By Jess Taylor – Mapping the Greek Polis (Poleis in plural) Where were the ancient Greek cities located? What was their sphere of influence? And what did it mean to be a polis? A pioneering body of work analyzed 1,035 ancient Greek settlements from the archaic and classical periods (c. […]
By Patrick Hunt – Annette Giesecke has recently added a wonderful and indispensable book to the corpus of mythology: Classical Mythology A to Z: An Encyclopedia of Gods, Goddesses, Heroes, Heroines, Nymphs, Spirits, Monsters and Places (Black Dog & Leventhal / Hachette Group, 2020). While “beautiful” isn’t the most important […]
By Walter Borden, M.D. The American Founders, including Madison, Jefferson, and Adams in creating our constitution studied the history of republics going back to Carthage, Greece and Rome. Adams in particular cited ancient Greece with long references to Solon, known as “the Law Giver”, one of the Seven Sages, and […]
By Walter Borden, MD – Aeschylus speaks to me. Born in Eleusis, a village just north of Athens and the haunting grounds of the goddess Demeter, said to be the goddess of fertility and the harvest. To Aeschylus that was just a myth that masked her true identity– the goddess […]
By Malia Maxwell – To read the poet Sappho (Archaic Greek, 7th-6th c. BCE) is to embrace painful incompletion. Little of her work remains, and what we do have left carries with it the stain of absence. While no amount of longing for a “completed” text can fill in her […]
Image Courtesy of Jean-Pascal Jospin, Laura Dalaine Hannibal et les Alpes: une traversee in mythe, 2011 By Patrick Hunt – Anyone with some imagination about Hannibal often thinks first of his intrepid army march over the Alps with elephants. I’m often asked more about the elephants than the multicultural army […]
Athena Parthenon model with cast of Athena Parthenios statue, Ludwig Maxmilians University Museum, Munich (image courtesy LMU, 2017) By Andrea Galdy – German universities are finally starting to engage with a particular kind of treasure many of them still possess: collections of many diverse categories that may have made a […]
W.-A. Bouguereau, The Remorse of Orestes, 1862 (public domain, courtesy of Chrysler Museum of Art) By Walter Borden, M.D. – “Revenge is a kind of wild justice, which the more man’s nature runs to, the more ought law to weed out; for the first wrong, it doth offend the law, […]
Bronze Chimera of Arezzo, ca 400 BCE, Cosimo I Medici Estate, Archaeological Museum, Florence (photo P. Hunt, 2014) By Andrea Gáldy – WINCKELMANN, FIRENZE E GLI ETRUSCHI IL PADRE DELL’ARCHEOLOGIA IN TOSCANA, Archaeological Museum, Florence, 26 May 2016 to 30 January 2017. Catalogue available in Italian and in German: Barbara Arbeid, […]
By Patrick Hunt – While this is not in any way comprehensive, some of my favorite word plays from Hebrew literature show a deliberate use of language for suggesting multiple ambiguities, sometimes even steganographic – hiding things in plain sight – and often paronomasic – having connections in both sound […]