It is not actually the case that I cannot think of anything more ghastly than going on a holiday tour with a group; spending any time on board one of those gigantic cruise ships would be substantially worse. But it is very much not my thing for multiple reasons. However, that doesn’t mean I can’t understand their attractions for some people who are not me, and I can certainly admire the business thinking behind them. Continue Reading »
I’ve spent the weekend in Krinides in northern Greece (south of Drama, to explain the particularly tenuous post title), next to the site of ancient Philippi and the plains on which the Roman Republic was finally euthanased. Actually staying here, rather than being bussed in for a couple of hours like 97%+ of the other people touring the ancient remains, has been wonderful, and not just for the magnificent breakfast (shout-out to the Hotel Philippeio); a chance for some close observation of local horticultural practice, fascinating wild flowers and a lot of wildlife – a surprising shortage of bats, given the numbers I detected in the streets of Thessaloniki last week, but lots of strange nocturnal noises (Scops owls among them, I think), and fireflies, and today a hoopoe as well as stork, swallows, Western Rock nuthatch, calandra larks and a lot of things I haven’t firmly identified yet.
The plains of Philippi. The camp of Cassius was supposedly on that hill.
Posted in Musings | Tagged archaeology, Philippi | Leave a Comment »
Thucydides knows everything about everything, Part 1283. It’s not enough that he recorded eclipses of both sun and moon, without directly attributing them to divine action – okay, he does claim an increased number of eclipses as grounds for recognising the unprecedented greatness of the Peloponnesian War, but he also notes that the eclipse of 431 occurred in the moon’s first phase, implying a natural event. No, he has to have anticipated all our modern concerns as well:
Posted in Musings | Tagged eclipse, Thucydides | Leave a Comment »
I was never entirely convinced by Douglas Adams’ Total Perspective Vortex. The idea – I’m taking this from the original radio series, which I could once recite by heart, so variations in the books are non-canonical and therefore irrelevant – is that every piece of matter is connected to every other piece of matter, and therefore it is possible to extrapolate the entire universe from a small fairy cake. One scientist used this principle to annoy his wife; “Have some sense of proportion”, she would say to him constantly, and so he plugged her into the extrapolated universe so that she saw herself in relation to the entirety of creation, an invisible dot on an invisible dot, and it annihilated her brain. In a minor rewrite of Eliot’s “humankind cannot bear too much reality”, The Book concludes that “if life is going to exist in a universe this size, the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense for proportion.” Continue Reading »
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Woken by a powerful, disturbing dream, in which I have had to organise some sort of awayday for graduate students, arrive at the venue to unpack everything and take over the room from the previous group punctually at half past six ready for dinner – only for the leader of that group, unmistakeably Prof. Pat Porter of the University of Birmingham, to say “Thanks for the food, Nev, we’ll see you at six thirty tomorrow morning.” I am positive that I haven’t misbooked this session, but there’s nothing I can do; A. is now berating me for letting everyone down – I have no idea what she’s doing here – and so I rush downstairs to catch up with everyone to apologise, and can’t find anyone. The strangest thing is that the logo for the Porter group is a dove of peace, which doesn’t seem very Realist at all… Continue Reading »
Posted in Twelve Days in the Year | Leave a Comment »
I wouldn’t say that it’s been the highlight of this academic year – that would be my lovely Thucydides seminar, for whose final class I spent yesterday morning baking shortbread and brownies – but the most unexpectedly memorable thing, both exhausting and rewarding, has been teaching Greek Historiography to first and second years. It’s not a new module, even if it’s the first time that I’ve taught it, so there hasn’t been a lot of extra time for preparing new material – but the previous lecturer had a unique style (hi, Irene!) that doesn’t suit me at all, so I’ve had to start from scratch anyway. Above all, this has involved revisiting the range of authors covered… Continue Reading »
Posted in Musings | Tagged historiography, Procopius | Leave a Comment »
Update from the Thucydiocy Bot: Ex-Twitter is now really, really boring. Yes, there are still a few people posting the ‘Scholars and Warriors’ quote to make the same old points about jacked librarians, and a fair amount of boilerplate ‘strong do what they want’ Realism, but there hasn’t been anything interesting – a decent argument, let alone a new misquotation – for six months or more. When someone posted the old image of three students in random graduation outfits, it actually created a little warm feeling, thinking of the old days when the Thucydides musattributions seemed never-ending. Continue Reading »
Posted in Musings | Tagged gAI, Thucydides | Leave a Comment »
As someone expensively educated in an imperialist state recklessly convinced of its innate superiority and entitlement, whose once-promising career was derailed by embarrassing failure, I have a far better instinct for Thucydides’ ethos and political sensibilities than do most moderns. I was once regularly threatened with violence by a member of the school’s Combined Cadet Force to extort the nicer elements of my packed lunch, so can personally attest to the prevalence of the mentality depicted in the Melian Dialogue within the officer class. And I visited Amphipolis once, gaining a powerful sense of quite how long it takes to get there… Continue Reading »
Posted in Musings | Tagged autoethnography, class, Homer | 1 Comment »
We have a new cat bed for upstairs, as the one in which Hans passed away last week clearly still smelt of him, and/or death, even after multiple washes, and the surviving two refused to use it. The problem is that it’s a design which Hector can get his teeth into, literally, and drag it off the bed onto the floor – and even down the stairs. We thought he had abandoned this habit, or we would have bought a different type, but clearly he was just waiting for conditions to change to resume his plan. Continue Reading »
Posted in Musings | Tagged research, Writing | Leave a Comment »
Woken marginally before the alarm went by A. putting the radio on – she has an even earlier start than usual, with a quick appointment for a routine blood test before heading into work. Got up to do last night’s washing up, remember to take a bread roll out of the freezer for her lunch and make tea; thick head full of phlegm, as the cold that’s been hanging around for the last couple of days seems to be coming out. Cats are still being very weird after Hans’s death last week; Hector briefly sits next to us then makes a grumpy noise and jumps up onto the wardrobe, which Olga takes as a cue to disappear under my legs under the duvet. News full of stupidity; apparently Lee Anderson is the true beating heart of Conservatism – which would actually confirm a lot of entrenched prejudices about the Tories, if one thought most of these unnamed MPs were entirely sincere, rather than sharing his prejudices but quietly sneering at his vulgarity. Continue Reading »
Posted in Twelve Days in the Year | 3 Comments »
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