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sententiae antiquae Profile picture
sententiae antiquae
@sentantiq
membra et incisa. Texas. Massachusetts. NYC. Twitter account for https://t.co/W3t5CnAUGS. Posts by Joel Christensen and Erik Robinson.
May 27 • 22 tweets • 3 min read
Today we are arguing about Odysseus' name!

Odysseus vs. Ulysses The Odyssey itself toys with the hero's name. It can be traced to the verb odussomai, which means to hate or to be hateful
May 25 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
just to sum up, 5 points on the rancor over nolan's #odyssey cast

1. Epic is myth and fantasy, not history. these are not real people, they are part of stories

2. The terms used to describe heroes within epic are ambiguous and flexible and change over time 3. The ancient audiences conceived of the heroic world as one big interconnected family, Dannaus, Aegyptus, Agenor etec knit Persians, Greeks, Egyptians, and Phoenicians into one family. Hektor and Memnon were cousins!
May 25 • 16 tweets • 3 min read
One final thread on why the gender, race, appearance of actors in the #Odyssey shouldn’t matter, and, moreover, why appearances are more complicated in this epic than any other Athena repeatedly makes him ugly and nobler again, so much so that there’s no sense of what he truly looks like: is he the pirate man in book 8, the withered beggar in book 16, the godlike man before Telemachus in book 16, or the cleaned up beau of Penelope in book 23?
May 11 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
sorry folks. Achilles and Odysseus are not role models, they are epic heroes. Each epic starts by specifying their destructiveness to their communities.

Iliad: Achilles's rage sends myriad Achaeans to their doom

Odyssey: Odysseus tried to bring his men home and failed in fact, the entire heroic age--the events of the Theban and Trojan Wars--is aimed at ERADICATING THE RACE OF HEROES because they are too bellicose towards each other and irreverent towards the gods [see Hesiod's Works and Days and the fragmentary Cypria]
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)
Feb 16, 2023 • 19 tweets • 3 min read
So, here we go I wrote up a little bit about the Duals. Its a draft part of a chapter in a book about how Homeric language functions like a biological organism

sententiaeantiquae.com/2023/02/16/epi…
Jun 24, 2022 • 15 tweets • 3 min read
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
Aug 29, 2021 • 6 tweets • 3 min read
Joining @FlintDibble and @rogueclassicist and others in a call for @AntigoneJournal to drop their problematic platforming of eugenicist.

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.
Aug 29, 2021 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
#AcademicTwitter #ClassicsTwitter

Let's normalize sharing our work when people ask for it and asking scholars for their work.

Friends, if there's an article out there you want to read and you don't have access, just reach out! 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
Jul 10, 2021 • 24 tweets • 13 min read
#MemePolice

A reminder thread of things #Aristotle did NOT say

1. “It is the mark of an educated mind to entertain a thought without accepting it”

nope.

sententiaeantiquae.com/2018/09/23/mem… 2. “A Whole is greater than the sum of its parts”

This really popular misattribution may be a poor translation of the Metaphysics
May 4, 2021 • 26 tweets • 7 min read
Following up on @SarahEBond's tweet: a list of reasons why Campbell's monomyth is problematic

7 themes.

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
May 3, 2021 • 6 tweets • 3 min read
#ClassicsTwitter #medievaltwitter and Friends

Politics a #RaceB4Race Symposium starts this week

Sponsored by @BrandeisU @BrandeisCLAS @acmrs_org

eventbrite.com/e/politics-a-r… Tuesday

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

#HomerTrees #ClassicsTwitter 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

rfkclassics.blogspot.com/2021/02/changi…
Feb 6, 2021 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
on #BurningItDown

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" The construction of the past is always political. Claiming otherwise is political.

sententiaeantiquae.com/2021/01/11/sav…
Oct 1, 2020 • 10 tweets • 4 min read
.@PeterGainsford @theo_nash @ProfThibodeau

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

#JankyHomer 2