27 Jun 2008
Hugh Fitzgerald

"British businessman Robert Bittlestone, Cambridge classicist James Diggle, and University of Edinburgh geologist John Underhill." [from the article above]

Bittleston, Diggle, and Underhill? 

In its younger days, in its rise-and-shine Ross-and-Shawn days, before it became middle-aged and was turned over to the young and the with-it, The New Yorker used to carry, under the rubric "There'll Always Be An England" little bottom-of-the-page items such as the excerpt above, its humor derived from those names that, to literate Americans, would seem quintessentially English, though in this case the names in question are not in the anthony-ashley-cooper, henry-chenevix-ffrench pip-pip-cheerio-and-tallyho (they all get jumbled together in our impressionable minds) line, but rather in the dickensian pickwickian mode. Such names as Bittleston, Diggle, Underhill, especially when they appear together, sound to Americans like people dragged by Mr. Alfred Jingle to an extraordinary meeting of the Pickwick Club to be held, weather permitting, this very evening at Dingley Dell. And what could be more fitting than those names Bittleston and Underhill and Diggle appearing together in a parargaph about a study to locate, through geology and, impliedly, archaeology, the exact location of Homer's Ithaca, the place from which wily Odysseus set out, and to which wily Odysseus returned, after many adventures under the protection of grey-eyed Athena, Pallas Athena. Yes, what names could be more dickensianly apt for such a scholarly entreprise or undertaking than that of Underhill, than that of Diggle? Especially Diggle.  

27 Jun 2008
John M. J.

Hugh, so used am I to the peculiarity of British surnames that I never noticed this. Surely, if there is any literary justice in this world, they have to be:

Bittleston, Diggle and Underhill, WS.

Now that would be nearly perfect!

27 Jun 2008
Hugh Fitzgerald
Scots Law is unique because it is partly descended, I have been led to believe ever since the rumor reached me, from Roman law. Being  a common person,  I'm all for the Common Law of commonsensical judges, straight up. Even in the English Common Law system studied and sung by Maitland, statutory law has been making too many recent inroads. How much more codified, then, must a legal system such as that in Scotland, which starts out as a glaikit civil-common law blend, by now have become? You must feel nowadays as if you're on the Continent, when you've just gone a little north of Gretna Green. That will never do.

28 Jun 2008
Special Guest
In the U.S., land of sensible and staid names, we have to settle for the law firm of Dewey, Cheatham, and Howe.

28 Jun 2008
John M. J.

No, not entirely correct. Scots law merely took, in medieval times, the Roman rational and applied that Roman reasoning, as medieval lawyers saw it, to pre-existing common law and its medieval sources. This has meant that much tribal law, and lore, has, in some sense, had to be rationalised into modern legal institutions in Scotland. Scots law, although homologous today, has not, historically, been the only law applied in Scotland. Much of Scots law - particularly property and inheritance law - pace The Lyon Court - is still difficult to set into a modern legal system.

 

Much Old Norse law, as well Celtic Tribal Law, has been incorporated into Scots Law. It's one of the great myths of our civilisation that' in some sense, Scottish law is Roman Law - it isn't, it's just law and just like all the other legal systems - complex and having of many roots.

The problem with you Americans is that you can't resist romanticising Scotland and all its institutions. The Roman reasoning  of the Enlightement certainly influenced the Laws of Scotland, just as it did in almost all other European states, and in your's, but it's not the basis, nor does it contain all the bases, of Scottish law.

Like all legal systems, the Scottish Legal System is precisely that - the Scottish legal system. The rationale of Roman thought systems overlaying medieval and tribal law complicatec by a belief in canon law prevalent and influential for several hundred years.

What on earth made you think that Scots law was going to turn out to be any different from any other Canon of Law? It's just law, for heaven's sake - no different from any other!

As for being North of Gretna - irrelevant. Law, as such, is pretty much the same no matter which democracy you live in.

There's no magic bullet and nothing in Law that guarantees freedom - but what the law fails to realise is that there is no part of Freedom that guarantees law - and that's what lawyers are afraid of! Law is the moving ground which freedom underpins - that's why lawyers run scared - but freedom and liberty are above the law. Grief, they hate that!

 

28 Jun 2008
Clark

After a remarkable 2500 years of a stable Hellenic language and traditions preserving even the battles in which Aeschylus took part, one hopes that the barbarians, especially the anglophone, have not excluded the isle of Ithaki, just east of Cephallonia, out of careless arrogance.

29 Jun 2008
John M. J.

Ithaki is not Ithaca - just a little learning, so very little learning, would make that obvious fact so very obvious. Consider the Venetians, dear fellow, and how they renamed - renamed in such ways so as to suit themselves and their classical readings and interpretations - each and every geological and political feature which they encountered. Ithaki was named by them - the brave adventurers - as such in, or earlier than, 1157AD, leastways according to the oldest records present in Venice which are reckoned to be the distributed remains of the great Marciano Library. That, in itself, indicates that Venetian seafarers called that small island Ithaki for no better reason than that was their interpretation of older, and still extant when they were writing, debased classical texts. That Greeks, much later and debased Greeks, accepted Venetian re-constructions of ancient history and accepted the name Ithaki for a small and irrelevant island, proves nothing. Names shift, names move, and one cannot trust modern statements to be anything other than a vague and inaccurate reflection of the past. What, in this case, you presently see, is not what, originally, you might have got!

Good try, but no cigar. Sorry!

29 Jun 2008
Clark
A millennium before the Venetians, Strabo,  who knew the geography of the islands well and was better versed in interpreting Homer than any living person, concluded that Ithaki was the island of Odysseus.
Although there is some modern archaeological evidence in support of this view, there are also substantive claims for Leukas or Paliki.
At this point the assertion that Ithaki is excluded is not well founded.