Thelxinoe ~ Classics News for June 9th, 2023

Hodie est a.d. V Id. Iun. 2776 AUC ~ 21 Thargelion in the second year of the 700th Olympiad

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What Latin words and concepts for time are still with us today? Guest: Associate Professor Rhiannon Evans (Classics and Ancient History, La Trobe University).

Jacob wonders, ‘if field artillery was ever used against a Macedonian-style phalanx? If not, why not? The close formation and immobility of the phalanx would leave it extremely susceptible to scorpion, ballista, etc fire.’

Liv speaks with PhD student Charlotte Gregory about all things Achilles and Patroclus, their relationship, and how modern Classical reception depicts their love, cousin or otherwise.

The idea of “Western civilization” looms large in the popular imagination, but it’s no longer taken seriously in academia. In her new book, The West: A New History in Fourteen Lives, historian Naoíse Mac Sweeney examines why the West won’t die and, in the process, dismantles ahistorical concepts like the “clash of civilizations” and the notion of a linear progression from Greek and Roman ideals to those of our present day—“from Plato to NATO.” Through biographical portraits of figures both well-known and forgotten—Herodotus and Francis Bacon, Livilla and Phyllis Wheatley, Tullia d’Aragona and Abu Yusuf Yaqub ibn Ishaq al-Kindi—Mac Sweeney assembles a history that resembles less of a grand narrative than a spiderweb of influence. Successive empires (whether Ottoman, Holy Roman, British, or American) built up self-mythologies in the service of their expansionist, patriarchal, or, later, racist ideologies. Mac Sweeney joins the podcast to talk about why the West has been such a dominant idea and on what values we might base a new vision of contemporary “western” identity.

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‘Sorting’ Out Your Day:

Today on the Etruscan Brontoscopic Calendar:

If it thunders today, it portends the death of flocks due to wolves.

… adapted from the text and translation of:

Jean MacIntosh Turfa, The Etruscan Brontoscopic Calendar, in Nancy Thomson de Grummond and Erika Simon (eds.), The Religion of the Etruscans. University of Texas Press, 2006. (Kindle edition)