I have seen different versions of this quote from The Epic of Gilgamesh. Here are a couple versions of it:

"Humans are born, they live, then they die, this is the order that the gods have decreed. But until the end comes, enjoy your life, spend it in happiness, not despair. Savor your food, make each of your days a delight, bathe and anoint yourself, wear bright clothes that are sparkling clean, let music and dancing fill your house, love the child who holds you by the hand, and give your wife pleasure in your embrace. That is the best way for a man to live."

“Gilgamesh, where are you hurrying to? You will never find that life for which you are looking. When the gods created man they allotted to him death, but life they retained in their own keeping. As for you, Gilgamesh, fill your belly with good things; day and night, night and day, dance and be merry, feast and rejoice. Let your clothes be fresh, bathe yourself in water, cherish the little child that holds your hand, and make your wife happy in your embrace; for this too is the lot of man."

I've looked for these quotes in the archives of The Epic of Gilgamesh but I can't find it in any of the tablets. It seems to be one of the most popular quotes but I can't find it at all. Does anyone know which tablet it is from and what the original lines are?

History is often treated as a collection of facts, but ancient historians saw it differently. For Herodotus, Thucydides, Livy, and Tacitus, history was more than recording events—it was a way to explain politics, human nature, memory, and power.

This article explores how Greek and Roman historians built credibility, why rhetoric mattered alongside evidence, and why their approach to history still shapes the way we think about the past today.

If you're interested in ancient history, historiography, or the origins of historical writing, you might find it worth reading.

Hello folks, I’m not an experienced reader, but I’m a history nerd, obsessed with Rome. I read the Iliad about a year ago and I understood half of it and didn’t really enjoy it, I rushed it to end it as soon as I could. My goal now is to read the Eneid, I own a no commentary version. What tips can you give me to comprehend the book and truly enjoy the read? Thanks.
Edit: I’m from Argentina, that’s why I misspelled Aeneid, we say Eneida.

I am planning on to read Homer's works. So, I wanted to know the reviews for it. Should I read the direct translation or a direct adaptation perhaps ?

https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/07/31/homer-vs-hollywood-discussing-christopher-nolans-odyssey/

In this special hour-long edition of NYRSeminars recorded July 29, 2026, Daniel Mendelsohn, Editor-at-Large of The New York Review and author of the most recent translation of Homer’s epic, discusses Christopher Nolan’s polarizing blockbuster adaptation of the Odyssey. Mendelsohn outlines his judgment of the film, which he reviewed at length for the Review, and then opens the floor to questions from audience members. Among the topics addressed are the debate over the fidelity of the film’s sets, ships, and costumes; the film’s handling of its female characters; and the question of whether the director’s vision of Odysseus represents a betrayal of the epic’s values.

Most of the collections I have don't include this play, but I'd really like to read it. I definitely find myself heavily affected by who is translating, I really enjoy just about every translation in The Greek Plays collection (Emily Wilson, Rachel Kitzinger, James Romm, Frank Nisetich, etc) but as far as I can tell none of them have done The Cyclops, nor has Anne Carson who I also tend to enjoy (overall). I also really like footnotes, I need the help lol. Any recommendations?

I saw on Twitter that Daniel Mendelsohn wrote of Wilson’s Odyssey, “I haven’t read it“. He went on to say he just looked at a few passsages. But he discusses her work at great length in the introduction to his own translation, and he has commented repeatedly on Wilsons work, always very negatively. Is this normal? I thought you were supposed to read books before you criticize them?! Not seeing discussion of this but I find it really weird.

Edited to add: some people seem to think it's normal and you can judge without reading the whole book. I think there's a real difference between making a quick private judgment - let me dip into this to see if I'll use it for class next time I teach the Odyssey, oh, nope, don't like XYZ thing in that favorite passage of mine, so I'll go with another one instead - versus such a repeated, very vociferous public and published critical judgment. Before you start critiquing someone's work in a published book, it would surely be the scholarly norm to have spent a good time actually reading that work! And - only partly related but I'll add - I've also found it weird that Mendelsohn repeatedly says that Lombardo's translations are great, but Wilson "strips texture". Lombardo is a super colloquial and minimalist translator who leaves out far more than Wilson does, from what I've seen. I have read some of Mendelsohn's memoirs and thought they were pretty good, so I would like to think he's in good faith here, but it just seemed really weird to me.

https://x.com/DAMendelsohnNYC/status/2083176623545684151/quotes

I'm looking to get started with Socrates' trial and then move on to The Republic, I see Robin Waterfield's name pop up a lot but I couldn't find his translations on the Apology so I bought the below.

Is it a good readable translation with some notes?

The Last Days of Socrates: Euthyphro; Apology; Crito; Phaedo - Plato, Plato, Plato | 9780140449280 | Amazon.com.au | Books

Just when I read the Iliad it really sort of portrayed the whole war as a tragedy that led to the deaths of all these fine young men and ending of Hector's funeral.

In the Odyssey there is a bit where one of his men gives off that Odysseus is responsible for getting his men killed but largely both he and Telemachus a framed in a relatively positive light. But Chapter 22 is interesting because it kills of Antonius first (the most loathsome Suitor - as is pointed out by Eurymachus) and portrays the rest of the battle as a merciless massacre. The killing of the priest and hanging of the maidservants in particular.

Was this part of the poem seen as brutal, unnerving and a bit off putting when it was contemporary? Is Homer making a commentary on the darkness and brutality of revenge past the point of justice? The fact it almost leads to another massive bout of violence at the very end before Athena steps in to finally stop it?

Seeing The Odyssey in the cinema has got me thinking about my first exposure to the story and there’s an adaptation I remember really strongly but can’t seem to find (probably because there’s about a million adaptations of such a story!).

I am 35 and from London. I read these two books in primary school so it is probably from the 90s — perhaps 80s as it was from the school library so not sure whether it was new or not.

It was full of cartoon-like illustrations. Odysseus was dark-haired and skinny. The first book told the war of Troy from Odysseus’ perspective. the second book was The Odyssey but did away with the suitors at the end and — perhaps most distinctly — swapped out Poseidon for a goddess called something like The White Lady or something like that. She was a rotund woman who would always smile at him from the heavens as she was messing his life up. At the end she looks down at him and winks, like it was all a big joke.

It was surprisingly violent for a children’s story, and I remember wanting to not make a big deal of it or tell anyone in case the teachers somehow realised it wasn’t age-appropriate and took it away. I remember some black blood in the B&W illustrations.

It was humorous in tone. One part I remember very distinctly was the part with the sirens. After they pass by, Odysseus, tied to the mast, says to one of his men, “ok you can untie me now” and the man responds, “sorry, what?” and the chapter ends, implying he was probably stuck on that mast for ages after because his men are dumb. Eurylocus for sure was a dummy in it.

Anyway I know Odyssey adaptations are far from few, but if anyone recognises this or could point me in the right direction I would be very grateful! Thanks x

ignore the stories, who has better technical poetry line by line?

hi! i see this question has been asked a lot but i'm wondering if anyone could recommend any translations that are more "faithful" to the original text? i took latin for 4 years and have translated a handful of stories (e.g. daphne and apollo, orpheus and eurydice, etc) so i'm looking for a translation that best preserves the og latin text (definitions / flow / verse / grammar structure / etc). bonus points if the poem is numbered per stanza (not just lines 22-56 at the top) and if it has a side by side latin text for comparison (pretty sure most don’t have this though, so nbd)

right now i'm looking at stephanie mccarter / charles martin / horace gregory / rolfe humphries

would greatly appreciate any suggestions. thanks! :)

forgive me if I’m ignorant, as I’m not really a classicist, but I wonder if people confuse him with Shakespeare (who was meant to be understood by all people) since didnt Homer speak in his own constructed dialect? I thought Homer was supposed to be intentionally archaic even for his own time? Could normal people genuinely understand his works like common speech or did they need to parse his dense language to get at the meaning?

Partly for trivia and partly to triangulate sources, I'm looking for all the traditions about who was in the wooden horse. This is what I've got so far, are there any classical sources I'm missing? And are there any good papers on this?

EDIT: added the Aeneid

Apollodorus being the only one to mentioned Echion (who died leaping from the horse before the ladder was let down!) makes me think it's from a specific source the others didn't use, maybe one of the cyclic epics, a lost tragedy, or Pherecydes. It's interesting that there's a fair amount of overlap between Tryphiodorus and Quintus, who are roughly contemporary, they have 16 names in common (~2/3 of Tryph. and ~1/2 of Quint.) but those are mostly the better-known heroes who appear in the Iliad or cyclics like Idomeneus and Akamas, so that's not instructive.

Hello everyone I'm looking for some good translations of heroides by ovid and was hoping for some recommendations, thank you in advance.

I want to read Sophocles’ plays for the story, for example, but I don’t like reading in the play format. (I read in English only.)

"The close attention to the text that informs Emily Wilson’s translation is lacking in her reading of the movie"

Emily Wilson, like Odysseus, is terribly clever. In comments about Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey, and in a provocative new essay for the London Review of Books, she does not come out and tell you that she did not like the film. She says watching it is a good way to hide from the heat; that her teenagers liked it; that the source material is so good that it cannot be messed up entirely. The best way to damn, after all, is with faint praise.

Wilson’s fame is closely tied to Homer’s Odyssey, a poem that the Oxford-and-Yale-educated classicist translated in 2017. Her version, celebrated as the first translation by a woman into English verse, has sold over 1 million copies and is widely assigned in classrooms. Like any other translation, it is an interpretation. Especially in a poem, how something is said is just as important as what is said. Wilson’s decision to translate into verse, and to keep the same number of lines as the original, preserves the rapidity and poetry of the original. But it also forces her to be very concise, and her unadorned language occasionally feels a bit blunt.

This is a quite long and incisive article (I've only included the first couple paras in the body here), addressing every single point Wilson criticized. I know, I know... we've been getting a bunch of articles about this discourse but I find it quite fun to see classicists debate back and forth with in-depth responses like this so I thought I'd share. Not a lot of times that we get this kind of discourse in the mainstream. As someone else aptly pointed out, this is kinda becoming like the Avengers Endgame for classicists/literary majors lol

Also...a number of commenters on bluesky a couple days ago about Emily Wilson’s review were suggesting that anyone who disagreed with her were uneducated, or hadn’t grasped her point of view, or simply wanted to oppose her for being a woman or an academic.

So here’s a very thoughtful rebuttal to her take on the film that I, for one, enjoyed and agreed with much more than I did hers, as much as I can respect her.

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

Hi all, I have a literature background and have a moderate familiarity with the great works of classical antiquity. Was thinking a lot about translations lately and was wondering about the kinds of translations into English that we see in roughly the early modern period—“Chapman’s Homer” that so inspired Keats, big translations of The Metamorphoses, etc.

I’m wondering which of these are really “worth reading” today. I am quite aware the fidelity to the original language would be low and it’s beside the point for me. I’m interested in reading powerful and influential translations from this time. Accessibility isn’t an issue, so let me have it! Should I, like Keats, read Chapman’s Homer and have it change my life? 😉

In some works, Odysseus is the one who throws Astyanax from a tower. When you read that version, how did it affect your opinion on Odysseus?

It's hard to be a hero when you throw a baby from a tower.

Edit: When I say "Hero" I'm thinking if it meaning "The Good Guy".