One of the most exciting points for classicists who have got some knowledge about Eastern matters consists in inquiring where so many similarities between Greece and Mesopotamia, Iran or India come from. Thereabout three hypotheses basically seem to be considered: 1) a direct influence; 2) a shared inheritance (especially for… Read more
Hello again, I’m just back from giving papers at Bryn Mawr and Yale, which is why this blog is a little late. In between preparing for those papers, I have been grappling with an interesting passage from the Chronicle of Ptolemy III. This is an Akkadian text that describes Ptolemy’s… Read more
OK, so he’s not quite decapitated, but after the student riot here at Chancellor College on the night of 2/15 he lost his mortar board. (So sad, especially after all that work by the masons---see photo in my earlier post). As it happens, I was inadvertently caught up in this event. Here is a brief blow-by-blow. Read more
In this formulation, heavily indebted to Derrida, Svenbro sees the "language" of early epigram. While I am nearly entirely sympathetic to this idea, I would like to take a tour of the kind of factory in which these machines themselves are produced—I'm sure the upper management would have some very interesting things to say about Greek poetics. Read more
I will start with a cliché: apologies for my delayed first posting. Now, there is one question I often like to pose to undergraduate students: can they name one salient feature of Athenian democracy? Surely enough, ‘democratic elections’ or some version thereof is the most common answer. Read more
