Beyond Solitaire Podcast 115: Josh Hartman on Puerto Rican Classical Reception

[Music] thank you it's ad break time the Beyond Solitaire podcast is proudly sponsored by Central Michigan University's Center for Learning through games and simulations which as usual has amazing things going on they continue to run courses in applied game design in partnership with Gen Con and next up is Travis Hills finding your Niche expanding your skill set across five different gaming genres it starts May 16th so register soon I also want to put in a plug for cartini from Darkness to light a game by Zenobia finalist Sharia ayawandini that will be published by ion game design CMU is partnering with ion to publish a curriculum guide which will be authored by the amazing Christian hints cartini is set to launch on Kickstarter on May 23rd and finally a quick plug for myself if you like my game work and want to see more of it support me at patreon.com Beyond Solitaire it would mean a whole lot to me for now though let's get on with the show hey Gamers it's Liz Davidson of Beyond Solitaire and this week I have a very special guest this is Dr Josh Hartman he's a visiting assistant professor of Classics at Bowdoin University uh how you doing Josh hello um I'm well and I feel like I should I don't know I should do Bowden a favor and mention that Bowdoin is actually vote in college um university well but thank you I always figure you just go up instead of down if you forget uh but um so you are doing a game about Greek which is one of the things I brought you on to talk about and then we're going to talk about some reception study stuff later in the interview for those of you who are interested in Puerto Rican reception of classical literature uh let's talk about your game first what uh what's your game and what what inspired you to make it so um when I began teaching um so I should say that this isn't something that I'm actively using at the moment um not because um well for no other reason that I'm just not teaching in the Greek sequence right now um but when I arrived at Kalamazoo College in 2017.

I knew that I was going to um be asked to teach the Greek sequence for all of my time there and I I had a a relatively long short-term contract um that is to say I knew I was probably going to do this for multiple years in a row and when I got on campus I noticed that there was a pretty robust gaming culture among the students especially students who were interested in ancient history and Classics there was a lot of reacting to the past in the history Department across different specializations so not only in ancient and medieval history but then also a little bit in U.S history um as well um and so that led me down the path of trying to think about what a classroom game that could uh that could exist across the entirety of an introductory sequence in an ancient language might be like so I began developing Olympus this board game uh set in sort of an a historical ancient Greece and I can talk about what I mean by that as we go forward in terms of what a historical is supposed to be yeah actually uh we just had Kate Cook come on about um Classics and you know women in classical video games so thinking about you know authenticity versus historicity versus accuracy you know yeah I actually am sort of curious about that um but this is mostly him about language correct yeah so um to um break it down into it's really its most basic part uh what I wanted was a flexible game-based structure that would allow students to use language skills while also exploring some of the history and cultures side of ancient and Roman and even medieval Byzantine Greece that is that is bringing students into the classroom and over the course of such a long history of 2000 years of Greek culture there's no way to to do that to sort of hit all of these diverse things and so one way to get around this problem of content selection is to make it random um and in so doing students sort of experience you know there are different cards and different events and different monsters that are from different mythologies or different historical time periods or different cities and so this is this a historical thing where it's odd in other contexts maybe to encounter something from the way to Roman Empire and from classical Athens um or from constant to Noble and Sparta in the same 20 minutes um but this was a framework that would permit that on the content side while also focusing on different aspects of uh sort of language learning reinforcement different paradigms can come into play so to give a concrete example here like um many of many of your listeners might be familiar with what a verb synopsis is in an ancient language where you uh basically give a ton of different forms as completely as you can depending on where you are in your knowledge of the language for different um for different parts of a verb form so like every second singular U form you can think of for example or something like this not just hanging out there by itself to do which is a common kind of assignment but instead put into the context of the Spartan um agoge the the training regimen uh for Spartan male citizen children sort of much romanticized in various forms of popular media sometimes but anyways to sort of introduce what that is through this grammar task and then of course your your character who you're following through this game gets some kind of benefit if they can do it so did you find that your students were receptive to uh playing a game instead of just doing a normal verb synopsis where uh do you have the ones who are like I'll just sit here and memorize this leave me alone um so yeah that's a great question um the the short answer is yes and the survey data that I collected indicates that too um but the you know in this in the spirit of what I've been talking about before right that is a random event that that came up when someone landed on Sparta and they they rolled a 20-sided die and that's the random event that happened to them because of that dice roll um and then they also learned this cultural fact and so one of the things that I was trying to get it when I mentioned this idea of a flexible framework that does a lot of things is um you know different students have different learning goals um and some of those are content driven so if somebody's really interested in ancient Sparta um that might feel very successful for them in spite of whatever happens on the synopsis um and that's important as well and then of course there are language related goals and so maybe you don't care about Sparta at all um and maybe you mentioned you have a background in early Christian Studies if you're there to read the New Testament the Spartan sort of uh rapper uh that that comes in is is maybe not exciting to you um but it could be later on um when there is the parable of the Publican which is also like one of the cards that comes up um anyway so yeah um the other thing about that too is one thing that was important to me um in terms of creating this framework was this idea okay your character is going on this journey and they progress and get stronger as as you might expect um in a lot of The Narrative of many gaming experiences uh but one thing that I wanted to do with that is turn it into an opportunity for reflection that's sort of the development of a growth mindset in the class so there were rappers that were attached to this is a concept ripped off from the idea of exam wrappers where you take an exam and afterwards you kind of have like a little mini survey where you talk about it and what I did was um ask them to sort of reflect on their experience playing the game of things they got right of things they got wrong of the progress that they were making and I think it's a it's a different thing entirely to ask students to do that kind of as you're indicating like what's their what's their affect towards this just by itself and then is making it kind of a game-based exercise um it I hope it's my hope there that it feels more more fun more engaging to do this kind of um mindset and reflection and progress reflection if it is also even somewhat transparently tied to this idea of oh my character is whoever um Achilles I have I've had multiple Achilles over the years so they also pick a character and decide why this character is um why this character is on this this journey um and um oh yeah that hopefully that idea is slightly more or rather slightly less intimidating is slightly more approachable or less intimidating depending on how we want to go about this because it is connected to a sort of game-based experience and then you also have different groups of students who uh play this together um and I think that that's also fun um and successful in certain ways there are also various mechanisms for student input for instance there's a delphic Oracle experience where students are supposed to make up prophecies for each other and then decipher them up and so [Music] um there is as I think you're suggesting a motivation based element for this um that it might incentivize for example different kinds of um different kinds of studying or a different disposition towards some of this um some of the sort of very grammar focused practice that students are often asked to do in introductory language classrooms of ancient languages in particular yeah I'm also interested in this because so I'm a comprehensible input Latin teacher which means that we do very little grammar-based stuff in the first couple of years and in fact spend a lot of time interacting the language so I'm always just really interested in um you know how are we all engaging our students how are we all playing games with our students and so like this is kind of an interesting implementation of that and then I you actually started to answer a question that I had which was um you know how do you target subject matter for your students and how do you choose what goes into the game and what doesn't and it sounds like you created something where you have a lot of game to game selection and control over what goes in and what does not yeah so the idea I mean I didn't uh maybe set this part up as um meticulously as I could have partially because I wasn't sure how much of the nuts and bolts you wanted but there is a deck of different sort of grammar Paradigm based questions that they have to draw from at various times when sort of challenges arise within this game world um and that is all pegged to whatever the chapter whatever the grammatical um Concepts in the chapter we're working on is or the last two chapters depending on exactly how the timing shakes out um so um I'm not 100 sure I answered the question there but it's you know it's it is according to sort of what they've been doing in the textbook is sort of the paradigms or vocabulary that are sort of then brought into the game world and so every week you add more just like every week you add more um in an actual in an actual classroom experience where you're incrementally building on whatever has come before right so it sounds like actually you answer my question and added information which is so we talked about different cultural facts appearing uh but also it's adaptable in terms of like which vocabulary points and which grammar point you want to hit um which makes sense how often do you play when you play is this like something that you're playing often or do you find that it's got a better effect if you just kind of trotted out every month every two months depends on your students I guess but yeah so I was teaching on a 10-week quarter system and so we would do this like about every two two to two and a half weeks so in a given term students would probably play this game like five times um between four and five times yeah um and then across the second term of the sequence as well the first two introductory terms so not that frequent but sort of enough to um really sort of you know as we were talking about sort of take a character through a bunch of different tests and trials and so on um yeah to interact with different times different locations throughout sort of The Wider Greek world um yeah so out of curiosity um did you come up with that idea for uh this game because you are yourself a gamer and if so what is your what is your personal gaming life look like and then you know what made you decide to bring into the classroom um I the short answer is kind of um that is to say I don't find a lot of time to to play games anymore um but I did um and I have fond memories of uh you know all the people in in my during my time as an undergrad who would play uh Settlers of Catan with me and uh Republic of Rome which may be near and dear to the hearts of many in this podcast uh one of the only games where there was assigned homework uh before we could ever start playing it because it was such a complex board game yeah I'm actually starting up a game of it uh so we're recording on March 13th for those of you out there to come out weeks later but we're starting a game on the Ides actually on Wednesday night so oh well that's fitting exactly and yeah so I mean there were there were um this was directly inspired in a lot of ways by um Talisman and prophecy um uh two games that are sort of relatively similar to one another in terms of their um they're Sim they're really simplified sort of like we're going adventuring on a board kind of um um framework one of my students once described it as a d and d on Rails um which is pretty accurate for the way that those types of games function and that's precisely one of the things that attracted me to it is just you roll a six-sided die and then that's how you move every once in a while after you do that other things will happen based on cards and the information is all on these cards I didn't want them to have to do the do the thing you have to do if you want to play Republic of Rome which is go through that very intense and of course that's an unfair example because that game is extremely complex but the sort of the first Principle as far as design being informed by my own experience playing games in the past was how can this be made as simple as possible um so that there's very little time wasted in terms of or rather time spent I don't mean to imply that it would be wasted um very little time spent onboarding anyone into into an experience like this was just especially valuable too if people add midterm or they test into the second semester or they just missed that day um it's so much better if it just takes five minutes um to kind of explain how it's working um so this leads me to another question too um and then I actually want to talk about reception because I can't myself but uh has playing one game in your classroom uh LED you to want to play others uh and if so how do you how would you want to implement them um yes and I should say um there are other shorter games that are that are far less complex that require far less input from from me um that also show up in my classroom a venerable Classics uh like Simon says uh which is you know one of the best ways to teach the imperative that has ever come down to us um and and and other uh other things too you know there are some things from different colleagues in modern languages which I have uh which I've borrowed as well um um for like vocabulary for example uh type of exercises and so on where you're you know uh walking up to the board and then once you're both there people get a word and then you know Etc you have to produce the English version of it um and yeah I mean it um maybe this has come up before um but uh you know the the um our sort of pedagogical ancestor uh quintillion uh also really believed in sort of classroom games um and and and talked about how breaks were really good and you you know you needed to kind of refresh your refresh your mind um um I think that's that's what he says um and um yeah the other thing about that too is um as I was saying there are there are different ways that games help students experience success and there's good research to suggest that success is a really important um component of retention and engagement and that success is defined as progress towards a goal in a lot of these psychological pedagogical research literatures um and that goal does not always have to be um related to the grammatical task that is to say there's also evidence to suggest that progress towards a goal which is peripheral is also valuable and that's one of the reasons why I chose this game-based framework is you could still have a good time doing this you could still feel like you were making progress even though there would be times where you've completely forgotten what the dative of third declension nouns should be like or whatever um and similarly a lot of these content driven things are also success related like if if you've come if you've come to the Greek classroom because you really want to read the New Testament and we spend 100 of our time talking about demosthenes you're not going to feel like you're making progress towards that goal even though you really are because a lot of those words are going to show up um and if you really want to if you really want to read I don't know uh um herodian um showing my my late antique uh bias here um and and all we do is read the New Testament you might not feel like you're making progress towards that goal because you you're really invested in the world of the later Roman Empire or the Byzantine Empire or classical Athens um and so um this was a way to to sort of um one to build in some opportunities for that but also to show that I was open to these different areas of uh Greek history and sort of of the life of the language Beyond whatever the textbook was giving to do a better job or do a more comprehensive job rather of sort of presenting myself as a resource or at least a co-conspirator uh because or whatever the proper term is there a collaborator in finding out some of these things because I certainly can't claim to have a great knowledge of the the courts of uh you know Constantine I don't know what he is Constantine the ninth or fear again it is the one everyone always talks about um um but I I'm I am very eager to have that conversation um um or about anyone else you might care to name that is not always there in the world of the Greek of the Greek uh introductory textbook yeah I sort of feel like it's it's not that you have to know everything it's that you have to know where to get everything yeah that's a that's a great way of of putting it um in as much as like I would I would love for them to come and ask me more about where can I get X um and sometimes I think the the textbook doesn't always suggest that your instructor is a resource for that or wants to help you find that or might might even might even know um XYZ thing that you're interested in right so this uh this leads me into uh what you are a fantastic resource resource for uh which is your research into Puerto Rican classical receptions you've given several talks in this topic and um first of all you know what what led you to um to this as a major branch of your work and uh where are you at with it now because I guarantee you I don't know anything about this and my audience will probably be interested as well so so while I was writing my dissertation a friend of mine advised me to have a sort of vacation project and this advice was motivated by the idea that you know while you're working on finishing your dissertation you know you will spend you will pour countless hours into extremely small ex not small but extremely detailed um points you know you can you can sit down to write for an hour and realize that what you're gonna kind of Come Away with is the undoing and redoing and eventual deletion of the paragraph or of a footnote and that can be really frustrating and so what this person was saying is you should find something that you want to learn about and sort of pursue the joy of of learning um of researching something for its own sake because you're kind of not going to be able to do that in the same way while you're um while you're working really intensely on this one project um the thing that I wanted to learn more about I took this this friend up on his advice uh was the revolutionary era in Puerto Rico I have a Heritage connection to Puerto Rico my grandfather was born there my mother was was born there when my grandfather was in the Air Force um um and he my grandfather was was born there um after generations of of living there and we're not actually sure just how far back that goes my brother tried to find out um but he didn't he didn't make it much much past the 1830s um but anyway um uh so I began just sort of learning about different figures in this history and what I came to learn is that many of them were also poets um and were informed um by readings of Greek and Latin uh literature um and so the one that I've worked to most extensively on is Ramon Betances who I was responsible uh for planning and uh executing um a very brief uh Insurrection against Spanish power in the 1860s um uh the so-called grito de lares where there was a independent republic of Puerto Rico that was proclaimed but uh as I recall um and the history here is not entirely um I can't claim to have perfect recall to this but as I recall Spanish forces discover this um and it's a it's around 30 days that this Revolt actually lasts Betances escapes um and meanwhile he is back in France uh where he had been educated his mother was French there's a big community of Franco Puerto Ricans anyway a bunch of his poetry is in French um and a bunch of his a bunch of his poetry um that engages classical authors is in French including one of his longest poems which is a sort of a reflection on Roman love elegy de poet um the love of poets um and one of the interesting things that struck me about that is he seems to be connecting to that tradition through uh Pierre de rossad which makes perfect sense uh because he's writing in French but it's also interesting for him to sidestep Spanish in this way and then probably the most interesting thing he's done which I hope to approach someday is he actually does this in the United States the Revolutionary Committee of Puerto Rico is based in the United States uh in New York uh at various periods throughout its history of the tunsis is in contact with many of its um leaders and is himself one of them and he deposits in the New York Public Library an alleged translation of the alularia um but it isn't a translation it is an adaptation very clearly um or you know so it appears there hasn't been a lot of scholarship on this and as I understand it we still it still exists the manuscript still exists um and so I'd I'd really like to dig into that and then beyond that there's also there are also two other poets that are incredibly worthwhile to mention in the same breath um as Betances even though I haven't worked on them as much uh one is Lola Rodriguez who is uh famous for writing the Revolutionary version of the national anthem um so there was a version of the national anthem that of the Puerto Rican national anthem Kenya that existed before it was sort of changed um after American military occupation and American Military governments in the in the 20th century in the 19th century there's different versions she writes it that's probably one of her most famous sort of poetic contributions but her Corpus is extremely vast and replete with different references to uh classical authors and themes and then alongside her there is um Luis Munoz Rivera who the story of that generation of Puerto Rican leaders can sort of be told through these three poets um because um Lola and Betances are revolutionary independent uh independentist actors who participate in this and it's sort of um planning and eventual government um their Munoz Rivera is an autonomous and secures as part of the political um Alliance on the island that secures autonomous self-rule within the Spanish system and all of this is of course blown to Smithereens after um the war in 1898 and occupation Puerto Rico by the United States military um but before that there was actually an agreement that was put in place that Puerto Rico would be self-governing um and would be kind of an overseas uh territory of Spain um and Munoz Rivera was one of these poets or extremely one of these politicians but he was also a poet so he has a lot of poetry uh about um this change um between sort of the dream of autonomy which he cherished even though he was at odds with many of these other politicians who I've just mentioned um and then also the sort of reality of living under the American Military government in the early 20th century and in addition to this he also talks about um the reception of the classical tradition and how it can work and you know among all of these poets in terms of where one might hope to go I'm not sure that I I will be the person to do this um uh but it seems uh like one of the things that's going on and that you see in other National literatures at this time is the sort of this is becoming a very long answer isn't it this sort of idea uh the impetus to kind of create a national culture ethos um uh from interaction with the classical past um in in various ways and what that might and could mean is kind of up for grabs among these different political actors and interestingly he is among the most pessimistic about the Vitality of Classics and whether they're worth doing um and so one of his longest poems um on the topic focuses very intensely on whether or not classical models can have vitality in in this I I hesitate to say revolutionary because of Munoz Rivera's own politics um but in this more liberated um Latin America that he inhabits um oh and this makes sense okay so I was actually going to ask so my understanding of Classics is of course deeply informed by I mean even things like British textbooks like I learned out of the Cambridge Latin course in high school and so I think in a lot of ways to study Classics is to become very fond of the Romans and therefore to become very fond of Empire and to study what they're writing is to sort of accept a very Imperial frame of mind and the idea of piideia and that Universal Imperial education um you know how do you as a revolutionary or at least an autonomous uh you know except I mean especially because it sounds like a lot of these uh writers are educated um in a way that also prioritizes the classics like how do you simultaneously use what you know push back against it and then like what images do they do these posts find like different images more interesting than others um yeah I'm just so curious about all this well I think one thing there and it's hard to speak universally to this um but to give you an example from Betances poem that I mentioned this this poem about elegists um right the poem is called the love of poets and it focuses very intensely on allergic mistresses um and one of its themes seems to be that these are misunderstood um people who are misrepresented by the sources that actually transmit them to us um and in the world of this poem they end up you know at one point in an article that I wrote about this I sort of talk about how um there is basically this allergic nightmare that like the only way you will be remembered is actually through the as a poet is through not through someone else's words through the words of your mistress and like how she portrays you and that's sort of the way that um Betances does carry out his reimagining of this PO like he goes to the underworld and the voices of these women speak and they are actually the ones who who say the names of these poets and sort of try to summarize uh their poetic activity um and so there's an inversion of power rules and he he explains at one point that they they don't understand them um that is to say that the allergists don't understand these these women um and they deprive them of uh Joy um that is to say that they appear as joyless figures um and that they're actually like full of life and vibrant um and in that same piece I I talk about um something that that Derek Walcott says um at one point in an interview which he mentioned at one point in an interview which is that if we actually saw Caribbean or excuse me if we actually saw Greek art now we'd think it was Caribbean art um because it's so vibrant and full of color um and it but it's been sort of washed away of all of its color and all of its joy and is now sad and stayed and boring um but it actually wasn't and that seems to be patanza's perspective in certain ways is that um there is a lot of there is a lot of joy that sort of has been squeezed out of these texts and squeezed out of this world um because it is connected to dominant um views and that's sort of what Munoz Rivera also says uh is that like it's just too stayed and boring to be vibrant the image that he constantly returns to in his poem is he uses language like a gaucho like the cowboy [Music] um like a cowboy subdues a horse um that's how he that's how he uses language he wrestles it down um and Plato is too boring and Virgil is too boring he says at one point um I want the verse that sings and sobs that expresses this desire and and longing and makes fun of tertius and pindar and Dante um and that's that's what he can't get uh from the classical tradition so a lot of it is antagonistic but at the same time it's also replete with references to classical text this is a this is a poem of Munoz Rivera as I'm moving to another author now um and so not all of it is positive um there are other places too and I should I should speak briefly to the work of others uh there are other places too where the Greek tradition is identified as kind of a you know a natural a point of resistance to Roman Imperial dominance and so poems from Greece figures from Greece poetry from Greece becomes important to many of these actors um but to many of these political actors I mean who are also cultural actors um and then there are also ways to where like uh their own sort of struggle to this is not not a theory of mind but it's far from somewhere else um and indeed a different context entirely somebody talking about uh revolutionary America um but the idea that these sort of Roman values that appear in a lot of Roman exemplary texts are also Theirs to inherit as military and political leaders um so there are sort of uh two two [Music] different Divergent ways of using material from the Greek and Roman past that appear in a lot of a lot of reception from Latin America and one is this valorizing um mode um and and one is more of uh as I said sort of uh um identification with oppressed forces Within the classical sources that have come down to us core outright hostility uh as you see in Munoz Rivera sometimes um towards um towards sort of canonical and classical authors oh man it's really interesting and I guess the reason I bring this up is because I like to think about reception um in gaming terms so I just wanted to hear about this work but I also think that you know across any sort of reception right any sort of repurposing of history or images it's not just that the images are from a shared Corpus right is whoever is using them has a different perspective and an ability to kind of push in a direction that makes a different point um and yeah this is really really interesting to hear so yeah that's a very famous theory of reception right that every text is rereading another text so if you're um if you're reading with the buy it you're actually reading you needed with stations um if you're reading day rap two proser P9 you're actually reading ovid's uh preserprene narratives with Claudia um and uh that is certainly the case in uh something like the um uh for example where batanesis is reading the Corpus of romanology or at least talking about his experience of reading it um and what this is like and what it might be like and what the the fetishization of Classics that he experienced in the 19th century was like um and how and interestingly by the way uh Betances is somebody who earlier in his sort of academic career won a bunch of prizes uh for uh Greek and Latin composition or um translation or or things like this well he was in in school in France um and that's why I sort of say that the fetishization it was clearly an incredibly important part of his uh education and sort of educational activity in his formative years before he went to University and eventually medical school in Paris yeah it's really hard to push back and repurpose something that is inside you already and it has been like put there with a specific Viewpoint by somebody else I mean you know I I feel that way about some of my own like early Latin education and like just out of curiosity have you like reading these poems I mean you are in Academia which is as we all know it's a little messy these days um have you ever wondered if the classics is devoid of life and if the sort of work that you're doing could perhaps breathe a little bit back in um I certainly will not claim that I I have the power to do anything um um for a whole host of reasons um but I do not I do not think uh that um I I don't want to put put words in your mouth here I believe the exact phrases of classic says devoid of life um and I think there will always Antiquity will always exert um you know uh or will always sort of uh prompt fascination in various audiences um and uh whether that's through mythology or through history or through uh the enduring sort of you know uh traditions of uh tragic drama that we continue to see recreated all the time um uh uh so I am you know as confident as I've ever been that people are people are interested um and to take things you know back to the gaming space uh we certainly see like uh extremely fruitful sort of um there's a there's a new game right now that you and I both don't know about uh that is set in Antiquities somewhere or somehow um one of the things that I have that I've put into the the classics in modern media class in the past has been the game Hades by supergiant games uh which is an extremely popular game I think it won I don't know it won something fancy people like it um and now there's going to be another one um they're they're going to make a sequel to it and as I understand it from reading the news article that I read about it that studio has never made a sequel before um and they're they're only they're they're Smash Hit was this game that's set in the Underworld um in the ancient of the ancient Greek underworld and so and it's probably uh the most sort of pop cultural Touchstone for the Greek underworld since whatever the book is called The Last Olympian the one where Percy Jackson at all go to the underworld sorry Percy Jackson fans I don't actually know if that's right but I know there's one where the underworld is important and I think that's it um yeah I only read the first couple so um they're my my siblings will will hate me um they're they're huge I'm the oldest um and it was not uh introduced to those books as a kid and they all were um and so they they will all know um which is why I have this weird this information sort of on the periphery of my awareness but the point is um you know that's a thing that's drawing audiences you know to to the ancient world in new and exciting ways this we can say the same thing about uh whatever it's called Uh Assassin's Creed which you know brought a lot of interest into classical Athens um whenever it came out maybe like four years ago the Athens one now there's a different one about Vikings and our our colleagues in the medieval medieval studies are having to deal with uh the consequences of that series moving into their territory now um um and so I think that those kinds of things will always draw people to the The Source material that inspired these things um and and maybe there's a better example that I'm missing that you could think of um actually I want to wrap up with a different question which is so one of the things I do this podcast and one of the things I think games can do uh is kind of help you see things in a different way or like help arrange things for you so of the literature that you talk about if somebody's going to read one thing that makes them see a myth or historical event through different eyes in a really striking way uh what would you recommend because I know you've read a lot of good poetry um how long can it be and how short can it be up to you Ithaca by kavafi gets me every time it is short so I don't know that's such a hard question because you know as I was indicating to you before everybody it's hard to prescribe a universally revelatory uh experience because so many people um have different interests then provide a personally revelatory experience because I know you can probably do um um I guess there I would maybe choose something my students have just seen um the nakshi rustam inscriptions um from Iran um these are inscriptions um that were made by the Persian the sasan and shahenshah shapur after he destroys a ton of Roman field armies and has great success against the Romans and um shapur appears on Horseback with his huge Dome crown that like depicts him as the most powerful being in the universe over a Roman Emperor's body uh in front of a pleading supplement Roman emperors um and you can see in that text the way that the Persian the King of Kings uses Roman barbarians the way that Romans use Barbarians in their iconography and so if you want to see Things From a Different Light Matthew canepa is the two eyes I hope I'm pronouncing his name right the two eyes of Earth which is about the relationship between um late Roman and um Persian power and how uh that Dynamic plays out how they share Court ceremonial how they influence one another contaminate one another and are sort of as the uh that title is taken from a letter of uh I think Coos route the second um to Justinian who he he says that God created the world so that the Roman and the Persian Emperors would be the two eyes of Earth to illuminate the world for mankind like the Sun and the Moon um and so uh there's there's there's much more to that relationship and as you and I were saying at the beginning there's often this way that non-roman peoples appear in games for example in a popular culture as these one-dimensional entities which are there to oppose and get in the way uh and obstruct Roman Roman progress and uh I know this is a podcast so uh you know please note my scare quotes around the word progress um but that's definitely not how they actually present themselves when we have a chance to look at their sources and read read from their perspective uh similarly um there are a number of really interesting sort of um non-uh a non-uh classical sources that can can do some of this stuff I am re-reading RF Quan's Babel oh God that was my Best Book of last year so um and so um you know that is that is a really interesting perspective on learning Greek for example which the main character Robin Swift does um and you know what it ends up being for and how he slowly comes to terms with what it's for um similarly you could say the same thing about uh what is her name arkady Martine a memory called Empire um which is a sort of sci-fi Byzantine Empire uh um that she creates and and exists in um so yeah um like I said um there's someone in the audience for whom uh all of the stuff that I said about the Persian Emperor and his relationship with Romans is completely banal and not exciting um and they know that already um but there is someone for whom it's completely unheard of and totally new um probably the same thing with um RF quam many of your readers will already have read that book and um or not readers listeners yes um but if they haven't they should all right so and then just I know you have a meeting so I just want to ask really quick uh people want if people want to ask you questions and and look at your work and find you online uh where could you be found oh I am kind of light on these terms um so I think that the best way to do this is actually to email me um at my my Bowden email address um and I am not on Twitter or anything like that um or um Instagram or I don't know tick tock um I I barely exist on the internet I might build an email is j.hartman my my first initial and my last name at voted on fantastic and those of you who are listening hopefully know you can find me anywhere online it's beyond Solitaire I am in fact terminally online so uh please like subscribe comment ask questions and most of all happy gaming Josh thank you so much for your time we really appreciate it by list thank you [Music]