Category: Classics

VikingBoyBilly asks:

I’ve been listening to all the NPCs in Kalos out of boredom and noticed some weird things. One of them says the Beauty and the Beast story is about a prince that turned into a pokémon, and there’s a portrait of AZ that supposedly had to have been made 3000 years ago; which is a renaissance-style painting. Did GF realize how anachronistic that is for a time when portraits were done on Greek pottery and Egyptian bedrock murals?

Okay so there’s sort of two parts to this question – do we expect developments in the history of art and technology in the Pokémon world to mirror those of the real world, and exactly how much do you know about ancient portraiture?

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Anonymous asks:

I have to read a paper on “Celtoscepticism” for a Middle Welsh course I’m taking. Archaeology is such a bizarre discipline. How do you guys get anything done?

Well, I don’t know what Celtoscepticism is because Celtic civilisation is very much not my area, but to answer your question with another question… what on earth makes you think we get anything done?

Anonymous asks:

Who is/are your favorite Classical mythological figure(s)? Me, I’ve always been partial to Prometheus and Hephaestus (what can I say, I’m a sucker for fiery things, and Fire’s my favorite type! :P)

You know, I don’t think I really have one.  I probably should because I’m a classicist and stuff, and I talked about it with Jim the Editor (who is a classicist as well) for like an hour about it and came to no particular consensus, so I’m just going to go with something interesting and non-obvious and say Helen, just because she’s such a complex and controversial character.  Like, you have Homer’s version in the Iliad, where she is vilified by pretty much all the Greeks and some of the Trojans while simultaneously being the exact thing they’re supposedly all fighting over, and she knows it.  She is well aware that everyone blames her for this terrible war, and she kinda blames herself for it too, because even if she wasn’t really in control of anything that happened, how could you not, in her position?  And there is this one amazing scene where she calls out Aphrodite – the goddess of sexuality, the source of what little power a woman can ever have in Helen’s world – for all the awful bull$#!t she’s been put through over the years because of her beauty.  And true, Aphrodite does immediately slap her down for it, but the thing is, no one else in Homer ever talks back to a goddess the way Helen does; they talk to each other about the awful things the gods do to them, but no one will ever actually say it to their faces (or at least not knowingly), because that’s the kind of thing that gets your ass smited, big time.

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Let Me Tell You About 300

I’m a TA for a first year Greek history class this semester, and a little while ago we had our students write some short essays comparing the movie 300 to a historical account of the battle of Thermopylae – namely, book 7 of Herodotus’ Histories.  Now, I personally think that calling 300 a good movie is something of a stretch, but it’s definitely an interesting movie, in terms of its relationship with the historical sources it draws upon.  When the subject of comparing the two comes up, what you normally get – and what the vast majority of our students gave us – is a list of places where the movie does something that isn’t attested in the sources, followed by a vague judgement about whether it comes “close enough” to be considered “historically accurate.”  And I think this is sort of missing the point, because I seriously doubt historical accuracy was 300’s top priority, and I seriously doubt that people went to see 300 because they thought it would be historically accurate.  There’s enough in that film for you to see that its creators (including the author of the original graphic novel) have obviously read ancient sources for Thermopylae and the Spartans (well, English translations of them, anyway) – quite closely, in fact; loads of the movie’s best lines are actually quotations from Herodotus and Plutarch.  If they had wanted to correct any of the “inaccuracies” my students identified, they almost certainly could have.  So let’s talk about why they didn’t.

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I submitted a thing to another thing

The premise of this blog is taking quotes from pop culture and tweaking them slightly so that they apply to characters from Homer’s Iliad (recently expanded to anything ‘classical’).  It amuses me.  You should totally follow it.  Y’know, if you’re a classicist.  The following is something that I actually wrote months ago and had hanging around uselessly until I discovered “OMG there is a Tumblr blog that is literally all about doing this.”

incorrectclassics:

H’okay, so, here’s the Aegean.  S’chilling.  ”Dang, that is a sweet sea,” you might say.  WRONG!  All right; ruling out the Hittites invading, a huge barbarian horde becoming crashed into us, the gods leaving, and Thera exploding, we’re definitely all going to stab each other.  H’okay.  So basically we’ve got Troy, Crete, Lydia, Egypt, Ethiopia, Thrace, the Amazons and us with demigods.  We’ve got about twenty-six hundred more than anybody else… whatever.  H’anyway.  One day we decides those Trojan sons of a bitches are going down, so we launch a thousand ships at Troy.  While they’re on their way, Troy is like “shit, shit, who the fuck brought Helen here?” “Oh well, Hector will save us!”  Then Helen is like “shit, Paris, that’s my husband; he’s coming!  Fire our shit!”  ”But I’m tired.”  ”Well… have a nap.  THEN FIRE YOUR ARROWS!”  Meanwhile, Italy is over there like “mamma mia, WTF?”  Lydia, Ethiopia and the Amazons send their guys, so now we’ve got heroes charging everywhere, passing each other.  Achilles is like “PATROCLUS, NOOOOOOOOO!”  Then Hector’s like “well, I’m dead.  Better get on with it.”  So now Greece is like “fuck, we’re dumbasses,” Philoctetes is like “wait, what the hell did I miss?” Italy is still like “mamma mia, WTF?” China is laughing at us, and some huge barbarian horde is like “well, fuck that.”  So.  Now we’ve got the fall of Troy.  Everyone’s dead, except Aeneas, and he’s like “mamma mia, WTF?”  And they’ll be in charge one day.  Fucking Romans.  But, assuming we don’t all stab each other, us Ithacans just have to work out Ithaca drifting away from the rest of Greece.  To go hang with Scheria.  Cyprus can come too.

– like, Homer or someone

Which is a reference to this, if you don’t recognise it.