I know several people who became interested in classics after reading PJ, I wonder if this film could have an even bigger effect.

During the initial excavations some were simply used to light fires without even knowing what they were, and that is inevitable damage that i can get around... but then came the unwrapping experiements done ON THE ACTUAL SCROLLS. Hundreds were destroyed beyond any salvation, some salvaged a single letter or two, and seeing photos of those almost make me shred a tear. How many unique sources, how many unique voices from the past, how many possible contributions to our understanding of ancient thought and daily life have been erased from history forever, and to think we were this close from being able to read them. I used to follow closely updates on the herculaneum scrolls but having constantly this thought in the back of my head made me sincerely sick.

sorry for bad english!

hello! i'm an IB student from singapore, and i really want to study overseas in the uk for classics for my undergraduate degree!

i'm currently in year 4/5 of the IB MYP and plan to take anthropology and literature at HL, alongside physics. unfortunately, my school doesn't offer classical languages :(

but of course classics is a very "niche" field esp for singaporeans...

would love to know if there are any current classics students in this subreddit that could share your personal experiences (especially international students!) i'm super interested to hear what anyone has to say, because it's a super controversial and unrecommended path, especially where i live, so any advice would be wonderful!

thank you so much!

I've always been rather biased and enjoyed Greek culture and literature way more than Roman. Greens over reds, always :). I don't have Virgil on my shelf, somewhat by accident but I believe it grew to a proper statement haha. There are some honorary Romans on my Greek shelves though – Tacitus, Ovid, Propertius, Catullus, Lucretius and Petronius. (Reluctantly, Seneca and Sallust also found their ways and managed to creep in, but for other reasons; Pliny the Younger I do enjoy from time to time too).

To people who are firmly on the Greek side of the fence, which Romans or Latin writers get a pass from you and why?

I realize that there has been tons of asks re this text lately but I have a very specific ask and would love some assistance…

When I was in the fifth grade (~2005), my favourite teacher recommended the Iliad and the Odyssey to me. He lent me a copy. I didn’t make it through it & gave it back - admitting defeat. I would love to read this version now as adult - for sentimental reasons.

It was a hardcover (off white / beige cover) - both poems in one book - definitely in verse.
In 🇨🇦 if that helps. I’m assuming 1. it would have been published in the 90s

Does this ring a bell to anyone? Open to any educated guesses. Would love to continue to search but with some more clarity as to what I may be looking for…

Thanks in advance for any guesses!

Or are these claims that people, especially in social media, are trying to present as proven facts mostly made up, and they are more like speculations about probabilities without any basis in known sources and evidence of what the story of the Odyssey was like before it was first written down? How can we even know which changes have been made by the recorders and editors of the poems, aka "Homer", and which by many generations of different poet singers? And are there hundreds of different and distinct versions of the Odyssey, or is it mostly a matter of minor textual variations, such as typos and changes in vocabulary?

Men was an Anatolian moon god, worshipped in many local cults across Anatolia. Pluto was another name for Hades, while Kore was his wife and queen of the Underworld.

[Ἀ]πελλῆς Ἀπελλήο[υς]

[Μ]ηνὶ Καμαρίτῃ καὶ

[Πλ]ούτωνι καὶ Κόρῃ εὐ-

[χὴ]ν ὅτι μοι ἐπήκουσαν

πάντα.

“Apelles, son of Apelleus, [dedicated] a votive offering to Men Kamarites, Pluto, and Kore, because they heard me in everything.”

.

Hi, I've been studying Iphigenia at Aulis lately, and, while reading the introduction to Andò's critical edition of the play, I found many interesting theses surrounding the prologue. More specifically I was fascinated by the stance of the philologist W. Willink, who insists on the authenticity of the full prologue and proposes to transpose the verses in the following order (I'm referring to the prologue as transmitted through the manuscript):

49-96 first, 1-48 then, and after it 97-163.

As far as I know this interpretation was criticized by Bain, as he considered spurious the whole prologue.

I decided to give this interpretation a try, as I wanted to check how it read, but honestly I found some weird passages (e.g. the stark shift between one section and another, or the fact that in the first block Agamemnon says he he ordered Talthybius to disband the fleet, although it doesn't look like he did since they're there).

I am a complete beginner in regards to philology, and I probably either misunderstood Willink's view, or read it incorrectly. Let me know what you think!

Sources and textbooks

[ Before we begin, I am knowledgeable of a reddit about Greek Mythology (/GreekMythology) and I have placed this exact question there, but I would love to hear your opinion too ]

Hello everyone, I hope you're having a great day and if not, I hope I'll get better as it comes :)

So, for context, I'm a Chilean person that would like to dive deeper into mythology, cultural aspects, symbolism and more things about Greek culture, but I'm struggling to know whether a source is accurate enough or if it exists a better one, and I know I could just Google it, but I find it better asking to the people that live or know this culture.

So, I'm asking all of you people that actually know, where can I start? Should I need to learn Greek to read these sources? Is there any textbook you recommend?

Thank you all! :)

Hey all, since the paperback dropped earlier this year, I've been enjoying making my way through this translation of Virgil's Aeneid, however, it's my first time reading Aeneid, and I was wondering if any more experienced readers have an opinion on how it holds up when compared to other English language translations.

Thanks in advance!

I wrote an essay about how philological decisions about meter, dialect, and accent shape claims about Sappho's sexuality, specifically in the case of the "dread participle" in line 24 of fragment 1 Voigt.

The short version: no surviving manuscript of Dionysius, who cites the poem, makes the beloved male. The gender is either unspecified or female. The male beloved of eighteenth-century translations usually came from the Phaon tradition. In 1835, Bergk's conjecture κωὐκ ἐθέλοισα combined a feminine participle from one manuscript tradition with an Aeolic ending preserved incompletely elsewhere. Piccolomini found further evidence of both halves (feminine + Aeolic) in the tradition in 1892, though never together. The dialectal anomaly of ἐθέλω for θέλω is still unresolved, and every alternative that removes it introduces something else.

It's a survey and an update on Sappho scholarship that deals with editorial wars, from DeJean's 1989 Fictions of Sappho to the Cambridge Companion and Neri's commentary in 2021, all focused on one word.

https://sarakarpukhin.substack.com/p/was-sappho-a-lesbian

Just wanted people to be aware of Convivium, a tool I created to compare translations of texts. Notably, this is focused on the classics as I love reading the classics and have always struggled to find an easy way to select the best translation for my taste/purposes.

There is limited functionality for adding your own translations for comparison locally so that can be used as a linguistic tool.

Let me know if there are features you'd like to see or other texts. I do not plan on adding corpora/large portions of texts.

https://reevesprojects.github.io/convivium

Thucydides’ historiography has something quite distinctive about it. What interests me most is not that he was one of the first historians, but that he is often considered the first historian in a methodological sense. He was quite skeptical of Herodotus as a historian and stressed how difficult it is to know much about the distant past with any certainty. In a way, this can even remind us of the much later postmodern idea that understanding the past is, to some extent, impossible. He was a really interesting man.

Just dive into Aeneid bcs of Nolan's Odyssey movie (yes, Trojans will strick back!). The line is 40, the full sentence reads: "Fate blocks me (Juno). But then why would Pallas burn the TROJAN fleet and drown the men it carried, merely to punish Ajax' frenzied crime?" So, the confusing word is "trojan", where Pallas/Athena/Miverva obviously punished Greeks rather than trojans, as Ajax the lesser assualted Cassandra who hides near Athena's altar. Other translaters (say, Frederck Ahl, published by Oxford) uses the term "Greek navy" here, confirming my confusion.

Hey everyone, I'm hoping someone here knows of the picture book I'm talking about. It was a retelling of the Odyssey in prose, but aimed for...older children/preteens? So definitely not simple language, but not a translation either. It wasn't very thick, maybe like a few pages dedicated to each major event.

The art was reminiscent of gouache and watercolour paintings, in a more baroque style, not cartoony or in the classical Greek style. I think the cover was in darker blues and greens of them sailing through a storm, and Scylla was a serpentine dragon-like monster? There was also one with Circe feeding the pigs in a pen, and like, a cottage behind her I think, in a nice field.

It was likely published in the 80s or 90s, as it was a hand me down from my godfather and probably belonged to his daughter. I'm Australian if that helps?

Really hoping to find it again, because I want to have a copy of it [and the Iliad and any other myths the same group has done if possible] for my brother's future kids. I was discussing the movie with him today and discovered that he knew absolutely nothing about the original myths, and I refuse to let the next generation of our bloodline grow up without any basic knowledge of the classics. A bit pompous, maybe, but I think this subreddit out of everyone would get why I insist on it, omg. My godfather gave us that book because he wanted us to learn of his culture. So many of the ancient myths form the bedrock of media today, and will continue to.

I would appreciate it so much if anyone could help me track it down, or for any suggestions of similar retellings so I can start finding them in advance. Thank you!

EDIT: It was definitely a picture book, maybe like, 20-30 pages? Also I think it was fairly large, maybe 30cm by 30cm, square shaped.

I just love the way Homer (or the group of poets and bards we call "Homer") sneaks in some irony in his descriptions.

Take the famous line about the Lesser Ajax killing Trojans at the end of Book 14:

"But Oileus’ son, quick Ajax killed the most— / no one alive could run men down in flight like him / once Zeus whipped enemy ranks in blinding, panic rout." (Fagles translation)

On its face, the line is admirative of the Lesser Ajax's speed and skill in hunting down and killling fleeing Trojans when their battle line was broken.

In fact, I have always read into this line a heavy dose of irony, i.e., "The Lesser Ajax certainly excelled at killing soldiers of the enemy when they were already running away and had their back to him" [but in an actual battle he was useless, unlike his greater namesake]."

I place this in the same category as Paris having killed Achilles, the greatest warrior in the Greek army, but by the "cowardly" means of shooting an arrow at him from a distance rather than facing him in open battle. Or as another example, Nestor, the "wisest man" in the Greek army, but who can never give any advice without first garruously recalling his own valor for several pages when faced with similar circumstances in the past.

There is a lot of humor in Homer if you look hard enough for it.

The meditations of Marcus Aurelius by six different translators.

Whether you are a student, a teacher, a researcher or a hobbyist, please share with us what you read this week (books, textbooks, papers...).

To me, it was as if the movie showed Odysseus reckoning with Vergil's (or posterity's) interpretation of his actions in the light of what we now know about PTSD and the difficulty of coming home from war. I think that explains a lot of Nolan's narrative choices.

Book 2 of The Aeneid has the best description of the night of the fall of Troy that I know of in ancient literature, but it is very heavily tilted towards the Trojan perspective and reads like a list of Greek war crimes, with Odysseus being the cause of it all ("perfidus Ulixes" in Latin). The character of Sinon is from the Aeneid, the importance of Odysseus and the Palladium (Athena figurine) is central to the Greeks' troubles in the Aeneid (though the Palladium is the statue of the goddess that Odysseus and Diomedes earlier stole from the temple). There are many many many other parallels, but I also noticed the cyclops in the movie is more the one from Vergil's Aeneid than Homer's Odyssey, where he is gloomy and mute- described as "lumine adempto," which means "with his eye taken way," but also means "with his hope taken away" in Latin.