Hesiod has races of gold, silver, bronze, heroes, and iron. The biblical book of Daniel has a statue where gold, silver, bronze, iron, and mixed iron and clay represent kingdoms. Coincidence? I think not! Does this mean the author(s) of Daniel knew their Hesiod? Well ... maybe. The Seleucid king Antiochos IV, r. 175–164 BCE. Left: bust of Antiochos, Altes Museum Berlin; right ..read more

Stoicism, the ancient school of philosophy, had some excellent ideas. Here’s their explanation of how sound works. We hear when the air between the sound-emitter and the listener is struck. Then it emits a wave in a spherical shape which spreads and arrives at the ears, in the same way that water in a tank forms waves in circles when a stone is thrown in. Diogenes Laertios 7.158 A ..read more

The earth has orbited around the sun since 1609. At least that’s when Kepler’s book on the subject came out, Astronomia nova (‘The new astronomy’). Copernicus had proposed a heliocentric theory in 1543, but with circular orbits it was a lousy model. The geocentric Ptolemaic system continued to be the better model of planetary motion until Kepler came along. But there was another precedent ..read more

In the Odyssey, the following kind of thing is absolutely normal. For a regular novelist this scene would be a triumph. For Homer, it was Tuesday. Silent silence We’re in Odyssey book 16. Odysseus has been separated from his family for twenty years. He’s back, disguised as a beggar, doing some reconnaissance. At the moment he’s visiting with Eumaios, an enslaved herdsman. Suddenly, with no ..read more

The new Percy Jackson and the Olympians series has begun to come out — three episodes, at the time of writing. It makes many changes from Rick Riordan’s book, Percy Jackson and the lightning thief (2005). It adds many new classical references, but it also begins to address some serious problems with the book. Spoilers follow. Percy (Walker Scobell) stands in front of Antonio Canova’s ..read more

There’s something almost magical about how papyrologists and editors take tiny scraps of ancient papyrus and turn them into coherent texts. Here’s an example taken from the Hesiodic Catalogue of women. P. Turner 1 Here’s a passage as it stands in one ancient papyrus, Turner papyrus 1, lines 17–24:   ]θεαιεξεγενον[   ]τ̣υ̣ρωνκαιαμη . . ν̣ο̣ε̣ργ̣[  &nbsp ..read more

Puns may be the lowest form of humour these days, but in early Greek literature, they’re more like word magic. ... τὸν δορίγαμβρον ἀμφινεικῆ θ’ Ἑλέναν; ἐπεὶ πρεπόντως ἑλέναυς ἕλανδρος ἑλέπτολις. (Who was it that named) that spear-bride, that bone of contention, Helen? A fitting name! Ship-destroyer, man-destroyer, city-destroyer. Aischylos, Agamemnon 688–690 In the last ..read more

It isn’t often that I get to combine my interests as a choral singer and a classicist. Recently I got interested in the Prophetiae Sibyllarum or ‘Sibylline prophecies’ by Roland de Lassus, also known as Orlando di Lasso. These are twelve short pieces for unaccompanied choir, in Latin, composed around 1560. This story is about how I noticed an error in the text. Lassus’ pieces are startling ..read more

You’d imagine the answer would be Achilleus, right? Actually he’s only number three. Remember, he’s out of combat for most of the epic. Now, I do have to apply some constraints, otherwise this won’t make sense. First, people don’t get to respawn in the Iliad. (Well, mostly. I’ll come back to this.) So we’re not really talking about K/D, it’s really just K. Only a handful of characters get ..read more

Every now and then an article about Homer pops up in my alerts and I’ll see if it’s worth sharing. This one isn’t. But maybe it’s a teaching opportunity. It’s a short piece about Achilles and Hector at The imaginative conservative, by Joseph Pearce, a writer and editor attached to a Catholic college in New Hampshire. Worshippers at the altar of ‘western civilisation’ have to put in many hours denying that early Greek literature shows influence from Anatolia and Mesopotamia, or avoiding thinking about non-binary gender representation in the Odyssey. Today’s deflection is about Hector in the Ili ..read more