… but this time, it isn’t Thessaloniki … From an AP report via the Miami Herald:

Greek police say they have arrested two men believed to have illegally unearthed a 2,600-year-old bronze helmet.

A police statement Friday said the 6th century B.C. ancient helmet was in fine condition.

The two Greek suspects were arrested on Thursday in the southern town of Pyrgos. Police say one of the men also had six antique silver coins in his house.

Under Greek law, all antiquities found in the country are state property. That doesn’t prevent a lucrative illicit trade in ancient artifacts discovered by farmers or organized gangs of grave robbers.

• 2 Greeks caught with 2,600-year-old helmet (Miami Herald)

… I’ve always found it interesting that all these sorts of reports rarely seem to make it into the English editions of Greek newspapers …

The Guardian reviews a collection of short stories in the Steampunk genre and includes this tantalizing summary of one of them:

MT Anderson’s “The Oracle Engine”, multilayered with irony and full of sly jokes, takes us, via Plutarch, to ancient Rome. A vengeful Artificer builds a prototype computer (out of metal, probably brass) and rigs it to bring about the downfall and death of the plutocrat Marcus Licinius Crassus in 53BC. A team of cloistered youths works the Oracle; its creator believing that “an order of male virgins who never see the light of day would be ideal for the operation of a computing machine such as this”. And, of course, there are dirigible triremes. Steampunkum est!

• Steampunk! edited by Kelly Link and Gavin J Grant – review

Don’t know about you, but whenever I see photos of some of the big names from the early modern history of our discipline, I can’t help but think that Classics and Steampunk is a natural mix: