In his “biography” of the first king of the Persian Empire, Xenophon says of Cyrus the Great: In his nature Cyrus is reputed and still celebrated even now among the barbarians as most beautiful in his form and most loving of humanity (φιλανθρωπότατος) in his soul, as well as most… Read more
The issue of bilingualism is central to my study of the Tebtunis priests. The priests employed Egyptian in “personal” (and, of course, cultic) texts throughout the Roman period—language preference is a more complicated matter—but the use of demotic Egyptian in official contexts drops significantly rather early on—not immediately with the… Read more
What is an epigram? A dwarfish whole, its body brevity and wit its soul (Samuel Taylor Coleridge) In her book on “Poetic closure”, Barbara Herrnstein Smith envisioned a poem of maximal closure as “pre-eminently teleological” and “in a sense […] suicidal […], for all of its… Read more
In any society which champions equality (not to mention liberty and the pursuit of happiness) it is surely of paramount importance that we do not ignore the different concerns and life experiences of those outside of political, social or economic elites, but how can this be achieved in practice? Hearing… Read more
Far from getting to the bottom of things, tracing the origin of riddles, or understanding the material basis of character, I would like to use this blog as an opportunity to “think out loud” about what worries me most these days, namely the flow of time… The ephemere medium of… Read more
