A Pattern Emerges

Folks,

I wish I could claim what I teach as my own, but I cannot. That essential
lesson I learned, and teach, is that you start from a problem you experience,
and make sure there is a buyer who says it is a good idea and does not exist.
Here is an example of a fellow doing it with a book (something I too did).
This fellow DID NOT take my class, but it just goes to show the best way is the
most direct... Note the first three paragraphs... recognize the pattern?

John

Here's Uncle Zeus, Aunt Hera, the Twins ...

July 12, 2003
By BENJAMIN WEISER

It was about 20 years ago when Jon O. Newman, a federal
appeals court judge in Manhattan, walked up to a staff
member in the New York Public Library and asked, "Do you
have a book anywhere in this library that has a complete
genealogical chart of Greek mythology?" They didn't.

"O.K., second question," Judge Newman said. "If there were
such a book, would you buy it?"

"We'd have to," the librarian replied.

It was what the
judge had wanted to hear. For years, his father, Harold
Newman, had pursued a hobby - an elaborate genealogy
project - trying to link all characters from Greek
mythology in a single family tree. Judge Newman wanted to
finish it.

Now, the Newmans' work has been published by the University
of North Carolina Press as "A Genealogical Chart of Greek
Mythology: Comprising 3,673 Named Figures of Greek
Mythology, All Related to Each Other Within a Single Family
of 20 Generations."

If the title seems daunting, the project was, well,
herculean. The research, begun by Harold Newman in 1964,
took almost 40 years.

Harold Newman did not live to see it published; he died in
1993 at the age of 93. Jon Newman, now 71, said in a recent
interview in his chambers that he was able to complete the
work with the assistance of a classics scholar and several
graduate students. Even with all the help, he said, "I
still had no idea it would take so long." The book is laid
out over 72 segments that connect horizontally and a
93-page index that allows readers to find, as the judge
writes, "the entire cast of Greek mythology - Titans, gods
and goddesses, kings, heroes, mortals, giants, monsters,
centaurs, horses, rivers, winds, stars, and
personifications of abstract conceptions."


Zeus's progeny appear on many pages. "He has liaisons with
girls all over the chart," the judge noted. His lovers
included his wife, Hera (producing Ares, the god of war);
Mnemosyne, the symbol of memory (producing the nine muses);
and Leda (producing Helen of Troy).

Judge Newman, who sits on the United States Court of
Appeals for the Second Circuit, with chambers in Manhattan
and Hartford, is not a classics scholar, nor does he
profess to have any more interest in mythological figures
than the average person. He says he was far more interested
in the detective work involved.

It seems fitting that the mapping of the family links
between the Greek gods and heroes would be a father-son
project. Harold Newman had practiced law and then began
writing books on decorative arts, including a definitive
guide to ceramic tea warmers. He also tinkered with
genealogies, tracing his own family tree.

Harold Newman's interest in mythology was casual, his son
said, until he started inserting mythological figures into
a family tree format. Then, his son said, "it just got out
of hand."

Harold had drawn his Grecian family tree on large pieces of
cardboard. In 1980, Judge Newman used a computer software
program to present the chart in printable form, but
discovered that it was incomplete and had "mistakes."

"As my wife keeps saying to me, `What do you mean mistakes?
These people aren't real.' "

To get the facts down, the judge leaned on Apollodorus, a
writer from the second century B.C. who collected myths and
legends.

"His whole book is just a collection of `Who begat whom'
and `Who married whom' " he said. "I'd read through that,
and pick up any names in that book that were not yet on my
chart."

Pausanias, who wrote a kind of Baedeker for ancient Greece
around the second century A.D., was also useful, Judge
Newman says. "He'd say, `I was in this town, and the local
figure is so and so, and they tell the story that he
married so and so, and the children were so and so.' I
would go through that, and pick up a lot of names."

Given the heavy demands of his day job, Judge Newman had to
squeeze in Greek time on Sundays, at night and in the hours
before rosy-fingered dawn made her appearance.

The judge eventually sent the work to a university press.
It was reviewed by an outside scholar, who found it
interesting, but not publishable because it lacked
authoritative citations.

The scholar, Maria-Viktoria Abricka, who had taught
mythology at the University of North Carolina and reads
Greek and Latin, agreed to help. She says she joined the
project because she felt that such a book, with citations,
would offer "a way of tracking the actual stories from the
ancient sources themselves, instead of the bland summaries
that you get in handbooks or dictionaries of myth."

"There was nothing like it before," Dr. Abricka said.


Assisted by a team of graduate students, she delved into
the ancient writings and gave the judge some new
connections and their sources.

Judge Newman found the material valuable. "I started
consulting original texts," he said, "and finding
relationships that weren't even in some of the secondary
sources."

His goal was to identify and cite the oldest authoritative
source for each relationship. But because many such works
have been lost to history, Dr. Abricka said, "we were
dealing with fragments, and putting them together, and
seeing what we could come up with."

One question was where to begin. "There are different
theories of the beginning," Judge Newman said. He chose the
version of the Greek poet Hesiod. "He says it started with
Chaos," the judge said. "Chaos is really not a person. It's
more a concept." But he had to start somewhere.

Another challenge was the blurry line between myth and
reality. Early Greek kings, for example, often claimed to
be descendants of the gods. The judge included such
personages only where "a recognized ancient source"
reported them as the offspring of mythical figures.

Different figures also had the same name. The judge found
at least four women named Antigone. In such cases, he would
try to determine whether they were different versions of
the same person, or different people with different
parents. As he notes in the introduction, "There was no
registry of births and marriages on Mt. Olympus, or at
Athens or Troy."

If there was any parallel to judging, he says, it was here:
it was like deciding paternity suits.

In the chart and the index, the judge used Roman type to
signify male figures, and italic for female. But some
mythological figures did not fit easily into the scheme.

Caenis, for one, was a famous beauty who was raped by
Poseidon while walking on the seashore. Poseidon then
agreed to her request that he make her into a man, so she
would never be a rape victim again. She was transformed
into the warrior Caeneus. In the book, Judge Newman lists
the figure in both italics and Roman type: Caenis/Caeneus.

The judge's daughter, Leigh Newman, 46, a trusts and
estates lawyer in Hartford, said her father's desire to
have accurate citations and a system for presenting them
reflected "something that one does in writing legal
opinions or legal briefs all the time - citing to
authority."

And Judge Guido Calabresi, a fellow member of the appeals
court, says he is not surprised that his colleague would
tackle such an ambitious project. He calls Judge Newman "a
brilliant legal scholar" who is "unusual, because at the
same time, he can see the forest and the trees."

One person who is grateful the Newmans stuck with the
project is Elizabeth L. Diefendorf, chief librarian of the
general research division of the New York Public Library
(who was not present when Judge Newman visited years ago).
She said she had already added "A Genealogical Chart of
Greek Mythology" to the collection.

"I showed it to my colleagues - and I do have some very
learned colleagues here - and their faces just lit up," she
said.

Judge Newman thinks the $75 oversized book could find an
audience with another group: crossword puzzle fans. "I
think hardly a week goes by they don't have a clue that has
to do with Greek mythology," he said.

Will Shortz, the puzzle editor of The New York Times,
confirmed the judge's suspicion. Mythological figures
appear frequently in the paper's puzzles, he said,
especially short names with lots of vowels, like Erato, the
muse of lyric poetry. "They help set up the juicy long
entries," he said.

"Mythology is part of our common culture," he said, "It's
something I expect New York Times solvers to know."

Ms. Newman, the judge's daughter, is a serious crossword
puzzle aficionado herself. Yet she admits to knowing little
about mythology. So will she use her father's book as a
reference tool?

No. If a Greek god appears in a clue, she will try to fill
in other answers until the mystery solves itself.

"Good solvers," she said, "don't use solving aides."


http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/12/nyregion/12GREE.html?ex=1059217688&ei=1&en=6
fc8daf84a056b6e

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