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The Lure of Coins

“Picking Harvard’s Pocket” by Christopher Reed (May-June, page 44) has got to be one of the most riveting articles that has ever appeared in Harvard Magazine. Even as he weaves a web of intrigue and suspense after the manner of a masterful whodunit, Reed leads the reader to a finer appreciation of ancient coins as objects of artistic value and keen scholarly interest. A few mysteries, however, linger on.

Although great care was taken in the article to describe the purloined coins accurately and to illustrate them in true proportion to one another, these concerns were largely abandoned when it came to the cover art. Here, for example, the magnificent ten-drachma Arethusa from fifth-century Syracuse is dwarfed by what in reality is a considerably smaller and older four-drachma satyr from Naxos. What is more, the coins appearing in the upper left and upper right of the cover cannot be identified on the basis of the handsome illustrations contained in the article.

Since Reed’s piece so powerfully piqued my interest, I could not repress the urge to search the cover art for some secret subtext that might illuminate the reason behind this aesthetic license. Is it merely my imagination, or is that drunken satyr (whose ithyphallic condition is tactfully concealed behind another coin) ogling the fair Arethusa? Why are Dionysus and Actaeon staring so intently at one another across Nero’s triumphal arch? Does wise Athena’s goggle-eyed owl see something in this highly suggestive mise en scène about which the rest of us can only speculate, or is the whole design a flight of fancy as elusive as that gold-winged steed of unknown provenance cantering capriciously across the upper left corner?

 

Editor’s note: Yes.

 

“At 4:55 p.m.,” the article begins, “the guard got a telephone call from a Mr. Ryan who said that he had forgotten his package and would like to come get
it…. ‘This Mr. Ryan walked over to the package, picked it up and…produced a chrome plated small revolver and said this is a hold-up.’”

Harvard’s security guards ought to read more Dashiell Hammett. The following is from his classic story “The Golden Horseshoe”:

“You got to show me.”

“I can do it,” he exclaimed, all eagerness. “You come down the drag with me, an’ I’ll show you. My name’s Ryan, an’ I been livin’ aroun’ the corner here on Sixth Street.”

“Ryan?” I asked.

“Yes—John Ryan.”

I chalked that up against him. I don’t suppose there are three old-time yeggs in the country who haven’t used the name at least once; it’s the John Smith of yeggdom.

 

Contributing editor Adam Goodheart ’92, a former Ledecky Undergraduate Fellow and now a writer based in Washington, D.C., was prompted by “Picking Harvard’s Pocket” to e-mail the editors the following numismatic recollections.

Reed captured the engagement with history and art that comes from studying Greek and Roman coins. I collected ancient coins as a teenager—yes, I was that sort of teenager—and although I haven’t added to my collection in years, I was tempted to after reading his article.

I was lucky to have a collecting mentor: the father of a high-school classmate of mine, who had an amazing Roman collection. We used to travel up and down the  mid-Atlantic states to coin shows together. I mostly bought Roman coins, since they were more within a teenager’s budget. (I remember thinking, “Now, how many lawns will I have to mow to get that sestertius...?”) My favorite acquisition was probably a bronze of Nero, which I still have. On the obverse is his portrait, looking unpleasant, and on the reverse he is portrayed again, full-length, in the garb of Apollo strumming his lyre. Suetonius actually describes this very coin, mentioning that it shocked the elders of Rome, which is how we know that it was taken at the time to be a rendering of Nero fiddling. (Yes, I was also the sort of teenager who read Suetonius.)

Reed’s tales of treasures lost and found also reminded me of some of my own experiences finding—and losing—ancient  coins during my post-Harvard year in Sicily on a Shaw Traveling Fellowship. I  spent that year working on various archaeological digs, where—thanks to  what remained of my adolescent expertise—I served as the unoficial coin-hunter and numismatist. I’d go around with a metal detector finding coins, recording their location, then cleaning and identifying them. We turned up hundreds, ranging from a beautiful silver denarius of the Roman Republic to fistfuls of the hideous medieval bronzes of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.

At Christmastime, as we were completing my first dig there (a Roman villa), one of the Italians who worked with us—and who did a considerable amount of “unoficial” archaeology in his spare time—presented me with a lovely little Syracusan silver obol of the fifth century b.c., with the nymph Arethusa on it. (We were feasting on wine and sausages at the villa site that day, and I was about to head home to America for the holidays.) He’d found the coin in a freshly plowed field 20 or 30 years before. Unfortunately, the oficious American archaeologist I was rooming with (who, I suspect, was jealous because he’d been working in Sicily for 10 years and no one had given him a coin) groused so much about how you shouldn’t do
this sort of thing, that it really belonged to the Italian state, et cetera, that final-
ly I turned my obol over to the regional archaeological museum at Agrigento.

The Sicilian workmen on our dig (mostly retired shepherds and such whom we called “uncle”—Uncle Pas-quale, Uncle Giovanni) liked to tell the story of how, a few years before, they’d been working on a construction project expanding the parking lot of the Agrigento Museum when they came across a small, intact terra cotta jug. The jug, when they picked it up, seemed much heavier than it ought to be. One of the workmen—I think it was Uncle Gio-vanni—turned it over to inspect it and out poured a shower of gold coins. (When he used to retell the story, Uncle Giovanni mimed this part with great fiair.) They were aurei of the early Roman Republic, about 100 of them, coins previously so rare that they had been known only from one or two specimens. The archaeologists later decided that this was the payroll of a Roman legion in the Second Punic War, money buried and never reclaimed when Hannibal’s forces drove the Romans out of Agrigentum in 216 b.c.

I spent that year digging up all kinds of other things, too—from a prehistoric village to a late-Roman cemetery to a medieval fortified house. One of our digs got blown up by the Mafia, but that’s another  story.

 

Editor’s note: For the record, when Professor David Mitten went to Montreal to examine recovered Harvard coins, on the top of the pile was not “the Dewing 10-drachma coin of Syracuse,” as reported, but a 10-drachma coin of Akragas, also from the Arthur Stone Dewing collection. Many Dewing coins are described and depicted on the Perseus Project website; this coin may be found at www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/coinindex?lookup= Dewing+562.

 

Musical Errors and Omissions

Thanks to Harvard Magazine and Janet Tassel for “Swing Time” (May-June, page 38), about Professor Robert Levin’s course on music of the swing era. For the past 50 years I have been so glad to see any writing on this music and jazz in mainstream media that I always let go by the seemingly inevitable big and little errors that crop up. But maybe it’s time for that to stop. In the first paragraph (and big print), Tassel is scoping out the first three choruses of Duke Ellington’s Victor recording of Mood Indigo (12/10/30). The second chorus indeed is played by Arthur Whetsol, and his variation on the theme remains the standard second chorus for this work down to the present day. But that sweet unforgettable sound in the mind’s ear is not a trombone, for Arthur Whetsol, one of Duke’s oldest friends, played trumpet. Sam Nanton, mentioned later in the article, plays trombone on the side.

 

Janet Tassel replies: Levin’s “Whetsol-tr” on the blackboard magically transformed itself into a trombone in my copy, where, just as magically, it slid by all my editorial colleagues.

 

Duke Ellington was, indeed, in a very special category, but several of his band’s most successful numbers—their theme, Take the ‘A’ Train, for instance—were actually written by Billy Strayhorn, a key member of the Duke’s team and his collaborator as composer, arranger, and performer for many years.

 

It was a pleasure to see American music featured so prominently in the May-June issue. But two errors cannot stand uncorrected.

Tassel quoted her subject, Robert Levin, claiming that “swing-jazz” was “our first national popular music.” I defer to Professor Levin’s expertise in Mozart and share his love of jazz, but, embarrassing and politically incorrect as it is to acknowledge, America’s first indigenous popular music and international musical export was blackface minstrelsy: songs such as “Jump Jim Crow,” “Zip Coon,” and “Oh! Susanna” that crudely caricatured African Americans. Minstrel songs preceded and infiuenced vaudeville, ragtime, jazz, and rock ‘n’ roll.

In his “Vita” of John Knowles Paine (page 42), Murray Forbes Somerville describes Paine’s first symphony, which premiered in 1876, as “the first written by an American.” It may have been musically superior to its antecedents, but Charles Hommann, George Bristow, and William Henry Fry composed symphonies that were performed before the Civil War. All three, like Bruce Springsteen, were born in the U.S.A.

 

Editor’s note: Emerson is the author of Doo-dah!: Stephen Foster and the Rise of American Popular Culture.

 

Frost on a Blustery Day

“Good poets Make Bad Neighbors” (May-June, page 28) by James Colvin is an entertaining glimpse into the testy personalities of two of our finest poets. There is, however, one error. Frost, in fact, did write a poem specifically for Ken-nedy’s inauguration. However, his attempts to read it that bright and blustery day at the Capitol were thwarted by the blinding glare and the wind blowing the papers out of his hands. He finally gave up. Then from memory he recited “The Gift Outright.” Sandburg’s scathing criticism not-withstanding, it was an inspiring and altogether appropriate selection. In reciting a well-known, familiar poem, Frost, for once, chose the path more traveled by and that made all the difference.

 

Searching for Missile Defense

Is Frances Fitzgerald telling us (in Way Out There in the Blue, reviewed by Stephen M. Walt, May-June, page 31),  that the nation that put men on the moon and vehicles on Venus and Mars and has spent $3.5 trillion on welfare in 20 years cannot develop a missile-defense system to protect its citizens from nuclear-missile attack? It can and should be done. No rocket project has been completed without failures. The spinoff in technology has been enormous. By the way, thank God we still have some conservative faculty left.

 

Walt’s article is a superb analysis. Those of us who worked on the Atlas and Titan contract, and later on the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System contract, never believed that an effective missile-defense system could be created. We had tracked the Russian missile test firings over the Urals into Siberia as early as 1955 with a long-range radar set up in Turkey. By 1958 we had the capability of dropping a warhead into the center of Red Square and had demonstrated it on the missile range. We also defined, as part of the BMEWS contract, the “threat,” i.e. the result, of a successful missile attack on the U.S. We concluded that between one-third and one-half the population would die within 24 to 48 hours. As one scientist put it, they would be the lucky ones.

Regrettably, as Walt points out, the United States probably will spend further billions of dollars on missile defense. If so, I guarantee we will be disappointed by the results.

 

Walt throws up many engineering-based objections to missile defense. I am an engineering graduate and recognize that missile defense is a great engineering challenge. However, the engineering issue is nothing compared to the political issue of whether we want to protect ourselves from nuclear or biological weapons sent by missile.

Walt objects on the political basis that “missile defense will discourage Russia from further reducing its existing arsenal and encourage states like China to increase theirs.” China threatens the U.S. by its bellicosity toward the democratic state of Taiwan. President Clinton continues to concede China’s claim to take over Taiwan, most recently by disallowing the sale of four destroyers to Taiwan. It is incumbent upon the U.S. to honor its 50-year agreement to protect Taiwan. In order to get a very limited A.B.M. defense agreement with Russia, President Clinton has proposed that the U.S. agree to extreme reductions in U.S. submarine-based missiles. America should protect itself without first asking permission from Russia.

 

The Pros and Cons of Prozac

As a practicing psychiatrist, I was disturbed by “The Downsides of Prozac,” by Craig Lambert (May-June, page 21), concerning work by Joseph Glenmullen, M.D. ’84, and his book Prozac Backlash, which gives superficial and inaccurate treatment to an important, complex topic: the benefits and risks of antidepressant pharmacotherapy with Prozac and related SSRIs (serotonin reuptake inhibitors). Unfortunately, it constitutes little more than a promotion for Glenmullen’s new book, which will only add to the current trend in misinforming the public about this issue. Prozac has been the subject of much inaccurate publicity and hyperbole since its introduction, from the wildly exaggerated claims of its potential benefits to the mistaken assertion that it causes suicidal or homicidal behavior. This latter claim has been largely resolved and dismissed in the professional literature, but your article perpetuates this bit of misinformation anyway. Controlled scientific studies, as well as many years of clinical experience, have demonstrated the favorable ratio of benefits to “downsides” of Prozac and related medications. Sadly, this article provides a biased and inaccurate presentation of the facts, which may cause additional harm by discouraging the appropriate use of SSRIs.

 

Craig Lambert replies: The notion that Prozac’s capacity to cause suicidal or homicidal behavior “has been largely resolved and dismissed in the professional literature” is mistaken. An authority on the brain’s serotonin system, Dr. David Healy, who directs the North Wales Department of Psychological Medicine at the University of Wales, estimates that “probably 50,000 people have committed suicide on Prozac since its launch, over and above the number who would have done so if left untreated.” Lilly hopes to market a “new” Prozac in 2002; the patent application identifies suicidality as a significant side effect of the current Prozac that will purportedly be absent in the new version.

 

Reporter Craig Lambert claims that the medication’s sales surged on the appearance in 1993 of my book Listening to Prozac. I believe that statement to be false. With the exception of a downtick after a Harvard team named suicidal ideation as a side effect, sales of Prozac followed a smooth upward path, one in which no statistician could detect so inconsequential an event as the publication of my book.

Beyond the sad fact that the size of the reading public is minuscule, there is the inconvenient one that my book did not celebrate but rather worried over the use of serotonin uptake inhibitors for indications beyond major mental illness. Like Glenmullen, I wrote that patients can become tolerant to Prozac, that the medication causes sexual dysfunction far in excess of what the manufacturer states, and that it can stim­u­late suicidality not as a result of idiosyncratic side effects but on some consistent basis. I made these judgments based on my own observations and those of colleagues, in advance of large-scale research.

My phrase “cosmetic psychopharmacology” was not a recommendation, but a call for debate on the proper use of medication. I asserted that psychotherapy remains the most important treatment for minor mood disorders. I wrote that only a small percentage of patients reported feeling “better than well” on Prozac, but that some certainly did. That claim likewise has been substantiated by subsequent research, along with my observation, which you cite, that antidepressants can lend social confidence.

Glenmullen misrepresents my book in his own—his use of it as a straw man has about it the unpleasant whiff of a publisher’s strategy—but there is no reason you should do the same. If I remember correctly, Harvard Magazine’s careful discussion of Listening to Prozac, when it appeared, recognized that the book was less a consideration of whether individuals should take a medication than of how we as a culture understand the role of biology in personality.

 

Craig Lambert replies: Several months after publication of Listening to Prozac, the Wall Street Journal of March 31, 1994, reported: “…all the publicity is hardly hurting Prozac’s sales. The drug ran up an astonishing $1.3 billion in sales from 1993, about a 30 percent gain from 1992….[Lilly spokesperson Andrew] Weber said Lilly is particularly concerned about the depiction of the drug in Peter Kramer’s bestseller Listening to Prozac. The book sparked much of the recent fascination with Prozac—and untold sales of the drug—by describing patients who aren’t clinically depressed but still feel happier, more productive, and ‘better than well’ on Prozac.”

 

It is complacent physicians who scare me even more than the pharmaceutical companies. I discovered Prozac’s adverse neurological effects while researching my mother’s rapid deterioration in the three years prior to her death. Her symptoms included lip smacking and pseudo-Parkinsonism. Eli Lilly’s Prozac entry in the Physicians’ Desk Reference includes this barely decipherable statement under the caption “Post-introduction Reports…that may have no causal relationship with the drug”: “Movement disorders developing in patients with risk factors including drugs associated with such events and worsening of preexisting movement disorders.”

I called Eli Lilly for clarification, and a pharmacist readily confirmed that “drugs associated with such events” referred to drugs known as neuroleptics, antipsychotics, or more specifically phenothiazines. My mother’s cofactor was long-term use of the phenothiazine Compazine for heartburn and anxiety. Compazine is more commonly associated with these side effects, but my mother’s symptoms were not apparent until a few months after she began taking Prozac.

Several renowned specialists (afiliated with Harvard hospitals) dismissed any connection between the symptoms and the medication. Instead, my mother was treated with anti-Parkinson’s drugs, which they acknowledged provided limited benefit at best. (An autopsy later confirmed she did not have Parkinson’s disease.) Meanwhile, all of these drugs can also cause nausea, ano-rexia, and taste alteration. Her weight dropped from 112 to 82 pounds over this period, yet no one reduced her medication. Instead, they searched for an obstruction or cancer (there was none) and, in her last week, added Prilosec to combat the nausea.

My mother died two days after she was hospitalized for bilateral pneumonia and jaundice. This brings up another dangerous effect discussed by Eli Lilly in the Physicians’ Desk Reference: sudden severe liver damage caused by two or more drugs. The pathologist suggested the liver failure might have been caused by the combination of Prilosec and Prozac. It is interesting to note that Prilosec and Prozac were the world’s number-one and number-three top-selling drugs that year.

I have corresponded with a few of my mother’s physicians. Not surprisingly in these litigious times, they have denied  that the medications caused her problems.

 

The Truth About Heroin

I read Craig Lambert’s cover article on addiction with great interest (“Deep Cravings,” March-April, page 60). Five months ago, my brother, at the age of 33, died of a heroin overdose. Addiction is something I am trying to understand right now as I search for reason in my brother’s senseless death. When I came across the sidebar interview with author and former heroin addict Ann Marlowe ’79, G ’80, I was astounded and deeply insulted by her casual attitude toward the drug. “Jet lag cures heroin addiction,” she said in one of her many fiip comments in the interview. She clearly seems to show no sympathy or interest in the thousands of people a year who are killed by heroin. To her, heroin is just a recreational drug that should be legalized. I hope your readers have more sense about the truth behind this deadly drug than she does.

 

Cancel My Subscription

The sheer economics of electronic publishing virtually guarantee that a substantial portion of all publishing will be electronic in the future. By drastically reducing the physical expenses and economic risks traditionally borne by publishers, electronic distribution will change the entire dynamic of what “publishing” means in the new millennium. Eliminating waste and slashing production costs will change the publisher’s focus from playing it safe with commercial material, to a new era of innovation and creativity that benefits readers and writers alike.

Jerome Rubin ’46 (“The New Gutenberg?” May-June, page 85) is dead on target in his statement that the weak link in the

chain of delivering “content” (books, magazines, newspapers, and more) from writers to publishers to readers electronically is the “user interface” (read: computer screen) where the content is read. The publishing industry has made huge and rapid strides in developing software solutions for the delivery of on-line content, yet the hardware lags behind.

Technologists and publishing-industry watchers now speculate endlessly about which hardware and software will ultimately prevail in the marketplace, how they will work, how they will protect the copyrights of authors and publishers, and a variety of other issues. But it seems certain that e-publishing is here to stay—and that it will dramatically alter the way writers and publishers reach readers in the twenty-first century.

Like Rubin, as much as I would prefer to save Harvard Magazine the cost of printing and mailing each issue to my snail- mail address, it simply isn’t comfortable to read the entire magazine while sitting upright before a computer screen. As much as I enjoy your publication, I look forward to cancelling my subscription (to the printed version) as soon as a more satisfactory medium for reading it electronically is available.

 

Too Jumpy

 I know i’m getting crotchetier as I get older, but your May-June issue was harder than normal to follow. Numismatic story A runs five pages (with two sidebars), then jumps over five pages of numismatic story B, which jumps to the back of the book; we are returned to story A, which after two pages jumps to the back itself so that we are reading parallel columns of related stories. Then comes the piece about Dr. Jerome Groopman, which, on its third page, has less than a full paragraph of the main text so that a long sidebar can be accommodated before the main text jumps to the back.

 

Gulda, Beethoven, and Jazz

In “Lost Art” (May-June, page 36), on Mozart and musical improvisation, Daniel Delgado writes that the Austrian pianist Friedrich Gulda “now seems to have stopped improvising publicly.” This is not surprising since Gulda died on January 27 at the age of 69. His interest in improvising was understandable since he was not only one of the greatest interpreters of the 32 Beethoven sonatas (well documented on recordings), but also a seasoned and dedicated jazz pianist.

 

Lightened Up

How much difference a preposition makes! In your news item about Jordan Field (“Nets ’n’ Turf,” May-June, page 81), you report, “The men’s lacrosse game there with Princeton on April 15 was the first athletic event ever played outdoors under lights at Harvard.”

If the author meant to write “by” a Harvard team, that might perhaps be correct; but I recall the opening game of the Olympic soccer competition in July 1984 being played under lights at the Harvard Stadium, with Chile and Norway playing to a tie.

 

Editor’s note: The author meant to write “under permanent lights.”

 

Darwin’s Whereabouts

Thanks for all the botany in the March-April issue. I do have one nit to pick, however. Although Charles Darwin did hypothesize that a long-tongued moth would be found that pollinated the Mada­gascan orchid Angraecum sesquipedale (“Orchid Peeping,” page 73), he did not come upon the orchid in Madagascar. Darwin examined it at home, the plant having been lent to him by the great English orchid enthusiast James Bateman. While Darwin sailed across the Indian Ocean on HMS Beagle in 1836, the closest that he got to Madagascar was Mauritius, more than 600 miles away.

 

An Enterprise Requiring New Clothes

Caille millner’s column “Fashion Victims?” (May-June, page 76), regarding clothes and the Harvard student, struck a strong chord for me. I arrived at Harvard in September 1977 from a small town in southern Oregon timberland, a scholarship student with no resources to fall back on. My grandmother sent me $25 from time to time, which made all the difference in my social life, enabling me to have the occasional cheese steak at Tommy’s, an indulgence that would otherwise have been impossible.

I had left my torn jeans at home and arrived with all my “nicest” clothes, but I determined within a few days of arrival that most of my wardrobe would be incompatible with “fitting in” at Harvard. There followed a mad scramble to come up with the money to acquire khakis, straight-legged corduroys, button-down shirts, wool sweaters, Wallabees, and hiking boots, none of which I owned and some of which I had never seen before. Clothes may or may not make the man, but they make all the difference as you try to fade into the background until you can figure out where you really fit—a comment the “Undergraduate” may wish to take to heart as she takes her classmates to task for wanting to conform.  

A few anecdotes: During Freshman Week, there was a dance called the Freshman Mixer, which involved busing in the entire freshman class of Wellesley. My roommate, a dear fellow from rural California, pulled on jeans and a T-shirt, and I dressed in overalls, a T-shirt, and Converse sneakers, as I would have for the first dance of the year in high school. We arrived at Memorial Hall to discover that we seemed to be the only people there who had not dusted off our prom clothes. A hard lesson, and an alienating one—we left after 10 minutes.  

Soon after, I auditioned for and was accepted by the Collegium Musicum as a first tenor. I look back on my membership in that organization as one of the great, defining experiences of my Harvard career. Only one problem: performances were given in white tie and tails. Somehow my grandmother came up with the funds to purchase that finery, but at that point her clothing budget for me was exhausted. Later in the semester, we learned that we would be singing Orff’s Carmina Burana with the Boston Ballet, and that “dark suits” would be the appropriate attire. I possessed only one suit, the reddish, rust-colored corduroy suit that I had worn to my high-school graduation. Anxiously I showed it to the choir director and asked if it would be acceptable. “Well, …I suppose,” was the response, a clear communication that it wouldn’t really be, but what could be done? The suit did prove to be so unacceptable that I was required to borrow ill-fitting suits from classmates at other occasions when performing in suits was required. The memory still makes me wince.

I calmed down sophomore year, largely because I had been given the gift of living in Adams House, where diversity was the norm. I settled into a personal uniform of jeans, plaid shirts, hooded sweatshirts, and steel-toed boots, which had the dual advantage of demonstrating some mild individuality while being the standard gay “Castro clone” look of the moment.

Still, I ran into uncomfortable moments from time to time. I’ll always remember attending a party at Eliot House. I wore my one sport jacket (a size-42 Harris tweed inherited from my uncle, which a tailor somehow managed to transform to fit my size-36 frame). The host, a friend of a friend, said to me, “Bob, you look so nice! Why don’t you always dress like that?” “Because,” I replied, “I don’t have the money to buy the clothes.” “Well, you need to get some money!”