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Book Club

Book Club | October 2021: Agamemnon, the Pathetic Despot

For October, we will be reading Andrew Porter’s 2019 book Agamemnon, the Pathetic Despot: Reading Characterization in Homer, available at the Center for Hellenic Studies website. That page provides an overview of his approach to the subject: Agamemnon led a ten-year-long struggle at Troy only to return home and die a pathetic death at his wife’s hands. Yet while Agamemnon’s story exerts an outsize influence—rivaled by few epic personalities—on the… Read more

Visiting Scholars

Open House | Teaching Greek in the 21st Century, with Gregory Crane and Farnoosh Shamsian

We were excited to welcome Gregory Crane and Farnoosh Shamsian for an Open House entitled “Teaching Greek in the 21st Century.” The event took place on Friday, October 1, 2021, at 11:00 a.m. EDT and was recorded. You can watch the video on our YouTube channel, or in the frame below. From the discussion: https://beyond-translation.perseus.org https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/ https://scaife.perseus.org For further videos please visit the Watch page. Gregory Crane Gregory Crane is… Read more

History

Women in Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, part 1

Diogenes Laertius Diogenes Laertius wrote in Greek in Anatolia in the third century CE. The piece of writing that has survived to this day is his Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, which is a compilation of biographies. He described philosophical thought, and gave biographical details, genealogies, and quotes from letters and wills. He gives us anecdotes, and he wrote his own poetry about his subjects. Wikipedia reports that he has… Read more

Book Club

Book Club | September 2021: Strabo Geography

If the scientific investigation of any subject be the proper avocation of the philosopher, Geography, the science of which we propose to treat, is certainly entitled to a high place Strabo Geography 1.1 Our Book Club selection for September 2021 is the opening book of Strabo’s Geography. Strabo (c 66 BCE – c 24 CE) was born in Amasia in Pontus. According to Falconer’s Preface[1], Strabo states that he studied the… Read more

Gallery

Gallery : Flesh Eater

Greeks and Romans in antiquity loved mythology. They depicted images on pottery, on frescos. They decorated their villas and palaces, and made these stories part of their daily lives. They loved these stories so much so that even in death they wanted to be reminded of them through beautifully engraved sarcophaguses. Pliny the Elder, in The Natural History, mentions an observation of a sarcophagus. At Assos in Troas, there is… Read more