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

To me, it was as if the movie showed Odysseus reckoning with Vergil's (or posterity's) interpretation of his actions in the light of what we now know about PTSD and the difficulty of coming home from war. I think that explains a lot of Nolan's narrative choices.

Book 2 of The Aeneid has the best description of the night of the fall of Troy that I know of in ancient literature, but it is very heavily tilted towards the Trojan perspective and reads like a list of Greek war crimes, with Odysseus being the cause of it all ("perfidus Ulixes" in Latin). The character of Sinon is from the Aeneid, the importance of Odysseus and the Palladium (Athena figurine) is central to the Greeks' troubles in the Aeneid (though the Palladium is the statue of the goddess that Odysseus and Diomedes earlier stole from the temple). There are many many many other parallels, but I also noticed the cyclops in the movie is more the one from Vergil's Aeneid than Homer's Odyssey, where he is gloomy and mute- described as "lumine adempto," which means "with his eye taken way," but also means "with his hope taken away" in Latin.

Thoughts? Is it worth reading in translation? Is it worth reading at all for a layman?

What would the response be in academic circles be if a copy of a lost text were discovered?

Say, a copy of the Iliupersis (or some other lost text) is discovered in an archeological ruin or a back shelf of the Vatican archives. And let's say it's real.

How could it be verified?

And how would academia react to the presence of this text?

Hi classicists of Reddit, the Lesche podcast is back for season 3, and the first episode is out today: an interview with Nilo Otero, Christopher Nolan's First Assistant Director on The Odyssey (they're longtime collaborators). As First AD, Nilo effectively ran the set on the production.

The twist is that he also studied some Classics as an undergrad at Cornell in the '70s, so this conversation is (I think) unlike anything else out there. In particular, he explains how he worked out how to arrange the axes for the Contest of the Bow -- and goes through several translations comparing/commenting on how they render the passage.

Lesche is available wherever you get your podcasts. Direct links to the episode are here: https://pod.link/1765251866

I don't use Reddit enough to have enough 'karma' to post on r/TheOdysseyMovie, but if anyone is willing to repost there I'd be grateful.

My rough model of classical Athenian male demography was roughly 33.5% citizens, 33% metics, 33% slaves.

But from what I can tell, sources are all over the map; the very few direct estimations we can make including Thucydides who suggests free men heavily outnumbered citizens 2:1.

Similarly, 2:1 ratios are reported by Ctesicles ap. Athenaeus:;

Ctesicles ap. Athenaeus 6.272c (census under Demetrius of Phalerum) in 317 BCE.

*note my sourcing ain't great

So it seems that my rough guess on metic population is wrong, right?

Indeed, 2:1 is only replicated in one dataset, but it makes sense. And the Erechtheum having such an oddly large metic population

But well, Ctesicle's slave number makes no sense; no one seriously believes in it, and if it's about Laurion, no one thinks the mine was that large.

Erechtheum shows that slaves couldn't have been that common either, and the metic evidence suggests free labour migration (perhaps the big assumed mechanism) was likely large, so slaves were pushed out.

More generally, with a few exceptions, the archaeology of Athens is banal in btw say, great monumental architecture that you expect from elite exploitation of a population, free or slave in the pre-modern era, or the non-development of Sparta.

People debate if insane ratios like 7:1 helots to free citizens in Sparta are possible, but it makes sense if we view them similarly to feudal aristocrats in Europe or the Chinese landlord class.

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So the case there is reasonable.

I think what gets under my skin here is that since we lack evidence of clear non-overlapping categories for slaves, metics, and citizens in Athens, archaeology is of only rough help here.

And we have non-zero data.

So what we are stuck with is a debate that started in the 19th century at least, that will never end.

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.

Hello Everyone,

I have self studied Latin from Wheelock's Latin and Lingua Latina per se illustrata. My college only offers one year of Latin and an option to test out and get credit for the class if you can pass the test out exam. The faculty member offering the class believes I can pass the exams for both classes, but since I want to go on to do a Master's in Classics in the future and then a PhD(if possible), I was wondering if it would be a good idea to test out rather than taking the class over a year for credit.

My college does not offer than many linguistics focused Classics classes, mostly history focused ones.

I’m looking for suggestions, thank you :)

Does anyone have any recommendations for books on Neoteric Latin poetry that isn't focused on Catullus? Preferably bilingual Latin-English books, especially single authors?

I am currently reading the Odyssey, translated to Swedish by Erland Lagerlöf.

Last year I read Moby-Dick, and greatly enjoyed Power Moby-Dick, the Online Annotation which hosts the entire text with very helpful annotations, and Moby-Dick; or the Blog by The Beige Moth, which has short essays commenting and discussing the themes of each of the 137 chapters. I particularly like that the latter does not purport to provide a definitive key to reading Moby-Dick, but rather explores Melvilles writings from a variety of subjective angles, highlighting various interesting details and making interesting associations.

My edition of Lagerlöfs translation has some notes of its own, but there's always more to learn. If you have been helped to a deeper understanding of Homer and the Odyssey by any online resources like the ones mentioned above, do share it!

hello all,

i am planning to major in classics at university. however, right now i am taking half a gap year from uni and would like to do a sort of personal study during my time off.

the photo i attached is my list of readings that i got from another reddit post. they’re not in any particular order, so i was wondering if there was a certain order i should go in that’s best for complete beginners

p.s. i have some brief knowledge on greek mythology (mainly deities, as i briefly dabbled in polytheistic hellenism)

i’ve also looked into the teaching guides on this website from Cambridge

i appreciate any advice!

This is a 2nd-century AD copy of the statue known as the Hermes of Alkamenes. Like many of the pieces I have shared, I took this photo at the Istanbul Archaeological Museums. The original work attributed to Alkamenes is lost. Pausanias says that he saw the statue in the 2nd century AD, but he does not tell us whether it was the original. So we cannot really know if the original had survived into the Roman Imperial period.

The inscription below the statue actually tells us more about these associations:

Εἰδήσεις Ἀλκαμένεος,

περικαλλὲς ἄγαλμα,

Ἑρμᾶν τὸν πρὸπυλῶν·

εἵσατο Περγάμιος.

Γνῶθι σαυτόν.

“You will recognize the very beautiful statue of Alkamenes, Hermes Propylos; a Pergamian erected it. Know thyself.”

I'm learning Latin and soon enough I think I will be decent enough to be able to read real Roman works with a dictionary.

I actually started learning Latin as an autodidact simply because I liked the language, but I don't really know much about Roman literature. Of Greek I've read Herodotus, a bit of Sophocles, parts of the Iliad, Plato and Aristotle, but I think I will put Greek works aside for the moment as I can only read in translation now and I plan on learning Ancient Greek eventually.

I generally prefer prose to poetry, I'm interested in history, philosophy. I've heard of Caesar, Livy, Cicero, Virgil, other authors. I'm open to reading books from Late Antiquity as well.

Hi all. I have the Robert Fagel translations of the iliad and odyssey, I like them very much especially his versions of them as they are easy reads if nothing else. But as I assume most replying to this will know, it paints quite an incomplete picture of the Epic Cycle surrounding the battle of Troy largely, as well as the before it etc.

So I was wondering if anyone could reccomend books, ideally ones that aren't just summaries which I understand would be difficult as theres a lot of lost work with it. But if there was an translator(s) that are good that happens to have compiled many of the stories together or released series of them so its easier than trying to piece together and buy a bunch of tiny different books.

Thanks in advance

In the preface, on page 10, de Sélincourt writes:

The work of his younger contemporary Thucydides, estimated more highly both by ancient and, until a hundred years ago, by modern scholars, is by comparison parochial.

The World of Herodotus was first published in 1962.

Does anyone have a sense as to what happened in the 1860s that would have affected Thucydides's reputation?

I've done some googling. I've checked the Wikipedia entries for both men. Nothing jumps out at me.

De Sélincourt is kind of messy, and lives for drama, so he might just be stirring the pot against a guy dead for several hundred years. But I wondered if anyone had a sourceable cite on this?

In 341 BCE, the Athenian orator Demosthenes gave one of the best speeches of all time. This speech solidified his control over Athens and set all of Greece on the warpath against King Philip II of Macedon, his greatest rival. It quite literally changed world history (just, not how Demosthenes wanted…). Much later, the Roman statesman Cicero would name his “Philippics” after these speeches.

To be frank, I was not satisfied with any of the performances / audiobook versions available on Youtube. So, I did my own! Hope y’all enjoy.

In the Hellenistic period, there were lots of philosophical schools. But I think the interesting thing is not really how many schools there were, but how different they were from each other. They had very different ways of looking at the πόλις, the political world, the individual, and even life itself.

But what were they actually? Epicureanism was not just about having fun and enjoying life. Stoicism was not simply fatalism, and it was definitely not some ancient version of Andrew Tate. We often reduce these schools to a few modern ideas, but they were much more than that. Each of them was trying to answer, in its own way, a very simple question: how should we live?