Today marks the end of the publication of new content on Eidolon. I hope that its closure doesn’t diminish what we accomplished in the past five years, and that we’ve proved that there’s a need for an explicitly progressive, public-facing publication in the field of Classics. We were able to make a mark on the field not in spite of our politics, but because of them.

Eidolon was not, at its inception, a “feminist” publication. It was founded as a “modern way to write about the ancient world,” and a venue for public-facing, broadly accessible essays that had “a strong authorial voice and a unique point of view.” This is not to say that feminism was not always a part of its project — because it was, from the very beginning. I was Eidolon’s founder and Editor-in-Chief, and I was a feminist, and the article I wrote as part of the launch in April 2015 was about the challenges of reading Euripides as a feminist. But a publication run by feminists, even vocal feminists, is not the same as an explicitly feminist publication.

The difference was impressed upon me forcefully when I wrote, in a draft of a May 2017 editorial, “People often ask me whether I would publish conservative-leaning articles on Eidolon, and I always respond that we would be happy to. We may be a progressive feminist journal, but we by no means expect (or want) all of our writers to share our politics. We welcome respectful, thoughtful disagreement, and we have never rejected a pitch because we disagreed with its political viewpoint.”

I didn’t know, when I drafted those sentences, just how dramatic an effect they would have on Eidolon’s future. Within a month, my editorial board had been convened to discuss the merits and downsides of identifying as feminist; one of my board members quit; and a series of increasingly acrimonious arguments led to my making the decision to part ways with our parent organization, the Paideia Institute. A few months later we relaunched with a new mission statement, vowing to make the Classics “political and personal, feminist and fun.”

Ironically, the sentences that set off this chain of events didn’t even make it into the published editorial. The final reads: “People often ask me whether I would be willing to publish conservative-leaning articles on Eidolon, and I always respond that we would. We do not expect every single one of our writers to share our editors’ politics.” I left implicit what, exactly, those politics were. And I’ve come to see that it was the right choice to not yet openly claim that Eidolon was feminist, because it forced my editorial team and I to radically reimagine what it would mean to claim a feminist politics and a mission explicitly focused on social justice.

When my editorial board was convened, several of its members were not, well, on board with the idea of openly identifying as feminist, because they were concerned that it would limit the kind of articles that we published and who was willing to publish with us, as well as possibly decreasing our readership. From my perspective now, I can confidently say that this outcome was not realized. Eidolon continued to grow in every way after its relaunch, crossing over 2 million total views, with an average over 10,000 views per week. We published more than 500 articles by writers ranging from high school students to full professors. We were able to signal-boost or be part of the launch of several exciting initiatives in Classics, including the Sportula, the Asian and Asian American Classical Caucus, and the Pharos project at Vassar.

Eidolon was a feminist publication, although we’ve come to see that a dedication to social justice is often less about identity that it is about action. Bringing social justice to Classics is asymptotic: something that one is always approaching but that it seems you may never quite intersect with. Much of the discipline is inherently resistant to change, especially progressive change, and I lost count of how many times people told me that Eidolon’s increasing radicalization was ruining both the publication and the discipline.

So I’m going to share with you the story of Eidolon, as seen through the evolution in my monthly editorials. I’m going to look back into the hopes and anxieties that have molded and fueled the publication — from the early days of trying to convince our colleagues to take us seriously without peer review, to our shift into thinking about the politics of Classics as a discipline. And I hope that my story of this journey will inspire people to dream about what kind of change they want to make in Classics from here on.

I received my PhD from Princeton in May 2014, and at first I believed that my career in Classics was likely over. My partner had a good job at a tech company, and we had a one-year-old child. My parents lived only twenty minutes away. And so I didn’t even try to go on the academic job market, because I couldn’t imagine uprooting my family when the best-case scenario was probably a series of short-term contingent faculty positions in God-knows-where. I toyed with the idea of going back to work with the Paideia Institute, a nonprofit that I had founded with some other graduate students a few years earlier, but there wasn’t an obvious role for me in the company. I decided to stay home with my child and focus on childcare, maybe do some writing. A month later, my Princeton email address was deactivated and my access to JSTOR was cut off. I was, as a friend later termed it, “academically dead.”

Six months later, a funny thing happened: I began to write short essays about Classics and the modern world. They were almost like blog posts, except that I didn’t feel that I had the commitment to start and keep a blog. I realized that there was no platform for people who wanted to write an essay about Classics for a general audience. So I decided to start one.

I brought the idea back to my Paideia Institute colleagues, and they loved it. For a hectic two months, we planned and fundraised and reached out to potential writers. The idea to name the nascent publication Eidolon came from my coworker, who argued, “It has the virtue of also being an English word that means either ‘Phantom’ or ‘Ideal’. it also contains a verbal pun on the sound ‘I’, which stresses the personal experience element we’re going for. And only classicists will hear the tricksy, crafty nature of ‘dolon’, which could point to its subversive potential to countermand positivist scholarship.”

We’d set up about six weeks’ worth of material in advance, and the night before our launch I privately told myself that it would be absolutely fine if nobody read our articles, nobody sent us any pitches, and the publication quietly petered out of existence that summer. No matter what, I’d learned something and gotten to work with some good writers. It would be a failed experiment, not a failure.

But it didn’t fail. It flourished. We easily reached 100,000 views by the end of 2015, and published some of the articles that are still among our most popular and influential. The task of fielding pitches, editing articles, and promoting our content, along with the logistics of putting together artwork, handling licensing, and paying our writers, became too big for me to handle alone. So we put out a job listing and hired two more editors, Tara Mulder and Yung In Chae.

Looking back on my editorials from the early period, it is clear that our biggest concern was how to convince classicists that writing for the public was worth their time. Our primary strategy was to try and lower the barrier for entry and attempt to remove what I thought would be common arguments against doing this kind of work.

Early editorials tried to demystify the process of writing for the public by giving advice on how to write engaging beginnings and avoid common mistakes. In one editorial, I argued that a compelling point of view was more valuable to an Eidolon article than a completely original argument. In another, I encouraged writers to “remix” their published, peer-reviewed work into public-facing essays in an attempt to promote themselves and boost the visibility of their core academic production. The other major anxiety revealed by those early editorials was a concern about how to position ourselves with respect to peer-reviewed scholarship. In a sense, this concern was connected with our desire to downplay the challenges of writing for Eidolon — after all, the main reason why it would not be worth someone’s time to write Eidolon articles if they were interested in doing so is the tremendous pressure put on most academics to publish peer-reviewed scholarship at a rapid pace.

Inherent in these calculations is, of course, a hierarchy of value, and we understood that a publications like ours wasn’t high up in that food chain. We had to articulate a separate value for us, rather than a lesser one. By this point, Tara had left the editorial team, and I had brought on two new team members, Sarah Scullin and Tori Lee. We were dreaming big for what Eidolon could accomplish. Editorials from the summer of 2016, a little over a year after our launch, are about using public scholarship as a place to write about something you’re not the absolute expert in and about why we use an internet-native, hyperlink-based citation structure.

We were trying to emphasize that Eidolon filled a different but necessary niche in the world of para-academic writing, and was a place where scholars could experiment, take risks, and have fun while doing so. One of the editorials from this period asserts the radical value of fun, and in the fall of 2016 we launched our companion blog, idle musings, when we needed a place to publish a satirical poem written by Associate Editor Yung In Chae about the fact that our inbox was full of two kinds of pitches: artistic musings on Classics by people who had become carpenters, and comparisons between Donald Trump and various Roman emperors.

Almost absent from my editorials at the time, however, was my growing unease about what it meant to do Classics in an increasingly politically charged landscape. I addressed this issue in one March 2016 editorial, with the title “Who Owns the Classics?” in which I discussed a petition to Harvard University Press to replace the (white) chair of the Murty Classical Library of India with an Indian scholar. But in that editorial, rather than taking any kind of firm stance, I resisted any pressure to take a side and made this rather unobjectionable claim: “Nobody owns the classics. But the question of whose interpretations are granted the most influence is a question with deep cultural and political ramifications.” I acknowledged the presence of these questions, but made no attempt to assert any kind of opinion on them.

Questions about politics and Classics were, of course, very much on our minds. I was writing a book about Classics and far-right online communities at the time, and on Eidolon we published a substantial amount of content about the presidential election. There was a good reason why writers thought we might be interested in all of those Donald Trump/Caligula comparisons. But I kept politics resolutely out of my editorials, even as our publication shifted to the left and the Republican party swung increasingly to the right into nativist populism. The politics of Classics and of Eidolon seem to have been the two topics we didn’t want to talk about. We were willing to opine ad nauseam on the question of why Classics should have a publication like ours, and why scholars should write for it. But we weren’t really willing yet to put pressure on the arguments classicists made for what studying Classics meant.

After the 2016 Presidential election, everything changed — big things, like our cultural norms, and also small things, like our little Classics publication. In mid-November we published an article I had written with the title “How to Be a Good Classicist Under a Bad Emperor.” The article was born out of the research I’d been doing in the previous year into classical reception in far-right internet communities. Exactly ten days after Donald Trump was elected, I gave a lecture at UC Santa Barbara about my research, and I left the Q&A with an overwhelming feeling that many people had been profoundly shaken in their sense of what it meant to be a classicist. So over the course of two and a half days, my fellow editors and I wrote, re-wrote, commissioned art, debated titles, and then woke up Monday and published what is still Eidolon’s most-read article, with almost 75,000 views.

“How to Be a Good Classicist” was intended primarily as a warning to my U.S. colleagues about the kind of fascist-inflected uses of ancient Greece and Rome that I expected to see more and more of in online communities that were empowered and energized by the election of Donald Trump. It was also meant as a spur to action, to convince the field that we needed to start thinking very seriously and carefully about how we wanted to respond to this kind of appropriation. I wrote, “Obviously, the ideological battle over Classics pales in comparison to the many, many more important battles we will spend the next few years fighting — over immigration, healthcare, the environment, reproductive rights. We need to do what we can in those battles as well. Give some of your time and your money. Use your expertise as a writer and a teacher. Resist however you can. But classicists are uniquely positioned to fight back against the self-mythologizing of the Alt-Right. When we see Classics used to support a hateful politics, we must push back — unless we want to live through a second wave of fascist classical reception.”

“How to Be a Good Classicist” had three outcomes, all of which were more forceful than I anticipated. First: it worked. Many classicists were scared, and worried, and appreciated the work that I was trying to do. Second, we unwittingly exacerbated an existing divide in the field between people who are interested in bringing Classics and social justice together and people who think that the Classics should be free of politicized interventions. These scholars tended to frame me and Eidolon as hysterical and immature and potentially disastrous for the future of the field. The third result was an onslaught of harassment by far-right trolls who bombarded me with Holocaust memes and violent language on Twitter and by email. I responded by making my personal email harder to find, but this just meant that the harassment was sent to my entire editorial team, because there was no way for us to hide the email address to which we wanted people to send pitches, and our social media channels were easily discoverable.

In the aftermath of “How to Be a Good Classicist,” my editorials focused on the harassment. We published several pieces urging scholars to think more about what kind of policies individual departments and scholarly organizations should put in place to support and protect scholars who found themselves the targets of harassment campaigns. We argued for the need for institutional support, both practical and in the form of formal statements, and also set forth some suggestions for how to personally support colleagues who were being harassed — including, first of all, by not treating their harassment as the most interesting thing about them, and making a point to talk to them about their scholarship.

Although I don’t regret doing this work — it was very important, and cathartic, at the time — I’m struck now by how much we tried to depoliticize it. There is, of course, a political aspect to the argument that one should care about the pain and fear of one’s colleagues, and particularly junior, female colleagues. But our overriding message seemed to be that denouncing harassment and verbal violence should know no political affiliation — that the one thing members of the field should all be able to agree on, regardless of who any of us voted for, was that we all agree in the importance of free academic discourse, and that free academic discourse is impossible in an environment where regular interventions by trolls lead to scholars being terrified into silence.

And so Eidolon continued to try to walk a fine line: although it was obvious to everyone that we were shifting increasingly to the left, especially after the election, we worked hard to maintain the fiction that we would publish conservatives, if only they would pitch to us more (or would stop ghosting on us after we had accepted their pitches, a process that happened repeatedly). This was the argument of that fateful May 2017 editorial. This was the fiction that we dispensed with in our August 2017 relaunch, when we committed to make Eidolon “a space for unapologetic progressive and inclusive approaches to Classics” and “to model a Classics that is ethical, diverse, intersectional, and especially feminist.” In our relaunch announcement, I wrote, “Eidolon isn’t going to publish articles arguing that identity politics are ruining Classics. I don’t feel any obligation to represent that view here. I don’t believe that political neutrality is either achievable or desirable. Classics as a discipline has deep roots in fascism and reactionary politics and white supremacy, and those ideologies exert a powerful gravitational pull on the discipline’s practitioners. If we want to fight those forces, we need to actively work against them.”

One month before that fateful May 2017 editorial, we published an editorial celebrating our two-year anniversary. The title was “Why Study Classics?” And that question, once we spoke it aloud, became the guiding question for Eidolon’s mission moving forward.

And, in fact, it always had been, in a way. “It didn’t exist, so I decided to start it” — the explanation I gave earlier in this essay for why I founded Eidolon — doesn’t feel like an adequate explanation for the amount of effort I’ve ultimately put into this publication, which has amounted to a nearly full-time job for no pay for more than five years. A better explanation is that I was trying to figure out why, exactly, I wanted to study Classics. (Much later, I published a list of answers to this question with varying degrees of truth and nobility.) But ultimately I decided to try to outsource it and find out why others wanted to study Classics. And what my team discovered, almost immediately, was that this is a very political question for many people.

This is especially, blatantly true for the alt-right, as I argued in my book Not All Dead White Men. The Far Right studies Classics because it loves to look back to an idealized past where there was patriarchy and white supremacy (allegedly) and also tremendous cultural flourishing. This idealized past then serves as an argument for reinstating that kind of society in the present day. This is a political, identity politics-based argument for studying the Classics.

Eidolon published a large number of articles studying and unpacking far-right Classics, mostly with the goal of denaturalizing it. We believe that this was important work, because some people — although fewer than in previous years, fortunately — have tended to assume that arguments such as “Classics should be studied because it is the foundation of Western Civilization” are fairly self-evident, and require little in the way of unpacking about their underlying assumptions regarding what work “Western Civilization” does as a conceptual category and why it is important that it had its foundations in Classics. It’s not an accident that Quillette, a so-called “intellectual dark web” publication that is deeply critical of Eidolon, published last year a four-part series on Classics that included essays with the titles “Is Western Civilization a Thing?”, “Is Western Civilization Uniquely Bad?”, and “Are the Classics Complicit in White Supremacy?” (If you’re keeping score, the answers are, of course, yes, no, and no.)

The writer actually first pitched me that series for Eidolon, but I don’t think that it’s an accident that it found a home on a site that regularly publishes justifications for scientific racism, particularly racist IQ science. Similarly, it isn’t an accident that Mary Frances Williams published a self-defense on Quillette after the events of the 2019 “The Future of the Classics” panel at the SCS. But our writers’ personal reasons for studying Classics were also political (although differently so). This was particularly true for our writers who came from historically marginalized communities.

So we rethought what questions we should be asking. At first, the question had been “Why study Classics?” Although implied, I think the subtle emphasis in that question is on the final word — why study Classics specifically, as opposed to any other discipline? Hearing some other scholars’ answers changed the shape of this question. For many people, it is not “Why are you studying Classics” but rather “Why are you studying Classics?” And this formulation may also be inadequate. In one of our most important and influential articles, “White People Explain Classics to Us,” Editor-at-Large Yung In Chae argued that people of color in Classics experience a kind of epistemic injustice whereby they are automatically, implicitly understood to be less knowledgeable about Classics and less deserving of a place at the table than white classicists. In this article, Jackie Murray suggests that the right questions to ask about the trajectories that bring people to Classics are “What was trying to push you out, and what made you stay?” and “What am I doing that is driving people away from Classics?”

We thought about this question at Eidolon quite a bit, because we were told all the time by colleagues and on the anonymous Famae Volent message board that our writers were driving people away from Classics by always obsessing over how bad things are, how much prejudice and cruelty there was in classical antiquity and still is in the discipline today. We make people feel bad about Classics, the argument goes, or portraying Classics as inherently evil, and doing so will drive away people who just love ancient Greece and really want to come into our classes to read some Plato.

Of course, the unexamined assumption here is that the people we’d be driving away with our “self-hating Classics” are people who would be instinctively drawn to studying ancient Greece and Rome without ever having to interrogate the racial and sexual politics of doing so — which is a really long way to say ‘white men.’ Few others have that luxury.

But I understand the fears that underlie these protestations. These critics believe that we’re failing to see the forest for the trees — that in our single-minded focus on white supremacist appropriation of Classics and the lack of diversity within Classics (which, counting generously, topped out at about 8% of our total content, but I’ll let that slide for the moment), we lost sight of what they see as a bigger and more pressing issue, which is that humanities enrollments are declining precipitously. Tenure lines, and in some cases even entire departments, are disappearing. In this anxious climate, some believe that we should embrace all students who are interested in Classics, for whatever reason. Even if we personally disagree with the politics behind their reasons, we should make them feel welcomed anyway and then hope that we can use our classrooms as a space to open their minds to other viewpoints.

If you think in this way, then I understand why it might feel like progressive Classics is causing the death of the discipline, although I also believe that this point of view is completely wrongheaded. It assumes that it is possible to welcome all views equally, and that welcoming the idea that Classics is the foundation of an inherently good and noble Western Civilization is not an idea that already excludes large swaths of the student population.

I’m not going to downplay the extent of the problems we’re facing. In addition to the concerns facing Classics specifically and the humanities more widely, there are also enormous and terrifying problems facing higher education in general. Even before the massive disruption of the Covid-19 pandemic, these problems already looked insurmountable: on one side the student debt crisis, which has financially crippled an entire generation, and on the other side the increasing precarity of the academic workforce has made teaching Classics (and every other discipline in academia, really) a terrible professional prospect. This is not to mention academia’s endemic problems with classism and sexual harassment.

Yet, in spite of all of that, people do keep studying Classics. They find ways to find value and meaning and fun and joy in that study. And that is exactly what Eidolon tried to make space to talk about. That is why we chose to be, as our mission statement has it, “personal and political, feminist and fun.” The Classics we want has all of these elements — perhaps not all at the same time, but all in balance.

The problems I’ve alluded to here may seem insoluble. Can we save the soul and future of a discipline that has historically been implicated in fascism and colonialism — one that continues to be enmeshed in white supremacy and misogyny — in the face of declining enrollments, the student debt crisis, and the unstable academic job market? And, even if we do somehow figure out how to save it, will we be studying Classics over Zoom in socially-distanced boats because all of our coastal cities are underwater? There’s ample reason to despair.

The atmosphere in Classics right now is undeniably fraught. On the one hand, there are promising signs of progress and growth. The smallest and least consequential of these is the increased attention being paid to white supremacist appropriation of the Classics. I’m much more excited about the increasing visibility and platform being given to the Sportula collective, the EOS Africana society, the Asian and Asian American Classical Caucus, and the Classics and Social Justice Group. The people involved in these projects are keen to articulate a vision for studying Classics that is vital and necessary and radical.

This pandemic has taken an enormous toll on us all, but it’s been heartening for me to see that the Classics community, especially on Classics Twitter, has remained a place where people support each other and care about each other. This may seem obvious, but: caring is vital. When I look back on the past five years of Eidolon and what we accomplished, it looks to me like we did it by caring. Caring about each other (seriously, my teammates are the best). About the future of a discipline that we didn’t always even feel welcome in. About students. About our readers. About good writing. About the criticisms leveled our way, which we always listened to and carried, even when it hurt.

When Eidolon began to identify as explicitly feminist and progressive, we definitely saw an increase in the volume of criticism we received. Most of this came from the Right, and while much of it was founded in bad-faith readings and unexamined assumptions about the whiteness of both classical antiquity and the kinds of students who care about classical antiquity, we still listened. The harder criticism came from the Left: that much as we wanted to provide a platform for marginalized voices in our field, in doing so I was undeniably benefiting my own career. That there’s a limit to how radical a wealthy Ivy League-educated white woman can be. I’ve always known this was a valid concern, and for a long time I felt that as long as I was doing more good by amplifying voices than I was sucking up oxygen, I should keep doing this work, and when I stopped being sure then I should step back. And now that time has come.

There’s a public misconception about classicists that we’re conservative, tweedy, stodgy, and boring. To the contrary, classicists are some of the most exciting, generous, radical, creative, and, yes, caring people I know. Eidolon was founded on the belief that Classics is for everyone. The work of making the field accessible and welcoming to all — regardless of gender, race, class, sexuality, and disability — will be far from easy. But I believe that classicists are up to the challenge, and although the struggle has barely begun, it was an honor to provide it with a platform for the past five years.

Donna Zuckerberg is the Editor-in-Chief of Eidolon and author of Not All Dead White Men (Harvard University Press 2018). She has a second book under contract on feminist reception of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata.

Teach Me How to Say Goodbye

My Classics Will Be Intersectional, Or… was originally published in EIDOLON on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In March of 2016 I threw my career away with both hands.

It’s not like it was much of a career at that point. I was rounding on a year of unemployment after quitting my teaching job for all the regular fucked-up reasons people quit academic jobs. I was also eight-months pregnant with my second child, so my academic days felt numbered in more ways than one. I didn’t have much to lose. But still, when I, together with the rest of the field, was shaken upon hearing that a prominent classicist had been arrested on charges of possessing child pornography, my first instinct was to keep quiet about it.

There’s already an entire social apparatus designed to protect men in these situations (“but what about his career?”), so that programming, combined with the pressure of academic precarity and the force of my myriad innate social anxieties were all screaming at me to shut up. Even so, I sent Donna a pitch, telling her “I can’t promise the piece won’t be a mess.” A week later, that piece went live. Five and a half months later I joined Eidolon as Managing Editor.

Looking back on this sequence of events, you could say that “Making A Monster” directly led to me getting a job at the journal (eww eww eww and also barf), but that’s not what it felt like at the time. During the week I was drafting the piece, I agonized over my decision to write it and talked things out ad nauseum with my family. I negotiated with my feelings constantly—I almost asked to publish anonymously and even toyed with pulling my pitch. I finally found peace when I decided that I was leaving academia for good and this article would be my mic drop.

It shouldn’t have to feel this way. How many other people have things worth saying but they don’t because they feel (and probably rightly feel) that it will damage their chances of getting one of the few dwindling jobs in higher education? Sure enough, many of the reactions to my article bore out my worst fears, saying I was damaging the field by talking about the scandal in a public setting, that I wasn’t showing enough care for the Parker family’s feelings, that it was too soon to talk about this and I should have taken months to ruminate before publishing.

Then I realized: if this is the pushback directed against gentle and deliberately equivocal writing about child pornography, then maybe we aren’t supposed to talk at all. Or maybe we should talk more, and louder.

After four plus years of editing articles at Eidolon, I’ve had the privilege of watching people speak up over and over again. Many of them have more to lose than I do, and some have lost out for speaking up. Sometimes our writers have needed to publish anonymously. Other times writers have pulled their pitches like I almost did. In those cases I would tell them, truthfully, that I understand completely.

Eidolon is ending but I will continue to cheer from the sidelines when those of you who aren’t supposed to talk lift your voices. To those of you who have something to say but feel you can’t: this is not a call for you to speak up—those risks are real and my survivor bias has reached its expiration date. I mourn your untold stories and I thank you for reading.

To those of you who wrote for Eidolon: it’s been an honor to midwife your writing. Whether you were excavating a painful past, geeking out over pop culture, taking risks or being rebelliously silly, you have enriched and fulfilled my life and helped my little academic heart heal. Thank you.

To those of you who always get a seat at the table: this is also not a call for you to speak up more—Make a hole. Don’t rush to defend those in power. Thanks for listening.

Sarah Scullin is a writer, editor, sometimes professor and full time homeschooler. Find out more at www.sarahscullin.com.

Byedolon

On Speaking Terms was originally published in EIDOLON on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Something that I’ve never admitted in writing: when I started working at Eidolon, I was the most depressed that I have ever been in my life. And it was caused by, of all things, a visa issue. (For this reason, I can’t stand books or movies where characters spontaneously decide to move to another country. Visas are a thing!) After receiving numerous rejections during my last year of college, I had finally come up with a plan to pursue a master’s degree in France. But my school would not send me a document that I needed to apply for a visa, and at some point, stopped responding to my emails altogether, while the start of the semester drew closer and then passed. All I wanted as a teenager was to get away from home; college in America felt like an escape route. But really, I had traveled around the world only to end up moored where I had started — in Seoul — with no idea if I could ever leave again.

I knew this was not the worst problem one could have, or even the worst problem I could have. But I was unable to take it in proportion. I started going to bed as early as possible so that the day would end as early as possible, but that meant that I woke up early too, and I would hide under the covers for hours, terrified of the day starting all over again. I had dramatic, prolonged crying jags at the slightest inconveniences. I would stand before crosswalks, watching vehicles zip over the white stripes, and think about how I didn’t actively want to die, but wouldn’t mind if one of them happened to crash into me, either.

Meanwhile, I started my job at Eidolon, which I only applied for because, at twenty-three years old, I was too naïve to consider that the other applicants might be more qualified than I was. (They were, but Donna hired me anyway. There’s a lesson in that.) Every week, I somehow pulled myself together for long enough to edit an article and participate in a meeting with Donna and Tara, our then-Managing Editor. In the moments that I pulled myself together to work, I felt like I was pulling my life together too.

Then in one meeting, Tara, who was an adjunct instructor in a small town at the time, suddenly said, “If I didn’t have Eidolon, I think I’d be depressed.”

“Before Eidolon, I was a stay-at-home mom, and I was depressed,” Donna responded.

I was taken by surprise. I had spent so much time submerged in self-pity that I had lost sight of the fact that I was not the only person in the world who was capable of feeling lonely or directionless or afraid. I found it comforting, even moving, that our small journal could help three different people in the same way.

That day, I did not find the courage to express to my co-editors just how much their words resonated with me. But that day, I started feeling less alone. I let myself believe that whatever this heaviness was, no matter why it had settled in my life, it was coming to an end. That something else was about to begin.

Much has been said about the value of public scholarship: it helps scholars gain certain skills, it makes knowledge more accessible, it challenges the rigidness of institutions. But I rarely hear anybody say what is, for me, the most important part: public scholarship, or writing for a wider audience, or whatever you want to call it, provides human connection. This is valuable in academia, where loneliness attends intense competition, endless uncertainty, departmental politicking, long hours of research in isolation, work that reaches few people. And it is also valuable elsewhere, because loneliness is present everywhere.

The exposure to other human beings is not necessarily positive — public scholarship can lead to conflict and even harassment. But I think at its best, public scholarship makes somebody feel like they are part of something that’s larger than themselves, whether that’s a community of academics or a community of people who share an emotion, experience, idea, or interest. One of my fondest Eidolon memories is a lunch talk at Cambridge where a research fellow told me she loved the journal. “I read it when I’m sad,” she added after a beat. I had been struggling in school, badly, and the idea that our work could make her less sad made me less sad. These glints of human connection are, at the end of five years, what I remember best.

My first Eidolon article — “Apples and Oranges, Ravens and Writing Desks” — was also my first attempt at non-academic writing. Not a lot of people read it. But among those who did read it, and responded to it, are some of the most important and influential people in my life. This article was the catalyst for my first conversations with Johanna Hanink and Dan-el Padilla Peralta, who are now not only members of Eidolon’s board but also good friends of mine. Maybe that’s why it’s still one of my favorites.

Two years later, I wrote “White People Explain Classics to Us.” I originally conceived it as a personal essay, but once I started asking other classicists of color whether they, too, had experienced epistemic injustice, I realized that my experience alone was inadequate and eventually wove in four different conversations. People with power tend to flatten the experiences of people without, but the truth is that experiences of race are unimaginably complex — they can overlap, they can contradict each other, they can be unexpected, they can be uncomfortable — and bringing in multiple voices, I thought, is a way of acknowledging that complexity. Nevertheless, quite a few people wrote to me saying that one part or another resonated with them, and I learned what it was like to feel solidarity with strangers.

For our music special, I wrote “Like Dionysus,” which was ostensibly about classics and BTS but was really about the complicated experience of receiving validation from an imperial power. I wrote it because BTS’s journey was so wondrous to me, especially because it seemed to be laced with my own pain, that I wanted to make somebody else feel even a fraction of what I was feeling. I wanted to give it to them, like a gift. In return, I received hundreds of responses. Readers from countries like India, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Vietnam said that although they were not Korean, they understood what I meant, reminding me that so many of us live with the legacy of colonialism or imperialism in some way. Mothers said they got to know BTS because of their daughters, who, through their love for this boy band, were learning more about both another culture and racism. I cried along with everybody who told me they cried.

As you can see, during my five years at Eidolon, I have had a few people respond to my writing, I have had dozens of people respond to my writing, and I have had hundreds of people respond to my writing. I mean it when I say that it has felt the same every single time. The gratitude I feel is so powerful, so complete, that I have never cared whether it was one person or many. It is a gratitude that is all the more overwhelming because I fear that I do not deserve it. It makes me want to write better, so that I do deserve it. This job has taught me that readers give you the most valuable thing they have — their time — and it is the writer’s responsibility not to waste it.

Recently, I went to a tarot reader who, before she even touched her cards, spent an hour talking to me in the manner of a therapist. She asked me what I wanted; I said I wanted to be a writer. She said this was not a goal, because I was already a writer, and I had to figure out what I wanted to do through my writing. Did I want to make money? Did I want to be famous? Did I want to write something consequential? Or did I want to resonate with the public?

Our conversation confirmed something I already suspected: I am not the sort of writer who can write for herself. If I ever stop writing professionally, I expect to stop writing entirely. This is partly because the writing process is very fraught for me: it exposes and exacerbates my worst habits; it plunges me into my greatest fears. I think I might hate it almost as much as I love it. But the ability to meet readers halfway in this weightless, infinite space makes writing absolutely worthwhile. It may be the only thing that makes writing worthwhile. I’m not entirely sure what Eidolon’s legacy will be, but I do know we have made people feel less alone at times, in the way that Donna, Sarah, and Tori make me feel less alone every day.

When I say that this job saved me, I don’t mean that it got me through some dark periods in my life, even though it did, nor do I mean that it led to opportunities that I wouldn’t have gotten otherwise, even though it did. I mean that it gave me a reason to face the day, goals to pursue, a life that is more than just life. Or to be more precise: you, reader of Eidolon, did. You found me at a time when I desperately needed a purpose, and you made me a writer.

And so, I don’t know how to end this piece, and this chapter of my life, except by saying: thank you. Thank you for saving me. I can only hope we were able to do something for you too.

Yung In Chae is a writer and the Editor-at-Large of Eidolon. She received an A.B. in Classics from Princeton University and an MPhil in Classics from the University of Cambridge, where she was a Gates Cambridge Scholar. She is the author of Goddess Power, a children’s book about goddesses in classical mythology.

Ten Things I Learned About Writing by Editing

Can Public Scholarship Save Your Life? was originally published in EIDOLON on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I’m going to miss so many things about this job—the rewarding work, the creative outlet, our artists and writers (sob!)—but especially I’ll miss working with the other three members of the editing team. I’m not one for long or sentimental goodbyes because feelings are disgusting, so please enjoy instead some entertaining behind-the-scenes details from four years of our group chat.

Most-used stickers and gifs

A pretty representative visualization of 2016–2020, actually.

Memes we shared in the Spring/Summer of 2017 for no reason whatsoever

Narrator: there was a reason

Screenshots of our favorite troll

Awwww, whatever happened to him?

Selfie brags from each time editors met in person for the first time

The one time we got together in person

Most-used cuss words

Representative example in parentheses

ass — 105 (“more ass cream in my mouth”)
bastard — 3 (“lucky bastard”)
bitch — 106 (“that bitch”)
cunt — 7 (“is your grandma a cunt?”)
crap — 50 (“oh crap I did not know this document existed”)
damn — 103 (“her damn distribution setting is on”)
dick — 128 (“Eidolon logo? Woman riding a dick? Fascinum?”)
fuck — 107 (“and fuck any both sidesism”)
duck — 58 (“when women are TA it’s ducking special”)
hell — 102 (“holy motherfucking hell” in response to this very NSFW image)
holy shit — 47 (“holy shit it always pays off to bet against men”)
shit — 112 (“oh you think I can make this shit up”)
slut — 12 (“I acknowledge that I am a style slut”)

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a post-partum woman in possession of a fresh baby must share a pic in the group chat

Times we really rocked our lipstick and had to show the team

Our favorite rejected headlines

The team usually workshops headlines together in the work chat. Here are titles that were thrown out during brainstorming sessions but didn’t … quite … stick for some reason.

“More Tits, Less Ass”
“Call Me by Some Other Name Before Publication TK”
“ONE MILLION, BITCHEZ”
“Classics in a Time of Intoler-a”
“Monti-hell-no”
“Liz Tore Her ACL”
“ABD, Pregnant, and White”
“Hate Male”
“Spoken Latin, Bro-ken Latin”
“Everything you ever wanted to know about orgasms in antiquity but were too afraid to reference a pedophile to ask”
“NASA, NASAE: In Space Nobody Can Hear You Scream Declensions”
“Cygnifying Consent”

Times we made each other jealous of food we were about to eat

Seriously, each one of these pics was met with a reply that was some version of “you bitch”

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a learned woman in possession of a fresh book must share a pic in the group chat

Donna, Tori, and Yung In, thanks for all the wonderful memories of a very professional good time. To our readers, thank you for your support. To our writers, be proud of everything y’all have accomplished and keep on writing — for us, your biggest fans.

Sarah Scullin doesn’t know the difference between “then” and “than.”

Pop References in the Classics Classroom

Byedolon was originally published in EIDOLON on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I am told, by my friends at Medium, that my first Eidolon post was published May 16th, 2016, a little more than a year after Eidolon was founded. I was, for a while, quite a regular contributor, especially from 2016 through 2018. I wrote, it seems, the lucky total of 13 posts for the blog — some serious, some assigned, some intended to be humorous, whether or not they met the goal. A historical oddity, courtesy largely of how relatively early I jumped on board, is that if you go to ye olde masthead, you will see that I am listed as a quite mysterious sort of fauna, a “contributing editor.” For the historical record: this is a misnomer. I did, as I say, contribute happily for many years. I edited no one. I deserve no credit for any of the wonderful things Eidolon has been, not that anyone thinks otherwise. Let it be a monument only of the long friendship that blossomed between Eidolon and myself, and the warmth it will ever have in my affections.

It is funny to think of how long five or so years can be, if they come at the right time in your life. I wrote my first column for Eidolon as an adjunct at two different universities in two different states, after spending the fall an adjunct somewhere else. Those were the worst taxes I’ve ever done. Later that year, I would move to Williamsburg, Virginia where I would take up a position as a Visiting Professor at William & Mary in the department of classics. I am, strange as it may seem, what we in the business call a “Hebrew Bible guy,” but always mixed in with the comparative study of classics, especially Greek mythology. I taught Greek Mythology and biblical Hebrew. Two years later, in September of 2018, my column “Goodbye, Classics” describes my perambulating thoughts around a success — I got a tenure-track job, also at William & Mary, but in the Religious Studies department, finding a more traditional fit for the more traditional aspects of my training.

There weren’t many columns after that, what with one thing in another, but perhaps one additional point for the historical record is worth making. I got married the year before I started with Eidolon, which was also the year I graduated with my Ph.D. But, like many academics that also started a period of extreme stress for my family — my wife and I would spend the next nearly five years wondering if we would ever find decent jobs in the same place. When I started in Virginia, she was still in Rhode Island, but eventually got a job at UNC, a three hour drive away. When I wrote my next column, after “Goodbye, Classics” — “A Historian Annotates the Horrific Speech Given at the Dedication of Silent Sam” — it was with a front row seat to the proceedings. Again, for the record: I am furious with UNC to this day.

Of course, it is also funny to think of how short five years can be. On April 6th, 2017, I published “A Tale of Two Kingdoms,” an account of American politics through the lens of a favorite Greek myth: the supposed-to-be-shared post-Oedipus kingship of Thebes, the implosion of which leads directly to the events of the Seven Against Thebes and then, immediately, those of Antigone. In the myth, Polynices and Eteocles agree that one will be king for a year, then the other, then back, and infinitum, an arrangement that ends with them killing each other in about five minutes. Here, in a nutshell, was my argument. It is possible for someone to have absolute power — many people have, in history! — and it is possible for two people, or groups, to share power. What is not possible is for two people to share absolute power in succession — back and forth, in this case — when they don’t have anything like the same vision for Thebes.

In other words if, say, Eteocles thinks there should be an eighth gate of Thebes, adding to the fabled seven, but Polynices thinks there should be six, and every year the monarchy rotates is spent building or destroying gates of Thebes ad infinitum, that is a state of affairs that cannot go on. Since the GOP remains committed to the position that no Dem victory is legitimate, and no Dem achievement should be allowed to stand — no matter how many tests it passes — we are still in ancient Thebes, as it were, and I’ve thought about it just about every day. When there are two parties, and one wants to eradicate the existence of the other, pass laws that prohibit its participation, and knock down anything it builds any time it comes to power, how can a nation survive? I have been wondering this from the beginning, and I will go on wondering, I know, for a long time to come.

So here we are, in a very different place from five years ago, and a very similar one, too. Throughout it all, Eidolon has been a place you could go to learn something — some fascinating classics fact, some new way of thinking about it all, some perspective that broadened your horizon. It was, best of all, a place you could go to read marginalized voices, and more than that — to read about marginalization, why it happens, the tremendous harm it causes, and how to go about redressing it. Now it leaves the scene. I am very sorry this is so, but I understand. Others can tell the story of Eidolon much better than I can, but I remember when it left the auspices of the Paideia Institute, and I remember why. It was, in part, at least, because the Institute insisted on an obeisance to a faux ideological diversity, rather than Eidolon’s deep and real commitment to genuine inclusivity — the only kind that matters. Eidolon wanted to give a platform to people whose voices we need but who rarely get the podium they deserve. Eidolon profited by it much more than any endeavor that requires the just-mentioned obeisances in sufficient quantity, and so did we all.

There is, however, a flip side to freedom, so reminiscent of everything else as to be almost a metaphor. Institutions restrict what is possible in the direction of true inclusion, and spaces outside of them are much more congenial — but whatever is made without institutional support is a labor of love, and labors of love are always on borrowed time. What is hardest to build and maintain is soonest knocked down. In an unending pandemic that we have stopped fighting, in a political moment that exhausts all energy, the burdens fall heaviest on those already carrying the load.

Yet it is the fundamental fact of the study of the ancient world that things are not gone just because they are done. Here is a monument to a different kind of classics, long may it stand, to be studied in years to come. From living reality, may it become an aspiration — to a world in which nobody wonders whether an Eidolon can survive and flourish, and it does not take so much to tend, to keep it blooming, to protect it from the elements. As for me, I leave with the deepest appreciation for all involved — Donna, Sarah, Tara, Yung In, and Tori, who invited me in and who, I believe I can say, have become my friends, or already were. I leave with that appreciation for the community Eidolon created, and all the wonderful things I learned from it. May we all meet again in better days.

Andrew Tobolowsky is an assistant professor at William & Mary, working on how we tell and retell stories, and what they say about us when we do.

Teach Me How to Say Goodbye

To Better Days was originally published in EIDOLON on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Within minutes of the news of Eidolon’s demise, social media flooded with testimony to the life it breathed into classics. Who could have imagined that in five short years, this scrappy, upstart, woman-led magazine could revolutionize a field that for centuries has been a byword for conservatism? Eidolon amplified voices and sparked conversations we’d never before imagined. And now we can’t imagine how we’ll go without.

I’ll leave it to others to give Eidolon the public laudatio it deserves. I just want to offer my personal thanks to a them that’s also an us and you. To me, Eidolon has never been an abstract noun so much as a group of people engaged in conversations that were alternately difficult, angry, funny, and necessary. Writers who placed their histories and humanity at the fore of their classics, and in doing so, changed how authority looks and how scholarship sounds. Above all, readers of all ages, races, and gender identities, spanning institutions and continents, who felt that finally someone was speaking for us.

I’m proud to have been part of this community. And I’m a better classicist for it. Sarah Scullin and team helped me unlearn the hedging, posturing, and self-whitewashing I’d internalized in grad school. I’m a clearer thinker as a result. It was here that I learned how hard it is, and how invigorating, to communicate complex ideas without condescension to a wider public. And it was here that I learned to write from my whole self, and not just a scholarly persona; to recognize how my experience as a human in this world has shaped and enriched my classics.

It was on Eidolon, too, that I and many others first felt the dignity of being a writer — of crafting voices that transcend hierarchies and traditional reward structures. It’s been a while since I accepted writer’s fees, because I always felt I should be paying Eidolon. Tens of thousands more people have read my articles here than will ever pick up my book. Throughout it all, you, dear readers, have been my therapists and confidantes, my light during the darkness of the past four years.

Eidolon has given me so much more than I gave. And I’m not the only one hoping to pay it forward. Lest we forget, it was Helen’s eidolon, not Helen herself, who kept the battle going. We, the people of Eidolon, have always been more than the banner. And the work we continue in its name has only just begun. It’s on us to keep expanding who gets a voice in our field and a place at the table. It’s on us to recognize and reward public-facing, socially conscious scholarship. It’s on us to be the change we want to see.

Thank you, Eidolon, for giving us not a possession for all time, but inspiration without end.

Eidolon is dead; long live Eidolon.

Nandini Pandey still can’t quite believe it.

Teach Me How to Say Goodbye

Eidolon Is Dead. Long Live Eidolon. was originally published in EIDOLON on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Tbh, the part many of us will miss most about Eidolon. How ~hilarious~ the copy writer/assistant editor is! Wow, that social media presence…so funny! Those short articles…WHIMSICALLY WITTY. Let’s offer her a job on the spot. Pls.

Sure you might be able to read Homer in the original Greek, but can you answer these who-said-its?

• Who Said It: Ovid or Dwight Schrute?
• Who Said it: Horace or Millennial Rustic Twee?
• Who Said It: Tibullus or Taylor Swift?

Play with our name generators!

• What Would Novae Famae Call You?
• What’s Your Triple-Monikered Prestigious University-Affiliated Scientific-Sciency Name?

Parodies of classical figures

• Pindr
• Classical Authors as John Mulaney Quotes
• If Classics Were High School

Fun with classical myth!

• OkCupīdō
• Pandora’s Radio
• Classical Myth Menu
• Classical Tragedies That Could Have Been Prevented With Smartphones
• Myths for the Misandrist
• Zeus and Friends

There’s a lot of pressure to drink in these socially-distant times, which we think is v. bad and irresponsible of society. That said, if you’re partaking, why not drink a myth-themed cocktail?

How to Drink Like a Hero

And while you’re drinking, why not play a drinking game?

Would You Rather: Classical Academia Edition

Don’t smoke though, kids:

How to Quit Smoking

Never mind— you say you want to be wholesome and make Classics things? You do you!

• Classicists Make Things
• Classicists Illustrate Things
• Classicists Crochet Things
• Classicists Bake Things

You can’t get a tattoo right now but you’re dreaming of getting a tattoo as soon as you can

• Classicists Get Inked
• Eidolon’s Tattoo Issue

This list is immature and juvenile and you only want to read serious classics things and learn wisdom from the ancients

• VII Ancient Philosophies for the Modern Bro
• 10 Inspirational Quotes by Thucydides
• Just the Texts, Ma’am

None of these are for me. Give me random articles!

Random Lists of 2018 Eidolon Articles

Lighthearted Articles About Classical Antiquity was originally published in EIDOLON on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Eidolon Classics Journal

A list of articles about classically-relevant film and television, with viewing suggestions that link to information on where to watch online. Perfect pandemic activity: reading counts as productive, so then you can watch TV afterwards without guilt!

Horror

Watch with: the Halloween movies, Us, Scream, The Walking Dead

When the Classics Won’t Stay Dead

E.D. Adams and T.J. Bolt on how ancient and modern storytelling handles sequels:

By looking at the ways in which modern horror’s propensity for sequels mirrors ancient literary practice, we can enrich our understanding of horror sequels and appreciate the sequel as a pillar of the horror genre.

When the Classics Won’t Stay Dead

The Undead in Bed

Ken Tully on ancient and modern zombie lovers:

Our own society expresses fears not through myth, but through media. Could it be that the stigma of aging and ugliness of death have nurtured a genre of the undead?

The Undead in Bed

Horrific Catharsis

E.D. Adams and T.J. Bolt on modern horror’s ancient pedigree:

Both the structural and the thematic similarities between tragedy and horror suggest that horror films are inheritors of the tragic tradition. The Scream franchise reveals its interest in this inheritance through its occasional direct references to the classical tradition and its clear familiarity with the tropes of the tragic genre.

Horrific Catharsis

The Uncanniest of Valleys

T.H.M. Geller-Goad on ancient and modern dopplegangers:

When we tell stories about meeting our doubles, they are not usually happy stories. Think of the myth of Narcissus, who fell in love with his own reflection and wasted away. On some level, we must fear self-knowledge, and suffer from a fragile sense of self. Who are you? How do you know? What makes you you? Are you replaceable?

The Uncanniest of Valleys

Classics-themed

Watch with: The 300, Troy, Chi-raq, Hamilton

Sing, Goddess, the Story of Tonight

Mark Buchan on straight-washing in Hamilton and Troy:

Indeed, the central dramatic dilemma Achilles and Alexander Hamilton face down, and which anchors the plot, is: should love be between equals, or is it part of a social, domestic arrangement, embedding a man in the family he ultimately controls? The similarity in plot of both is tied to how the central characters construct their erotic identities.

Sing, Goddess, the Story of Tonight

This Is Not Sparta

Sarah Bond on why white supremacists love Sparta:

While the movie 300 focuses on the fight for Greek liberty in the conflict with Persia in the early 5th century BCE, it also neglects to tell the audience that Sparta also took liberty from others.

This Is Not Sparta

(Sex) Striking Out: Spike Lee’s Chi-raq

Helen Morales on Spike Lee’s adaptation of Lysistrata:

The key problem is the movie’s failure to provide a feasible solution to the violence. It is a mistake that Aristophanes did not make.

(Sex) Striking Out: Spike Lee’s Chi-raq

Hip-Hopera Americana

Matthew Wellenback on Hamilton and Chi-raq:

Even as Hamilton and Chi-Raq move modern dramatic story-telling in new directions, they thus return to some of the oldest practices of the theater and reignite long-standing debates about the relationship between art and real life. Greek tragedy, meet your latest successor, American hip-hopera.

Hip-Hopera Americana

Sci-fi

Watch with: Blade Runner, Star Wars, Westworld

Do Androids Dream of Electric Greeks?

C.W. Marshall on Blade Runner 2049:

This isn’t a review of 2049. I want instead to discuss the three most prominent classical images of the film — the wooden horse, Oedipus, and Pygmalion’s statue, Galatea.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Greeks?

How Epic is Star Wars?

Rachel Lesser on the Star Wars franchise and epic successors:

What in particular defines a “classical epic,” and how might The Force Awakens or the other Star Wars films fit into this category? And what exactly is the Aeneid’s relationship with its Homeric precedents, and is the new Star Wars movie really responding to the earlier movies in a similar way?

How Epic is Star Wars?

Virgil in Westworld

Columnist Nandini Pandey on Westworld’s katabases:

Via and beyond their complementary visions of the afterlife, the Aeneid and Westworld together raise enduring questions about freedom, heredity, and creative violence as they apply to artists’ quests for originality as well as the universal human struggle to exert agency within the storylines of our lives.

Virgil in Westworld

Levity

Watch with: Mean Girls, Love Actually, How I Met Your Mother, Bromans

If Classics Were High School

Michael Mignanelli imagines Mean Girls quotes in the mouths of classical figures:

“You all have got to stop calling each other sluts and whores. It just makes it OK for guys to call you sluts and whores.”
 — Lucretia to the other women in Collatia

If Classics Were High School

Legendary! The Aeneid’s Tapestry of Lies

Ayelet Haimson Lushkov on the similarities between Aeneas and … Barney Stinson from How I Met Your Mother:

These superficial characteristics, however, fail to explain why the figure of Barney Stinson really appeals to us, especially in conjunction with Aeneas. What intrigues me in both characters — and what makes a comparison of more than passing critical interest — is their common role as masterful storytellers, and the female audience of their stories.

Legendary! The Aeneid’s Tapestry of Lies

To Me, You Are Creepy

Assistant Editor Tori Lee on the exclusus amator trope:

As the rom-com as a circumscribed genre continues to lose popularity (I did manage to persuade one person to accompany me to Bridget Jones’s Baby, which was generously deemed “not as bad as you might imagine” by, of all sources, The Financial Times), the excluded lover trope is also losing some of its formerly defining characteristics.

To Me, You Are Creepy

Bromani Ite Domum

Editor-at-large Yung In Chae offers scathing and hilarious recaps of the Bromans reality tv show:

The contestants are eager to show off their knowledge of the civilization (or is it just civilization?) that they are here to honor. Modina claims to know about Caesar. “Caesar salad?” Kai asks. “No, just Caesar,” she says, giving him a look. Brandon marvels at how they’re going two thousand years back. “I’ve never been that far back!” he exclaims. Has he been any number of years back?

Bromani Ite Domum

Drama

Watch with: First Man, My Brilliant Friend

Elena Ferrante Is My Mother

Barbara Graziosi on outing authors:

Still, it is also true that literature enables us to feel ourselves into others — others who are not like ourselves. If there is one good thing about Gatti’s revelation, it is this reminder: Ferrante is not, and need not be, exactly like her characters in order to write authentically about them

Elena Ferrante Is My Mother

Elena Ferrante’s Virgil

Stephanie McCarter on the Aeneid and Ferrante:

Neither Elena nor Aeneas ultimately restrains the shadow of the feminine. Aeneas submits to fury as war embroils him in the epic’s second half, and he perpetrates death with gruesome impiety. Lila’s reading in fact prioritizes this furious Aeneas, whose moral ambiguity disquiets readers and undermines the easy simplicity of a pious hero.

Elena Ferrante’s Virgil

Heroes Are A Virus From Outer Space

Columnist Nandini Pandey on First Man:

Take a breather from the virulent rhetoric on display in the news and our annual conference and let me show you how we harbor and honor the mental infections that kill us, from the first epic to First Man.

Heroes Are a Virus From Outer Space

Adventure

Watch with: The Harry Potter movies, The Lightning Thief, Coco, Wonder Woman

Crossing Cultures as a First-Generation Classicist

Columnist Nandini Pandey on first-generation experience and Coco:

Growing up, books were my marigold bridge to a wider world. They were all the more a lifeline as the walls of my house began closing in, as my family’s differences from others loomed larger in my mind. All my parents’ friends looked like them. None of the kids at school looked like me.

Crossing Cultures as a First-Generation Classicist

The Whitening Thief

Maxwell T. Paule on Percy Jackson’s white supremacy:

That said, Riordan’s later growth doesn’t excuse The Lightning Thief’’s problems. A the end of the day, it’s still a text rooted in white supremacist ideology, and I’m not going to rush out to buy it for my niece. On the other hand, I’m not going to tell you to skip it, either. In fact, you probably should read it.

The Whitening Thief

Wonder Woman and Her Influence

Michele Kennerly and Carly S. Woods on Wonder Woman and the persuasive power of women:

So we stake our claim in the old: the story and history of Wonder Woman are suggestive of the ancient (yet enduring) habit of talking about influence, obedience, and persuasion through a gender-based idiom of power.

Wonder Woman and Her Influence

Epigraphs and Epitaphs

Mitchell Parks on the Aeschylean epigraph on the final Harry Potter book:

While some might see it as mere classical window dressing — a quick dash of ancient literature meant to add the kind of unexamined “prestige” that can become odious, if not downright harmful — I believe that the quotation is part of a consistent and, as near as I can determine, intentional network of borrowings closely tied to the themes of the series.

Epigraphs and Epitaphs

Report of the Tenure Committee of the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry Regarding The Tenure Application of Minerva McGonagall

Eric C. Smith with some levity:

Tenured members of the Hogwarts faculty should be pushing the boundaries of their disciplines; they should be magical innovators, and not simply tradents for old knowledge. Since only one professor per department may hold tenure, would not Hogwarts have been better served by hiring a more senior Wizard, and allowing Professor McGonagall to continue on in the junior role?

Report of the Tenure Committee of the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry Regarding The…

Up to No Good

Liz Butterworth on Hogwarts’ terrible pedagogy:

But it seems, after twenty years of Pottermania, high time that we tickle the sleeping dragon, interrogate our celebration of how Harry Potter shaped a generation’s collective imagination, and face the fact that the magic of Harry Potter bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the processes by which academic institutions discriminate and exclude.

Up to No Good

The Greek Tragedy of Tom Riddle Tyrannos

Brett M. Rogers on Voldemort’s tragic and tyrannical elements:

Dumbledore’s lecture is perhaps the series’ most complete statement on the nature of tyranny and seems to point to the question — or, if you will, the riddle — at the heart of the Harry Potter story: “What makes a man become an evil tyrant?”

The Greek Tragedy of Tom Riddle Tyrannos

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Return Them

Margaret Day Elsner on issues of repatriation and appropriation:

So the issue of reception and cultural appropriation and its connection to Fluffy, the Parthenon Marbles, and Native American religion begs a broader question, one of ownership. Who decides when something is taken from its native setting, and more importantly, who gives permission?

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Return Them

Harry Potter and the Undead Author

Caroline Bishop on JK Rowling and Cicero:

In much the same way, Rowling challenges the image of the well wrought urn produced by an artist who politely plays dead. But she is not the first to have done so: it was challenged long ago by the very existence of Roman literature, which made a virtue out of unoriginality. And when we look at Roman literature and the tradition it inspired, we can see that authors have not always been forced to play dead for their works to be appreciated.

Harry Potter and the Undead Author

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phaedrus

Caroline Bishop reimagines the Phaedrus as a Hogwartian dialogue:

Socrates
My good Harry, where are you rushing off to, and where have you come from?

Harry
I’ve come from the Headmaster’s office, Socrates, son of Cephalus, and I’m going for a walk through the Hogwarts grounds. I’ve spent a long time with Dumbledore today, since early morning.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phaedrus

How Harrius Potter Helped Me Read More Latin

Justin Slocum Bailey on the joys of reading Harry Potter in Latin:

Of course, you might worry whether the Latin of Harrius Potter is such that you would even want to soak it up. It’s not the nimblest Latin, and the English sentence structure underlying the Latin frequently seeps through.

How Harrius Potter Helped Me Read More Latin

The Boy Who Was A Fox

Managing Editor Sarah Scullin offers some not very accurate translations of the Latin Harry Potter book:

Master and Mistress Dursley, who used to live in the temples of Ligustrorian Childbirth with a number of signs (four, in fact), not in the suburbs, used to say with a normal amount of reason that to live without a UTI meant they themselves didn’t feel pain for any reason.

The Boy Who Was A Fox

Articles About Movies and TV was originally published in EIDOLON on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Which articles are our editors’ favorites? Or which keep them coming back to read and share again and again, because they changed their outlooks on topics or just made them snort Diet Coke out of their noses? These!

Tori Lee, Assistant Editor

These are articles that bring me lots of joy every time I think of them. They are mostly humorous, which makes sense given me.

Trump’s Winged Words by Bill Beck: Doing philology on non-literary texts amuses me to no end. It’s like when you put babies in grown-up shoes, or fluffy cats into tiny, strangely-shaped boxes. Also, I use these examples every time I need to explain what an epithet is to my students.

Trump’s Winged Words

Toward a Critical Edition of ‘If You’re Happy and You Know It’ by Curtis Dozier: Stay for the stemma and edition at the end. They are so worth it.

Toward a Critical Edition of "If You're Happy and You Know It"

Object-ifying Language: In the Classroom, Syntax Can Be a Tool or a Weapon by Daniel Libatique: This is a magical piece that teaches you a new thing about grammar and subsequently changes the way you hear people speak.

Object-ifying Language

Spinning Out of Hades: A Journey from the Thesmophoria to Spin Class by Kourtney Murray: This article makes me feel validated as a woman who loves spin class. Fitness trends are one of those things that everyone likes to make fun of for some reason (think avocado toast or kale chips), and it’s usually at the expense of women, and it frustrates me to no end. This isn’t cigarettes or pet rocks! This is a healthy habit that people actually like. Can we maybe not mock it? Can we compare it to ancient religious rituals instead?

Spinning Out of Hades

A Sexual Encounter, Narrated through Entries in the Index of Herbert Weir Smyth, (Ancient) Greek Grammar (1920) by David Rohrbacher: The kind of piece that makes you go “hehehe” under your breath the entire time.

A Sexual Encounter, Narrated through Entries in the Index of Herbert Weir Smyth, (Ancient) Greek…

Donna Zuckerberg, Editor-in-chief

Over the years, many people have told me (somewhat sheepishly) that they just aren’t interested in writing for the public. I always tell them that that’s absolutely fine — I don’t think anybody has an obligation to write for broad audiences, and I’ve never forced anyone to write for Eidolon. But the second part of that claim isn’t exactly true. Although technically I’ve never forced anyone to write for Eidolon, there have been a few times where I have wanted SO MUCH for a (very busy) specific writer to write a specific article that I’ve begged, cajoled, and pleaded the piece into existence. (Not surprisingly, all have custom art by Mali, because when I wanted piece to exist this much I also tended to have a very clear idea for a hero image.)

Barbarians Inside the Gate, Parts I and II by Dan-el Padilla Peralta: Another writer brought me the idea for this piece but didn’t think he was the right writer for it, and honestly, I’m not sure anyone other than Dan-el could have done justice to the topic. After he sent me a very dense 3500-word draft, I encouraged him to spin it out into two separate pieces — “one looking at the issues from a primarily micro perspective (the rhetoric of xenophobia and racism, the stances of individual politicians) and one from a primarily macro perspective (population movement, legal structures, economic trends)” — and to do it before the debate on 11/10/2015, which I was sure would be the death knell for Donald Trump’s presidential ambitions. This was also the first piece I got Mali to do custom art for, and I adore it.

• Barbarians Inside the Gate, Part I
• Barbarians Inside the Gate, Part II

Black Athena, White Power by Denise Eileen McCoskey: In my opinion, this article by Denise McCoskey is one of the most important ones that Eidolon published. Denise, Curtis Dozier, and I were discussing the legacy of classicists’ response to Black Athena on a podcast, and as we spoke I knew that I wanted Denise to dig deeper into the topic in an Eidolon article.

Black Athena, White Power

How Harrius Potter Helped Me Read More Latin by Justin Slocum Bailey: I feel a little bit conflicted now about Eidolon’s Harry Potter special, which produced so many wonderful articles in honor of the work of an unrepentant TERF writer whose fantasy world had a huge impact on my adolescence. I didn’t write for the special myself, but I did beg Justin Bailey to write a “really strong, joyful celebration/defense” of the Latin translations of the first two Harry Potter books. I even offered him the option to write the defense in Latin, if he felt inspired.

How Harrius Potter Helped Me Read More Latin

Other ways I’d slice this

Articles that made me cry the most (a totally unverifiable list based on my feelings):
Spinning Into Hades by Kourtney Murray, with its course packet epilogue
Nandini on Not Bringing Home a Baby
Yung In’s BTS article

THESE ARTICLES ARE SO FUNNY, PLEASE LOVE THEM LIKE I DO:

The limerick translation of the Ars Amatoria
McGonagall’s tenure review file
Pindr
everything by Tori Lee, I couldn’t pick one

Articles that seriously changed the direction of the journal:

Ode on a Grecian Crisis by Johanna Hanink
Making a Monster by Sarah Scullin
White People Explain Classics to Us by Yung In Chae

Yung In Chae, Editor-at-Large

In an effort to make us appear a little less self-centered, I excluded articles from the editors or the editorial board, but these would have made my list anyway.

Beyoncé, Plato, and the Foundation of the Polis by John Richard Ahern: I learned so much about both music and politics from this article, which shows that non-classicists can produce some of the best work on the classics. I remember talking to Sarah about how “magical” it was before publication; years after publication, it still is.

Medium

Altar of Facts by Elena Giusti: I was really struck by how Elena Giusti effortlessly weaves together philological analysis of Virgil and critique of modern Italian politics (so much of our political content has, for obvious reasons, centered on America, so I appreciate the exceptions). And her writing is in turns beautiful and harrowing.

Altar of Facts

The Measure of a Man by Bill Beck: I get asked why classical statues have tiny penises a lot, so it’s great to be able to point to an article that answers the question with genuine humor and insight.

The Measure of a Man

Sarah Scullin, Managing Editor

Dear writers, I love all of you equally and could never choose a favorite, just like with my kids. However, also just like my children, some of you have been ever so slightly neglected! We’ve compiled a list of our most-viewed articles elsewhere, so here’s my list of “articles that didn’t quite place on that list but that I love and you should love too”:

Definition, Please: Dr. Bailly, Coffee, and Orthography by Tino Delamerced: Zippy writing, anti-pretentiousness, and radical ideas about spelling.

Definition, Please: Dr. Bailly, Covfefe, and Orthography

A Tale of Two Kingdoms by Andrew Tobolowsky: What happens when partisanship reaches such extremes that one side erases everything the other accomplished and when an outgoing leader doesn’t commit to a peaceful transfer of power? Seriously, someone please tell me I’d like to know.

A Tale of Two Kingdoms

Breaking Up With Plato by Heather Harwood: I love pieces like this that take a deep, painful dive into a personal relationship with a problematic work.

Breaking Up With Plato

Cupid Cleans House by Stella Fawn Ragsdale: Parts of this article are artful written and other parts are actually art.

Cupid Cleans House

Can a Middle-Aged Woman Seize the Day by Stephanie McCarter: Bookmarking this for my impending middle age.

Can a Middle-Aged Woman Seize the Day?

Articles that make me very mad because of how effortlessly well-written they are

Spinning Out of Hades by Kourtney Murray (displays a level of mastery over the genre creative non-fiction I will never achieve. Rude.)

Spinning Out of Hades

Honest Ads for Cars of Myth by Bill Beck (this is such a funny conceit I will never not be completely outraged that I didn’t think of it first)

Honest Ads for Cars of Myth

Life as an Iphis by Lisa Franklin (why am I not this funny UGH?)

Life as an Iphis

Classics Beyond the Pale by Dan-el Padilla Peralta (this article ever so kindly and gently reminds me that I am just a baby writer. An infant. A babbling, insensate, amateur toddler scribbling in chalk on the sidewalk while Padilla Peralta makes Leonardos out of sentences)

Classics Beyond the Pale

Articles with my favorite original artwork:

• “But Is It Organic?”
• In Defense of (Studying) Food
• Hippocrates Would Have Wanted You to Eat Cake
• Eidolon’s Tattoo Issue
• White People Explain Classics to Us
• Playing Zeus: Reproductive Technology and Lessons from Hesiod
• Harry Potter and the Order of the Phaedrus

Fine, the articles that made me cry:

“Did You Eat?” by Woojin Kim (it’s just so sweet and it feels like we will never be able to feed our students ever again)

“Did You Eat?”

Intergenerational Trauma and the Novus Homo by Heather Galante (the interweaving of “Latin and English is so propulsive, I sort of slow-cried throughout the whole thing)

Intergenerational Trauma and the Novus Homo

Why I (Sometimes) Teach Bad Latin by Elizabeth Manwell (I don’t know why but I burst into tears when I finished reading the first draft of this and then everyone made fun of me for crying about Latin of all things)

Why I (Sometimes) Teach Bad Latin

Her Absence Is Like the Sky by Jason Nethercut (full disclosure: I’m the wife in this essay)

Her Absence Is Like the Sky

Crossing Cultures as a First-Generation Classicist by Nandini Pandey (Actually I’ve cried at every article Pandey wrote?)

Crossing Cultures as a First-Generation Classicist

Our Top Articles: Editors’ Choice was originally published in EIDOLON on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

You have reached the ultimate boss level of Eidolon. The top 30 most-viewed articles *ever* are compiled right here. Read them, and you’ll be participating in a self-perpetuating cycle that will ensure they remain the most-viewed. But the fact that they have so many views must make you want to read them?? Oh well.

30. What Would James Baldwin Do?
Classics and the Dream of White Europe

By Denise McCoskey

“But I believe we can take Baldwin himself as inspiration for adding another term to that list or, more precisely, for debunking the very idea on which all the others reside: the whiteness of ancient Greece and Rome.”

What Would James Baldwin Do?

29. Making a Monster
Why We Need to Talk about Holt Parker’s Arrest

By Sarah Scullin

“It’s no surprise, then, that Parker’s arrest has me thinking about how I might navigate these oppressive waters: should I consider the biography of a scholar relevant to an evaluation of his or her scholarship?”

Making a Monster

28. What Is the Best Way to Learn Latin?
A Conversation between Eleanor Dickey and Daniel Gallagher, led by Michael Fontaine

“… there never really was a single way of learning Latin, even in the ancient world. The method of learning Latin depended on — among other factors — where and into what social class you were born into, the purpose for which you were learning Latin, and the resources available to you.”

What Is the Best Way to Learn Latin?

27. Teaching Latin to Humans
How to Honor both the Language and the Learner

By Justin Slocum Bailey

“If MR is what a language-knowing brain knows, linguistic Skill is what a language-knowing person can do”

Teaching Latin to Humans

26. “The Slaves Were Happy”
High School Latin and the Horrors of Classical Studies

By Erik Robinson

“Caesar’s value as an exemplar of clear and conveniently grammaticized Latin is indisputable; yet, how can we use the horrors which Caesar describes as a tool to inform our common humanity?”

“The Slaves Were Happy”: High School Latin and the Horrors of Classical Studies

25. White People Explain Classics to Us
Epistemic Injustice in the Everyday Experiences of Racial Minorities

By Yung In Chae

“In plain language, we need to talk about white classicists thinking that they know more than classicists of color because they “look the part” and we don’t.”

White People Explain Classics to Us

24. On Not Knowing (Modern) Greek

By Johanna Hanink

“The time I have dedicated to Modern Greek is some of the best I have spent as a classicist, since it has given me a sounder, more internalized sense of the ancient language”

On Not Knowing (Modern) Greek

23. Not Bringing Home a Baby
On Academic Infertility and Miscarried Hope

By Nandini Pandey

“They don’t tell you, when you start on the long road toward your classics professor career, how much it might cost.”

Not Bringing Home a Baby

22. How to Climb Mt. Olympus
A Concise Travel Guide

By Luke Madson

“This is by no means a comprehensive guide to the mountain or a strict itinerary. The resources posted here are just a framework for planning any trip to the region.”

How to Climb Mt. Olympus

21. The Bad Wives
Misogyny’s Age-Old Roots in the Home

By Stephanie McCarter

“The etymology of “misogyny” is “hatred of women.” But the Greek word gynê means, more specifically, “wife.” The household, perhaps even more than the state, remains a bastion of patriarchy.”

The Bad Wives

20. Like Dionysus
BTS, Classics in K-Pop, and the Narcissism of the West

By Yung In Chae

“… it’s impossible to honestly discuss the story of BTS’s success without placing it within this larger context of imperialism, especially because the story itself reenacts the dynamic of America setting a standard that South Korea then tries to meet.”

Like Dionysus

19. This Is Not Sparta
Why the Modern Romance With Sparta Is a Bad One

By Sarah Bond

“The rise of Sparta in the romantic imaginations of Bannon and others that occupy the Alt-Right is about more than weapons.”

This Is Not Sparta

18. The Whitening Thief
Latent White Supremacy in Percy Jackson

By Maxwell T. Paule

“The field of classics cannot keep pretending like we’re above popular culture and its reception of Greek and Roman antiquity.”

The Whitening Thief

17. We Condone It by Our Silence
Confronting Classics’ Complicity in White Supremacy

By Rebecca Futo Kennedy

“As long as Classics justifies itself by claiming to be the foundation of Western Civilization (feel free to do a random check of university department web pages), it will continue to find itself uncomfortably at the contested center of the continuing culture wars.”

We Condone It by Our Silence

16. Re-Queering Sappho

By Ella Haselswerdt

“But why did I care so deeply? Why do I so badly want a female Sappho? And why do I so badly want a queer Sappho?”

Re-Queering Sappho

15. Putting the “Neon” in “Neo-Nazi”
The Aesthetics of Fashwave

By Jip Lemmens

“Fashwave artists have names like CYBERNΔZI, and their songs have titles such as “Right Wing Death Squads,” “Germania.exe,” and “Gas the Xenos, Galactic War Now!” Unsurprisingly, the music is absolutely terrible.”

Putting the “Neon” in “Neo-Nazi”

14. Why Students of Color Don’t Take Latin

By John Bracey

“ It’s pretty obvious to me what the answer is — but then again, I’m black. Because I am one of few people on the planet who can call themselves both black and a Latin teacher, I have some unique insights into this problem as well as some practical solutions.”

Why Students of Color Don’t Take Latin

13. Black Athena, White Power
Are We Paying the Price for Classics’ Response to Bernal?

By Denise Eileen McCoskey

“… we cannot effectively combat today’s use of Greece and Rome by white nationalists until we admit our own role in bringing such ideology about, until we grapple honestly with the fact that in no small way Classics’ response to Black Athena is coming home to roost.”

Black Athena, White Power

12. Drag Her by the Hair and Heart
The Manosphere and Ancient Love Curses

By Britta Ager

“Whiny dudes, it seems, whine in much the same way across the millennia.”

Drag Her by the Hair and Heart

11. “Learn Some F*cking History”

By Donna Zuckerberg

“Almost a year ago I encouraged my colleagues to call out historical errors of this type. While I still believe that work is necessary and important, I’m disheartened to see that some scholars believe that identifying basic errors is equivalent to fighting white supremacy. It isn’t.”

“Learn Some F*cking History”

10. Don’t Look Now, But There’s an Ancient Roman Depiction of a Dolphin Under Your Bed
A Horrifying Inquiry, with Pictures and Benjamin Franklin

By Donna Zuckerberg

“… it’s impossible to take this Cupid with his dinky little bow seriously, considering that he’s riding on what appears to be a feral hog with scales and fins.”

Don’t Look Now, But There’s an Ancient Roman Depiction of a Dolphin Under Your Bed

9. Plato Would Have Wanted You to Unplug
Technology Addiction, Technophobia, and Kids These Days

By Sarah Scullin

“Classicists might be dead language pushers, but the ancient texts that we promote were once new; and when they were first written people were also shaking their fists at the youth of the day and were terrified of contemporaneous cutting-edge technologies — in their case, paper, reading, and formal education.”

Plato Would Have Wanted You to Unplug

8. The Measure of a Man
Minor Classical Phalluses, Major Modern Fragility

By Bill Beck

“Now when we go to the museum, we’ll laugh, not at the size of the dicks, but at the culture that preferred them that way.”

The Measure of a Man

7. The Body in Question
Looking At Non-Binary Gender in the Greek and Roman World

By Grace Gillies

“Central to the dialogue is the unsolvable riddle of Megillos’s body, a common theme for invective works written by men about women who have sex with women — how do they do it? Is she a man? Is she a woman? Is she a pickled artichoke?”

The Body in Question

6. Why is Stoicism Having a Cultural Moment?

By Chiara Sulprizio

“By concentrating on the similarities between us, we can succeed not only at living in accordance with nature, but also at creating a new, expansive sense of community that transcends local differences.”

Why is Stoicism Having a Cultural Moment?

5. Why I Teach About Race and Ethnicity in the Classical World

By Rebecca Futo Kennedy

“Something has gone wrong in the classroom when even those people who have taken courses on the Classical world view discussions of race and ethnicity in Classics as part of a politicized liberal agenda rather than as scholarship designed to understand the ancient world and the history of its study.”

Why I Teach About Race and Ethnicity in the Classical World

4. What Women (Don’t) Want
Tiresias on Female Pleasure

By Tara Mulder

“What is the purpose for us of asking whether men or women experience more pleasure in sex? Can Tiresias’ “experience” tell us anything useful about our own gendered approaches to sex?”

What Women (Don’t) Want

3. Emanscapation
Between the Public and the Pubic in Ancient Greece

By Angele Rosenberg

“To shave or not to shave?”

Emanscapation

2. Dick Pics, Ancient and Modern

By Nikolas Oktaba

“… the penis is versatile and appropriate for many situations while the vulva is typically associated with either sex or terror. Therefore, genital intrusions such as the dick pic are acceptable for both public and private showing, while most things vulvate are not.”

Dick Pics, Ancient and Modern

1. How to Be a Good Classicist Under a Bad Emperor

By Donna Zuckerberg

“This is my call to arms for all classicists. No matter how white and male Classics once was, we are not that anymore. In spite of the numerous obstacles that remain, our field is now more diverse than ever, and that is something to be proud of.”

How to Be a Good Classicist Under a Bad Emperor

Our Most-Viewed Articles was originally published in EIDOLON on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.