detritus from Greece and Rome.
@sentantiq.bsky.social
3 subscribers
Dec 29, 2024 • 20 tweets • 4 min read
#odyssey discourse whirling around, but reading epic is not easy because it is a little weird
1. I think almost no one in antiquity ‘read’ Homeric epic from beginning to end.
They listened to episodes and then later read passages. It would have been rare to experience either epic from beginning to end
Apr 25, 2023 • 21 tweets • 3 min read
Ok, one more thread on Achilles and Odysseus and how we should read Homer then I promise I will chill
The reason I am profoundly unchill about this is the confusion of rich epic narrative for simple paradigmatic propaganda
Homeric poetry is like a philosophical dialogue, a tragedy, or a piece of visual art: it invites audiences to explore its narrative through their experiences, and to compare their experiences to epic
Apr 24, 2023 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
A little more: Odysseus is not a "hero" or anti-hero. Those terms are anachronistic
He is a "man" (andra) at the beginning of the epic, apoem thematically part of exploring the END of the race of heroes
Audiences are supposed to think about how he fucked up his life
At the beginning of the poem, the narrator says he tried super hard to rescue his men, but failed, "because they died thanks to their own recklessnesss" (gr. σφῇσιν ἀτασθαλίῃσιν)
It is easy to dunk on absurd theories that make Achilles a culture warrior representing some kind of prelapsarian ubermensch. Let me tell you why that’s dangerous.
1.Jocular, attacking dismissals let those desperate hatemongers feel persecuted and feeds their sense of righteous outsider position
Antigone can do great work and the journal is doing a disservice to its other authors by standing behind a bad decision
All of us who move into this new, fast digital space make mistakes trying to respond and adapt. I have have RT'd some bad stuff, said stupid things, and thought better of earlier stances.
1. Academic publishing is a cartel. Sometimes it is benevolent and helpful, but mostly it gatekeeps
2. Most academics are FLOORED when people ask because that means that 11 people will now have read articles we spent years on
Aug 28, 2021 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
Super excited to see "Beautiful Bodies, Beautiful Minds: Some Applications of Disability Studies to Homer" come out in the most recent Classical World
Thanks to @RMitchellBoyask CW's editor and audiences at @BrandeisU@UTClassics and @HellenicStudies who responded to earlier versions of the work
Aug 13, 2021 • 18 tweets • 8 min read
I was super excited to get this article published with @LAReviewofBooks written with @SarahEBond to launch our new #PastsImperfect initiative. The feedback has been great, and it hasn't all been positive
lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-ma…
we've received a couple of questions/points that I'd like to mention because they point to some of the challenges of (1) taking academic discussions public and (2) dealing with dearly held topics
1. The monomyth presents simplified descriptive narrative pattern as a prescriptive tool, overlooking that most myths that have monomythic patterns can be analyzed in different ways for many different functions. Campbell reduces myth to what is useful for Campbell
Shelley P. Haley - "Re-imagining Classics: Audre Lorde Was Right"
Scott Manning Stevens - "Early Modern Indigenous Chronologies"
Jared Rodriguez - “Anti-Blackness, Medieval Studies, and Other Religions of Latin Christian Coloniality”
Q&A with Dan-El Padilla Peralta
Apr 4, 2021 • 13 tweets • 5 min read
take a minute and imagine a tree in a park or garden. Make it a really nice tree that has been well situated in its environment. Think about the trees’ imperfect symmetry, they way it occupies its space
Now think about this: someone planted the tree; others tended to it and trimmed it; more people spent generations selecting this domesticated tree from its ancestral stock. It is a inextricable product of nature and nurture. #HomerTrees
Feb 16, 2021 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
To riff on Tolstoy as one does: All happy classics departments resemble one another, but every unhappy department is unhappy in its own way
#classicstwitter
.@kataplexis and @lpoldybloom train our gaze to a small liberal arts school where they teach, to move the discourse from elite institutions and PhD programs
When you were young you bought your dream house. It was an old, sprawling victorian. It needed work, but you loved the neighborhood and really thought you could restore it
Every summer, every break, on weeknights and weekends: you sanded, painted, watched videos about tiling, tried to find original molding for the trim. You made your life into fixing that house
Jan 19, 2021 • 31 tweets • 5 min read
This report's reductive, revisionist, and racist idolatry is exactly why I come down so hard on approaches to the humanities that use similar strategies even if they adjust the content and make it "centrist" or "apolitical"
Friends, I have been following the janko discussion and as a homerist with some interest in traditional and formulaic language, I just wanted to add my two cents. Sorry to butt in! But...you know...
#JankyHomer
I have not taken Janko’s methods or his results seriously for decades because (1) it is based on deeply problematic premises and (2) the dataset will never be sufficient
Agamemnon, in a press conference today, declared the start of a 1266 BCE Commission to combat the #fakenews Helen and Clytenmestra apologists and the #AntiArgive lies of the Iliad which shows the Trojans as human beings
IN particular, the Peloponnesian death lord was eager to combat anti-Greek and pro-women propaganda, claiming that Helen wasn't all to blame or that people shouldn't sacrifice their daughters.
Sep 4, 2020 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
Homer provides few universal rights for human beings, but one that emerges in the Iliad is the expectation of proper burial, lamentation, and memorial.
The γέρας…θανόντων (Geras thanontôn).
Literally, something like the "honor prize of the dead"
#ALoserCausedAPlague
γέρας (geras) is charged in the Iliad. The whole conflict between Agamemnon and Achilles starts when Agamemnon deprives Achilles of Briseis, his γέρας (geras), which is a token of the honor (timê) he has in his community.
“Fuck mortal thought, where will it stop?
What boundary will there be for boldness and daring?
If it grows like a tumor during a man’s life
And whoever comes next is even more insanely criminal
Than the guy who came before,
....then the gods
Will have to made a second earth to hold
All the unjust and wicked people”
#ClassicsTwitter anyone else struggling to find the lines of where white supremacy ends and the study of the classics begins?
Not saying they are perfectly coterminous but as the years go by it is harder and harder for me to deny our discipline's historical complicity
The "Classics" we teach and we trained on is heir to elitist and racist constructions of the past as @kataplexis shows, so attempts to decolonialize are doomed to fail
(Which makes for easy appropriation as @pharosclassics documents)
