It’s felt like a very, very long year – but also a productive one, especially on the blog; anger is an energy, there’s been plenty to get angry about, but also things worth celebrating with enthusiasm. As I did last year, the aim of this end-of-year review isn’t to parade my most-viewed posts, since I imagine most people reading this will already have seen them, but to look back over some themes and issues, and highlight the things I most enjoyed writing and/or feel most proud to have written.
January: dominated by the advent of Trump, inevitably, and just as much by the deluge of classical analogies; Welcome to the Toga Party was the start of my ongoing attempts at making sense of what’s really going on in these comparisons. Much more positive was my first encounter with the people at Kaleider and the start of some really exciting explorations of new ways of presenting and discussing Thucydides – even if some of the ideas in The Strong Do What They Can, Big Boy remain embryonic or even imaginary.
February: I’d forgotten that it was this month I got embroiled in ongoing debates about David Engels’ apocalyptical visions of European civil war and the rise of a new Augustus, chronicled in Bring on the Night and If It Comes Up Mud; that seems to have gone quiet for the moment. I have much stronger feelings about The Red Shoes, my fanciful juxtaposition of the ballet, the film and La La Land with Rachel Moss’s brilliant piece on Choosing Not To Give, reflecting on life goals and identity.
March: there seems to have been an endless cyclical debate this year about lectures, technology in lectures, students, students and technology etc.; Keep Lectures Live! was my contribution, responding to an excellent essay in defence of lectures by Miya Tokumitsu. This was quite a month, in retrospect: an essay on Marx and classical reception in Eidolon, my contribution to the excellent Crooked Timber seminar on Ada Palmer’s thought-provoking Terra Ignota novels, supplemented by The Future of Classical Reception for a load of ideas I didn’t have room for in the main essay, *and* the advent of my ‘choose your own adventure’ version of the Melian Dialogue (and I will add the Melian half of the game this year, I promise).
April: another hectic month, which was why I found myself pleading Mea Culpa for all the book reviews I’ve failed to write – with a segue into wider reflections on academic book reviews as a genre. A fantastic production of Parsifal in Berlin somehow connected in my mind to issues of community, good and bad, and Theresa May’s Vicarage Values. An opportunity to reflect on academic fashion was simply fun…
May: a quieter month, wondering whether there actually is any way in which the Melians can ‘win’ (a vital question both for my game, and for Brexit Britain) and contemplating the idea of a happy, even frivolous Thucydides in A Serious Man? – and that reminds me that I still need to research Thucydidean jokes…
June: various heavyweight pieces (well, by my standards) this month, on the dodgy Wonder Woman quote (and its appropriation by the Graham Allison marketing campaign) and on Thucydides being read avidly in the White House. Much more important, however, was a guest post from the CthulhuUK campaign, setting out a manifesto for Bragnarök, and a careful analysis of the alien origins of Roman technology.
July: starting to think about the book on Classics: why it matters (due March, early May in the US), I wrote something about the idea of Proper Classics (and why I’m not keen on it). Even more entertaining, for all its brevity, was the Emoji Thucydides (though I’m still not happy with parts of Book 8…). Finally, a belated addition to the User’s Guide to Thucydides, which will get finished some day.
August: maybe we should skip August – a fairly quiet month on the blogging (hard at work on the book and on overdue articles) which saw the highest viewing figures for the year, entirely due to getting involved in that very silly and revealing argument about ethnicity in Roman Britain. But I was quite pleased with my analysis of Greek hunting techniques to try to establish what sort of trap the Thucydides Trap was…
September: again, only a few posts – finishing book – but one which belatedly proved popular on the new Tacitus Trap idea developing in China, and one I’m very proud of on Jenny Erpenbeck’s Gehen, Ging, Gegangen and the need for an engaged Classics.
October: a hectic month, with my inaugural lecture (video of all but the last fifteen seconds here) and a trip to Croatia which raised important questions about the role of Open Access, but also an opportunity to finish my essay on the Castorf production of the Ring, which brought to mind issues of historical determinism and narrative.
November: this seems to have been another Brexity month, with further concerns over the dynamics of the negotiations and how the Melian Dialogue seems to be inescapable, and – more cheerfully – the first plot outline of Goodbye, Europe! The essay I was most pleased with turned to the comparison of Roman slavery and modern automation, and the possibility that the ancient experience of a society permeated with slavery might offer a guide to our future.
December: no major pieces this month, largely because I spent much of it trying to recover from the productive but exhausting experience of organising a Thucydides-related evening of games and performance at the end of the previous month. The latest Brexit shambles brought to mind, yet again, issues of counterfactualism and anticipation; the Tacitus Trap continued to provoke interesting discussions. Finally, though it’s so recent that it’s scarcely worth mentioning, I did enjoy the Thucydides Christmas Carol…
Sphinx 
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