Theo Nash

Ι have a friend whose one-year-old who seems to think that 'dada' is not her father but the water bottle that he lets her play with.

Given that Odysseus thought the most beautiful man in the world was Memnon the Ethiopian, casting a black woman as Helen may have been the only defensible choice.

In the Greek world there is (to my knowledge) no firmly identifiable brothel. I don't know the Roman evidence as well, but my understanding is that the only confidently identified one is at Pompeii.

Nearest book, page 42, second sentence:

οὐ at the end of a sentence: φῄς, ἢ οὔ; do you say or not? πῶς γὰρ οὔ; for why not? Also οὔ, no, standing alone.

Feel good about my AIA paper today, which means I will feel bad about it tomorrow, good again on Wednesday, and then inevitably bad on Thursday when actually presenting it.

The advantage of Latin, too, is that there are thousands of parallels, often well-studied (as with this example), handbooks, and over a century of pedagogical tools. Greek falls into this box too, though some papyri do get fairly post modern, shall we say.

My understanding of this was similar (using old 'ethnic' last names as a way of maintaining a connection with an immigrant past), but to your point I do believe that even this has already been largely forgotten, and now they're just names the same as any other.

Without substantially more institutional support than is ever likely to exist, or a general cultural shift on the use of generative AI, I don't see how traditional writing courses survive the next decade.

It is also, I should say, deeply troubling to spend time using AI yourself to generate responses to your prompts to see which ideas are genuinely the students' and which ones come from the machine.

Lots of friends and colleagues did not feel that they had the time or wherewithal to take these steps, and while I disagree on principle in practice I can see why. It is tremendously dispiriting to have a student lie to your face about what they did or didn't do.

I wrote three reports of suspected misconduct this semester, and each took 5+ hours to put together. That's time I don't strictly have, and a quarter of my contracted teaching hours for the week, if you like to think in those times.

I've seen it with GSIs/TAs, too. The mere possibility of AI drastically slows the reading process ('wait, why does this word/example/argument keep popping up'), in some cases more in heavily-edited or non-AI papers. The fully AI ones are easy to spot, but handling it is slow.

The funny thing is that the Odyssey poet wasn’t very detail-oriented either. As a story frame it handles expansion and absurdity well. It ought to work well with Nolan’s style.

The slight irony is that Hesperia was founded precisely to publish articles like this (IIRC, reports by directors were originally not even edited).

A single word, even a single letter, can mean a lot more when it's in a classic work.
A little papyrological rediscovery and some time-travelling detective work (literary rather than literal) by @theonash.bsky.social has unearthed evidence of medieval misunderstanding & meddling in Homer's Odyssey.

New issue of the Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists, edited by @sofiatorallas.bsky.social , with contributions on literary papyri from @theonash.bsky.social and myself.

So beyond the question of whether you can really be an expert Latinist without knowing Cicero well (I'm not so sure), your job training requires a wide-range of knowledge and expertise no matter your dissertation topic.

So, e.g., your Proto-Italic scholar would be hired, not to teach historical linguistics, but Cicero and other Roman lit, mostly in translation.

I think the basic problem right now is that research is increasingly specialised but (at least in America) most academic positions are teaching first, and teaching is increasingly broad and general as departments hunt for non-majors to fill their seats.

... and there was no sense that you were 'behind' or whatever if you didn't have them, just that you would need them and had better start cracking.

Yeah, within Classics a lot of people don't hear 'You need the languages', they hear 'You need to have learned them in school.' I didn't realise how lucky I was doing all of this in New Zealand, where there is basically no Latin or Greek at school level, so everyone starts at uni...

Real-world Quellenforschung: identifying which AI system a student used to write their essay.

I would say ‘more-or-less adequately’ for New Zealand.

Elite private universities are actually a pretty American phenomenon.

YouTube video by dogsrule3444 TheFellowshipoftheRingST-17-The Breaking of the Fellowship

www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQ9N...

A good, narrative introduction to the BA (a la Vermeule's Greece in the Bronze Age) remains a great desideratum.

Very late, but the trouble (as I'm sure you've experienced) is that very little on BA archaeology is particularly accessible beyond those handbooks. Once you've digested the basics, you more or less have to go wading into specialist literature.

Beyond Thalassocracies - Oxbow Books Beyond Thalassocracies aims to evaluate and rethink the manner in which archaeologists approach, understand, and analyse the various processes associated wit...

If they're particularly keen, the most recent overview of the general issue of 'Minoanisation' is probably Beyond Thalassocracies (I can share a PDF if you don't have access): www.oxbowbooks.com/978178570203...

Unfortunately there is probably not a 'one-stop-shop'. The Cambridge Companion is probably still the best narrative introduction to most of these issues. The Oxford Handbook is a little bit trickier, but fairly rich if they're willing to dig around a bit.

No worries! I am much less active here, but do pop in from time to time.