We are excited to share the themes for the upcoming Hour 25 Book Club selections. Look out for further announcements with details of the texts, and the related forum threads, nearer the time! Tuesday March 29: Herodotus Tuesday April 26: Aesop Tuesday May 31: Celtic mythology There will also be CHS Open House discussions to tie in with these themes. Since many of you were unable to attend the January… Read more
This gallery will take you to Delphi in Greece. Plutarch, who was a priest of Apollo in Delphi for several years, wrote a book about the oracles. Here are two passages from his book. Plutarch describes “the shrine of Earth” τὸ τῆς Γῆς ἱερὸν. Accordingly we went round and seated ourselves upon the southern steps of the temple, looking towards the shrine of Earth and the stream of water, with the result that Boethus… Read more
A guest post by Sarah Scott I was reading Gregory Nagy’s translation of the Sappho ‘Brothers’ poem, and it made me think of Works and Days, and then I got to wondering about brothers—or sisters for that matter. I do not mean those who form a pair, as in the ‘twin’ myths discussed with us by Douglas Frame for example, where the two are complementary. Rather, I mean those siblings… Read more
Painting of the Organizer of the sacrifice (1780 BCE), Mari Herodotus is fascinating, and I have dreamed of Mesopotamia many times while reading his chapters about it. This gallery is going to take you through the rooms dedicated to Mesopotamia in the Louvre. Herodotus writes about Babylon, and Hit, a city near the Euphrates River in his Histories. Cyrus had made all the mainland submit to him, he attacked the… Read more
This [hēde] is the public presentation [apo-deixis] of the inquiry [historia] of Herodotus of Halikarnassos, with the purpose of bringing it about that whatever results from men may not, with the passage of time, become evanescent, and that great and wondrous deeds—some of them publicly performed [apo-deik-numai ] by Hellenes, others by barbarians—may not become akleā [= without kleos]. In particular [this apodeixis of this historiā concerns] why (= on account of what cause [aitiā]) they entered… Read more