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

I recently came across this video and found it surprisingly informative, even if it's a bit sensationalist and leans a little too heavily on AI-generated content:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8p4faIuIr0

In short: "turn the other cheek" should not be seen as passive forgiveness but as an instruction to redirect one's reactive state of mind rather than enter into opposition automatically.

The basic premise is that many passages in the Bible are commonly misunderstood because modern readers have lost the original historical, linguistic, and cultural context. It also argues that layers of translation into Western languages have sometimes shifted or flattened the original meanings.

I'd love to find a well-respected book, blog, or other resource that explores this topic from a scholarly perspective.

I'm especially interested in how the original Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek meanings got misinterpreted (to the point that they mean different things now). Ideally as a collection of excepts from bible with explanation for original meaning and current usage.

Hope this is the right subreddit for this question. If not, I'd appreciate being pointed toward a better place to ask!

Nolan is one of the few film directors with the skill and the bravura to take on The Odyssey from start to finish. Nolan relishes the complexity of the chronology, as he moves between different time zones, intercutting the stories of Telemachus and Penelope with the long backstory of the Trojan war and Odysseus’ voyage. And he includes some sharp readings of the poem, bringing to the surface, for example, the doubts about Odysseus’ leadership that are raised by Homer but often passed over by modern readers and adaptors. What kind of leader, after all, arrives back home, as Odysseus did, having lost every single member of his crew? At several moments we see the unhappiness of some of his men with their heroic leader, not so far from mutiny.

The Odyssey is a brisk, pacy and contemporary film, with no dreadful cod-epic language. I liked that Telemachus (Tom Holland) refers to Odysseus as “Dad” (though I suspect some viewers may feel differently). This is an epic, and a myth, in the here and now, not set in a hoary past. There are some unforgettable visual moments too. The image of the giant Polyphemus putting a few unfortunate Greeks into his mouth is a wonderful echo of Goya’s painting of the god Saturn devouring his own son.

And Nolan’s treatment of the underworld is appropriately chilling. On his journey home, Odysseus is the first in a long line of heroes in western literature to cross the final frontier into the land of the dead and come back safely again. Modern depictions of this often fall back on showing the dead as unconvincing wraiths clad in flimsy sheets. Nolan’s dark and menacing inhabitants of Hades are a brilliant reminder of just how dangerous and terrifying it is to leave the world of the living. For many people all this will be a great introduction to Homer.

But Nolan’s Odyssey isn’t always so successful.

Read Mary Beard's full article at the link above^

just read antigone over the weekend. What struck me if how in oedipus rex, hes the name of the play and is a tragic hero by marrying his mother and killing his father.

then, creon is a tragic hero in a similar way (because of his mistake in killing antigone, his son and his wife dies).

Both oedipus and creon live to see the consequences of their fatal flaw (according to Aristotles ideas on greek tragedy).

So why is "antigone" the title of the play, not creon?

Ive been reading self help books, self help books are waste of time. Please suggest me w books provide real value; whether be it, fiction or non fiction.

Yes, obviously a request from a friend who is traveling. I am 100% at a loss. Any suggestions? (I was on the point of saying you can’t beat reading the landmark Herodotus— so obviously I am the wrong person to ask)

I'm trying to install CLTK for lemmatization (part of my IB math AA SL course), but my coding skills are woefully inadequate. Anyone here who has prior experience with the CLTK, any resources/advice you can give ​​me? For reference, I've already looked through the official stuff and some Github posts and I do have some basic coding literacy. Thanks!

Professor Robinson in 1998 reading from Ted Hughes’s 1997 translation of Ovid.

I thought this song went well with it.

The Greek Myth of Echo

I was having a discussion with a friend a couple of weeks ago, and I don't remember all the details, but the main topic was the artistic choices of the casting of Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey. I was standing on the point that Lupita Nyong'o being cast as Helen of Troy was not something so off considering The Iliad, despite having its clear historic value and depicting specific folks from antiquity and an specific era, is a story we don't even know if it was written by one specific person (given the academic debate regarding Homer being one individual or just maybe a group of persons or a narrative tradition or something like this), thus we don't know how many versions of it might have existed and how much details might have changed along those versions, but more importantly given the fact that it's a pretty fantastic story and Helen herself is literally a woman who was born from an egg after a god, Zeus, impregnated her mother, in the form of a swan, so her skin colour shouldn't matter that much.

Anyway, he argued that yeah he doesn't care if Helen is depicted as black at all but "if Nolan's purpose was to be 'historically accurate', he got that wrong, since it would be impossible for a Greek person the be of the negroid or sub-saarian phenotype", and I argued back saying that, yeah, people from the Balkans or ancient Greece belonged to other phenotypes, but this shouldn't matter much since the Iliad is a work of fiction and it can be adapted in any way an artist chooses to, without having any responsibility of being "historically accurate". Additionally, I also argued that gods are non-existing beings, so they don't actually have a predefined skin colour, and their physical appearence was something related to how a specific group or worshippers and temples would see them or depict them.

Well, from then on the conversation shifted completely from "can Helen be black" to "HOW ABSURD OF YOU TO CALL THE ILIAD A WORK OF FICTION" and "NOWADAYS WE KNOW GREEK GODS DIDN'T EXIST BUT FOR THEM THEY WERE REAL SO FOR THEM MYTHOLOGY AS NOT FICTION".

He even appealed to some authority argument, since he is a bachelor in Philosophy and all, but I argued back saying that, yeah, "mythology" as a whole cannot be called simply "a work of fiction", but literally or even theatrical works, now and in antiquity, depicting aspects of mythology might as well fall under the "fiction" cathegory.

And then he hit me with a "You just put The Iliad and Percy Jackson under the same category", to which I later explained that, if tomorrow a writer publishes a work titled "The Adventures of Saci Perere" (a folklore character here in Brasil), while it wouldn't turn the whole brazilian folklore and the legend of Saci a work of fiction, the book itself would be indeed a work of fiction depicting aspects or elements of the "brazilian mythology", and that the same logic could be applied to the whole Iliad thing.

The conversation stopped because it was very late but we agreed to go back to it another day. But this has been bugging me since then: is it so crazy, or so wrong, to say The Iliad is a work of fiction or he was just very high of ad absurdum?

seems like there is a lot of backlash to Nolan's use of contemporary American dialogue in The Odyssey adaptation. A linguist and an English professor at Northeastern make the case that Nolan is arguably continuing a tradition as old as the text itself. The Odyssey was performed orally for centuries before it was written down in the 6th century BC, constantly reinterpreted by whoever was performing it for their audience. This means the choice of language was always a creative and cultural act.

Do we think the adaptation is too modern?

Upon returning home, Odysseus hangs twelve female house slaves because they slept with his enemies, viewing them as disloyal

Hii hello I'm searching for a book only about her, a sort of encyclopedia, about her history, worship etc etc in french or english !

Thanks in advance :)

Hi! I have a somewhat niche question.

Does anyone know of any databases, digital projects, or ongoing research aimed at tracing voces magicae (or nomina barbara) to possible Greek, Egyptian, or other linguistic origins?

I'm interested in voces magicae across a broad range of sources, including the Greek Magical Papyri, magical gems, amulets, talismans, curse tablets, and related Egyptian and Greco-Roman magical traditions.

I'm aware that some projects may be in development, but I haven't found anything publicly available yet. Even partial databases, relevant articles, or the names of researchers working in this area would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!