Tag: Greek mythology
-
Running it Back: Ten (More!) Unusual and Obscure Greek Gods
While the Egyptians were rightfully held by the ancient world as the possessors of the largest (western) pantheon, we know from our previous discussions about the snide remarks of the early Christian writers that the Greeks and Romans were hardly defined solely by the Olympians when it came to the breadth of their synthesized religious…
-
Preview for HELIKON QUEENS (+ a secret second project!)
Some of you were probably impressed that I managed to write a book of a more reasonable length in Lady Safflower this past year. But apparently writing for me is like a liquid that will spread to fill a space, so the extra thousands of words that would have been poured into, say, a God’s…
-
Monks, Masons, and Mozart: Enlightenment Fiction in The Life of Sethos
In my post about Mary Wollstonecraft’s novels, I intimated that the Enlightenment had a bit of a fictional literature problem. In the broad strokes, it’s just very hard to create compelling fiction if you were a serious adherent of the period’s new cult of reason (if not the literal Cult of Reason…) and science. At…
-
Day Tripping at the Met, Part 2: Little Latin and Less Greek
As promised, we’re back with round two on my latest experience in the Metropolitan Museum of Art—this week focused on the Greek and Roman Art wing. As my paraphrase of Ben Jonson above suggests, I spent more time with the Romans (and specifically the first century Romans of my books) than the Greek stuff, but…
-
Babes in the Woods: Longus’ Daphnis & Chloe
“[A]bsolutely no one has ever escaped Love nor ever shall, as long as beauty exists and eyes can see.” — Daphnis & Chloe, prologue “For our part, may the gods grant us proper detachment in depicting the story of others.” (ibid—and my new writing mantra) As threatened multiple times, we’re circling back to more of…
-
A (Fake) True Story: Lucian and the Birth of Modern Sci Fi
“To put yourself in another man’s shoes and say what he would of said was a regular exercise of the schools, but to laugh in your sleeve as you said it was not the way of the ordinary rhetorician.” – A.M. Harmon (introduction to Phalaris) Okay, as promised, we’re going to talk about Lucian (c.…
