William Makepeace Thackeray incorporates three types of reference to the Trojan War in Vanity Fair.[1] The first presents the elements of the story included in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon: the sacrifice of Iphigeneia sculpted and surmounting “a great French clock” (Ch. 13, 129);[2] the fighting of the war… Read more
In my first post, I discussed Thucydides’ vision for cultivating sensitive reason and sensible emotion in order to equip the dêmos for competent collective action. Here I turn to Aeschylus’ Eumenides that famously dramatizes the foundation of the Areopagus as the first criminal court in Athens and examine the role… Read more
“…our dispositions [toward antiquities, archaeology and the past] have been shaped by the relevant laws…to such an extent that we are likely to forget that those laws are human institutions–products of history, that is–and treat them instead as if they draw their authority from a timeless universal… Read more
The aim of this post is to be a little provocative, with regard to interpretations of Sappho’s poetry, including my own. Over the last 20 years, some American scholars – especially Parker (1993) and Stehle (1996) – have challenged what had been the commonly held belief, that Sappho was a… Read more
For the last post I have chosen a subject – the question of the scepter of Agamemnon as a cult object – that arose during the conversation I had at the CHS symposium on November 30. Statues representing gods and other cult recipients are usually classified as “cult objects,” an… Read more
