Three Things Thursday: Writing, Reading, and More Writing

It feels like a good time to offer a Three Things Thursday post as it’s not the Third Thursday of the Semester. Such alliteration will not occur again until the Thirteenth Thursday and who knows what’ll happen to me by then!

Thing the First

Here’s a little Writing Wednesday update. I had a good day writing yesterday on the heals of my first writing group meeting. I’m crediting that writing group. I won’t regale you with the whole thing, but it continues my recent thinking about walls (and the Hexamilion Wall in particular):

We are living in a time of walls. From the destruction of the Berlin Wall in 1989 to Trump’s much scrutinized promise to build a wall along the US border, the appearance and disappearance of walls has punctuated the turn of the century world and triggered an outpouring of popular and scholarly work on walls. Ancient walls have featured prominently in these conversations with Hadrians Wall (as well as the Great Wall of China) taking pride of place. In popular and even scholarly literature, these walls have emerged as archetypal border walls despite the considerable ambiguity around their actual function in the past. In fact, the reputation of ancient walls allowed Randall Maguire to claim in a recent article that “architects designed the old walls to drive off and annihilate the invaders” (Maguire 2023). Putting aside the naive character of Maguire’s statement — which I suspect was meant more as a glib dismissal of the utility of ancient walls to inform contemporary border policies than a piece of historical interpretation — ancient walls and borders continue to fascinate modern commentators. 

For the last several years, with the generous support of Jon Frey and the Michigan State Excavations at Isthmia, my colleagues Scott Moore, Richard Rothaus, David Pettegrew, and I have been studying the fifth-century Hexamilion Wall at Isthmia. This 7.5 mile rampart formed a barrier across the Isthmus of Corinth linking the Corinthian to the Saronic Gulf. It featured numerous towers and in the 6th century saw the addition of two fortresses: one on the west end and one at the site of the former sanctuary of Poseidon at Isthmia. Historians and archaeologists generally attribute to Justinian. The wall and its fortresses seemingly served as a barrier preventing the passage of an armed force from the north to the south. 

This summer David Pettegrew and I seem to have identified the previously overlooked eastern end of the wall, but I won’t talk much about that today. Instead, it is this work that we’ve done in collaboration with Prof. Frey that I’d like to focus on today. In particular, my paper will focus on the study of a second-century AD Roman Bath which the builders of the fifth-century Hexamilion Wall incorporate into its structure. Our interest is in the relationship between the bath and the wall between the fifth and eighth centuries. My hope is that this will contribute to not only how we understand the Hexmilion Wall in the Late Roman and Early Byzantine landscape of Greece, but also how we understand walls more broadly. To this end, I’m going to try to demonstrate how a better appreciation of the history of the Hexamilion Wall can contribute to how we understand contemporary border strategies and move beyond Randall Maguire’s ham-fisted assessment of ancient fortifications in productive ways.

Thing the Second

Here’s something in the spirit of Teaching Thursday! What to do when no one reads? This week in my undergraduate methods class about 2/3rd of the student didn’t do the reading. This happens sometimes, but rarely this early in the semester and rarely do so many students simply decide not to read.

What made it amusing for me is that it has happened to me so rarely in recent memory that I really struggled to figure out what to do. This group of students seem likely to be a challenge and I need to develop some strategies for how to move class forward on days that students don’t read.

Thing the Third

What is the writing for the public? Finally, I really enjoyed our first writing group meeting of the semester. We had a nice conversation about the virtues of public writing and there seems to be a lot of support for it in the group.

The one question that I came away with though is whether public writing has to mean writing for a mass audience. It seems increasingly to mean that and I’m not sure that it’s good thing especially as the desire for eyeballs seems have resulted not in a more accessible media, but a media that is rushing to the lowest common denominator in a desperate race to capture clicks and views.

That said, no one think that something is good just because a lot of people read it, and there is no reason to think that something is bad just because only a few people know it. There are more than a few influential and important pieces of public writing that were never especially popular in their time and some incredibly popular pieces that proved as ephemeral as yesterday’s news cycle.