Re: National Association of Scholars on the SCS fiasco

Dan-el Padilla Peralta's work is already impressive, and we'll soon see
more.  I recommend his succinct wrap-up essay to the volume he's coedited:

Rome, Empire of Plunder: The Dynamics of Cultural Appropriation
<https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fsmile.amazon.com%2FRome-Empire-Plunder-Dynamics-Appropriation-ebook%2Fdp%2FB074XFY9DP%2Fref%3Dsr_1_fkmrnull_1%3Fkeywords%3Drome%252C%2Bempire%2Bof%2Bplunder%26qid%3D1551980872%26s%3Dbooks%26sr%3D1-1-fkmrnull&amp;data=02%7C01%7CCLASSICS-L%40lsv.uky.edu%7Ccbecd4ddbce143a9e31e08d6a329fe60%7C2b30530b69b64457b818481cb53d42ae%7C0%7C0%7C636875798093393770&amp;sdata=AymqsylDJtoz3dA6OGxqGR1Xn0EfiDubpZ3zPBAHfWo%3D&amp;reserved=0>
Cambridge University Press, 2018.

The other contributors are quite good too, and the sweep of the volume is
impressive.  David Randall and others have hooted at his publication stats
but seem to feel no obligation to read the man's work: on whom that will
rebound, we'll find out.

It *is* too bad that a volume so focused on plunder omits the -- I'd
thought unforgettable -- remark by Geoffrey de Ste. Croix:

In Peter Brown's brilliant little book. *The World of Late Antiquity*
(1971), there is a metaphor of a rather different kind [than Gibbon's
"stupendous fabric"], which equally expresses the basic idea of something
that was essentially either inevitable or ... fortuitous: "Altogether, the
prosperity of the Mediterranean world seems to have drained to the top."
... If I were in search of a metaphor to describe the great and growing
concentration of wealth in the hands of the upper classes, I would not
incline towards anything so innocent and so automatic as drainage: I should
want to think in terms of something much more purposive and deliberate -
perhaps the vampire bat." ("Karl Marx and the Study of Classical
Antiquity," *Arethusa* 1975)


-- although Padilla-Peralta offers yet another apt metaphor, p. 270.

Dan

On Fri, Mar 1, 2019 at 9:53 AM John Lauritsen <[email protected]>
wrote:

> David Randall, writing for the National Association of Scholars,
> gives a judicious summary of the SCS Williams-Peralta fiasco:
>
> "Clearing the Air: Racial Preferences in Classics Studies Revisited":
>
> https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nas.org%2Farticles%2Fclearing_the_air_racial_preferences_in_classics_studies_revisited&amp;data=02%7C01%7CCLASSICS-L%40lsv.uky.edu%7Ccbecd4ddbce143a9e31e08d6a329fe60%7C2b30530b69b64457b818481cb53d42ae%7C0%7C0%7C636875798093393770&amp;sdata=0wjJgrR8FZFnEfE3OkT8feZZFpjjVKMKAAxTjOe3xps%3D&amp;reserved=0
>
>
> John Lauritsen, Independent Scholar
>