In Rome related news (but not classical Rome), the Italian Renaissance painter Michelangelo Caravaggio appears to have overtaken that other Michelangelo (di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni) in the race for the most scholarly articles, according to the New York Times.  The reason?  The erosion of the classical education, according to the scholar who is tracking this trend:

But, charts or no charts, Mr. Sohm has touched on something. Caravaggiomania, as he calls it, implies not just that art history doctoral students may finally be struggling to think up anything fresh to say about Michelangelo. It suggests that the whole classical tradition in which Michelangelo was steeped is becoming ever more foreign and therefore seemingly less germane, even to many educated people. His otherworldly muscle men, casting the damned into hell or straining to emerge from thick blocks of veined marble, aspired to an abstract and bygone ideal of the sublime, grounded in Renaissance rhetoric, which, for postwar generations, now belongs with the poetry of Alexander Pope or plays by Corneille as admirable but culturally remote splendors.

Caravaggio, on the other hand, exemplifies the modern antihero, a hyperrealist whose art is instantly accessible. His doe-eyed, tousle-haired boys with puffy lips and bubble buttocks look as if they’ve just tumbled out of bed, not descended from heaven. Coarse not godly, locked into dark, ambiguous spaces by a strict geometry then picked out of deep shadow by an oracular light, his models come straight off the street. Cupid is clearly a hired urchin on whom Caravaggio strapped a pair of fake wings. The angel in his “Annunciation” dangles like Chaplin’s tramp on the high wire in “The Circus,” from what must have been a rope contraption Caravaggio devised.

I can accept that the classical tradition may be going out of fashion and becoming less vogue (even I have my spurts of liking post-modernism), but the disturbing trend is that the classical tradition appears to be growing less relevant.  Yikes.

The following, given below, showed up in USA Today (that big hotbed of classical news), but references the much more reliable Archaeology publication (given even more below).

Unearthed tombs on Crete reveal a dynasty of priestesses reigned on the isle during the "Dark Ages" of ancient Greece.

In an Archaeology magazine report, writer Eti Bonn-Muller details the results from last summer's excavation of the tombs of Orthi Petra at Eleutherna on Crete, where a team found the burials of a high priestess of Zeus and three acolytes this summer.

"People then may have considered them sorceresses, or intermediaries with the gods," Bonn-Muller says. Led by archaeologist Nicholas Stampolidis, the team dates the four burials to 2,800 years ago. Earlier digs had discovered the cremated remains of other priestesses, buried together in large "pithoi" jars from 2,900 to 2,700 years ago. All of the women appear related, based on distinctive features of their teeth, the team reports. "What's really remarkable is the find shows these women were a dynasty that lasted at least 200 years in this location," Bonn-Muller says.

The burial site is near Mount Ida, where in Greek mythology, Zeus, the king of the gods, was sheltered from his father in infancy. Artifacts from the tombs show trade with Egypt, Greece and the Near East took place on Crete at the time. "The finds have the potential to change how we think about the roles of women during this period of time," Bonn-Muller adds. "Archaeologists had thrift of the era as an empty period but we are seeing a lot took place then."

The Archaeology piece, of course, has much more information, some pretty nice pictures (ooh, Mount Ida! ooh, excavated ruins!  ooh, dirt!  I do like the picture of the author taking a picture of an archaeologist - it's metaphotography).  The best part is this:

Stampolidis's team has unearthed three types of Iron Age burials at Orthi Petra--or "Standing Stone" (see "Introduction to Orthi Petra" video for more on the site's name)--dating from the ninth to the seventh century B.C.: pithos (large ceramic jar) burials, cremations, and basic inhumations. Over the years, stunning finds have come to light, ranging from exquisite bronze vessels to the fragile skeleton of a dog that accompanied its master to the other side. The team has also discovered funerary buildings and activity areas for cremations, including pyres straight out of verses from the Iliad.

As a classicist, you can only get so excited about large ceramic jars.  But, anything that comes straight out of the Iliad sends a (good) shiver down my spine.  Plus, the dog (no doubt named Argos, if Greek textbooks and ancient epics are at all accurate) buried beside its master is both chilling (was the dog killed when its master died?) and somber (recalling the dog from Pompeii).

MCA member TW heard on the BBC World Service yesterday morning (at 5 am, yikes!) an interview with Caroline Alexander, the author of The War That Killed Achilles (available here from the MCA Store) that has since been lost in the ether (at least as best this web-savvy classicist can tell).

• The best I could do is find this hour long lecture given by the author, on Thirteen Forum on the MPBN website.  An hour of video is much better than a couple of minutes of audio, right?  (Sadly, the video isn't embeddable, so you'll have to click on the link - given here again - to watch it)
• The second best I could do is find this 45 minutes worth audio from BBC Radio about a few weeks ago on the subject of war (and the British Chilcot Inquiry) with Caroline Alexander.  The Trojan War is the first topic discussed, but the rest of the discussion is amazingly (refreshingly?) intelligent and sprinkled with classical references. (Again, not embeddable, so you'll have to click on the link - given here again - to listen to it)
• And, of course, not related to Caroline Alexander at all, is In Search of the Trojan War, the great BBC miniseries from the 80s.  It's available on Netflix (Instant Netflix too, if you're one of those people to spend 6 hours of your summer sitting, mesmerized, in front of your laptop while the baby sleeps), and is a great way to get anyone interested in Troy, Mycenaean Greece, and Michael Wood, once called "the thinking woman's crumpet," which I think is a good thing.  (Wood also made In the Footsteps of Alexander the Great, if you want a manufacture a connection between him and someone named Alexander)

Forty-seven teams from nine schools through Maine came to Camden Hills Regional High School to participate in the annual Certamen Night to determine the best, most knowledgeable, and quickest Latin teams in the state.  All teams played three rounds to determine seeding going into the final round, which pitted the top three teams, then the next three, as a way to determine the final placings.  Individual teams were allowed to determine their team names, and we had some creative ones as well (translations in parentheses).

The results for the top 12 teams at each level are:

Latin 1

1. Camden Hills Fulgor Pisces (Lightening Fish)
2. Camden Hills Fuscae Laetae (Jolly Brown)
3. Nokomis Latinam Dicam (I Shall Speak Latin)
4. Nokomis Voluntes Sciuri (Flying Squirrels)
5. John Bapst SPectaQulaR
6. Camden Hills Rarae Aves (Rare Birds, literally but not idiomatically)
7. Boothbay Region Alpha
8. Sacopee Accipites Acres (Fierce Hawks)
9. Winthrop Exercitus Magistrae (Mrs. Cook's Army)
10. Camden Eugepae (Hurrah!)
11. Winthrop Magni et Mali (Big and Bad)
12. Boothbay Beta