Amy Pistone

Few things bug me more than higher ed leaders saying that we lost our mission and lost the trust of the public, when we have actually been the target of a decades-long smear campaign by the right wing that worked. The moment we’re losing our mission is right now, in capitulation.

Oh, the alternative approach is to create demand for something by convincing people they need it and/or giving them a taste for free until they're addicted

Absolute s-tier hating here to write an obituary for a bad person that you know will outlive you so that you can make sure they don't get the hagiography treatment once they're gone. And hoo boy, Watson's racism sure needs to be mentioned in the same breath as co-discovering DNA's structure

Always super fun to get to chat with you, @antiquitypod.bsky.social!!

Sidequest 26 – Drinking in Ancient Greece with Dr. Amy Pistone Our friend Amy Pistone returns to the podcast to educate us on drinking habits in Ancient Greece. During this episode, we’ll hear about the current climate in higher education and discuss the…

New website, new podcast episode and new post at the site! Our friend @apistone.bsky.social stopped by for a wide-ranging talk about higher ed, ancient Greek drinking habits and Odysseus. I hope you enjoy it!
classicalantiquitypod.com/2025/10/25/s...

Y'all, my colleagues are so fun! Last week classics, history, and religious studies celebrated the start of spooky season with a historical seance

We played the ghosts of Sappho and Julius Caesar and joined our colleagues, Stalin, Teddy Roosevelt, Saint Lucy, Maggie Fox, and Otto von Bismark.

😍😍😍😍

President Trump envisions D.C. arch to mark 250th anniversary of U.S. On Wednesday, the president showcased models for a grand new monument to be added to the gateway of the National Mall: a large, neoclassical arch topped with eagles and a gilded, winged figure.

Yet again, the cursed monkey paw strikes classicists who idly wished for more contemporary relevance . . .

www.npr.org/2025/10/16/n...

That's really interesting though!

Amazing, thank you for sharing this!

GO BEAAAAARRRSSSSS!!

Picture of me reading at a podium with a sweater with a Minoan octopus design on it in black figure style

Minoan octopus fit, courtesy of @greekmythcomix.bsky.social!

DYING 😂😂😂

God bless, the Aeneid is SO MUCH more manageable than the Iliad! We are chugging beautifully along, in Book 9, and getting to Nisus and Euryalus 😭

As Hoo-dith Butler always says, gender is perfor-molt-ive

To clarify, I would like it to be a more meaningful connection there than just "girl human, girl owl" -- the lament maybe feels like it's actually more like Anna? Are there things people say about this special she-owl? (I'm not in my office/a library to actually look into this properly)

So I have learned that Aeneid 4.462 is the only place in (classical, probably) Latin where bubo is feminine??

solaque culminibus ferali carmine bubo
saepe queri et longas in fletum ducere voces

Anyone have thoughts on why? Because Dido is also a woman isn't super satisfying

Pyrrhus replied: ‘Then go tell Peleus’ son, My father, how far short of him I fall. Be sure he knows what hateful things I did. Now die.’

This is such a badass line.

"Oh, my dad didn't fight like this? He was better than me? WELL YOU CAN TELL HIM THAT WHEN YOU SEE HIM IN HELLLLLLLLLLL"

Selfie of me wearing a shirt with a black figure pot print and my colleague, Dave Oosterhuis, wearing a Mundus Sine Caesaribus shirt

Today is Gonzaga's Homerathon (ft. Virgil)! Sorry in advance for all the Aeneid content that I'm going to be churning out today, since I have 12ish hours of marinating in the Aeneid and I need SOMEWHERE to share all my dumbest, weirdest reflections...

😂

Very excited to be part of a panel talk-back after a screening of this documentary tomorrow -- this will be an exciting opportunity to have a conversation among Classics, Religious Studies, and our LGBTQ+ center!

CJ-Online -- 2025.09.02 Strike: Labor, Unions, and Resistance in the Roman Empire. By SARAH E. BOND. Yale University Press, 2025. Pp. 272. Hardcover, $35.00. ISBN 978-0-300-27314-4. Reviewed by Amy Pistone, Gonzaga University (pistone@gonzaga.edu) Bond offers a compelling historical account and a provocative claim: the histories we tell about labor organizing ought to start earlier than the medieval guild system or the industrial revolution. Her argument is persuasive and she effectively balances careful historical analysis with invitations to draw connections between ancient and modern labor, a theme well served by her strategic use of modern terminology. For example, Bond’s decision to describe manual laborers as “essential workers” (37) is at once jarring in its apparent anachronism and also very effective at prompting the reader to consider parallels between ancient craftspeople and modern workers during the COVID-19 crisis. With Strike, Bond carries the banner for unapologetically political scholarly analysis. In a way, critical engagement with this book—a book which will inevitably receive criticism in some circles for politicizing ancient history (horribile dictu!)—forces the reader to grapple with whether apolitical history is possible, particularly on topics like labor and collective action.

A great strength of this work is Bond’s transparency about the methodological challenges of a history like this: the dearth of sources and elite biases in the sources that do survive. Bond is transparent and regularly returns to the question of how to deal with scant and fragmentary sources. Further questions arise with mythohistorical sources and determining what we can learn about material realities from legends about an imagined past. Rather than debate the historicity of, say, Livy’s account of the Struggle of the Orders, she instead highlights how we can excavate Livy for a sense of what Romans might have considered the “imaginable types of popular resistance and collective action” (22). Ultimately, articulating and expanding “the imaginable” is precisely the role that Strike plays more generally, asking us to reconsider how we interpret ancient sources and to cultivate more capacious historical imaginations. Scholars of the ancient world will know that we constantly imagine what the past might look like when we connect the dots of incomplete sources. Often, contemporary political circumstances narrow our sense of the possible or we unconsciously replicate the lines of inquiry found in the scholarship that shaped us. What Bond offers in this work is a welcome invitation to dream a little bigger. To be clear, she also offers a detailed examination of Roman history through the lens of labor, and it would be an injustice to her to elide the thorough yet accessible scholarship just because this reviewer wants to wax poetic about historical imaginations. Strike is organized into seven chapters (plus an introduction and conclusion) that are mostly chronological in their treatment of Roman history, though each period is also approached through thematic lenses. The first chapter deals with early Roman history and offers a reading of stories found in sources like Livy and Dionysius of Halicarnassus that is attentive to class conflict. Chapter Two looks at the Late Re…

Chapter Three, on the fall of the Republic, takes freedom of assembly as its theme. We see how elite anxieties and suspicions about large assemblies are balanced against the realization (most notably, by Caesar) that large groups of lower-class people could also be an effective source of power. Chapter Four develops these themes, looking at how Augustus co-opted and promoted associations that benefited him, even as associations of entertainers and religious groups found themselves in more tenuous positions across the Empire. Chapter Five, about the Imperial Period, focuses on the ongoing power negotiations between workers and the state, particularly in Asia Minor where associations often flourished and work stoppages among coloni were frequent. Chapter Six focuses on Late Antiquity, the rising problem of compulsory labor, and an increase in surveillance, all done under the guise of “anticorruption.” I found that some of her interpretations, including the effect of reforms around coinage, lacked the evidence to be completely persuasive, but her speculations raise interesting questions about the evidence that does exist. Finally, as an avid sports fan, I devoured the final chapter’s analysis of athletic factions and the role the arena and spectacles play in mediating social and political relationships. Space precludes thorough treatment of all the themes of this book. Bond offers an accessible survey of Roman history that decenters the upper classes and instead looks for the experience of both free and enslaved labor within the changing political landscape of the Roman Empire. I see so much potential to use this book in a classroom context, where it would serve as a helpful tool for introducing source criticism, historiography, methodologies for engaging with fragmentary sources, and the uses and limits of comparisons between the ancient and modern world. The open, readable style makes this book suitable for advanced high school students, classics majors and non…

My review of @sarahebond.bsky.social's latest book, Strike, just came out in the Classical Journal! It was a pleasure to read and review and I really hope everyone will check it out!

YESSS

It's Minnesota State Fair time! It's time for Minnesotan folk art! Here, for example, is Saturn Devouring His Corn, in the seed art category!

This is horrible. Attacks on the humanities are another way to destroy our future. Now is when we need the humanities the most.

Um EXCUSE ME???

Yes. Once you start seeing this (Institution X probably wanted do this conservative thing anyway but now can blame it on Trump), it's everywhere. It's not capitulation, it's agreement. "We can stop doing this thing we started doing from 2014-2020 because of woke/progressive/anti-racist pressure."

I'm so glad you found it useful!! ❤❤❤

Mostly classics-ish stuff, and two copies of the Spokane Is Reading book so my partner and I can both participate!

THIS IS PERFECT I WILL BUY 200 ITEMS OF CLOTHING FOR A TEAM THAT ISN'T EVEN MY TEAM AS SOON AS I HAVE THE OPTION