just a couple of lesbians running a blog about more lesbians // by following you agree never to use the words "the original myth says" on one of our posts // sappho loves trans women and so do we, terfs will be blocked // both mods are white and transmisogyny exempt.
I've been meaning to make a new pinned post for this blog with a few resources etc. for a million years and now I'm procrastinating so here it is.
Link to old pinned post (articles about racism and white supremacy in classics) here. I highly recommend checking it out.
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Under the cut you will find a list of resources that I have found invaluable. Please put your own in the replies and reblogs!
Dickinson College Commentaries: Latin and Greek grammars, word lists, and intermediate level commentaries on ancient texts.
Perseus Digital Library and Scaife viewer: absolute classic. Ancient texts and dictionaries. You can click a word in the text and see its potential functions and its definition in a few different dictionaries. also will let you view some texts side by side with an English translation.
philolog.us: literally just Lewis and Short, LSJ, and Slater dictionaries imported from Perseus, but with a really simple interface that makes it the easiest online dictionary to use if you just want to look up a word.
Logeion and Morpho: Logeion lets you look up a word in Latin or Greek and see it in a ton of different dictionaries at once. Morpho will tell you all the possible forms for any given word.
Diogenes Viewer: app that basically does what Perseus does except you can download it. There's a web version with open source texts but to get the full benefit you need to have both the app and the TLG and PHI Greek and Latin text databases downloaded. Send an ask off anon if you want more information about those.
Haverford Bridge: vocab lists for selected texts. There's also a page with the tools they use to generate the lists so you can make your own.
johnstoniatexts: texts that Ian Johnston has translated and put online for free. It doesn't have everything but it has kind of a mind-boggling amount considering everything on here is translated by one person. The translations tend to be a little wordier than I prefer but it's still my first stop when I'm looking for easily accessible translations to recommend to people because I know they're fairly recent and reasonably well-done.
Geoffrey Steadman: free early intermediate level commentaries in Latin and Greek. If you use them and have the means please consider giving him a couple dollars!
PHI Latin Texts: lots of Latin with word + author search functions.
theoi.com: theoi has source material in translation for a number of gods and mythical figures. They don't have everything but if you're looking for every story with x god it's usually a decent place to start.
Intermediate Ancient Greek Language: free open source Greek textbook covering Greek in more detail than your intro textbook/course.
Latin Macronizer: you can paste in a Latin text and it'll add macrons to long syllables! It highlights forms it isn't sure about and you can double check it. (Related tip: the LaNe dictionary, on Logeion, is considered the gold standard for checking which syllables are long by nature in a given word!)
Race and Ethnicity in Classics Pedagogy: A Starter Pack: Google Doc with links to resources to help understand topics relating to race and ethnicity in classics. Aimed at educators but the resources can help anyone.
This list is not comprehensive and I will probably keep adding to it!
Also if you're looking for anything feel free to send an ask and I'll see if I can find it and/or poll the masses (everyone following this blog). Every so often I turn off anon but I'm always happy to answer asks privately, just say you'd rather it not be published.
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The ghost of Elagabalus penning an open letter asking people to stop calling him trans and you're like fair enough I guess it was just political slander after all but then midway through it becomes clear he's promoting this right wing ethnonationalist femboy aesthetic that still involves taking estrogen
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i will always champion finding a recent translation when reading an ancient text but i do also think there is value in learning how to read older translations and especially how to read them critically. for one thing it's a snapshot of how a work was perceived at a specific time and by a specific person, but also those translations do have literary value and may reveal something about the source text that you won't find in something newer. and it's also the case that newer translations can have many of the same flaws, because we are still in a racist misogynist etc. world.
like, never trust the word "servant" in a translation of an ancient text--that servant is inevitably a slave. if anyone says "God" singular, with a capital g, they are lying to you.* if they spend too long on particular features of a woman's body, proceed with caution.** if something sexual is being communicated via euphemism, consider that it may have been much cruder and/or more explicit in the original, especially if you're reading comedy or elegy. etc. etc. etc. learning to recognize common ways in which translation is affected by the morals and standards of a given time period is really useful.
*with the caveat that plato does sometimes reference "the god," and to be fair, plato does have the vibe of a guy who really really wanted to be monotheist and also serves as a blueprint for a ton of christian thought so i do concede that "God" may be a valid translation choice there.
** the greeks and romans were also misogynist in their descriptions of women's bodies but sometimes the translators like to one-up them. translation is not free from women who breast boobily for no known reason.
every single time people are like "you can read this ancient or classical piece of lit for free on project gutenberg!" and then link to the worlds most dogshit and sexist translation it makes me insane. don't do that.
feel free to reblog this without the addition but i feel bad being catty without offering a solution so here is how to operationalize how to find a good translation of classic/al lit:
check gutenberg for list of "free" out of copyright translations so you know what to avoid (if it is from 1970 or earlier it's probably just a non-starter)
check wikipedia or an online bookstore shopfront or equivalent to find or make a list of (your language) translations
pick one that was done: (a) (mandatory) in the last 30 years (as recent as possible) (b) (optional, if you have multiple modern editions) by a woman
find it in the usual way you find cheap or free books (libraries, institutional access, thriftbooks, other options, etc)
from a classical studies perspective: unless you are specifically studying the translation and reception of these works across time there simply is no reason you should be reading translations from the 1890s (thru really the 1950s and even later in some cases), that call women whores and bitches simply for existing on the page🧍♀️. unrelatedly, emily wilson's excellent recent odyssey translation is currently on sale on audible for $8 even if you don't have audible i have heard tell.
obligatory statement here that some authors whose translation style is much more accessible to a broad audience are not especially beloved by academics who work in the same field for persnickety reasons (see: the way classicists get about anne carson being the trending translator on tumblr dot edu) so don't necessarily pay too much attention to THAT sort of persnicketing, but do be sure that whoever is translating the work actually knows the original language well enough to work with it (i.e. for academic translators maybe check their wikipedia page for a controversy section to make sure that, for example, the translator of rumi can actually read rumi). this is probably harder for modern publishing where translator info isn't as widely publicized and i don't have great advice for you other than finding and googling the translators' name in the hopes that they've done recent interviews or have a website etc etc etc.
however, all works of literature require the reader to come into being - they are a conversation between you and the historical/ancient author. the translator is just adding another voice to the conversation and there is nothing wrong or Dangerous or traitorous etc about reading thru a translator! ideally they're just helping the ancient author get close enough to you to be comprehensible, so a more recent translation is always going to do a better job of that bc it's closer to where YOU are in the first place.
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The fact that we can get so combative over the right characterizations of the gods when, as an example, Istrus in the Hellenistic period could just present Artemis as being in love with a man and even coming close to marrying him...
The truth is that a lot of the things some of us Greek mythology enthusiasts take issue with when it comes to contemporary approaches to Greek myth already existed in antiquity. Purposefully changing a myth or figure to fit the needs of the story one wanted to tell? Rejecting earlier accounts and labeling them false in contrast to one's own true account? Passing judgment on the morality of various figures? Mocking the gods? Allowing them to exist outside rigid lines of acceptable behavior as in the case above where a famous parthenos wants to get married? All of that and more.
you missed the discourse about the "can't stand between my men and home" line on twitter where people were saying "omg that is against the entire point of the odyssey. how stupid. christopher nolan is ruining classics" and then film studies 101 students had to explain dramatic irony
i have been blissfully missing discourse on twitter essentially since twitter was founded
but i think the question ultimately is, "do we trust christopher nolan to portray odysseus well?"
personally, i trust no one to portray odysseus well. because a lot of people make him very boring. and in addition to that quote i kind of thought the interaction between him and penelope in the trailer pointed in that direction. not to mention there are so many terrible movies set in ancient greece or rome. i accidentally took a class on it once and we watched so many bad movies. so the established precedent is bad movies that use the least interesting parts of the source material. and at least from what i've seen so far i feel like this movie also sort of falls into the trap of giving the ancient past a sort of desaturated aesthetic, which is untrue and also boring. (my stance is: untrue is fine; boring is not.) so i guess i think there are reasons for odyssey fans to take the trailer at face value.
on the other hand, when i was looking stuff up about the film, nolan did have a number of quotes about really liking the tricky aspects of odysseus' character. so that made me more willing to read it as a deliberate lie. and it would be funny for the trailer to sort of bait people who haven't read the odyssey into thinking odysseus is going to be a very straightforward conventional protagonist only for him to turn out to be a total liar. (and a classic odysseus move for the trailer to have different meanings for people who do know the odyssey vs people who don't.)
ultimately i'll be interested to know how the line is used in the movie/how the movie portrays odysseus. because it really could go either way. and to everyone planning to see the movie, feel free to tell me how they handle odysseus' character. i don't watch movies in theaters for sensory overload reasons, so i am not likely to make my own judgments in the near future, but i am curious to hear what you all think.
either way though i guess i hope it goes without saying i don't think christopher nolan is "ruining classics." "classics" is a sham but it's not christopher nolan's fault.
someone asked me about the nolan odyssey movie so i looked it up and found that one of the only spoken lines in the trailer is odysseus saying "no one could stand between my men and home. not even me." which is like. well famously that is not true. and on one hand having odysseus say something famously untrue in the movie trailer feels correct. on the other hand. deeply funny
Basically, if you say "this historical thing is a human universal", ask yourself, did it also happen in the Americas? Because the Americas developed thousands of years of civilization completely independent from Eurasia. Many of those broad claims about earliest "human" history and civilization are based on the Middle East and the Mediterranean. Not even China or India are considered most of the time, let alone Africa or the Americas or Oceania, which had multiple different independent origins of agriculture and social organization.
As a practical example, any theory of the origin of writing cannot only study the Sumerians. You need at least to consider the origin of writing in China and India. Even if you operate with the assumption (highly debatable) that writing from the Middle East influenced them, you cannot just assign the same factors to it.
And you ESPECIALLY have to take into account the invention of writing (Maya scripts) and proto-writing in the Americas. These were created completely differently from other writing systems, sometimes radically differently (Andean quipus). You cannot ignore them.
This is the same with everything: the origin of agriculture, cities, social organization, warfare, anything you consider a "human universal". You cannot only work with Eurasia. You cannot ignore Africa and you cannot ignore Oceania. But America, in particular, is the key to understanding history in a complete picture.
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One of the ways Greek mythology spaces so often reduce stories (and I've mentioned it before) is the way a lot of people can't seem to realize how much more interesting things are when they aren't so straightforward and are more complicated. Is it not more interesting when you realize Clytemnestra killed Agamemnon for Iphigenia, yet still abused her other children? Is it not more interesting when you realize Penelope and Odysseus are the very foundation of why a traditional couple might be and yet still they are still somewhat equal despite it? I could name a million other examples.
related to last reblog my number one piece of advice to classics grad students specifically is Do Not Let Them Convince You The Language Exams Are An Accurate Reflection Of Your Skill. there is absolutely no standard across the field or even within individual departments as to the content or grading of these exams. i have heard of faculty failing people and saying their translation was grammatically perfect but didn't flow nicely enough. personally i didn't get any feedback at all for half the exams i took. i knew people who passed and had no idea why they passed. i spent two summers working on my languages and got to the point where i was reading more fluidly in class than people who had passed and never passed. i was told it was an issue of test taking strategy when i was getting A's on quizzes in class. it very much feels like a tool of control--if the criteria are completely opaque then they can push anyone out and claim it's because of the exams. it took my faculty three years and kicking me out to offer to explain where i was going wrong.
if you are dealing with the language exams do not ever let yourself believe your results are a true reflection of your skill. and find other ways to evaluate your skill! i knew i had improved when i got much faster at translating the individual passages on the exams, and when i started to feel the sense of any given passage fall into place as i read. and now i know i'm missing something if that doesn't happen. translating latin and greek is so much fun and worthwhile for its own sake but the exams are worth absolutely nothing.
