping me from moving on to the many other exciting writing projects I am working on. This is a good life lesson: sometimes it is better to give a thing up than to hold on and get dragged down with it. Several years ago, my good friend Peter Linenthal asked me to write a children’s book for him and he would do the illustrations. We worked very hard over a long, long time, but publishers and agents prefer to choose their own collaborators. They typically pair a lesser-known illustrator with a better-known writer or vis versa, in the hopes of giving as much support as possible to the project. I hope Peter finds a home for Jaya in the coming months so that he can get to work on the final art work. And thank you, Peter, for the gift of that amazing convention!
