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Antigone Journal An online forum for Classics and Ancient History

26/01/2025

What does it mean to be contemplative not about life, but in life as lived? Plotinus, a Greek philosopher born in Egypt, seems to have had the answer. Today, Mateusz Stróżyński explores ancient ideas about attaining meditation in the moment, on the back of his new book:

MATEUSZ STRÓŻYŃSKI Learning to think with Plotinus

23/01/2025

"Empathy" is a term that does the daily rounds, but (despite its obvious Greek roots) it is in fact a modern idea that is hard to identify in antiquity. Today, Danuta Shanzer of Universität Wien connects the contemporary to the ancient, through Homer's account of Achilles, Hector and Priam, and Alaric's shocking Sack of Rome in 410:

DANUTA SHANZER On empathy and the ancients

31/12/2024

It's been our best year so far at Antigone Towers, a thriling and inspiring one! To round off 2024, then, here are our 10 most read articles published this year.

At #10, we have Carey Jobe's "Aeschylus' Prometheus Unbound: Rebuilding a Lost Masterpiece": https://antigonejournal.com/2024/02/aeschylus-prometheus-unbound/
At #9, we move from the Athenian stage to the Byzantine court, with this wide-ranging interview with Dame Averil Cameron: https://antigonejournal.com/2024/03/averil-cameron-interview/
At #8, events of the present month called our attention to defending Latin from the philistine decisions of the UK government. J.S. Ubhi's powerful piece "LatinGate: A Teacher's Lament" is powering up the charts as we write: https://antigonejournal.com/2024/12/latingate-teachers-lament/
For #7, we dive back into the language of the Ancient Greeks, and learn how we can build on our use of dictionaries to know this beautiful language even more intimately. It's Harry Tanner's "Beyond LSJ: How to Deepen Your Understanding of Ancient Greek": https://antigonejournal.com/2024/04/understanding-ancient-greek/
The Greek language lives on for #6, as we step into the remarkable world of how Homer was tackled in Byzantine scholarship. Here's Baukje van den Berg's "Homer in the Byzantine Classroom: Euasthios of Thessaloniki and John Tzetzes": https://antigonejournal.com/2024/03/homer-byzantine-eustathios-tzetzes/
For #5, we leap across the Adriatic and explore one of the most lavish sites of the ancient world. Carole Raddato, aka Following Hadrian, explores "Hadrian's Villa and its Treasures": https://antigonejournal.com/2024/06/hadrians-villa-and-its-treasures/
Then it's up to Vienna for #4, as we find how the ancient world inspired two major figures in philology and psychoanalysis. Here's Jakub Handszu's "Analysing Centaurs: Carl Jung and Friedrich Creuzer": https://antigonejournal.com/2024/06/jung-creuzer-greek-myth/
On to the podium now, we cast back to Plato and the intriguing similarities between his greatest work and the fate of Jesus. At #3 Mateusz Stróżyński writes on "Plato the Prophet? The Crucified Just Man in the Republic and New Testament": https://antigonejournal.com/2024/03/plato-prophet-crucifixion/
Taking silver for 2024 is a piece that is about Greek so Ancient that it predates the arrival of the alphabet by half a millennium or so. In the #2 spot it's Theodore Nash's crystal-clear account "Cracking the Code of Linear B": https://antigonejournal.com/2024/01/decipherment-linear-b/
But we can only have one winner. And this year we must leap to the final days of the Roman Empire. But when were those days? To take home the gold medal, we have Anatoly Grablevsky answer that enduring question "When did the Roman Empire Fall?": https://antigonejournal.com/2024/09/when-did-the-roman-empire-fall/

Congratulations to all of these wonderful contributors. And thank you to all of you who have supported the Antigone mission, by reading, sharing, prompting, writing, or indeed editing, the articles we host. We're very grateful for your support, and wish you all the best for 2025.
So, to close, εὐτυχὲς τὸ νέον ἔτος, felix novus annus, and happy new year!

ANATOLY GRABLEVSKY Chronicle of a death foretold

30/12/2024

The perverse cancellation of the Latin Excellence Programme in UK state schools has rightly elicited a lot of passionate responses, including from J.S. Ubhi last week. We are pleased now to add a practical response, from Josh Allan, about how the usefulness of Latin may be the most useful route to convincing ministers to let Latin grow again:

JOSH ALLAN On the use of usefulness

22/12/2024

Latin can and should be learned by anyone, anywhere. This week the artificially 'elite' nature of the language was compounded by the UK government's perverse decision to cancel funding Latin in state schools halfway through the year, abandoning 5,000 pupils who were deep in their studies. Today, J.S. Ubhi shares the real anger that is coming from the classroom:

J.S. UBHI On a current British scandal

21/12/2024

The Winter Solstice heralds the latest Antigone contest: we challenge you (anyone in the world!) to draw/paint the Shield of Achilles/Aeneas on the basis of its Homeric/Virgilian description, using whatever style/imagination you like. Take the fancies of Flaxman to a whole new level! There's £800 and books for the various winners, 18+ and

TRY YOUR HAND At our winter competition

20/12/2024

In 1783, Constanze Mozart sang her husband's aria "Et incarnatus est", one of the most sublime pieces of Christmas music. The couple had lost their firstborn two months earlier, but the joy of new birth and hope shines forth. Today, Mateusz Stróżyński charts the work's Classical sources, and Virgil in particular:

MATEUSZ STRÓŻYŃSKI How Mozart captures the Christmas spirit

08/12/2024

Although only Sophocles' Philoctetes survives to us, both Aeschylus and Euripides wrote plays on this same tragic and tortured Greek figure. Yet thanks to the curiosity of Dio Chrysostom we are still able to see how the trio differed, as Carey Jobe reveals today:

CAREY JOBE Reads tragedy with Dio Chrysostom

07/12/2024

Claudian stands as the last of the great "pagan" Roman poets. But what is less well known is that he also wrote literature in Greek. Introducing to us today his short but powerful Gigantomachia is this essay, and wonderful translation, by Paul McKenna:

PAUL MCKENNA Grapples with the Greek Gigantomachia

24/11/2024

Hot on the heels of our Politian-on-silver-Latin pieces yesterday, we are thrilled to put that theory into practice: today, Richard Rutherford of Christ Church, Oxford dives into Valerius Flaccus' Argonautica to discuss one of that poem's most powerful passages:

RICHARD RUTHERFORD Depicting the disaster of Jason and Medea

23/11/2024

Once called "silver Latin", because of its apparent second-rate character, literature of the post-Augustan empire has had a mixed reception. But for the greatest Latinist of the Renaissance, its charms were immense. Here's an introduction to Politian's stirring lecture on Quintilian and Statius: https://antigonejournal.com/2024/11/politian-silver-latin-literature/
We are proud to publish the first English translation of that 1480 lecture, thanks to the hard labour of Jaspreet Singh Boparai. These two companion pieces are illustrated by over 40 beautiful pictures, so you can't say we don't spoil you, eh! https://antigonejournal.com/2024/11/politian-quintilian-statius-sylvae/

POLITIAN On Silver Latin's virtues

16/11/2024

The Romans aren't known as an especially easy-going people; in fact, there's no obvious Latin word for "fun". However, when festival time swung round, they certainly knew how to let their collective hair down. Today, Joel Moore reveals the revels that burst into their calendar:

JOEL MOORE Topsy-turvy times together

06/11/2024

112 years ago, the Loeb Classical Library sprang up to bring Greek and Latin literature to a wider audience. To promote the series, co-editor W.H.D. Rouse wrote a barnstormer of an essay in defence of Classics, the clarity of Latin and Greek, and the need to nourish the soul. And now, more than a century later, we have some 558 Loebs from Harvard University Press to keep us happy. Here's Rouse's rousing apologia:

W.H.D. ROUSE On why the Classics matter

03/11/2024

Speaking the truth under tyranny is always fraught with peril, as Father Jerzy Popiełuszko discovered, ruthlessly murdered by the Polish Communist Security Service. Today, on the 40th anniversary of his funeral, Mateusz Stróżyński explores how a quotation from "Plato" inspired him in the final months of his short life:

MATEUSZ STRÓŻYŃSKI Defending Truth under Communism

31/10/2024

The Serious Game (Den allvarsamma leken), writtten in 1912 by Hjalmar Söderberg, stands as one of the great Swedish novels. But its femme fatale, Lydia, shares more than just a name with the Roman poet Horace's beloved. Here to show how Classical literature deepens this beguiling character and her heartbreaking relationships is Martina Björk of Lund University:

MARTINA BJÖRK Finds Lydia rediviva

27/10/2024

Tonight is the night, legend has it, that Constantine saw the sign of the cross before defeating Maxentius at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge. So how fitting it is to publish a piece by Edmund Racher of Magdalen College, Oxford which explores how this world-changing emperor was depicted in 20th-century drama!

EDMUND RACHER On the emperor in mass media

26/10/2024

Two poems of Sappho, Fragments 94 and 96, speak of remembering a beloved, named as Atthis in 96. Most critics assume that three people are caught up in some complex love triangle, but could Sappho in fact be speaking to herself about her beloved? In this posthumous paper, Thomas A. Montgomery makes the case:

THOMAS A. MONTGOMERY On two beguiling lyric poems

25/10/2024

One is singular, and more than one is plural. But is it all as simple as that? Some languages have the 'dual', or even the 'paucal' number, to distinguish these intermediary scenarios. And what about when grammar doesn't follow the rules it is meant to uphold? Today, Nicholas Swift explores how Greek and Latin handled these tricky problems:

NICHOLAS SWIFT On Greek and Latin number

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