Kevin's Classics

What is Miraculous Myths? Miraculous Myths is a new series of blog posts centred around a myth. In this series, I want to give a good overview of a well-known myth by providing my translations and analyses of important source texts (Greek and Latin). Moreover, we will transgress the boundaries of ancient times and approach the myth from more modern retellings and stories. In a way, these posts will combine my skills of translation and interpretation with studies of reception. Thus, it's gonna be more than a mere overview of all the source material or common plot lines, as you can find on many other websites.  How did I come up with the idea? This series of miraculous myths is indebted to the podcast "Let's Talk About Myths, Baby!" by Liv Albert. As the title implies, this podcast is all about Greek & Roman mythological stories with sporadic interviews of professors on other ancient historical topics (her last series was on the Mediterranean Bronze Age). Liv likes...

When I read poetry, it is often either Greek or Latin, and preferably short. That's one of the reasons I like Greek epigrams as they meet both criteria. Hopefully you can appreciate these three poems too. There is not much to say more, rather than I have chosen them for their theme on love. The titles are my own as are the translations.

This post is focused around the first chorus song, the parodos, in the Clouds. This song introduces the choir to the audience and informs them how to perceive the chorus; you can do only so much with costumes and attributes, especially in antiquity. As such, we can learn a lot on the nature of clouds according to the Greek in the 5th century BCE. Being personified godlike characters, the clouds reveal not only how they act as natural phenomena, but also as divine beings (although the divine aspect is a satirical jest of Aristophanes, yet there must lie some truth beneath this association).

A new blog post where I discuss the opening scene of Aristophanes's Clouds and give my reasons why I can relate to the protagonist in his opening lines. It contains the same theme as my Monday Mornings post so you may suspect I'm a bit intrigued by the process of sleeping.

Having to wake up at 6:00AM sucks, but it's  less of a hassle when you consider that this has been going on for centuries

Classicists being classicists: or are we changing? Note beforehand: this post should have been a short anecdote about my fondness for nitpicking, grammatical questions but it turned into a rant about new teaching methods. If you don't get the coherence, it's not your fault: I don't get it either.