 This is Think Tech Hawaii, Community Matters here. Okay, we're back. I'm Jay Fidel. We're live. I'm here in Think Tech Studios. And we're calling this life in the law. It's a very important law discussion. And I'm with Sandra Schwartz, who is an associate professor at UH Minoa Teaching History. I get that right so far. Absolutely. Welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. Yeah, it's going to be great because you just published the book. Here's the book. I want to show everybody the book. This is the book. Okay. And in fact, we have a slide of this book. Okay. From bedroom to court, very provocative. And then you read a small type that says, Law and Justice in the Greek novel. Bedroom to courtroom with the Greek novel. Who knew, right? So this is about marriage, about sex, about trials and tribulations and Perry Mason kind of oratory and all that. Travels around the world. Dangers at sea. Pirates. Those are exciting times. Those are lascivious say traps. Wow. Exciting time. Well, they were exciting in the minds of the authors who wrote them for their audiences. Yeah. Well, put it in a historical continuum for me. When did these novels and scenarios happen? Where was it in the Greek and Roman period? So when you take world history, you kind of go through the march of civilizations and you get Greece and then you get Rome. I study the Greek world under the Roman Empire. In fact, most of the Greek literature that survives and Greek texts in general that survive up until now are mostly from the period when the Romans dominated the Greek-speaking world. Interesting. Is there a reason for that? Well, the period of the Roman Empire was one of the high points of civilization in terms of the engineering and the urban development and the growth of schools and literacy. And this was a high point that wasn't matched in European history until the 18th century or 19th century even. So when archaeologists and scholars of the ancient world go and look at the material remains and the texts, we have a huge pile of material to get through until we get down to the earlier levels of the culture. So the Roman Empire was a thriving productive time and so we have a lot of evidence from that period which makes it very interesting. I studied history much later. My minor in history at college was about the 19th century and all that. And I didn't spend a lot of time on the classics, I have to say. But I do remember that it went from the days of Greek glory to the days of greater Roman glory. But we forget that the Greeks had a fair amount of glory going on themselves. Yeah, and the interesting thing about the authors who have studied in this book that I wrote is that they themselves were looking back at the past glory days of ancient Greece. So many of the novels are set in a period that was four or five hundred years prior to what the actual audiences were reading. And so they did have this memory of a glorious past that they tried to market to the Roman emperors because this was the way that the Greeks could claim for themselves a seat at the table of power. And eventually the Greeks came to have very important positions in the administration of the different Roman emperors. And the Greeks were very clear about reminding the Romans that the Greeks, the glories of ancient Athens, really preceded the glories that the Romans came to. Yeah, good for them. This reminds me of a point that's been a thread this week. And that is Hawaii's great contribution and potentially its greater contribution going forward to its art, its culture, its indigenous and local intellectual property. And it sounds to me like what the Greeks were selling to the Romans in order to get that leverage was we have a great artistic literary tradition. So listen to us, we have a certain amount of wisdom to offer you. Absolutely. And if you go look at the famous archaeological sites from Greece and Rome, you see that the emperors were willing to throw tons and tons of resources to these Greek cities in the Eastern Mediterranean to rebuild temples and theaters and arenas for athletic competitions. And so it was considered a status symbol for Roman emperors to become benefactors of Greek cities. And the Greeks who lived in those cities were very careful to cultivate those relations with the Roman emperors. So it's really during this period of time from about like the second to the fourth centuries CE that we can really speak of a true Greco-Roman culture. Yeah, at Greco-Roman it's almost like a partnership. It's almost like we collaborate rather than we take dominion over you and we put you in chains. Right. It's like benign imperialism in its own way. Yeah, yeah, he could say that. Okay, so in this context now, somebody was writing novels. A number of people were writing novels. So in the early part of that millennia, what was a novel actually? And could you buy it on Amazon? No. Amazon, well the Amazons were in Scythia so I don't think you could buy it from there. Well the interesting thing about these novels was that they were written in prose. Now we take it for granted today that novels are prose fiction. But in the ancient world prose was the medium of things such as philosophy, history, medical texts, important truth-bearing works. So at some point in time we don't know exactly who started it. One scholar of the ancient novel said that the ancient novel was invented on a Tuesday in July. At three o'clock. Yeah, at three o'clock in the hot afternoon sun. Your mind wanders. So Greek novels were, I should say classical scholars were aware that there were these Greek novels floating around. But most classicists kind of pushed them aside as not very serious literature. And it wasn't until about the 1980s or 90s around the time when I was in graduate school that that would have been the Columbia University. You spend plenty of time there. Plenty of time, yeah. And so many classicists just ignored these Greek novels because frankly the plots of the novels are very corny. Interesting. A young boy and a young girl meet each other in one of these cities they're both aristocratic. They fall in love. Sometimes there are descriptions of love sickness and rivals for the hand and marriage. It's really corny. They end up going on a honeymoon where they sail off and they're captured by pirates and they end up on a seashore. I'm just kind of giving that over. Sounds like daytime TV. It is. So when I first encountered these novels I thought, what have I gotten myself into? I really wanted to study Sophocles and Aeschylus. Great thinkers. But instead I developed an affection for these novels because they were so strange and hackneyed in a way. I thought there must be something here. So because they're written in prose ancient audiences received them as being somehow real stories. So I was interested. Isn't that what happens today too? It's art imitating life, imitating art and all that and people get a little confused about which is the real one. And some people were quite threatened by this new genre of writing fiction in the form of prose. Now of course in Greek literature there were stories that were fictional but those were mostly written in poetry. So if you think about the epics of Homer the Iliad and the Odyssey that's the root for all of Greek literature especially the Odyssey which is also an adventure story. And this came later though. This was a product that was developed after those classical poems. Right, right. It was inspired by those poems but someone said hey what if we made a fictional version or I'm sorry a prose version of the Odyssey. What would that look like? So... What strikes me about this is that who knew from a novel, who knew? I mean in the years say 5000 BC that was not even imagined. All of a sudden these guys were writing and calling it a novel. And they were talking about love stories and all this. It sounds like it was like first impression. They sort of invented something under the reign of the Romans. Right, they kind of invented something and audiences had a taste for exotic stories. With the extension of the empire people in the Roman Empire were kind of coming in contact with different cultures and different stories. A lot of these stories were orally handed down. There were stories of for example Alexander the Great that became not history but became like these fantastic mythic stories. And those circulated and those were very popular in the Roman Empire. Well isn't one of the elements of all of this is that between the Greeks and Alexander and the Romans they were doing very unusual things developing these huge empires that had never been seen before and weren't seen afterward for a thousand years. And so what strikes me about it is that there had to be this kind of this kind of pollination going on that stimulated people to write these novels and have these stories. Oh yeah, and in the stories themselves the basic plot is that the couple usually start from a Greek city and end up in the far flung regions of the civilized world. Even beyond the civilized world the Persian Empire comes into play. Egypt, Meroi which was the famous capital of Ethiopia in the ancient world. And so all of these stories about going and traveling and meeting strange exotic people who don't speak your language well sometimes in the stories magically the king of Meroi speaks perfect Greek because that's the language of culture so what king wouldn't be cultured. Kind of a cultural travelogue we have here part of the assimilation process. Yeah, but it's not real. That's the thing. It's completely made up and these novels were very much created to reinforce Greco-Roman culture and ideas. So there was a method about the madness. Yeah, I don't know how methodical it was. Well, there were three stories, three novels that you wrote about in this book and you have been studying them for a long time and try to analyze them and draw what we can learn from them. And after this break, Sandra, I would like to get into all three and see what the common denominators are and what kind of analysis you could make and what we can learn from them today from what you wrote. This is Andrew Schwartz, associate professor at UH Manoa, teaching history and writing this book. This book just came out, see that book? We can talk about that book. I'll read the title from bedroom to courtroom. It's a sex thing, law and justice in the Greek novel. We'll be right back. This is Think Tech Hawaii, raising public awareness. Life for fun and responsibility. A sign a designated driver. Life in the law. Sandra Schwartz is kind of a lawyer. I mean, she's a legal observer. A wannabe lawyer. But not the law of today necessarily. The law of maybe 300 A.D. or something like that. Something like that. You said the book was inspired. Your book was inspired by Sally Engels, was it? Sally Engel Meyer. I'm sorry, Sally Engel Mary. Mary, okay. So what was the inspiration? Well, as I was going through these hackneyed novels, I thought, what can I get out of them? You know, and I had moved to Hawaii in 1995 and I had moved from New York. And when I moved here, it dawned on me that this was what colonization looks like. Because you don't necessarily have that in New York. Colonies are buried long, long. And so I found this book by Sally Engel Mary called Colonizing Hawaii. And I read it with great interest because she talked about how the indigenous Hawaiian legal systems interacted with the colonizing power. And once I read that, it just clicked in my mind that Greece was a colonized power by Rome. And so you have a system where there are overlapping jurisdictions. And with that there's a lot of potential for conflict. And change. And a culture as well. So that book paradoxically made me rethink the way I was looking at these trial scenes in these novels. So each of the novels that exist in their relative totality has at least one trial scene. Ancient audiences had a hunger for these trial scenes. It was definitely part of the culture of living in a city in the Roman Empire. There were trials that were being put on every day. Trials typically occurred in porticoes or public spaces. These were public trials. Oh yeah, they were public trials and they would attract large audiences. We have evidence of people milling around the courts just to kind of see what the gossip was or what the scandals were and sometimes the crowds would get rowdy. So it was kind of an aspect of urban life in the ancient world. And they were finding their way to a law system. A system of laws where they could take problematic issues and discuss them in public and have oratory about it. It was like the beginning of what we have now almost like. The interesting thing with these novels is because they're romance novels there's a lot of episodes of rape or adultery or all these lurid sensational crimes. This is part of what ancient audiences expected to see. The interesting thing was that in ancient Greece in the 5th century women were relatively secluded. They didn't really go out and mill around in public that much if they were respectable women. This is the 5th century BC or BC. The Roman culture had a different attitude towards women's participation in public. In ancient Roman families first of all there was a value placed on daughters because daughters could be married off to allies. You can make marriage alliances. Roman women had a little bit more authority and control over the family and the household and sometimes got involved in politics in Rome. It's part of that same acculturation. It's positing two cultures seeing what comes out of it and then writing about it so people get into the arena of a trial and I can see why you get very interested in this sort of thing. These novels have pretty sexy and personal kinds of stories and do the novels announce the result? Did they tell you how it came out? Well, yes sometimes. These aren't real trials mine too. The trials scenes are wonderful mechanisms for tying up loose ends at the end of a story and in our culture you don't have to look very far to go to the movies and see trial scenes all over the place. We still have that hunger for competing stories with a victor and a loser. Like a gladiatorial contest. It's a similarity then. Some disputes could be settled with a gladiation. So Roman culture Roman law had developed in a much more rational organized fashion than Greek law ever was and so that enabled the Roman empire to extend its reach throughout the empire because they had a systematic codified more or less, not perfectly codified a system of laws and a culture of legalism. The benefits of having an empire because your jurisdiction was greater and you had a need to make it uniform and all that. You spoke of Augustus. He criminalized certain things that were not criminal before around sex and marriage. That's kind of a really odd moment in world history. Prior to that time if you were married your wife had an affair with someone that would be settled behind closed doors. Or maybe by some sort of dastardly act. Dastardly yeah, a lot of honor killing and things like that. But Augustus who came out of a very bloody civil war in which much of the senatorial elite was slaughtered Augustus decided it was time to bring back family values. To use a modern term. And his family values were that if a husband knew his wife was having an affair any man could prosecute that husband and bring him to trial in a public court to be embarrassed in front of the whole community and punished and eventually punished he could be disgraced his status, his social status would be degraded his wife would be degraded to the status of a prostitute he a husband who turned a blind eye to his wife's lovers could be degraded to the status of a pimp and you know in an honor society such as Rome was it was really devastating for a man to have his status degraded like that. So Augustus initiated a law actually there were a series of laws after he became emperor of Rome the first emperor of Rome and he he tried to regulate family life was there a political reason for that aside from the morality of it was there a reason in terms of governing that he needed to advance yeah well it was always a good idea to have a threat to hold over the elites it wasn't necessarily for social stability as much as having control I mean laws like that that govern family values and morality cut both ways and Augustus tried to reign in the aristocracy the senatorial elite by threatening them it was a control thing a policy and they were probably doing plenty of this within the senatorial elite one of the interesting things was that Augustus allowed women who had given birth to three children their legal independence so women traditionally in Rome had to have a guardian a male guardian to transact their business but a woman who had three children could transact her own business emancipation she was emancipated and so I mean there are questions about whether that actually was very effective some people think Augustus was concerned about the evolution of Rome but that may have been a myth well you know this all suggests to me that not only did we see we have to look at this I'm sure you do through the lens of history we have to see it where it existed what the factors were what the sea changes in the evolutions were socially, historically, militarily and especially with regard to the empires that were emerging or declining at the time it was a very interesting history lesson so you can learn history through a novel you can certainly learn it when people are making advocacy in their orations in the trial parts so you analyzed all three and at the end of the day I mean I think it's useful it may be very classical if you will but it's very useful so we have the book that came out and I wonder if you could read a piece just so we can sort of taste your prose okay so this is just for my introduction okay in ancient Greek and Roman culture marriage was traditionally an institution for the propagation of patrilineal bloodlines particularly when property was at stake this was true at least among the elites whose perspectives are so disproportionately represented in the surviving literature from antiquity at some point however this is the concept that mutual love and fidelity ought to be the foundation of marriage this ideal is espoused in a genre known as the Greek ideal romance or novel the five extant novels that have survived in full present a model of normative sexuality they typically begin when a boy and girl fall in love undergo a series of adventures that test their love for each other with their blissful union or reunion in marriage but let me just go on this study however is not about love it instead focuses on the dark side of their romantic ideal adultery the inversion of the emblematic value of conjugality sounds like, may I say, a Greek tragedy can I say that okay so are you teaching this also in your teaching at UH can I take a course and discuss this with you in greater detail? absolutely, I can go on for hours well I would like to so the kids come around the students come around is this popular? oh yeah, well I teach both Greek and Roman history and the students of our era are familiar with the fantasies of the ancient Greek and Roman world and I try to disabuse them it learns from the 300 you know so I do get students it's actually nice to find that the classics are alive and well at UH Minoa and that there are students who want to study it and I think it is definitely relevant you examine the human condition and the fundamental points of humanity are still the same and we can learn from what they did it has cast a shadow over all of European history and maybe global history to live there to live in your mind at that time and to feel the processes that were going must be really fabulous so what's your next book? well I think I'm going to work on more trial scenes this time in Plutarch there was a polymath who lived in Biosha like a backwater area of Greece under the Roman Empire but he was trying to assimilate Greek and Roman culture he wrote a series of parallel lives which were very influential to the founding fathers they were steeped in this literature and so they had they could draw upon models of heroism and anti heroism and depravity the whole gamut is out there you can learn a lot about the book by just going on the web because it was recently published and there's a lot of hits on it by the way have you been to Greece? so when you go to Greece you can see all these Greek words and places that play out the fantasy I think that I can speak modern Greek but when the words come out of my mouth the modern Greeks think I'm crazy it's as if I'm speaking Chauceran Chauceran English and it's on Amazon this book the title is From Bedroom to Courtroom a tremendous overlay there are law and justice in the Greek novel learning about the the fertile crescent of all these things and here are the spectators the jurors who are on trial passing judgement and you can go on Amazon and you can buy it and it's not cheap but I say it's worth it unfortunately they're out of stock right now you must be either very popular or about to have a deluge of books on to Amazon yeah well if only so what would you say to people as to why this book is relevant in our time? because we are still bringing people to trial judging them for things that really are private individual issues I see had it not been for what was going on in Greece under the Roman Empire maybe we would have had a completely different view of that today thank you Sandra thank you Jay thank you very much you know where I am