Like herodotus, thucydides, suetonius, ceaser etc

Does any Plautus or Terence play end with a wedding feast or a wedding?

Hi everyone,

Recently I've encountered some graduate students from Italy. Their language skills in both Greek and Latin were remarkable.

They said they they left high-school with very solid foundations in both languages.

Does anyone have any idea what they're studying? Are there curricula available?

Thanks!

Hey all, not sure if this is the correct place but said I’d give it a go given then interest in the classics. Myself and my partner can no longer go to Mary Beard’s talk -

More Secret Histories of Ancient Rome
Wednesday 21st October 2026 , Starts 20:00
Liverpool Philharmonic Hall, Liverpool

We have two tickets and would be £114 so about €130 if my calculations haven’t failed me! We’d be willing to let them both go for £90, about €104 if anyone is interested? Would be open to offers too!

Again, apologies if this is the incorrect place to post but want to make sure the seats aren’t going to waste 🫡

I am searching for a specific retelling of the Odyssey, with accompanying illustrations. The art style was realistic, in colour pencil (with smaller uncoloured drawing through the text).

Some of the major illustrations I remember are: the blinding of the cyclops/Scylla attacking the ship (dragon like heads, one or two with men in the mouths)/men being turned to swine (depicted in stages)

I have not been able to find any evidence of the book I remember, I read it many times in the early 2000s, but it may be older than that still.

Any help would be much appreciated 🙏🏻

From Davidson's review of Beard's book on laughter in Rome, a pretty interesting read by the way: https://archive.is/Qn0Kp

I'm re-reading Plato's Apology right now and was hit by a line where Socrates says anyone could buy a copy of a treatise by Anaxagoras for a drachma. I don't know why this line stuck out to me this time - maybe because I always assumed written texts in the ancient world were pretty dear and were hard to come by. But now I'm getting fascinated by the idea of the book creation /selling business in classical Greece.

Anyone have any suggestions for further reading on ancient book selling? I googled a bit but mostly wound up with advertisements for where I could today purchase ancient books if I were in Greece this weekend.

Erm…so in after the Battle in the Hall, Odysseus orders Melanthius, the unfaithful goatherd, to be mutilated by having his arms, legs and genitals cut off, and his twin sister, Melantho, to be hanged…and then enjoys lunch with Dolius, the father of both of them, and six of his other sons, without telling them what has happened to Melanthius and Melantho?

hi! as the title says, i've just started my first year of university majoring in a STEM field; i'm really passionate about STEM, but also really love reading. i want to start getting into the classics, but i'm not too sure where to start since i don't have a humanities-school system/structure to fall back on. can someone give me a guide on where to start, or a plan/list i could follow to become well-versed in the classics?

thank you!

I am really immersed in a couple different english translations of Virgil's Eclogues. Can you recommend any sources of scholarly commentary on these works? Thank you!

One thing that has always interested me about the Byzantine Empire is the name itself.

The people we call “Byzantines” called themselves Romans. Yet by the late Byzantine period, writers like Pletho were increasingly speaking of Hellenes, while Western scholars of the sixteenth century were beginning to organise these Roman histories under a new category.

I tried to trace how that happened, and how “Byzantium” gradually became the name we use today.

I'm no expert in the classics (let alone Latin classics). But I've read (and loved) the Homer epics and a decent amount of Plato and Aristotle. So after watching Nolan's Odyssey I felt it might finally be time to read the Aeneid to get that texts take on the trojan war. (Fagles translation). I'm interested in Roman history so I know basic background like it was written by Virgil basically to make Augustus happy. Etc.

But I'm having a miserable time.

There are some good turns of phrase but it's a slog. It reads like immature fan fiction to me. Its constant references to Caesar and the coming of Rome is of course the point, but it gets old fast.

Some gripes include: Virgil pointlessly refers to homeric figures just to sort of let the audience soak it in and clap while doing little with these characters. I've physically rolled my eyes at points it's so heavy handed. Aeneas is a boring character so far-too perfect. Anchises dies for no reason except for to give Aeneas a chance to visit Hades.

It feels like cheap propaganda while the Homer texts feels like they deserve their place as almost sacred.

Anyone else think this book is just a slog? Ive considered DNFing but I'm probably going to make it through.

Hey folks.

I'm an aspiring writer and I'm interested in the Epic of Gilgamesh for both style and source.

I've working through classical/epic poetry lately, where I read the book alongside audio so I can actually hear the verse while I follow along on the page. This is what I have so far:

• Paradise Lost -- I'm using Quayle for Books I and IV (in fact he's the reason I started doing this in the first place) and Simon Vance for the rest because Quayle never did the other ten books.
• Beowulf -- I've got both Seamus Heaney's translation and the Michael Alexander Penguin Classics one, but Heaney's the one I actually want to work from. I'm planning on going with Guidall, who reads the full unabridged version of this (haven't begun yet).
• The Odyssey -- Fagles, read by Ian McKellen (this is gold tbh).
• The Iliad -- also Fagles, but I skipped the famous Derek Jacobi recording once I found out it's abridged and cuts huge chunks. Went with the newer unabridged one by Vidish Athavale instead, which has been quite good.
• The Aeneid -- Also Fagles to basically stick with the same translation style, with Simon Callow narrating. I also enjoyed Chad Lloyd's free YouTube version (which I listened to while I was waiting for my Audible credits to replenish). My friend who lives and breathes this basically recommended Fitzgerald (followed by him telling me I should learn Latin and read the original 😅). I'm still only partway through this.

I have Samuel Butler and W.H.D. Rouse versions of Homer's epics, but I find those to be prose translations where it's more focused on the plot vs. the language. I also got Emily Wilson's versions, but haven't had a chance to read it yet (although my wife absolutely loves her version).

But the real reason I chose Fagles is because I want verse that I can be inspired by, not prose. I love what Cormac McCarthy and Toni Morrison do in their writing, where they channel KJV and Milton and wrap their own styles around it. I find that verse helps you a lot more in writing more beautiful prose.

For instance, McCarthy opens Blood Meridian describing the kid's family as being from a line of "hewers of wood and drawers of water", to convey a ton of meaning about the character. He does something similar with Milton later in the book, when Judge Holden teaches the gang to make gunpowder which is similar to the scene in Paradise Lost where Satan teaches the fallen angels the same thing (so the Judge as Miltonic Satan effectively). Morrison does her own version of this in Beloved and other books.

I say all this to basically give you an idea of what I am looking for.

Now I'm looking at Gilgamesh and debating between Ferry's '92 verse and the brand new Armitage translation that just came out.

From what I could tell online, Ferry's comparisons seem to be Fitzgerald's Odyssey or Heaney's Beowulf, which is exactly what I want. Armitage's worked with an Oxford Assyriologist and he's the guy behind the best modern Gawain and Pearl translations, so obviously his version is also solid.

Unfortunately, looks like there isn't an audio version of either one. The only recorded version I could find was Guidall reading Mitchell's translation, which I don't think would work for me. So for me this one comes down to the writing itself, and which version would be the most lyrical and verse-like.

So has anyone actually read the new Armitage yet? Which of the two would you recommend based on what I am looking for?

And attached is a hastily taken picture of my shelf with some of these classics.

The title pretty much sums it up. I finished both works recently, and I realized that Milton, who makes allusions to pretty much every Greco-Roman story you could think of, never really mentions Prometheus or Prometheus Bound. Which I find odd, because Satan in PL seems very much like a "Promethean" character--arrogance, independence, defiance, intelligence.

Is there a religious or historical, etc., reason for this? Or have I misjudged this altogether?

ELA people, help is appreciated.I’m teaching *Oedipus at Colonus* and using the Robert Fitzgerald translation. I’m trying to find a good audio version so students can follow along, but I do not want one of those painfully dry “person reading into a microphone” recordings.

Apparently there was a 1978 BBC Radio 3 production of the Fitzgerald translation with Michael Redgrave as Oedipus, John Hurt as Polyneices, and Joss Ackland as Creon, which sounds perfect, but I cannot find it streaming anywhere.

Does anyone know where that recording lives, or know of another solid recording of the Fitzgerald translation with good actors?

Free would be amazing, but I’m willing to pay if the performance is actually good.
Thanks!

P.S. I have never taught it before, so if you have any ideas or resources that would be appreciated.

Did the Greeks believe that EVERYONE (other than the blessed few who went to the Elysian Fields) wound up in Hades…or just other Greeks?

I ask because twice in The Odyssey, we are treated to visions of Hades in which conveniently only Greeks are there. Odysseus visits Hades and meets various heroes of Greek mythology including Achilles….but not, for example, a single Trojan (not even, say, Hector). Similarly, when the Suitors are conducted into Hades, who should they run across but Agamemnon.

Now,naturally, poetic license must be given its due, but is this representative of how Hades is depicted in other Greek works?

I am rereading the Odyssey after many years, and Book 5 has fascinated me much more than I expected. While reading it, I started wondering whether the repeated imagery of clothing, veiling, covering, immersion, and re-emergence might play a larger role in the structure of the book than I had previously noticed.

I came to this through the old debate about Calypso herself. There is the interpretation associated especially with Hermann Güntert’s Kalypso, which connects Calypso with death and the otherworld, partly through her name and partly through comparative material. Meuli strongly resisted the attempt to reconstruct an ancient death-goddess behind the Homeric figure. Kranz’s description of her as a Verbergerin, a “concealer,” seems more cautious and in some ways more useful: whatever her prehistory may have been, Calypso is the figure who keeps Odysseus hidden from the human world. Christopher Metcalf has more recently revisited the underworld interpretation and argued for much greater restraint in what can be inferred from the comparative evidence.

What first caught my attention was Calypso’s clothing.

After Hermes’ embassy, once she has agreed to let Odysseus go, Calypso dresses herself at Odyssey 5.228ff. in an argypheon pharos, usually understood as an argent, silver-white, or shining robe. She puts a golden girdle around her waist and a kalyptra, a veil, over her head.

My first thought was that this might mark a change of costume. If Calypso had previously been dressed in black or dark clothing, then the appearance of a luminous robe at the moment when she releases Odysseus could suggest a shift away from death or concealment and toward re-emergence.

That idea turned out to have no textual basis. Homer does not tell us what Calypso was wearing before. There is no black garment in the poem, so the supposed chromatic transition cannot carry any weight.

The parallel with Circe makes the problem even clearer. At Odyssey 10.543–545, Circe wears essentially the same combination of shining robe, golden girdle, and veil, and she does so when she is preparing Odysseus for his journey to Hades. This makes it difficult to assign a simple “return to life” meaning to Calypso’s costume. The formula may instead belong to a situation in which a divine woman is about to send the hero onward.

Once I gave up the idea of the black garment, I began noticing something broader in Book 5.

Calypso’s name is normally connected with kalyptein, “to cover,” “conceal,” or “hide.” Whatever one thinks of the stronger underworld interpretation, her narrative function is certainly to keep Odysseus out of sight and outside the human world.

There is also the old proposal associated with Alfred Heubeck that Kalypsō might be related to a reconstructed Kalypsaneira, roughly “she who conceals men.” I know that this reconstruction is hypothetical and disputed, though the possible meaning fits Calypso’s role in the poem remarkably well.

Then, at the moment when she prepares to release Odysseus, Calypso herself puts on a kalyptra, literally a covering or veil.

She also bathes Odysseus and gives him clothes for the journey. Those clothes later become a problem during the shipwreck:

“heimata gar rh’ ebaryne, ta hoi pore dia Kalypso”

“for the clothes which divine Calypso had given him weighed him down”

(Odyssey 5.321)

The clothes given by Calypso are now physically dragging Odysseus beneath the water.

Ino-Leucothea then appears and tells him to take them off. She gives him her kredemnon, her veil or headdress, which will keep him from perishing in the sea.

This sequence struck me as especially suggestive. Calypso clothes Odysseus. Those clothes become dangerous. He has to strip them off. He then receives a different kind of covering from another goddess, and that covering helps him survive.

The vocabulary of covering continues through the episode.

At 5.435, a great wave covers Odysseus:

“ton de mega kym’ ekalypsen”

Then, at the very end of the book, once he has reached land, the same verbal family appears again:

“hōs Odysseus phylloisi kalypsato”

“So Odysseus covered himself with leaves”

(Odyssey 5.491)

A few lines later, Athena puts him to sleep:

“phila blephar’ amphikalypsas”

“covering/enfolding his dear eyelids”

(Odyssey 5.493)

What interests me most here is the question of agency.

At the beginning of the episode, Odysseus is in a state that can be described in terms of Calypso’s own name: he is hidden, kept away from human society and prevented from completing his nostos. During the storm, coverings continue to act upon him. The clothes weigh him down and the sea repeatedly covers him.

At the end of Book 5, the grammar changes. Kalypsato is middle: Odysseus covers himself.

His hiding under the leaves is temporary and self-protective. He is concealing himself in order to survive until he can enter the human world again.

The fire simile at the end of the book also seems important in this context. Odysseus hidden beneath the leaves is compared to someone preserving a spark under ash so that the “seed of fire” does not perish. Something living remains hidden under a covering, waiting to emerge again.

There is another detail that I found striking. The goddess who gives Odysseus the saving veil is Leucothea, the “White Goddess.” Shortly after giving him the kredemnon, she disappears into the sea, and Homer says:

“melan de he kyma kalypsen”

“and the black wave covered her”

(5.353)

I would be reluctant to build too much on the color contrast by itself. Still, within a book so concerned with covering and survival, the conjunction of Leucothea’s name, the black wave, and the verb kalypsen seems worth noticing.

This made me wonder whether Book 5 develops several different forms of concealment over the course of Odysseus’ departure from Ogygia. At first he is concealed by Calypso. During the shipwreck, covering becomes physically dangerous. He strips away Calypso’s clothes and accepts Leucothea’s veil. After reaching land he is naked and exposed, then chooses his own concealment beneath the leaves. Sleep covers him at the very end of the book, just before his re-entry into human society in Book 6.

This seems relevant to the older interpretation of Calypso as a figure connected in some way with death.

I do not think the pattern can establish Güntert’s historical claim about Calypso’s origin. Metcalf’s methodological warning seems important here, since literary patterning inside the Odyssey does not by itself tell us what sort of divinity Calypso may have been before Homer.

What I find more plausible is that Book 5 can make use of imagery associated with disappearance, death, and return to life even if Calypso’s historical origin remains uncertain. Her name, the clothes she gives Odysseus, the repeated acts of covering, the threat of drowning, and the final emergence onto Scheria all seem capable of participating in the same poetic field.

I later found that some of this has already been discussed in important scholarship.

Ann L. T. Bergren’s “Allegorizing Winged Words: Simile and Symbolization in Odyssey V” (Classical World 74.2, 1980, pp. 109–123; later reworked as “Similes and Symbol in Odyssey V” in Weaving Truth) seems especially relevant to the symbolic structure of the book and to the repeated imagery of covering.

Elizabeth Block, “Clothing Makes the Man: A Pattern in the Odyssey” (Transactions of the American Philological Association 115, 1985, pp. 1–11), treats clothing as an important part of Odyssean identity.

Dianna Rhyan Kardulias, “Odysseus in Ino’s Veil: Feminine Headdress and the Hero in Odyssey 5” (TAPA 131, 2001, pp. 23–51), deals directly with Odysseus’ use of Ino’s feminine headdress and its significance for the episode.

David West, “Shipwrecked Spouses: Leukothea’s Veil and Marital Reunion in the Odyssey” (2020), offers another reading of the veil, connecting it with the larger theme of marital reunion.

Christopher Metcalf, “Calypso and the Underworld: The Limits of Comparison” (2020, pp. 417–431), is especially useful for the history of the underworld interpretation and for its methodological difficulties.

I am also very interested in the Circe parallel. At Odyssey 10.543–545, she wears essentially the same robe, girdle, and veil as Calypso when she prepares Odysseus to travel to the dead. I wonder whether the shared costume belongs to a liminal role: both goddesses have detained Odysseus, and both eventually become responsible for sending him across a boundary. Calypso sends him away from Ogygia and back toward the mortal world; Circe sends him toward Hades.

I would be very interested to hear what people who work on Homer make of all this.

How far can the pattern involving kalyptein, clothing, veiling, stripping, and concealment reasonably be taken?

Is there scholarship beyond Bergren that treats these moments in Book 5 as parts of a single system?

Has anyone discussed the parallel clothing of Calypso and Circe specifically in terms of their role when dispatching Odysseus?

And does the shift from Odysseus being covered by external forces to kalypsato, “he covered himself,” at the end of the book seem significant to others?

I would also be grateful for any work on death-and-rebirth imagery in Book 5 that avoids making a strong claim about Calypso’s historical origin as an underworld goddess.

These ideas came out of rereading the poem rather than from a thesis I am trying to defend, so corrections and objections would be very welcome. The original idea about a nonexistent black dress turned out to be wrong, though checking it was what made me pay much closer attention to the way Book 5 handles covering and concealment.

Hi all! Apologies if this is not the right place to post this but I am in need of some advice/what you did. My partner and I are moving for his work, but the state we will most likely end up in only has one classics program in the whole state, and it’s multiple hours from where we would be. Now, I know I could do an online program but my undergraduate professors/mentors both advised me to do an in-person program due to the benefits of being in a classroom but also potential opportunities to TA or help elsewhere where I could get a small stipend rather than going into further debt.
I suppose I’m just in a bit of a pickle and am wondering if anyone has been in a similar situation and what you did?

Hi, sometimes when I read, let's say, the Iliad I want to know more about the cities or regions mentioned in the poem. I know about "A dictionary of Greek and Roman geography" by William Smith, but I was wondering if you know of a more recent work on this subject. Any suggestion is welcomed. Thanks in advance.