Category: Uncategorized
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Gods, Girls, and Gender: Elagabalus and the Cultural Politics of the Severan Roman Empire
Since it’s Pride Month here the US for our LGBTQ+ community, I thought we’d do a little deep dive into the reign of Rome’s queerest ruler (yes, even more than Hadrian…), the 3rd century emperor Elagabalus (c.204-222 CE), formerly mentioned on this blog as a Vestal Virgin-marrying early adopter of the wheelbarrow/unicycle. Held by many traditional historians…
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The Cakes of Osiris are a Lie: Portals of the Duat and their Keepers
“Ugh,” scoffs the first man. “Don’t let her bother you. You know the Egyptians dream up the maddest things…” – Children of Actium Last week we looked at the seven gates a soul must traverse as part of their journey through the Egyptian Duat in order to prove their worthiness to the gods of the afterlife, as…
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Hold That Door!: The Gates of the Duat and Their Keepers
I turn to the drooling hyena holding its flaming sword before the gate. “We demand your name, gatekeeper.” The hyena lets loose an unnerving cascade of shrieking sounds that makes Dru wince. “I must have heard him wrong,” she says, frowning. I shake my head. “Not if what you heard was One Who Eats Up…
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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…
Sarah Holz 