Outside of the top few posts, this was a year of guest posts and essays. Erik and I were always willing and interested to share the blog with other people, but we have never really had the time to go out and seek them. So, when people have reached out to us, we have been happy to have them join us.
This post wasn’t even from this year! Somehow, it turned into a hot post on Reddit for a while and burned down the house.
2. Newly Discovered Text: Caesar on Forestry in Finland
Dani Bostick’s ‘discovery’ of a fragmentary text responding to fires in California and some of our current President’s more insane comments was politely declined by a few other sites. It found a home here and Dani has shared many more new Latin discoveries since.
3. Head and Heart: A Quotation Falsely Attributed to Aristotle
This one eventually inspired a collection of false-Aristotle quotes I eventually just put in one post: Meme Police, A Collection of Things Aristotle Did not Say
4. “This is Not My Beautiful House”: Classics, Class and Identity
This post was a response to some discussion online and Erik’s post (at #9) about Class and Classics. It seems to have hit a nerve and prompted more discussion. We got a great followup from Brandon Conley: “How Was [the Expensive Classics Event]?”
5. Classics and Theory: A Monday Rant
This started out as a twitter rant and turned into an essay. There are still many, many people who have a naive attitude about what theory is and how it shapes writing, teaching, and just being in the world. There is still an alarmingly stubborn faction in Classics who falsely oppose “Philology” to theory, imagining that the former is not a species of the latter. I think forms of this one will keep coming back.
6. The Humanities: Aristotle in the Sheets, But Xenophon on the Streets
There was a NY Times Op-Ed on the Humanities that got me up in arms. I posted some tweets, wrote a thing. Erik is working on a much deeper and prolonged project on the Humanities and Classics among the Founding Fathers. Since the culture wars continue and the humanities are always already embattled, this subject will probably come back too.
7. A List of Women Authors from the Ancient World
This is a list that needs more work. I am still looking for people to help me expand these entries!
8. Famae Volent: a Personal History
The infamous and hated although obsessively checked classics job bulletin board closed down this year. I wrote a wistful and self-indulgent piece about it. Then I wrote a second one. The successor site is not nearly as interesting.
9. Classics [Itself] Is Not Classist
When Grace Bertelli (The Classics Major is Classist) first wrote on this topic, we had some discussions online and Erik wrote this overview of why the content of Classics is not essentially class-oriented. As with all of his essays, it is sharp and filled with turns of phrase I wish I could think of.
10. Terrible, Wonderful Odysseus, His Epithets, and How We Read Him
This is a hodgpodge of stuff about Odysseus which started out as a twitter discussion because people don’t like my occasional translation of polytropos as shifty. (Don’t @ me! Read the post!)
Some things I love outside the top 10
- The Story of Dido in the Aeneid Through Buffy GIFS
- Classics For the Fascists
- How Was the [Expensive] Classics Event: Income Inequality and the Classics
- Exploring Gender and Sexuality in Antiquity
- Reclaiming the Story: Ovid’s Mythological Hermaphrodite
- Post-Classical Intellectualism in the Latin Classroom
Thanks to Elton Barker, Dani Bostick, Brandon Conley, Hilary Ilkay, Cassie Garrison, Christian Lehmann, Ben Stevens, and Zachary Taylor for making the past year memorable and special
Reblogged this on Talmidimblogging.