Eidolon

“I finished the MA program, by some miracle, but the Professor and Title IX were so interwoven with Classics that I had to give that up too. The Professor and Greece became one and the same, and both have left a sweet sadness in me that I am loathe to keep carrying or give up.”

Few industries have relied as heavily on classical mythology for branding opportunities as the auto industry has, but when car companies christen their models with names like Phaeton, Proteus, or Python, the engagement with mythology typically ends there, leaving many opportunities for marketing (and reception) on the table. With that in mind, I’ve written the ad copy these cars deserve, but never got.

“As tempting as it may be to long for a golden era when civic discourse was more harmonious, it is important to remember that through much of our nation’s history, the burden of calm was imposed on those whose demands for justice were routinely overridden by calls for patience and civility.”

We're back and better than ever with our 2019 Gift Guide! This year, we're featuring DIY ideas, gifts made by classicists, and ways to give to the field, as well as the usual selection of classical treasures. Happy gifting!

“Instead of approaching palaeoscience as a threat, or summarily dismissing it, we might engage with it as we would with any other new source of historical evidence: by asking how it yields historical knowledge.”

So a woman can, as her duty, speak in (deceitful) riddles, weave cloth (literally), weave lies (metaphorically), do baby things, do housewife things. And only some of those were considered crafts. But they were all coded female, for better (nurturing!) or worse (lying bitch!). And I imagine that the meaning and satisfaction that ancient women weavers derived from their work was inextricably tied up in their identity as a woman, wife, or mother.

The next installment in our crafting special features illustrations! Take a look at some classical masterpieces to brighten up a chilly Wednesday.

When we asked our readers to share classical crafts they’ve made to feature in an Eidolon Crafting Special, we never could have expected such a huge turnout! We’ve compiled creative pieces from our tight-knit (pun intended) community in a series of posts. In this post, we highlight fiber works; photos and blurbs feature here, along with links to the full texts of artists’ descriptions. We hope these inspire others to go out and create some classical masterpieces of their own!

“What is valuable in papyrology, the text or the context? The context is equally as important to me, an Egyptian, as the text. I cannot understand any literary or documentary text without asking the most difficult questions about how it came into “our” possession.”

“In other words, dear Classicists, especially those among you who have commented and written pages and pages on the new Sappho poems, we have completely lost track of the only extant copy of the verses in question, verses otherwise unknown and unattested. Leaving aside the problems connected to the very unclear provenance of this “elderly” gentleman’s fragment, to me this seems a remarkable illustration of the unfair conditions of access that come with private collections.”

“When a museum accepts, and therefore lends its authority to, a fake manuscript because it didn’t ask enough questions, that action has the capacity to send all scholarship on the subject down the wrong path. When a museum accepts a real but stolen manuscript the same is true, and not only because it muddies the waters of what is real and not real.”

“The discipline of Classics has, for the most part, abetted Obbink’s past behavior through our silence, and so we are all to some degree implicated in his misconduct.”

“Libraries and archives, too, used to hide their losses from insider thieves. But they are increasingly announcing these losses publicly. Libraries and archives know how much damage can be done when narcissistic, grandiose insiders are unquestioningly trusted. The privileged insider thief leaves an archive in ruins; the privileged classicist can leave careers, or even lives, in ruins.”

Reading ancient confrontations with the self alongside modern iterations reveals fundamental and enduring concerns about who we are, how we know that, and how our society shapes our sense of self. And the modern doppelgänger dramas shed new light on their ancient counterparts.

“Because I was trained as a Western poet, even if I want to disengage from those forms, those forms are there in me. Maybe that’s one of the things that’s an issue, in part because it’s awareness of yourself as intersections of diaspora and empire, and having to reckon with those structures even if you don’t want to.”

The first four identified moons of Jupiter were named after Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto, many of whom were not Jupiter’s mistresses but rather victims of sexual assault and rape. This naming convention, though not entirely NASA’s purview but certainly strengthened by their choice of mission title and press materials, suggests a mythical context in which these women are continuously confronted by their rapist.