~ A guest post by Brian Prescott-Decie ~ In the course of searching for simple texts for a student of Latin who has been making rather heavy weather of Agricola, and needed some light relief, I recently came across the History of Apollonius, King of Tyre, a Latin romantic novel of perhaps the third century CE. By the purest serendipity, I then found myself reading the following lines of the… Read more
Members of the Kosmos Society have been reading sections of Xenophon’s Anabasis, and this post provides a brief historical context to that work. The text is available on Perseus, both in Greek and in an English translation by Carleton L. Brownson (1922). Historical context The Anabasis by the Athenian soldier, historian and philosopher Xenophon, also known as The Anabasis of Cyrus, The March of the Ten Thousand and The March… Read more
Translation and notes by Jack Vaughan Pindar, First Nemean Epinikion For Khromios of Aetna or Syracuse, Victor in Four-Horse Chariot Race Sacred precinct where Alpheus comes to rest and catches breath[1], Ortygia, child of famed Syracuse, bedstead of Artemis, sister isle of Delos, from you my sweet-voiced hymn proceeds to set forth great ainos of storm-footed horses, gifts of Aetnaean Zeus. Nemea spurs on the chariot of Khromios[2] to yoke… Read more
The spectator on the aft deck A clay model found in a tomb at Amathos[1] tells us the story of a man who comfortably sits on the back of his ship without a helm, having such a clear vision over the well-built ship—and where it is going to—that we could call it a modeled scene of a theōriā: the figure being a spectator who looks with his eyes and his… Read more
A guest post by Bill Moulton Ah, ah! Oh, oh, the agony! 1215 Once more the dreadful ordeal [ponos] of true prophecy whirls and distracts me with its ill-boding onset. Do you see them there—sitting before the house—young creatures like phantoms of dreams? Children, they seem, slaughtered by their own kindred, 1220 their hands full of the meat of their own flesh; they are clear to my sight, holding their… Read more