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Launching a new Ancient Greek YouTube channel
As I’ve been making more Ancient Greek language videos on my Latin channel, it has become increasingly clear that it is best if these Greek videos have their own home on a dedicated channel for Ancient Greek content. So now I’m launching a new channel for Ancient Greek comprehensible input – Found in Antiquity: Ancient…
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List of Epigraphical Resource Abbreviations
Collections of inscriptions are very useful but a little intimidating for budding Classicists to get their teeth into. These collections are almost always referred to by their acronym, which appear as a meaningless series of letters to the uninitiated. And since epigraphy is a somewhat arcane topic, it is surprisingly difficult to find the full…
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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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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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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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Greek words for love, in context
A while ago, I tallied up the Latin words for kill. Today I’m doing something different: I’ll be studying the Greek words for love. Can I hear an “aww” from the audience? Or… was that a sigh of impatience? Because to be honest, I’m tired of people talking about the Greek words for love. It’s…
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Ancient scrolls: where are the wooden handles?
We all know what an ancient scroll should look like. Most of us haven’t actually seen a scroll from the first century AD, but we know what they look like in movies and stage productions. They should look something like a rolled up cylinder of paper with attractive wooden knobs poking out at either end.…
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Ancient Atheism
We take atheism for granted today; the ancients took theism for granted. Of course, that’s a sweeping generalisation. But the first part holds true for most university students today, and it has often led students to assume that the greatest ancient philosophers, politicians and authors were atheists at heart too. That is, until they find…
Found in Antiquity 