Sphinx

More eagly-eyed readers may have noticed a change to the main URL of this blog, from bristolclassics.wordpress.com to thesphinxblog.com. I’ve paid some money to WordPress for this, in order to make it clear henceforth that this is my personal blog rather than anything official from the Department of Classics & Ancient History at the University of Bristol. Many of you probably assumed that this was the case, as 97% of the posts that appear here are by me with a scattering of contributions from people directly associated with my research projects – you have to go back a long way to find anything by someone who doesn’t fall into either of those categories. It was rather telling, earlier this month, that the post by Ben Earley on recent television programmes about classical subjects was for a while being discussed on Twitter as if it were by me, simply because it had appeared here.

Sphinx was originally conceived as a collective academic blog, with the aim that everyone in the department would have a forum for posts about their research and other interests without feeling the obligation to write something every week or every month. In practice, scarcely anyone took up this opportunity, for many perfectly good reasons; I, on the other hand, have developed a taste for the particular demands and advantages of blog posts as a means of discussing issues and ideas, and so was happy to write regularly, and moreover felt a bit of responsibility for keeping the blog more or less active – and the result was that the blog became ever more associated with me while my colleagues felt, apparently, ever more intimidated from posting anything. The change of name (and of the ‘About Sphinx’ blurb) simply recognises this situation, and the fact that I’ve obtained my colleagues’ agreement to make this my own private domain. There is talk of developing an alternative online forum for Bristol Classics as a whole, run on very different lines, and obviously I’ll report on any developments. In the meantime, welcome to the New Sphinx, more or less the same as the Old Sphinx. You really are in my world now, rather than just feeling like it…

Incidentally, I’ve given WordPress some more money to make the adverts go away. I actually had no idea until very recently that there were any adverts here, as I use AdBlock on Firefox, and I suppose I could simply have encouraged you all to do the same, but on balance it seemed like a small investment in a matter of principle.