An online paper by David Pritchard … here’s the abstract:

This article concerns the paradox of athletics in classical Athens. Democracy may have opened up politics to every class of Athenian but it had little impact on sporting participation. The city’s athletes continued to drawn predominantly from the upper class. It comes as a surprise then that lower-class Athenians actually esteemed athletes above every other group in the public eye, honoured them very generously when they won, and directed a great deal of public and private money to sporting competitions and facilities. In addition athletics escaped the otherwise persistent criticism of upper-class activities in the popular culture of the democracy. The research of social scientists on sport and aggression suggests this paradox may have been due to the cultural overlap between athletics and war under the Athenian democracy. The article concludes that the practical and ideological democratization of war by classical Athens legitimized and supported upper-class sport.

• Sport, War and Democracy in Classical Athens.

Seen on the Classicists list:

Announcement of a conference organized by the Network on Ancient and Modern Imperialisms.

The Past-Colonial: Classics and the Colonization of the Past
Friday April 1st – Sunday April 3rd 2011

Yale University Department of Classics in association with the International Network on Ancient and Modern Imperialisms and Yale’s Ancient Societies Research Network

PROGRAMME

Location: Linsly-Chittenden Hall Room 211

Friday 1st April

4.00-4.30 Welcome and Introduction (Emily Greenwood and Milette Gaifman)

Panel 1: Greek and Roman Alter-natives

4.30-5.30 Daniel Selden: Callimachus the Egyptian
5.30-6.30 Tessa Rajak: The Disappearing Septuagint: between past- and post-colonial

6.30 pm RECEPTION at the Beinecke Library, Mezzanine level

Saturday 2nd April

Breakfast Linsly-Chittenden Hall Room 213

Panel 2: Reception as Colonization

9.00-10.00 Katherine Harloe: The past-colonial in eighteenth-century historical and prehistorical narratives of Greece

10.00-11.00 Simon Goldhill: How Christianity really began in Gloucester: the Victorian Christian Imperial Imagination

COFFEE 11-11.30 Linsly-Chittenden Hall Room 213

11.30-12.30 Miriam Leonard: Matthew Arnold’s ‘Hellenism and Hebraism’

12.30-1.30 Constanze Guthenke: The Black and the White Atlantic: The Transnational and Nineteenth-Century American Classical Scholarship

LUNCH 1.30-2.30, all welcome Linsly-Chittenden Hall Room 213

Panel 3: The Distance of Empires

2.30-3.30 Margaret Williamson: "Nero, the mustard!" Classically-named slaves in the British Caribbean

3.30-4.30 Rachel Friedman: Landscapes without Seasons: Situating the primitive in Greek and Caribbean topographies

COFFEE 4.30 – 5 Linsly-Chittenden Hall Room 213

5.00-6.00 Nicholas Allen: "Past, or passing, or to come": The Poetics of Late Imperial Space

Sunday 3rd April

Breakfast Linsly-Chittenden Hall Room 213

9.00-10.00 Lorna Hardwick: Agency, empires and ambivalence in translations of Greek Drama and Historiography

10.00-11.00 Daniel Tompkins: Moses Finley and Imperialism, Ancient and Modern

11-11.30 COFFEE Linsly-Chittenden Hall Room 213

Panel 4: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

11.30-12.30 Richard Neer "Daphnis in Oxford, or, A Brief History of Archaeological Style"

12.30-1.30 Phiroze Vasunia Classicism, Race, and Architecture in Colonial India

1.30-2.30 LUNCH, all welcome Linsly-Chittenden Hall Room 213

2.30-3.30 ROUNDTABLE PANEL (to include 30 minutes’ wrap-up discussion (2:30-3), and a 30 minute planning discussion for the Network on Ancient and Modern Imperialisms).

Network on Ancient and Modern Imperialisms
http://www.reading.ac.uk/classics/imperialisms/imp-home-2.aspx

I’m used to wading through journalistic attempts to make a quotation from Marcus Aurelius relevant to whatever they’re writing about. Today I was pointed to a very interesting blog, the title of which is pretty much self explanatory:

• Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations Translated into Housewife.

Registration open for Triennial Conference, University of Cambridge, 25-28 July 2011

Hosted by the Faculty of Classics, the Celebration of Classics will see a remarkable line up of international scholars brought together in a novel format for such an event. There will, of course, be some very distinguished plenary lecturers, and there will also be two outreach evenings with well-known figures from the media and literary world. But the centre of the event is a set of seminars where leading classicists will be presenting their cutting edge work in a seminar format with extensive opportunities for discussion (each paper will have at least 45 minutes for comment and questions). Each day has only two such seminar slots, leaving plenty of time for debate as well as meeting old and new friends. We are hoping that you will want to come to Cambridge and participate in this event.

For more information about the conference please go to http://www.classics.cam.ac.uk/faculty/seminars_conferences/triennial_conference/.

Professor Stephen Oakley
Chair, Organising Committee

Over the weekend, the Makeuseof folks mentioned this site to make ‘fake’ Facebook profiles, which is something I have been planning to do with my history classes at some point. One of their ‘favourites’, it turns out, is one made for Hermes:

• Hermes (Mercury) Fake Facebook Profile – MyFakeWall.com.

I expect my announcing this will launch a few helen’s worth of similar ships … if you’re proud of it, make sure to tell us so we can share!