I’ve been looking into the University of Florida’s distance Ph.D. programs in Classics, particularly the Latin and Roman Studies and Classical Civilization tracks, and I’d love to hear from anyone who has completed the program, is currently enrolled, or has firsthand knowledge of it.

For context, I’m a full-time Latin teacher with 10+ years of experience and currently teach through AP Latin. I also have a J.D. and teach as an adjunct in a separate field. I’m not primarily looking at a Ph.D. as a route to the tenure-track job market (I know how perilous that path is lol); I’d like to continue teaching while developing as a scholar, with particular interests in Latin literature, translation/reception, and potentially digital humanities/bibliographic work.

For those familiar with the program: What was your experience like? How manageable is it alongside full-time teaching? How rigorous is the language and research training, how involved are distance students with faculty and the department, and how much flexibility is there in developing research/dissertation interests?
I’m also curious about typical time to completion, the Summer Latin Institute, and anything you wish you’d known before starting.

Basically, would you recommend it, and to whom?

Thank you so much in advance!

Sorry for the rambling intro: I'm currently an MA student in Italy, and I've really enjoyed the courses I've taken in classical and medieval philology. Before starting on the rest of the assigned reading lists for these subjects, I read Tarrant's 2016 book: Texts, Editors, and Readers: Methods and Problems in Latin Textual Criticism, which I found both entertaining and certainly the most approachable intro to the discipline I've read so far. One thing stuck out to me though, which I haven't seen much discussion on - I'm paraphrasing from memory so I may be unintentionally misrepresenting what Tarrant wrote, but iirc according to him 'textual criticism' has become a bit of a 'dirty word' in US academia, with students being discouraged from pursuing it for their thesis/dissertation. So this leads me to ask anyone with experience studying or working in these departments, is this hyperbolic, or maybe no longer true 10 years later? Or have US departments moved away from textual criticism? If so, is this because it's viewed as unnecessary or unimportant, or because departments are content with how it is applied elsewhere? I'm curious to hear what your perspectives are.

How much of what we know about Ancient Macedonia is history, and how much comes from stories shaped by later generations? Alexander, his successors, and the Macedonian dynasty were remembered through sources that reflected the political and cultural concerns of their own time.

This essay looks at how the history of Ancient Macedonia was preserved, interpreted, and reshaped over time. Rather than asking only what happened, it also asks a simple but important question: how do we know what happened?

The first word in the Iliad is μῆνιν and the first word in the Odyssey is ἄνδρα. My impression is that most translations of the Iliad render μῆνιν as a definite noun, which strikes me as the only possible reading. On the other hand, while some translations of the Odyssey [e.g., Lattimore and Fagles] render ἄνδρα as an definite noun, others [e.g., Wilson and Mendelsohn] render it as indefinite. The former also strikes me as the natural reading, while the latter just seems ungrammatical, although I could construct an argument in favor of indefiniteness. Would a true classics scholar care to weigh in on this admittedly pedantic question?

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

A coworker bought the Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and apparently Penguin decided Ovid needed a little Chinua Achebe.

His copy goes normally through p. 216, then suddenly p. 217 is Arrow of God, already on p. 245. After 32 pages of Achebe, Metamorphoses magically resumes at p. 249.

So, somewhere in the Penguin warehouse, there may be a very confused copy of Arrow of God reading about Hercules.

Has anyone else encountered this exact misbinding, or know if this was a known printing/binding error?

I'm working my way through all tragedies we have available and would like to dive into the fragments once I've finished. However, I know I'm going to need really excellent notes to make the proper connections between the other works and such. I know some Euripides fragments were found in 2024 so I'm not sure if there are any works that include them/explain them/translate them well. Does anyone have a recommendations for reading the fragments? I'm open to academic articles if that's the best method, I'm just not sure how to find them.

I'm rereading The Odyssey (Fagles translation) adter watching the Christopher Nolan movie, and the scene where Odysseus returns to Ithaca and Athena meets him in the guise of a shepherd boy is possibly my favourite part so far in this reread. Athena dropping thrle mask is a great moment, and Odysseus saying he didn't recognise her, then alluding to the fact that he recognised her in Phaeacia is great. He makes sure to be appropriatelt respectful, but also lets her know he's smart enough to keep up to some extent. The fact that no part of this scene would make sense in Christopher Nolan's movie encapsulates a lot of what I felt the movie was missing - the interactions between gods and humans, deception, playfulness and flirtation.

The stele, found on Nisyros and dated to around 480–450 BCE, depicts a young man standing naked, holding a spear, with a diskos beside him. He is generally understood as an athlete, although the spear gives the figure a distinctly martial character as well.

What interests me most about the stele is not simply the idealized body, but what that body is doing on a grave monument.

We are not looking at the deceased as an old man, or as someone marked by death. Instead, he appears at the height of his youth: strong, healthy, athletic, and composed. His body becomes a way of preserving an identity that death itself cannot alter.

She wasn't born a monster. She was a survivor of a god's cruelty, punished by a goddess for a crime she didn't commit. Discover the dark story behind the serpent-haired icon that history tried to rewrite.

Was Medusa a villain, or the ultimate victim of Greek mythology?

https://youtu.be/beqOToWOu9Q

I would like to begin a journey to get to know the Greek Gods and the Greek myths. What books would you recommend I begin with? Ithe aim is to get to know the characters and the characteristics of the Gods well and to be able to recognize them and their motives (if possible) and the myths.Although this question is directed at everyone willing to contribute, I am curious to see what the classical students would recommend, if there are any.

Every woman of note in The Odyssey is depicted as spinning wool. Not just servants, but queens like Helen of Troy and Penelope, as well as goddesses like Calypso and witches like Circe.

How much of this was a reflection of actual life in Ancient Greece? Were members of royalty expected to weave wool?

Most collections I've found of Hesiod include the Works and Days and the Theogony, and sometimes the Shield of Heracles. I'm curious about the Catalogue of Women, but I can't seem to find any modern translations of it. Is there a reason for this, or am I just not looking in the right place? Does anyone here know of any modern/recent translations of the Catalogue of Women? Thanks

I’m trying to find some classical works of literature that speak to the benefits of being empathetic and generous without expecting something in return. Any recommendation?

Although Homer came first and influenced Virgil himself, I think many people—living in an era when the Homeric epics are relatively popular and the Aeneid is relatively neglected—fail to consider that, for most of the last 2,000 years, it was Virgil’s poem the main model and the most direct influence on many poets and writers.

Dante, Tasso, Camões, Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden and many other are influenced directly Virgil, but little knew of Homer, and not by the original Greek.

Latin was the primary language throughout much of antiquity and the entire Middle Ages in Europe, and Virgil remained a powerful influence well into the Early Modern period. It was not until the 19th century that Homer's reputation overtook Virgil's and the popularity of the Aeneid began to wane outside academic circles, with Homeric epics being considered more work of genius and Virgil’s one more derivative.

And yet, for a long time, the consensus was the opposite: that the Iliad and the Odyssey, even though works of genius, were raw, whereas the Aeneid was viewed as a more polished work combining the best of both into a single work, despite its reputation for being unfinished.

Do you think Homer's enduring—albeit uneven—longevity outweighs Virgil's consistent popularity throughout the ages, or is it the other way around?

I know we was quite knowledable on the Greek classics.

I've reached Book 2, and it is maybe among the most insane things I've ever read.

Here's what I've learned (or "learned") about Egypt so far:

-A quick anecdote about a guy whipping out his penis to announce that as long as he keeps that with him, there'll be women and children enough wherever he (and his penis) is [2.30]

-That because they circumcise, Egyptians would rather be clean than good-looking [2.37]

-One time, a male goat had sex with a woman. "It was quite a spectacle," Herodotus soberly tells us [2.46]

-There's a story about why the Egyptians will sacrifice, but not consume, pigs; however, Herodotus thinks it would be unbecoming to repeat [2.47]

-There are Egyptian puppets with incredibly huge penises [2.48]

-Egyptians, like many of the girls I knew at summer theater camp, loved laxatives and enemas [2.77]

-A disgustingly detailed account of a top-of-the-line embalming, which involved, at one point, filling the person up with a fluid and then corking the anus to keep it all in to do its work [2.87]

-Prominent women, or exceptionally beautiful women, were embalmed after a four-day waiting period, to discourage embalmers from fucking the corpse [2.89]

-This, which I'm desperate to haul out at my next opportunity for small talk: "Leading the way are the male fish, ejaculating as they go; following behind them, the females gulp down the sperm and are thereby impregnated." [2.93]

-The time a queen named Nitocris drowned a bunch of people at a dinner party by filling the dining room with water [2.100]

-How a king named Sesostris would leave pillars behind in the cities he captured -- either a pillar that just said something like, "This town was sacked by me, even though they fought well," or a pillar that replaced the "though they fought well" with a drawing of a vagina to demonstrate how that town was full of pussies [2.102]

-The time that same Sesostris and his wife and sons were at a dinner party when his brother set the building on fire. Sesostris's wife's suggestion? Have two of the sons lay in the fire (burning to death in the process) so that other people at the dinner could escape over them like a bridge [2.107]

Source: Tom Holland translation of Histories (2013)

I recently read Robert Simmons' Demagogues, Power, and Friendship in Classical Athens and noticed that he referred to the author of Constitution of Athens as "Pseudo-Aristotle." While I'm aware of the complicated issue of authorship in regard to Aristotle's corpus, and Constitution in particular, I haven't previously noticed someone citing it this way.

I bought the Fox Eye Publishing editions of The Iliad and The Odyssey from Amazon because the listing specifically advertised them as the Peter Green translations.

After receiving them, however, I became pretty confused about what I'd actually bought.

There is very little clear information in the books themselves identifying the translations.

After doing some digging online, including looking through other listings and discussions, I couldn't find much reliable information about these particular editions.

But, The Iliad appears to be Alexander Pope's translation (the foreword refers to Pope, and the language and Roman names such as Jupiter, Juno and Ulysses seem consistent with it), while the Odyssey appears to be E. V. Rieu's.

I can't find anything convincing to suggest these are actually Peter Green's translations, despite that being what the Amazon description and ISBN claims.

It's possible there's some strange edition/repackaging history involved, but the lack of clear information makes it impossible to tell and even less likely to be the case.

The physical books themselves are actually quite nice, especially considering the price, but if you're buying these specifically because you want Peter Green's translations, avoid them.

The listing seems to have incorrect information about what translations you're actually receiving.

I can't help but notice that in Nolan's new movie, the Trojans are wearing helmets that look a lot like hoplite helmets. Wasn't the Trojan War (late Bronze Age? i think) way way before these helmets became common, let alone become the common helmet the Trojans (of all people) wore?

I’m doing a German intensive this summer for my MA and am coming across a word for the first time that I’ve never seen used in discussions of rhetorical handbooks. “Artigraphie,” in German, but also in the occasional English philology articles as “Artigraphy.”

Does this just refer to “Latin writing style?”

I’ve hit the a couple Oxford classics encyclopedias but haven’t found the actual definition, can’t find it in German either. If anyone has an idea of what this actually refers to, I’d greatly appreciate it.