DiotimosReading Desk
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Ancient Greek & Latin

Every in-library item filed under this category, newest first, with its research summary and organization.

5 itemsCategory: Ancient Greek & Latin · newest first
  1. Feature

    The Arrow Herodotus Would Not Talk About

    Abaris the Hyperborean is a man about whom Herodotus declines to tell the story, and the one sentence of refusal is almost everything solid we have: a priest from beyond the north wind who carried, or rode, the arrow of Apollo around the world without eating. This feature follows that arrow through the ancient sources, from Plato's Socrates to Iamblichus's scene in which Abaris hands it to Pythagoras and is shown a golden thigh in return, and then through the modern readings that have made him a Scythian shaman, a Mongolian visitor, or a fiction generated by his own books, to ask what the Greeks were doing when they invented him.

    Ancient Greek & Latin
  2. Research Note

    Potter Is Angry With Potter

    Hesiod says there are two kinds of Strife, one of them good for us, and then describes the good one in terms that sound suspiciously like the envy I was hoping to be excused from.

    Ancient Greek & Latin
  3. Research Note

    The Pyre at Carthage: What Virgil Put on Dido's Fire

    In Book 4 of the *Aeneid*, the queen of Carthage has a pyre built in her courtyard and tells her sister exactly what to place on it. Following those objects, and comparing the scene with the older legend in which Dido burned for a different reason, shows how Virgil turned a love story into an account of why Rome and Carthage would one day try to destroy each other.

    Ancient Greek & Latin
  4. Research Note

    How Penelope Turns a Marriage Bed Into Proof

    Penelope’s command to move her marriage bed is deliberately impossible to carry out intact. By provoking Odysseus to explain how he built the chamber around an olive tree and fashioned its rooted trunk into a bedpost, she turns workmanship and restricted knowledge into evidence. Their reunion depends not on appearance alone, but on interpreting an object embedded in their shared past.

    Ancient Greek & Latin
  5. Research Note

    At the Funeral Fires: Lucretius’ Plague Ending

    Read against Thucydides’ plague narrative, Lucretius’ transmitted close tests rather than simply refutes Epicurean therapy. Natural explanation can dispel superstition, but catastrophe asks whether such understanding can become steadiness and humane conduct amid contagion, grief and civic collapse.

    Ancient Greek & Latin