Despite any scurrilous rumours you may have heard, I do not in fact advocate for everyone to be compelled to read Thucydides. On the contrary, I’d be more easily persuaded of the need to introduce a short proficiency test as a prequisite for being allowed to read it – though clearly, given the rash of vacuous social media commentary over the last couple of weeks, the priority for our political energies must be the creation of a compulsory licensing scheme such that you’re not allowed to quote Thucydides unless you can demonstrate that you’ve read it. So, the news that Thucydides (extract thereof) appears as one of only three classical texts on the draft ‘Literary Works List’ proposed by the Texas Education Agency to the State Board of Education as a ‘minimum common literary canon’ that all schools in the state should cover is less cause for cracking open the champagne in this household than some might assume. Continue Reading »
Posted in Musings | Tagged Death, education, Texas, Thucydides, United States | 1 Comment »
I am a little surprised at the more or less total lack of discussion amongst classical reception folks on here of the third episode of the new series of Fallout, given that one of the major plot strands involves the appearance of Caesar’s Legion as one of the various violent factions hanging around the Mojave Desert in the post-apocalypse 23rd century. Am I the only person watching? Has everyone just been too busy heading off to the New California Republic? Or is it the case, as Jordan Christopher argued in his article on ‘Caesar’s Legion in Fallout: New Vegas’ in Classical Receptions Journal last year*, that this is simply a very embarrassing bit of reception, offering a critique both of the historical Roman Empire and of any attempted revival in the present, so people would rather not talk about it? If so, it probably doesn’t help that we’re now presented with the added twist that, whereas Caesar’s Legion in F:NV was terrifyingly powerful and effective, in the tv series it has (appropriately) been reduced to internal squabbling over the succession and endless civil war, leaving it vulnerable to attack from outside… Continue Reading »
Posted in Musings | Tagged classical reception, Fallout, Roman Empire | 1 Comment »
There’s nothing like a would-be strongman with poor impulse control throwing his weight (and, more significantly, his country’s weight) around on the international stage to bring out the Thucydides quoters on social media. 80% Melian Dialogue – the ‘gangstas rule, suckas suffer’ line, obviously, rather than any of the rest of it, usually decontextualised but with a few people trying to push back with the point that T. really wasn’t endorsing the Athenian claim that the Strong can do what they like – and 20% ‘Thucydides Trap’, though without any clarity as to how this is relevant to anything. What I did enjoy was the scattering of accounts on Ex-Twitter quoting ‘the original Greek’ in order to enhance the authority of their opinions – with a hit rate of only one third actually getting the Greek correct. Google Translate and/or GenAI, one assumes – with the latter definitely being to blame for this magnificent creation: 
Continue Reading »
Posted in Musings | Tagged Melian Dialogue, politics, Thucydides | Leave a Comment »
And now the end is near – of the blogging year, of course. It’s traditional for me to shake my head despairingly at this point, wondering whether it’s all worth it, but actually I feel in a pretty good place at the moment as far as the blog is concerned. Viewing and visitor figures have hit a five-year high – though since there have been a couple of days in the course of the year when suddenly hundreds of new visitors appeared, each looking at a single different post, I’m inclined to be suspicious as to whether they were all real people. More concretely and authentically, however, the fact that a few people clicked on the donations button – not enough to pay all the hosting and ‘ad-free’ costs, but certainly enough to buy a couple of coffees – did help me feel warm and appreciated. Continue Reading »
Posted in Musings, Publications | Tagged 2025, blogging | 2 Comments »
As ever, one of the fun aspects of end-of-year reflection is revisiting the blog posts, articles and other internet things that I noted down in the course of the year as worth revisiting – sorry, I had another bad night and my sentence-writing gland is sluggish. This is of course a completely subjective exercise, based on whether the thing I’m reading catches my fancy enough at the time to remember to do the cut’n’paste of the URL, which doesn’t have any necessary relationship to its quality or interest; I suppose there is an unconscious distinction between ‘piece I appreciated reading at the time’ and ‘piece I immediately want to recommend to others’. And of course there is far too much about GenAI, and university teaching, as I can’t escape the thought that I’m going to have to start thinking about this again properly… Continue Reading »
Posted in Reviews | Tagged blogging, blogs | Leave a Comment »
Dreadful night; dropped off fine, then after an hour or so the cats started – to be strictly accurate, Hector and Olga started, running around the house like mad things and dropping the rubber ball down the stairs in order to chase it and then bring it back to the top to start again. This was all, one suspects, because they wanted wet food rather than just the plentiful supply of dried food available. For me, it was as if a switch went click in my brain, suddenly I was as awake and unable to switch off or relax as if I’d had several espressos before bed. Probably I dozed off eventually, but in that way when you feel wide awake even if you’re asleep. None of this was helped by being penned in by Buddy, curled up next to me as usual and gradually stretching out to expand his share of the duvet. Continue Reading »
Posted in Twelve Days in the Year | 5 Comments »
One of the minor unexpected consequences of having a playlist of gentle, mostly piano trio jazz tracks designed to help me relax and drop off to sleep, that sometimes gets left on all night, is that it completely skews end-of-year listening stats. The number of quiet piano trio pieces on which Paul Motian is playing drums is indeed remarkable, but the claim that I’ve listened to him twice as much as any other artist doesn’t reflect the artists or albums I’ve actually listened to this year. Continue Reading »
Posted in music | Tagged 2025, music | 2 Comments »
Have we not learnt to double-check all references? Especially in this new era of bullshitting machines?
This afternoon, Naomi Scott (@drnaomiscott.bsky.social) posted on Bluesky that she’d just been reading the really wild Wikipedia page for Euripides’ lost tragedy Thyestes. And, yes, this is pretty remarkable…
Posted in Musings | Tagged Ennius, Wikipedia | Leave a Comment »
That there is no life without truth, and no truth without Philology.
That Philology alone is objective; everything else is speculation.
That language defines our humanity; Philology is the mastery of language, and so Philology is the highest form of human knowledge and development.
That anything in Greek or Latin is inherently interesting, and nothing else matters unless it has some association with Greek or Latin.
That apparently there are other languages besides Latin and Greek. This is of no concern.
That Philology brings order and establishes hierarchy; it differentiates between those who know Latin and Greek and those who do not, and between the acknowledged experts in Latin and Greek and those who aspire to such expertise. Thus is civilisation brought forth out of chaos.
That Philology was perfected by the early twentieth century. We should award a prize to celebrate this! And must strive to defend civilisation by resisting all subsequent developments.
The true philologist knows this. The philologist who questions any of it is therefore no true philologist, and can be ignored.
Posted in Musings | Leave a Comment »
An addendum to my comment last week, speculating on the possible motives for anyone to send a fake, GenAI-produced enquiry about a possible MRes project. One of the more serious theories is that it’s a way of gathering more training data, up-to-date specialised information about a niche topic, expressed in analytical terms – either specifically to improve the generation of research proposals, or for more general purposes. But I now wonder whether it might be an attempt at refining the essay mill, “let us write your assessment task – solely for research purposes, obviously” grift, now that the bottom has been thoroughly kicked out of that business model by ChatGPT and its ilk. Continue Reading »
Posted in Musings | Tagged GenAI, spam | Leave a Comment »
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