Author: sarahlholz
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Of Pirates and Persians: Chariton of Aphrodisias’ Callirhoe
“O treacherous beauty, you are the cause of all my woes!” – Callirhoe (Book 6.5) As threatened, I’ve been reading what might be the first western historical fiction novel, Chariton of Aphrodisias’ Callirhoe, and when I intimated that it sounded like the more far-fetched of Shakespeare’s comedies (I’m thinking The Winter’s Tale or Pericles), it has more lived up to that […]
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Dream Girls: The Jinling Beauties and the Many Illusions of Dream of the Red Chamber
The office jack’s career is blighted, The rich man’s fortune now all vanished, The kind with life have been requited, The cruel exemplarily punished; The one who owed a life is dead, The tears one owed have all been shed. Wrongs suffered have the wrongs done expiated; The couplings and the sundering were fated. Untimely […]
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Glimpses of Love: The Two Sulpicias and the Private Lives of Roman Women
“He who shall weigh well her poems will say no maid was so roguish, will say no maid was so modest.” (Martial, Epigrams, 10.35, 11-12) We’ve spent a fair amount of time (some, I’m sure, would argue too much) talking about Roman poets and their work. But at end of the day, the poets, indeed all […]
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Heavenly Advice: Christine de Pizan’s Othéa and Mythology as Morality
“Do not resemble Jason.” – Othéa to Hector (Allegory 54), giving out the single best piece of advice in the entire epistle We have discussed how the ancients often had an adversarial relationship to their own cosmogony, especially when it came to the truthfulness or utility of mythological stories that painted the gods in a […]
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Getting Away the Roman Way: Drama, Death, and Debauchery in Baiae
To witness persons wandering drunk along the beach, the riotous revelling of sailing parties, the lakes a-din with choral song, and all the other ways in which luxury, when it is, so to speak, released from the restraints of law not merely sins, but blazons its sins abroad, – why must I witness all this? – […]
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Is This a Blog Post, or is it a Boar Vessel 600-500 BC Etruscan Ceramic?: The Wonderful World of Forged Antiquities
Back in the faraway time of the 2010s, classical Reddit and Twitter were seized by a strange obsession with an Etruscan ceramic piece in the collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art. It is a small vessel about seven inches done in terracotta in the shape of a wild boar. The museum acquired the piece […]
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A Bug’s Life: Khepri & the Many Faces of Ra
“Khepri in the morning, Ra at midday, and Atum in the evening.” – ancient Egyptian saying “Khepri clicks his mandibles sympathetically. ‘I would, child, but I am not a god of death. I am here to create you from the ashes of your resurrection. Be who you were destined to be and be reborn before […]
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Beyond the Plagiarism: (Almost) Ten Things Actually Invented by the Romans
“You read what others had done and you took the next step. You didn’t earn the knowledge for yourselves, so you don’t take any responsibility for it. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could, and before you even knew what you had, you patented it, and you […]
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Stuff That Doesn’t End in ‘-ology’: Ten Lesser-Known Greek Innovations
I was thinking back on my post from last year about ancient Egyptian inventions, and like many of my list entries, I realized I should circle back and do a couple more on at least the other two main hobbyhorses of this blog, Greece and Rome. So while I spend an extra week trying to […]
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Frozen in Time While Moving Forward: Museums As Agents of Cultural Exchange & Contextualization
Here for us in Pittsburgh, when our local museums stage non-art-specific traveling exhibitions, they are usually held at the Carnegie Science Museum, rather than the Carnegie Museum of Natural History (CMNH)/Carnegie Museum of Art (CMOA). I think this is for space reasons, as the science museum has a dedicated exhibition hall, while the other two […]
Sarah Holz 