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On the merits of learning German
Happy news! I’ve just started learning German! I signed up for a super-intensive course (with the Goethe Institute, Melbourne) that runs all day each day from Monday to Friday this week. There are so many good reasons to learn German if you like Classics. Perhaps you’ve realised everyone is citing German academics. Name any topic…
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Saint Nicholas through the Ages
How did a Saint from Western Turkey become an elf-Lord driving reindeer around the North Pole? The journey of St. Nicholas through time, space and cultures has transformed this pious bishop of Myra into Santa: a secular, round-bellied, cheerful caricature of modern consumerism. How, exactly, did he get from there to here? And does anything…
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Moving words: which languages have the closest word order to Ancient Greek?
There’s an art to translation. It involves moving concepts from one language into another while trying to refit the same thought into a different set of grammar rules. In this study I’d like to look at one obvious part of the translation process: word order change. In studying this, I don’t mean to suggest that…
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Textception
You know what’s my pet peeve? Scholars who cite fragmentary sources by their fragment numbers only.
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The Melitan Miniature Dog: The most popular lapdog in antiquity
There is something so disarming, so human, about reading that the ancient Greeks and Romans kept dogs as pets – not just as hunting hounds, but also as tiny companions. The Melitan, while it is not the only kind of miniature dog mentioned in surviving texts (a “Gallic miniature dog” was named once in Martial’s…
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Changing site name, address, and domain purchase
My dearest subscribers, Fished Up Classics will soon be known under a new name, Found in Antiquity. It was a difficult decision to make, but I believe the long term gain will be worth today’s hassle. It feels scary, in a way, like I might be starting all over again. Has it only really been…
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Orpheus and the Can-can
How on earth could the Can-can dance have anything to do with the myth of Orpheus? I’m sure you’ve heard and seen the Can-can before, but just in case you’ve been living under a rock for the last 150 years, here’s a demonstration: The Can-can was a type of bawdy Parisian dance popular in the…
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The Weasel in Antiquity: Pet or Pest?
It’s a nice time for a light-hearted piece, and I’ve been dying to write this article for a while. It’s about pet weasels in antiquity. A surprising amount of respectable scholarship all the way from 1718 to 1997 has claimed that the Greeks and Romans kept tame weasels as household pets. At the very least,…
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Top ten Fayum Portraits
At the moment, I’m in full flurry of editing my Classics Honours thesis which is due on Monday. Enjoy these Fayum mummy portraits while I prep my thesis! What strikes me about these is the incredible individuality of each of these faces. It’s like the coloured, painted equivalent of looking at Roman statue busts where…
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Rape Culture in Classical Mythology
I’m a little ambivalent about putting this take-home exam essay I wrote in second year up on the blog. On the one hand, it’s something I’ve thought about posting up for a while. On the other, I feel that even though I’ve learned more about Classics and grown as a person since second year, I…
Found in Antiquity:
Learner-friendly Latin and Ancient Greek
The Lover’s Curse: a Tiered Reader of Aeneid 4
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