My book on Demetrios of Scepsis is out!

Demetrios of Scepsis and his Troikos Diakosmos. Ancient and Modern Readings of a Lost Contribution to Ancient Scholarship.

That is the title!

And here is a picture:

It is with great pleasure and much satisfaction that I provide here the link to the open access version of it. It is available at the Center for Hellenic Studies, in Washington. This is also the place where my studies on Demetrios started, back in 2007, and I am very grateful to the editorial board that they accepted it in their Hellenic Studies Series. It is number 85!

http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:TrachselA.Demetrios_of_Scepsis_and_His_Troikos_Diakosmos.2021.

Of course, you may also want to have the printed version of it. This is available at Harvard University Press and you may follow this second link to see the offer:

https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674237933

Now I really can move on and I hope the work will inspire new studies on this fascinating scholar!

News from Tartu

Once again the digital meeting tools allowed me to catch up with old friends whom I have not seen for ages.

Last Wednesday I attended spontaneously a seminar on the Renaissance revival of ancient Greek verse forms entitled “Form and Genre in Humanist Greek”. It was organised by the project Helleno-Nordica and the University of Tartu, but has been postponed from April to June.

It was certainly not my topic, but I still spent a nice afternoon at the seminar learning a lot!

The second part of the event was dedicated to a short virtual tour of the current web exhibition implemented by the Tatu University Library. It was an answer to the current situation as the original exhibition could not open as planed because of the Library’s closure. The online version is extremely well done and I wanted to provide the link here, so that others may take the opportunity to visit the exhibition from the own homes.

The topic of the exhibition is dedicated to the Plantine prints owned by the Tartu University Library and the project bears the nice title Töö ja püsivusega (the Estonian version of “Labore et constantia”, the Plantine moto).

The most attractive part, at least from my point of view, is the fact that this exhibition offers the option to skim through some of the volumes held by the Tartu University Library. You find this part of the exhibition under the rubric Valik plantiine.

Plase take the opportunity and have a look at them!

Antigone Journal

Today I would like to mention a very nice initiative from an enthusiastic and open-minded team of Classicists. They started a few months ago the Classics website Antigone. Please use this link https://antigonejournal.com to visit the site. It is really worth!

I felt very honoured when I was asked whether I would be interested in contributing with a piece to this blog and, of course, I accepted with great pleasure. The result was published last week!

I decided to present a fascinating ancient document on which I worked for several years. It is a single leaf from a parchment codex and it was discovered, as a palimpsest, in the Cairo Genizah at the end of the 19th century. Today it belongs to the University of Geneva, but you may read the rest of the story in my piece on the Antigone website here.

While doing so, please also explore the other contributions. They are amazing pieces that all demonstrate the relevance of Classics today!

Naming and Mapping the gods in the Ancient Mediterranean

Here is the link to a very interesting conference. I have been following the project, the ERC funded Mapping Ancient Polytheisms Project, for some time and I find their research questions very appealing. I am, therefore, very glad to be able to point to their upcoming conference here. It is scheduled for 10th-12th February 2021. Moreover, with regard to the present situation, it is a smart combination of “on-site” and “remote” activities.
Please have a look at their programme here.

 

Hippocrene – Mythological Society

A couple of weeks ago I have been contacted via email about this new initiative. Hippocrene is an intellectual society, started by young Belgian academics, that focuses on mythology with the aim to bridge the gap between academia and the public at large. It uses the channels of social media (Facebook: Hippocrene – Mythologisch genootschap) to release its outputs, which take the form of short notes on different subjects related to mythology. I find it particularly promising that the collected material is not restricted to Greco-Roman mythology and that the project also focuses on artistic creations inspired by mythology. Indeed objects of art representing mythological topics are often neglected, especially with regard to contemporaneous art, although they belong to the public space and bear witness to the still vivid reception of ancient mythological lore. I experienced this myself while working on the mythological quiz Antike Heute in Hamburg developed in collaboration with the Hamburg Open Online University (HOOU).

I have been asked to contribute to the society’s rubric on literature dedicated to mythology. It will contain a list of works on mythology or religious studies where the society’s followers will find a whole range of texts providing further readings about mythology. I am looking forward to making my choice about three works that I find particularly noteworthy.

Your may read the society’s own presentation in these posters:

2018: a “monstrous” year?

I am about to start a course on ancient monsters. We will focus on mythological handbooks such as Hyginus’ Fabulae, Ps.-Apollodorus’ Bibliotheke, Antoninus Liberalis’ Metamorphoses, and Ps.-Eratosthenes’ Catasterisms, and the goal consists in translating and discussing passages where monsters are mentioned. I am very much looking forward to this class.

While preparing the course since last spring, I discovered with great pleasure that I was not the only one who was dealing with monsters this year!

First, I could follow, however from rather far away, the book launch of the Making Monsters Anthology edited by Emma Bridges and Djibril al-Ayad. You may find a summary of the event and more informations about the book at the blog of The Institute of Classical Studies.

Congratulation to all the contributors!

 

Secondly, I met last week, Lena van Beek, a colleague from the Medieval German Studies who is preparing her PhD on Giants in Medieval Literature. She also gave a seminar last semester on monsters! You may find a nice interview about her course on the website of the University of Hamburg.

Moreover, during her course, she prepared with her students a blog and I am very happy to present it here. All the contributions have been made by the students in small groups and represent the outcome of their seminar. Have a look at their work. It is worthwhile!

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find them

Congratulation also to all of them!

Cicero at Open Book Publishers

Having given a talk on ancient commentaries this summer, and remembering a conference on ancient commentaries a few years ago, during which one talk compared ancient commentaries and modern ones, I am happy to share a few thoughts on a recently published work. It is Ingo Gildenhard’s, Cicero, Philippic 2, 44-50, 78-92, 100-119. Latin Text, Study Aids with Vocabulary and Commentary. This work is much more than a commentary, as it is lined out as a textbook and provides a whole range of additional information one would perhaps not expect in a commentary.

The book falls actually in two parts: in a first part, we have the Latin text, with three rubrics of questions (Study Questions, Stylistic Appreciation, Discussion Points). It also provides a list of vocabulary as useful help for the translation of the original. The second part is dedicated to the commentary of each of the sections of Phillippic 2 that the author included in his work and he discusses, among many other points, the questions listed in the first part.

Even though the book is targeting UK readers (with the Oxford Cambridge and RSA (OCR) As/A Level specifications as its primary focus), it may certainly also be useful outside the UK. As suggested by the author, and especially when considering a non-English speaking educational environment, I could very well imagine that the book could still be inspiring, in particular for teachers (secondary teachers and beyond). Moreover, the work is published open access and can be read for free as a digital edition.

Therefore have a look at it!

 

Finally, this is not the only work Ingo Gildenhard published this way. Under the rubric Classics Textbooks at Open Book Publisher you can find a whole list of works, most of them by Ingo Gildenhard.

Having fun with Demetrios…

As first short note, after my holidays, I just would like to draw attention to Pour l’amour du grec, another blog, from which you may learn, among other interesting things, how reading the highly scholarly work of Demetrios of Scepsis may still provide some everyday knowledge for those fond of travelling to the Greek seashore…

Il a mangé un oursin entier

 

Interesting way of dealing with fragments

I just received an announcement about a British Academy Network entitled “The Art of Fragments”. I copy the description here. The person in charge is Dr Laura Swift from the Open University in London. Looks interesting…

*****DESCRIPTION****

Thanks to the generous support of the British Academy, we are delighted to announce the launch of a new collaborative network bringing together academics and creative practitioners around the theme of ‘fragments’. We aim to use the form of the fragment, and the concept of fragmentation, as a springboard for creative opportunities. The network will support and showcase recent or ongoing projects where academics have worked in partnership with artists, and will provide a forum to discuss the challenges and opportunities for this type of collaborative work.

This is the launch event for the network, and its aim is to lay groundwork for discussions or partnerships that will continue over the next year. It will focus on themes of general interest, including:

– Why are fragments artistically inspiring?

– Finding the right partner

– Managing the relationship with project partners

– The funding landscape

– Organisations which support or facilitate collaborative work

Attendance is free, but places are limited so booking is essential.

We particularly welcome involvement from creatives of all types and from early career academics (defined by the British Academy for this scheme as those within 10 years of the award of their doctorate) who are interested in collaborating with the creative sector and/or in the creative potential of fragments.

To learn more or book your place, see here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-art-of-fragments-network-launch-event-tickets-45387322704?ref=estw

If you are unable to attend the launch event, but would like to stay  informed about the network and any activities over the next year, please contact me (laura.swift@open.ac.uk).

****

I am looking forward to hearing more from this Network. Unfortunately I am no longer within the timespan of 10 years after my PhD.

The History of Humanity

It is now the second time I hear from this huge project of the UNESCO. The first time it was at the GISFOH Sympsion in Potsdam last September. Now, being at the New Europe College in Romania, I attended another paper on this project. It was given by Bogdan C. Iacob, researcher from the project: Turning Global: Socialist Experts during the Cold War (1960s-1980s).

It started in 1947, just after the WW II and had two phases: it was first a History of Mankind and then became a History of Humanity. Both presentations underlined the difficulties the project encountered and the many controversies it fostered as the project struggled to get a global perspective, by taking account of all kind of new players.

At the GISFOH in Potsdam the focus was on the South and the paper presented the rise of Africa in the international context and its claim to have the right to tell its own history.  Last week at the weekly NEC-seminars we learned about how the Balkans got their way back into History.

It is an amazingly large project, with each volume having grown to over 1000 pages, but nonetheless, with all the debates and disagreements among the participants, it reached a conclusion in 2009 and the volume are now available:

• Volume I: Prehistory and the beginnings of civilizations
• Volume II: From the Third Millennium to the Seventh Century B.C. 
• Volume III: From the Seventh Century B.C. to the Seventh Century A.D.
• Volume IV: From the Seventh to the Sixteenth Century
  
• Volume V: From the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century
  
• Volume VI: The Nineteenth Century
  
• Volume VII: The Twentieth Century

Some of them are freely available online and further information can be found on two different websites:
History of Humanity
Learning to Live Together

Of course I had a quick look at volume III, which contains the timespan under which the field of Classics falls! A surprising large number of French Classics scholars took part in the undertaking….