During my happy sojourn as a teacher, I was encouraging some 11-year-olds to study maps of New York State, to find various features and places of interest. In passing I asked them if they could find a place Homer would like, imagining in my innocence that Troy might catch their eye. But no, it was “Me, me, me! I know: Springfield!”
But I learned to day that Homer’s creator hailed from Oregon, not NY State, and he might well have hailed from any other of the 38-ish Springfields in the US of A. How was that for trivia? For even more, see: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-17673475
Boadicea's Chariot 
We have a Springfield right here in Algoa Bay.
Actually within walking distance of my home, never met anybody called Simpson though 😦
Actually Janus, I was going to say Ithaca. It was from the ‘rocky shores of Ithaca’ that Homer’s hero began his Odyssey. Of course,your students might have suggested Ulysses, but Homer would probably not have recognised the Latin style.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithaca,_New_York
I have actually been to Troy, NY. I am not sure that I would have ever have chosen to spend as much time there as Odysseus spent in Turkey.
Vergil was a plagiarist.
OZ
Hi OZ, we had to learn Book XII of the Aeneid for O’Level. The battle between Aeneas and Turnus. The Romans did not like Odysseus/Ulysses whom they considered a sly and sneaky coward. They preferred the honour and courage of Aeneas. Or so I learned.
Hiya Sipu. I always felt slightly uneasy about the Romans, the Aeneid being written as a propoganda exercise to legitimise the imperial hierarchy. The Iliad was the better written book anyway.
OZ
Our son’s mother-in-law lives in Springfield VA. It is not a bad place at all and within easy reach of DC. She is OK as mother-in-laws go, as well.
Janus: More trivia. New York state is abundantly blessed with classical place names. Lysander, Fabius, Pompey, Aurelius, Camilus, Athens, Syracuse, Scipio, Manilus, Cicero, Rome and many more (Greek or Roman they were all acceptable)
Most did not arise from the classical whims of the populace (far from it, they were disliked by many of the original settlers) but were the work of one man, Robert Harpur who was charged with administering “The Military Tract” in northern New York state and granting land to veterans of the war of independance.
LW, I wondered why.
LW, and then you have Cincinnati in OH.
In 1790, Arthur St. Clair, the governor of the Northwest Territory, changed the name of the settlement to “Cincinnati” in honor of the Society of the Cincinnati, of which he was a member.[8] The society honored General George Washington, who was considered a latter day Cincinnatus, the Roman farmer who was called to serve Rome as dictator, an office which he resigned after completing his task of defeating the Aequians in no less than 16 days, and was considered the role model dictator.
Excuse the cut and paste, but this makes interesting reading and does little to flatter the newly independent USA with its non-colonial ideals.
The “Pioneer Period” and Towns with Classically Inspired Names
The association of Elmira and almost all of central New York with the Greek and Roman tradition began with the advent of the American Revolution. Often forgotten is the fact that the leaders of the American Revolution lived in the glow of the European Enlightenment. The Age of Enlightenment was a period when society began to focus on quantitative science and historical data for the answers to life’s major questions. This humanist, pro-Enlightenment attitude was intensely apparent in early America. Carl J. Richard writes that “during the Revolutionary era, the classics provided an indispensable illusion of precedent for actions that were essentially unprecedented.”7 The Founding Fathers were clearly influenced by the classical tradition in their choice of government, even though their beliefs were most likely based on mythology. 11
In looking for an organizational model for the new government, the American colonists did not have many options, even if they were subconsciously (or consciously, for that matter) trying to emulate the classical tradition. They could not use contemporary Europe, since despotic monarchs ruled most of that continent, and emulating the organizational structures of the governments of Asia and Africa, both ancient and modern, was simply out of the question. Medieval European governments could not be used either, since they were completely entangled with the Catholic Church and pesky popes. This would not do for the predominately Protestant Founding Fathers, who sincerely wanted to establish a real separation of church and state, another important intellectual by-product of the European Enlightenment. As a result, the classical world of ancient Greeks and Romans provided the revolutionaries with established models and precedents. 12
There is more than ample confirmation for an American cult of classical antiquity, particularly during the second half of the eighteenth century. Classical quotations were ubiquitous. They littered political pamphlets, newspaper articles, and monument inscriptions. Another common display was the habit of American authors adapting classical pseudonyms and noms de plume.8 American patriots credited themselves or their colleagues with such names as Brutus, Scipio, Catulus, Solon, and Demosthenes. At the same time, they chastised their enemies with labels like Tarquin, Catiline, and Caesar, the worst of all pseudonyms to the young American Republic. 13
It should be no surprise that the label “Caesar” was abhorrent to the American Revolutionaries, since Julius Caesar represented a charismatic demagogue who became an absolute despot and was a primary contributor to the collapse of a five-hundred year old republic.9 Much more desirable was the alias “Cato,” the Republic idealist who stood up to Caesar’s armies at Utica, or “Cincinnatus,” a self-effacing officer who was given unprecedented control of the Roman army in a time of national crisis and then, once the crisis had passed, renounced his power and returned to private life. In fact, almost every aspect of the American Revolution, its justification, the forms of the new government, and the identities of the primary players, were derived from the classical past, most importantly and most numerously from Republican Rome.10 14
One of the most persuasive pieces of evidence for Americans identifying themselves as reincarnated Athenians and Romans soon after the Revolutionary War is the large numbers of classical place names, such as Syracuse, Romulus, Utica, Hector, Pompey, and Ithaca, most conspicuously located in west-central upstate New York. In fact, this concentrated swarm of upstate New York towns is the beginning of a geographical belt with high concentrations of towns named after classical references that extends through the upper Ohio Valley, on to southern Michigan, south-central Iowa, and the Ozark mountains.11 Obviously, these American town names did not reproduce the world of Pericles or Hadrian in any substantial way, but they testify to the importance of the ancient Mediterranean world to the Americans who were in the position of power to name these towns. 15
According to data compiled by Wilbur Zelinsky, the state of New York adopted a total of one hundred fifty classical place names by political and settlement units (eighty-two before 1820; fifty-one between 1820 and 1860; fourteen between 1860 and 1890; and three after 1890).12 How these classical names happened to be sprinkled over upstate New York without any significant association or relationship to one another has sparked some debate in the past.13 16
What is known with historical certainty is that during the Revolutionary War, the New York State government promised many soldiers a basic land grant of 600 acres, if they enlisted in the army.14 As a result, in 1782, New York State created a “Military Tract” of over 1,500,000 acres, the territory of the Iroquois Confederacy, which was divided into twenty-eight six-mile-square townships. The tract covered much of the present-day Finger Lakes region and included all or portions of the present- day counties of Cayuga, Chemung, Cortland, Onondaga, Oswego, Schuyler, Seneca, Tompkins, and Wayne.15 17
The land-grant program reflected the best of post-Revolutionary War optimism in that, just like the Roman hero Cincinnatus, American soldiers would, hopefully, put down their swords and pick up their ploughshares. In reality, however, much of the land was still under the sovereignty of the Iroquois Confederacy. A military campaign led by General John Sullivan in 1779 systematically destroyed the Iroquois population centers and ended their control in this area. John Sullivan’s campaign culminated in a final battle with the Iroquois Confederacy at the Battle of Newtown, taking place just outside the future boundaries of Elmira. This military campaign opened the wilderness of central New York to European-American colonization.16 Even after 1779, however, some Indian tribes still lived on this land, squatters existed in large numbers, and many soldiers had sold their land almost immediately to land speculators.17 In fact, before the distribution of the grants by balloting was completed in 1793, more than 90 percent of the six-hundred-acre military lots were controlled by eastern land speculators, known as “land jobbers,” operating out of Albany and New York City.18 18
With the destruction of Iroquois sovereignty, the newly acquired land had to be surveyed. This task fell to Simeon De Witt, former chief geographer and surveyor of the American Revolutionary army. Legend has it that on July 3, 1790, in New York City, Simeon De Witt presented a map to the land commissioners with most of the townships labeled with classical names. De Witt’s team had been given the task of naming dozens of towns and it appears that De Witt and his team reached back to the ancient past for their inspiration.19 Almost immediately, Simeon De Witt was given sole blame for the classically named towns. In 1819 Joseph Rodman Drake and Fitz-Greene Halleck lampooned the fact that the frontier wilderness of central New York had been named after places and people of the civilized classical past. As a result the two men published a poem in The Evening Post and The National Advertiser.20 The poem’s name was “Ode to Simeon De Witt, Esquire, Surveyor General” and consisted of seven stanzas. The following is a selection:
God-father of the christened West!
Thy wonder-working power
Has called from their eternal rest
The poets and the chiefs who blest
Old Europe in their happier hour:
Thou gavest, to the buried great,
A citizen’s certificate,
And, aliens now no more,
The children of each classic town
Shall emulate their sire’s renown
In science, wisdom, or in War.
Surveyor of the western plains!
The Sapient work is thine—
Full-fledged, it sprung from out thy brains;
One added touch, alone remains
To consummate the grand design.
Select a town—and christen it
With thy unrivall’d name, De Witt!
Soon shall the glorious bantling bless us
With a fair progeny of Fools,
To fill our colleges and schools
With tutors, regents, and professors.21
19
Thus, the authorship of the classical names was fixed upon De Witt. The “surveyor general” declared that he “knew nothing of these obnoxious names, til they were officially communicated to him” by the land commissioners.22 After further investigation, it appears that Robert Harpur, born in Ireland, a former teacher at King’s College (now known as Columbia University) and New York deputy secretary of state in 1790, was given direct orders from the land commissioners to create a list of names for the Military Tract. It seems likely that it was Harpur who was responsible for the classical flavor of these names. Regardless of whether Harpur or De Witt were responsible, the land commission approved the classical place names, and central New York was open for an influx of American pioneers.
http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/nyh/89.3/lemak.html
Very interesting,
🙂
Did he nick his mate’s tabula or wha’? 😉
‘Homer’s’ work was of course eventually written down after centuries of ‘oral transmission’ which honed its style and memorable phraseology. Vergil was a writer.