Detail of the “Saffron Gatherers” 3,675-year-old fresco from Akrotiri, the Bronze Age city of Santorini entombed by volcanic ash.

Greek lekythos (oil flask) with three mythological scenes

Upper zone: chariot surrounded by men and women (perhaps the abduction of Persephone or the departure of a goddess / god) Middle zone: Achilles mourning Patroklos, and Nereids bringing Achilles' second set of armor Lower zone: Amazonomachy (battle of Greeks against Amazons)

ca. 420 BCE, Eretria Painter

That's the cardinal rule of translations actually. Translators need to enter the authors' mind and then transfer the same spirit of the original into the target language. A professor of mine used to say that if a text reeks of translation (i.e it's dead obvious that it's a translation) the translation is a bad one. This, of course, only worsens with the new "trend" where the translators wish to equal themselves to the authors of the original. You aren't the author; you're just the transmitter of the author's work into an audience that, due to the linguistic barrier, cannot read the original.

Also she claimed at first to be the first woman to translate the epics which is false.

Anne Dacier did it first ages ago, as well as Rosa Calzecchi Onesti. Then she went around to say "I meant in english-" Caroline Alexander did it first then but as a translator didn't try to loudly announce and market her presence to disrespect Homer's works.

We also have Greek women in this as well. Olga Komninou-Kakridi, Chrysanthi Drosou, and the countless Greek women who worked at Kaktos Editions specifically Greek female philologists and linguists.

So, first, I just wanted to say I'm loving the comments conversation on why no one married Roxana later. When I first came to Tumblr, having had prior experience on the (now ancient) LiveJournal (et al.), as well as bulletin boards before that, I sorta missed such interaction. Every social media platform has its own culture, and Tumblr's is more reblog with (maybe) comments in the tags--occasionally a response tacked onto the bottom of a prior post. And I understand that in the very fast-paced scrolling of Tumblr, that makes sense, maybe more sense than comments as those comments might never be seen by anybody who'd already seen the post.

That said, comments are a different sort of interaction that I (also) quite enjoy. More conversational, rather than spoken to "the room at large," as it were. So I just thought I'd mention there ARE comments on that post (quite a few), in case you read it already but want to recheck.

Also, I'm always open to comments if you're the commenting type.

Second, as usual, I am behind on replying to asks. But I have a good excuse! I am hard at work on the Hephaistion-Krateros monograph. I'm almost done with the Diodorus portions on Hephaistion, then will turn to Krateros in that source. There remains a lot to do, but before even sitting down to write a monograph, there is a whole HELLA lot of reading to do, so you can even frame the question(s) you want to address. Then even more as you go along. But it IS happening, folks. After almost 30 years of threatening that particular book, I'm to the writing stage. Ha. (Diodorus is a better historian than he's given credit, btw.) There's a lot of Other Stuff I'm doing too "after hours" in the evening, some of which is answering Tumblr. (Just so folks know, when I reply to one of the longer asks, it typically takes me several hours to chase things down, occasionally a couple days as I like to let those long posts sit at least overnight before proofreading. And even then, I find typos later.)

Last, and of import, @starweaverblog kindly messaged me yesterday just to confirm that no, they do NOT hold the horrible beliefs the original asker accused them of holding. I don't know if any of you recall the kerfluffle of someone dropping an "ask" after I'd reposted some of their art, telling me they were homophobic and racist, etc., etc., and I shouldn't be platforming them... only for someone else to drop *another* ask saying the original was a lie. Both were "anon." I was quite put out and warned folks not to haul fandom drama onto my blog, especially not unless the anons were willing to put their names to it, and I was unable to comment further.

So, Starweaverblog came forward to defend themself, and I'm glad they did.

This is the dark side of the "ask" environment on Tumblr. And I will be frank that rather than just react with an "I don't want to be associated with homophobia or racism," I should have gone back and re-explored the blog-in-question further. (When I friend someone, I DO tend to read through their blog a bit, largely to be sure it's not in a language I can't read, or about books/movies/topics I know nothing about.) I DON'T want to be associated with homophobia or racism, but neither do they. So lesson learned and apologies to them. I hope this statement will go some way towards reparations.

If anyone comes to me again saying so-and-so believes such-and-thus... they had better bring the receipts. AND use their name. This was presented as an, "Oh, btw, you might want to know..." E.g., intended to be "helpful." Which is highly deceptive. And the once-removed nature of social media makes that far easier. The young poster who sent it should be ashamed of themselves.

I am here as myself, using my real name. And I think that's important because of the nature of what I do on the internet. (It's hard to be an expert under a pseudonym, ha.) I never post anything publicly that I would fear to see come up in a court of law--because it can. That's true of the internet all the way back to when I first found the online world in the very late '80s. Yes, that's before the public "internet" existed: I was on the GEnie and NVN networks, and that tells you just how old I am.

In any case, as we all know, social media has a distinct dark side that allows Mean Girls to germinate like algae in a certain reflecting pool. ;-)

Yet social media has a light side in connecting folks who might otherwise never have met. That has charmed me since I first found it all those years ago when I was a much younger 20-something with peculiar (to most people) interests. WOW, there were other people out there in the world like me!

I'm so glad I've got to meet some of you, a couple in the flesh. What humanity has been learning to navigate across the last 30 years or so is how to integrate the virtual world into their "real" (analog) world, especially when we've existed in the analog world for literally millennia. To that, 30 years is a micro-drop in the bucket.

Being REAL with each other is crucial to our health as human beings. I think we are, as a species, still trying to figure out how to do that online. And do it authentically.