Reasoning: Homer and Fish

I finally arrived in Greece for the first time a few days ago. On my first night, I was sitting with a collection of graduate students who were studying at the American and Canadian schools here. This question came up at dinner: "why do Odysseus and his men never eat fish?" It's a pretty good question, especially considering that Odysseus and his men are starving when his comrades resort to eating Helios's cattle. The same can be said, even outside of the Odyssey. When Agamemnon and his men are marooned on an island by lack of wind on their way to Troy (as retold in the Agamemnon), they too begin to starve.

Today I was reading Pomoroy et al.'s Ancient Greece (now in it's third edition), and they claim that "because fish are not abundant in the Mediterranean, they were usually eaten as a small 'relish' with the meal" (Pomeroy et al. 2012: 19).

Is this true? There seems to be seafood on menus in Greece today (including fish). Is the Mediterranean really short of fish?

Appetitive: Three Random and Cool Grad Student Things

Yes, my title was oh-so-descriptive. I wanted to share three things for grad students that I thought were interesting that I came upon this week in various ways.

First, and most exciting, Living Greek. I don't know almost anything about the institute, but the idea of speaking to fellow scholars in classical Attic Greek and translating Homer into the Attic sounds amazing.

Second, even though my recent graduate orientation emphasized the necessity of aiming high when trying to get published, I thought that this list of open-access student journals in classics was useful.

Third, there is a cool conference happening this spring on food and consumption in the Ancient World. Over the last few years, I have noticed a growing set of cool conferences on things like synesthesia, touch, smells, etc in the ancient world. I think this one is particularly cool because it's for graduate students. Plus, there are some truly fascinating things about food in the ancient world from conceptions of ambrosia to Tramalchio's dinner and from the loaves perserved in Egyptian ovens to the preserved fish in barrels on sunken Roman ships.

Appetitive: I Knew Classics Must Be Useful For Something

I've been busy getting ready for grad school starting next week. However, I found this and thought people might enjoy it.

Source: Communication Studies

Have a nice day!

Reasoning: Grad School Reading List

So I've been (slowly) doing a little work on my reading list for grad school. However, I'm realizing I don't actually have any idea how to find the best commentaries on specific texts (either grammatical, historical, or literary). I thought I'd put up just a few of the titles in case anyone has any ideas.

Greek

• Aeschylus' Choephoroe
• Aristophanes' Frogs, Lysistrata
• Euripides' Trojan Women
• Isocrates' Panegyricus, Helen
• Thucydides' Peloponnesian War, Book II

Latin

• St. Augustine's Confessions, Book VIII
• Lucretius' Books I and V
• Quintilian's Book X
• Suetonius' Augustus

Spirited: The Craft of Writing

 

I've been putting off working on my writing sample for PhD applications all summer. I have had a lot of other things to do, but I've also just been procrastinating-- doing anything else to avoid it. At first glance it might seem odd that this is the task which I have been avoiding. While I do find writing to be slow and difficult at times, I enjoy writing in general and I really loved writing my undergraduate thesis.

The issue is doing battle with my undergraduate thesis again. While I still believe in most of it, the copy editing is a mess and there are places where the writing is downright unwieldy or the ideas are expressed in an excessively convoluted manner. Yet, even this was not the main turn off. I've been hitting my head against the page restriction on writing samples for a long time. 25 pages is just not much space to express the ideas in an 80 page thesis. I honestly didn't think I could do that. In my head this was just something I couldn't get around.

For my birthday, my parents very smartly bought me a copy of Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks: A Guide to Academic Publishing Success. Avoiding drilling more Latin vocabulary, yesterday, I decided to read the beginning of this wonderful book. While I am not turning this into an article for publication, the book helped me feel that I could probably mine something out of my thesis to make a solid 25 page stand-alone piece.

One of the things that Belcher recommends is to read the paper through twice, once without a pen and once with a pen. Most of the time, I read the binder copy I have of my thesis which already has some notes with typographical errors and snide comments. This time, I borrowed the nice, clean, bound copy I gave to my parents. Looking at it clean and not looking for problems at the level of sentences, I realize that there are at least 10 pages I can cut out of my introduction and first chapter because I wrote my thesis in the hope that someone without expert knowledge of Plato (and particularly someone who had not read the Laws) could read and understand it (as it will reside in the library of my alma mater). My new target audience (1) will mostly be people who have a solid knowledge of Plato and (2) who don't necessarily need to be up on the data because they are more looking for argumentative structure and originality than understanding. I'm sure I will find even more passages that I can cut the further I go.

Beyond this, I noticed that my writing style tends to imitate the authors I have been reading most recently. During my thesis I read a lot of two wonderful scholars: Catherine Zuckert and Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood. While I hope I incorporated some of their flair for analysis my writing definitely picked up some of their faults (Zuckert: over-inclusion of summary in arguments; Sourvinou-Inwood: clunky, overly-complex sentences). Divesting myself of some of this will also make my thesis more cogent and streamlined.

If anyone has any tips for doing similar things, I'd love to hear them. Also, so far, I would highly recommend Belcher's book. In the first 60 pages she tackled so many of my writing excuses and insecurities and made me feel like I should just go for it. I'm hoping it continues to be stellar.

Reasoning: Ancient Greek Paradigms

For any of you out there who, like me, are reviewing your Ancient Greek grammar for fall classes, I have found an interesting resource. Somebody posted a set of Ancient Greek paradigms for nouns, pronouns,  adjectives, and verbs on Berkeley's old Socrates server. Enjoy.

Also, because I have a lot to do before the summer ends, I am postponing my reworkings of "Dates in the Platonic Corpus" until after September 8th.

Spirited: It's Been a While...

Hi everyone. It's been a really long time since I updated. I am going to get back into it this week.

I got some good news, yesterday. I was accepted to a program which will allow me to take advanced classics classes at the local university without actually having to start graduate school. I will be doing my applications this summer for grad school. I am really excited...it should be a lot of fun, especially since Herodotus II and Propertius II are off to the same graduate programs.

On my recent trip to see Cerinthus, I started rereading Female Acts in Greek Tragedy. Notes will be forthcoming.

Reasoning/Spirited: Publishing and the Internet

I found this article on Twitter. I thought it was especially interesting for classicists/grad students. Apparently some publishers get really jumpy about publishing books from dissertations that appear online in digital form. Others seem to feel that this means that there is already a market for the product. I wonder whether publishers will end up moving digital information backward by forcing students not to share their work if they want to be considered publishable.

I read over 80 lines of Μήδεια today and I am exhausted (how will I ever survive grad school?) so I am not going to finish my addendum to the comments on "Μήδεια and Rhetoric" tonight. However, they should appear in a semi-coherent form in the next few days along with some addenda to "Μήδεια and the 'Royal We'," some thoughts on Isocrates, Parmenides, and a review of the most recent Marathon 2500 talk.

Reasoning: Sanskrit Library

I have spent most of the day working on a time line for the art history in the second chapter of my thesis. I am trying to do some revision to see if I can get anyone interested in my thesis, and I also to use it for a writing sample.

Some of the programs that I am looking at, e.g. Brown, require Sanskrit. Ever since I was in high school and my first Greek teacher talked about the relationship between Greek and Sanskrit, I have been interested in learning Sanskrit. My interest was stoked further by a beautiful green leather book I discovered in one of my friends rooms when hanging out one day. The book was beautiful, thick with cream pages, and became much more so when I realized that the book was in fact a Sanskrit Grammar. A few summers ago, two friends of mine decided to teach themselves Sanskrit (one of whom was Propertius). I was going to do it with them, but it became complicated, although I believe they did manage to pick up some amount of the language. In the process, I received my own copy of the Sanskrit Grammar. I have planned on looking into it this summer, but I have not gotten around to it yet. You can download it for free online on the Internet Archive.


While I was searching around, I found a Sanskrit Library. It appears to have Sanskrit texts and materials of some kind, although I haven to looked into much of it yet. I hope that I would manage to teach myself a little at some point.