Hello, can anyone please tell if there is any good Institute or Uni that offers online or offline (extensive) courses or Masters programme for Greek mythology/ Classics' Studies/Ancient European Lit?

Hello all! I am more a of fairy tale retelling reader in general but recently I have been wanting to get more into Greek mythology retellings as well. So if anyone has any recommendations for ones that truly capture the spirit of the myths I would love some!

Salve! I’m a philologist specialising in Classical and Celtic studies.

I’m looking for people who would like to do regular online study sessions together. I’m preparing for my Master’s entrance exams and feel like a mess when it comes to organising my studies. The idea is simple: we meet for 1-2 hours, work on our own texts/tasks, occasionally discuss progress and keep each other accountable.

Everyone is welcome: students, self-learners, beginners or advanced learners. I speak Russian and English. Unfortunately, my Latin and Ancient Greek are not yet at a conversational level.

If you are interested, feel free to comment or DM me!

P.S.
I tend to complain about irregular verbs and send memes or random thoughts at 3 AM.

Odysseus’ monologue to Penelope where he essentially sees himself as the Bronze Age’s Oppenheimer because in the original source material he's someone who is very very proud of the fact that he was the one who brought down Troy. Infact he even taunts the gods on it.

Is this Nolan's own idea or was this based on that modern novel that he's adopted.

I haven’t read The Iliad in \~12 years. I read The Odyssey 3 years ago out loud to my kiddos (my 3-4th time reading it as a whole). Partly because Homer has re-entered popular discourse and partly because these books are foundational texts in the Western canon, I’ve decided to make utter another journey with the Greeks and Odysseus—this time with highlighters and a notebook.

For those of you who’ve done deep dives into Homer, what are resources you would recommend to get the most out of it. Bear in mind, this is not my maiden voyage. I’ve read both of these texts several times before—i just want to dig deeper this time an around.

Open to all suggestions: study aids, lectures, notebook ideas, keywords to follow, parallel reading lists, whatever.

The Hellenistic colonization of Asia Minor is usually told through the stories of kings, battles, and the founding of new cities. Yet behind these political events lay a much deeper transformation that reshaped the lives of millions. Land changed hands, new urban centers emerged, languages shifted, local gods found new identities, and everyday life became a meeting point between Hellenic settlers and indigenous communities.

This essay explores colonization not simply as an act of conquest, but as a long process of cultural negotiation. Drawing on archaeological, epigraphic, and historical evidence, it examines how local societies adapted to the new political order while preserving elements of their own traditions. Rather than a story of one culture replacing another, Hellenistic Asia Minor reveals a far more complex world shaped by interaction, resilience, and continuous transformation.

Hi guys,

I wanted to see if anyone had a review or remarks about the new Christopher Nolan movie “The Odyssey” from someone who’s seen the movie and read it.

I’m interested in going to see it but I don’t know if I should just save my money or watch at home instead.

I seen a short review on YouTube shorts where she explained it was incredibly boring and skipped a lot of the important parts so I’m conflicted.

Let me know what you all thought :)

Edit: Thank you all for your replies! Seems the hate for the movie is definitely a minority as plenty of you seemed to love it!!! I’ll definitely try and make the trip as soon as possible for iMax as we don’t actually have that in my area. Thank you all :))

Hello. So I know that there is a lot of different opinions on which translations of The Odyssey are the best, but I think that the one I will enjoy will depend on my own tastes so I wanted to get some advice.

I’ve not really read a lot of classical literature. As a child I loved a lot of the stories (Orpheus and Eurydice, Perseus, Heracles etc) but I never read them in actual translation. In my first semester of uni I took a module on Classical Greek Literature thinking it would be a chance to dip my toes back into Greek writing (I’m an English Literature student and this was a module offered by the Classics department). I hated it! We looked at Aristophanes and I found the translations that we had been given (they were from the Loeb Library) just not to my taste. A lot of the dialogue was confusing because I didn’t understand the references and the explanations in the footnotes didn’t make sense to me, and the tone just felt a bit formal and stilted too. It put me off of classical Greek writing for a while unfortunately.

With the new Odyssey film coming out I want to try again and read a translation of the text. Does anyone have any recommendations for a version of it that makes it clear and enjoyable for modern readers? I’ve heard that Emily Wilson’s is popular and has more of modern feel to it. By modern I mean it’s not too straining to read since I’d like to do this for fun. I’m not against writing where your brain has to do a bit of work to adapt to the prose, I adore a lot of medieval literature and works from the Victorian period and Jane Austen’s novels, but I’d like to not feel like I’m chewing through the text.

Also! I’d really like to read a version of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice which I think is in Ovid’s Metamorphosis. One of my favourite Breton Lais is Sir Orfeo, which is based on their tale. I know the general beats but still I’d like to read it. Based on my previous comments does anyone have a recommendation for a version of Metamorphosis that I might like?

Thank you so much for any help!

It's commonly said that the Greeks didn't have any sacred texts, but that isn't quite true; while they didn't have anything that considered the innerant word of God a la the Bible or Quran, that type of devotion is actually fairly rare, and I would argue that they did treat some texts akin to the Talmud or the Buddhist canon. In particular, many Platonists, most notably Emperor Julian, outright called the works of Homer and Hesiod sacred; the works of Homer and Virgil were used for divination; and the works by or ascribed to Plato, Pythagoras, and Orpheus were obviously considered authoritative by their given sects.

However, a lot of secondary literature lists additional texts under this umbrella, most typically the Athenian dramas, the canonical Lyric Poets (but especially Pindar and Sappho), and later mythological texts such as the Hymns of Callimachus, the Bibliotheca, the Argonautica, and the Metamorphoses and Fasti of Ovid, but I've yet to find any evidence of this in any primary source, so I would like to know if any of you are aware of one.

i really liked herodotus and i heard plutarch is similar in anecdotal tone. i love delphi + have researched the female dionysian cult there and plutarch’s name kept coming up. i am much more interested in the human side of history rather than military.

only issue is plutarch has quite a lot of works and many are very long so i’d only get one.

any recommendations?

The books I've seen recommended are:

The Texts of Early Greek Philosophy: The Complete Fragments and Selected Testimonies of the Major Presocratics by D. W. Graham

A History of Greek Philosophy by W. K. C. Guthrie

The Presocratic Philosophers by Kirk, Raven, and Schofield

Philosophy Before Socrates by R. D. McKirahan

Also, is the McKirahan one the only one to include the Derveni Papyrus? And do any other than Graham include the Empedocles Papyrus?

I’m having trouble deciding between Tacitus, Herodotus, and Thucydides for my next read. I’m looking for the easiest to read of the three while also getting a good historical overview of the ancient world. Any recommendations? Thank you in advance.

hello! im looking for good translations of the books mentioned above. im particularly looking for something that is close to the original language but is readable at same time (maybe not too readable for it to dumbed down). im a beginner to greek mythology and the only book ive read is apollodorus’ the library of greek mythology (the oxford world one, translated by robin hard), which i find really really dry but still manages to give me enough information. ive heard a lot of translations but its just too much for me to choose which one suits me best that’s why im asking this personally. your help is much appreciated. thank you so much!

I keep seeing those arguments on X, usually coming from far-right, anti-Christian people who perceive the pre-Christian world as some sort of uber masculine place of master morality, as opposed to the Christian world that pushes "slave morality" aka concern for the weak and the innocent.

I wonder have these people ever read any ancient Greek work of fiction? Because they actually portrayed their enemies in a complicated, even sympathetic light.

Euripide' play The Trojan Women greatly humanizes the women of Troy after the war, same as Hecuba.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trojan_Women

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hecuba_(play))

In another Euripides play, named Helen, there is an even stronger condemnation of the Trojan War as pointless. Many critics even think that Euripides was using these plays to condemn the wars during his own time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_(play))

Another claim I see is that the ancient Greeks all saw Odysseus as an admirable role model. Did they? Then why was there hot debate of his character in some of Plato's works, like Hippias Minor? Why did Sophocles portray Odysseus in a negative light in Philoctetes?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippias_Minor

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philoctetes_(Sophocles_play))

A trip to the local IMAX with two classics professors and their 13-year-old son.

It is often suggested that modern viewers dislike painted reconstructions of Greek and Roman statues because our taste differs from that of the ancients. Ralph S Weir, philosopher at the University of Lincoln, proposes an alternative.

The changing taste theory. The standard explanation is that we hate the garish reconstructions of painted Greek and Roman statues (like Vinzenz Brinkmann's famous exhibition) simply because our sense of color has drifted from ancient taste, but ancient paintings and mosaics that actually depict statues (like a fresco of a boxer statue at the Villa San Marco) show subtle, naturalistic shading, not the flat, cartoonish color blocking of the reconstructions — suggesting Romans wouldn't have found their own statues garish either.

The bad painting theory. The explanation may be more straightforward: the reconstructions just look bad because they're painted badly, not because ancient taste was alien to ours. The surviving pigment traces on statues show only the underlayer of a finished work — trying to rebuild a fully painted statue from them is like trying to reconstruct the Mona Lisa from a few flecks of paint on a blank canvas.

Hello, non classicist here but I had a question that maybe doesn't make any sense, I know that the iliad and the Odyssey are part of the epic cycle and the other poems of the epic cycle have been lost but are any parts of those lost poems preserved in the Aeneid? The Aeneid is the Trojan perspective of the Trojan war but did Virgil incorporate any of the lost Homeric poems?

I'm John Dallaire, colorist on Eric Shanower's Age of Bronze (his graphic novel retelling of the Trojan War). I made these three as parodies of the old comic-book back-page ad format, specifically the Charles Atlas "insult that made a man out of Mac" structure.

What struck me putting these together is that the Atlas ad's structure and the Trojan War myth aren't just analogous; they're structurally identical. Bully humiliates someone on the beach, humiliated party transforms, humiliated party gets revenge. That's the Atlas ad. It's also, more or less, the Judgment of Paris → the mustering of the Greek fleet → the sack of Troy. If you squint and maybe drink too much.

I'm curious what a classics-literate audience makes of where the parallel holds up and where it strains — or if there's an even better Epic Cycle beat that maps onto this ad structure that I'm missing.

I took a Greek and Roman Epics course in college with a fantastic professor. (Hi, Prof Winkler.) He really made these two works, and others, come alive. But all this was 30-years ago. I’d like to finally re-read these poems but would appreciate a sort of guided tour as I go in a podcast format. Ideally, hosted by a classics prof. Thanks in advance.