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RECENT ARTICLES
Camilla Richardson
THE MANY CLEOPATRAS: CLEO THE BELOVED TO CLEO THE MOON GODDESS
"They were many, these Cleopatras, yet each made her own mark on history’s pages."
Camilla Richardson
THE MANY CLEOPATRAS: CLEO THE FORMIDABLE
"She may be remembered as a villain to historians, despising and exiling her own son, forcing her children to marry and divorce at whim and controlling the reign instead of letting it pass to her descendants, but she was a Ptolemaic ruler and a Cleopatra at that."
Camilla Richardson
THE MANY CLEOPATRAS: CLEO THE PRUDENT
"From Cleopatra I, known as “the Syrian”, to Cleopatra II and VI, their political savvy as queens cemented their legacy—not as pawns to their societies—but powerful rulers, no less brutal in their quest for dominance than their male counterparts."
Grove Koger
"Studied and debated for millennia not just by geographers and explorers but by novelists, poets, anthropologists and philosophers as well, Odysseus, it seems, is everywhere and nowhere."
Sally Cottam
ROMAN GLASS - A WONDER OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
"The manufacture of glass is one of the outstanding industrial accomplishments of the Roman period. Glass was not a new discovery; it had already been used for objects and vessels for around fifteen hundred years, but the Romans transformed glass production in terms of the quantity of glass produced, the uses to which it was put, and the artistic excellence that they achieved."
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Viviana De Cecco
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Dr Mario Trabucco della Torretta
“The Elgin Marbles are where they are legitimately and with reason. Not only have we no cause to remove them from London, but to be authentically anti-colonial and genuinely Philhellenic, we should reject any idea of ever returning them to Athens. ”
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the many cleopatras: cleo the beloved to cleo the moon goddess
By Camilla Richardson
Cover image courtesy of TimeTravelRome
After the tumultuous reign of the many Cleopatras during the Ptolemaic dynasty from the first Cleopatra’s murder by her attendant to Cleopatra III, killed by her own son, the next Queen to the throne, Cleopatra V, was most beloved by her subjects. Her husband and uncle, Ptolemy X, was ironically most hated. He was considered the mother killer, having been the one to commit matricide in a fury over Cleo III’s power hungry manipulations (Llewellyn-Jones d). It was an irony, as his mother had been the only one to favor him. He was seen as weak and volatile by both the Egyptian population and Rome. His failings were even more apparent next to his niece-wife, since she was so intensely admired. Another Cleopatra Queen adored by her people, though that was little protection over her fate, as the previous Queens proved.
After the murderous betrayal of his own mother, things went downhill quickly for Ptolemy X, and soon he was at war with his own military. He had defiled Alexander the Great’s tomb, melting down the gold coffin into coins in an ill-fated attempt to continue funding his battles. As his wife, the lovely Cleo V was forced to flee with him. Perhaps happily for her, he drowned in a following skirmish, and both she and her father – who had been exiled earlier – were able to return to Egypt and the throne.
She was made sole ruler upon her father’s death (d), but the Egyptians rebelled against a single ruler, popular as Cleo V was, desiring another earthly mimic of their mythical sibling-lover gods as all the previous rulers before her. According to historical references, Cleo V wanted a partner as well, unlike her power hungry lineage (Jordan and Jordan, 2021). Enter Ptolemy XI, her late husband’s son by her aunt, another Cleopatra. While they quickly married, this Ptolemy was apparently less open to co-ruling than his new wife, for he murdered Cleo V less than three weeks into their marriage, primarily because he felt she was too old for him. She had been his ticket to power, and upon cashing it in, he saw her as disposable. It was a bad move on his part to take out the Egyptians’ adored goddess-Queen. They took quick revenge, storming in and killing him.
The now dead Queen’s younger brother, known as Fluter, was quickly set upon the throne next. Considered a wasteful dunce by the populace, (Jordan and Jordan), Fluter was still wise enough to continue the Egyptians’ favored incestuous tradition by marrying his niece, Cleopatra VI Tryphaina (Llewellyn-Jones d). The ensuing daughter from this union is the infamous Cleopatra VII Thea Philopater, the last pharaoh-Queen of Egypt (Jordan and Jordan) and the one that has filled history books with her influence and legend.
When Fluter died, he left his kingdom to her, his eighteen year old daughter, as well as her twelve year old brother, another Ptolemy. As ambitious as her predecessors, Cleopatra VII quickly proved she meant to have the crown for herself alone. She was the first of the Ptolemaic rulers to learn Egyptian (Stanwick) and soon had coins designed with her image only, a clear sign of proclaiming sole leadership (Jordan and Jordan 2021). This was a powerful symbol of power that had started all the way back to Ptolemy I (Hölbl 2001, p. 29) and after she also dropped her brother’s name from official documents, he took it as the slap in the face that it was.
A civil war broke out between the siblings (Jordan and Jordan), unsurprising given the family history. Like the women before her, Cleo VII was not just a Queen but had the status of the “King of Egypt.” (Samson 1985, p. 103). Though “…not a great beauty”, her charm and intelligence spoke volumes.” (p.103). She gained an ally and lover in Julius Caesar, who was visiting from Rome, managing to sneak into his room by outwitting her King-brother. The seduction of Julius was politically effective and rather necessary for survival, as she gained his protection from the same co-ruling brother who had been set on killing her. She then travelled with Julius, bearing him a son, whom she named Ptolemy Caesar, making his patronage clear in case her Egyptian subjects thought another sibling union had occurred. Her memorable rule lasted two decades (Chauveau 2000, p. 24) before she was defeated in battle and she committed that infamous suicide along with her lover, Marc Antony.
Cleopatra VII is a significant monarch who not only rallied armies against her brother but also managed to win over two Roman rulers to her ambitions and bed, prolonging the Ptolemaic dynasty. It’s no wonder she became an icon. Other dynasties had fallen to Rome around her. Yet Egypt remained the final satrapy from Alexander’s conquest because she was sharp to the ways of the world. Her reign shows a perceptive mind and commanding hand. It seems appropriate the asp is often associated with this pharoah-Queen, the wise serpent often wrapped around her arm in a symbol of her suicide, but also of her cunning.
After the long list of Cleopatras in Egypt, it would be easy to assume she was the last, but the seductive Cleopatra VII also had twins by Antony, one of which was a daughter she named Cleopatra Selene, in the family tradition (Draycott 2023, p. 73). We’ll call her by her second name Selene, which referenced the goddess of the moon. The young royal’s inherited kingdom had outlasted all of Alexander’s successors (p. 33) and must have been excruciating to watch fall, along with losing both of her parents and much of her family.
As a child in Egypt, Selene loved her native crocodiles, an affection that lasted lifelong (p. 40) and she was also likely a bibliophile, as her father gifted her hundreds of thousands of books after the Alexandrian library burned (p. 42). Aged only ten or eleven when her parents died, she was taken to Rome (p. 73) by her mother’s conqueror, Octavian, later known as Augustus. In a strange twist of compassion, or perhaps in an attempt to brainwash, he raised her – and the other siblings he hadn’t executed, all children of his enemies – as his own (p. 123). Sadly, her surviving brothers died later by either betrayal or illness (p. 137), before reaching adulthood.
Fully immersed in Roman culture, Selene was matched with another royal exile from Africa, Gaius Julius Juba, King of Mauritania (pp. 171-2). His father had also committed suicide after Roman defeat (p.172), so it is likely the two bonded over their similar traumas. Though a captive under terrible circumstances from infancy, Juba was known for his happiness (p. 171) and may have been a much needed source of light and joy for the much grieved girl, as she was constantly accosted by images of her dead mother as a villain and whore in Rome (p.172). The two were set up as client King and Queen of Mauritania (p. 180) and she ruled as his equal (p. 208). It was only fitting, given her lineage. But unlike her ancestors, there seems to have been little strife between her and her children, the total number of which is unknown (p. 213). Sadly, Selene died young, aged only thirty-five, and it is speculated that it was during childbirth (p. 215), but not before she had at least one son she named Ptolemy (p. 225). It seems only right, given she was the last Ptolemaic Queen. She was memorialized by her husband (p. 219), and due to her second name, was often compared to the moon in life and death. A poem reiterating that symbol was written as a eulogy by Crinagorous.
“The moon herself, rising at early eve, dimmed her light, veiling her mourning in night, because she saw her namesake, pretty Selene, going down dead to murky Hades. On her she had bestowed the beauty of her light, and with her death she mingled her own darkness.” (P. 216).
Given that her mother’s memory was scorned throughout the Roman Empire, it’s impressive that as Queen, Selene had earned such benevolent respect by the people in her short life, but she was a Cleopatra after all, and destined to rule not simply beside men but with them, championed by her people.
This long line of Ptolemaic women were forces to be reckoned with. They were not led by the men who fathered or married them, and refused to let others hold power when it was within their own grasp. Often more beloved by their people than their co-ruling husbands, brothers and fathers, these queens showed the favor they held, the sway they could elicit, and just how uncontrollable they were. As Queens they simply outran their male peers when permitted to enter the monarchical race in the pursuit of power. History brands them as female Kings in both status and memory, and while Rome attempted to erase that legacy, it has endured through the ages. They were many, these Cleopatras, yet each made her own mark on history’s pages.
BibliographyChauveau, M., 2000. Egypt in the Age of Cleopatra: History and Society under the Ptolemies. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.Draycott, J., 2023. Cleopatra’s Daughter. eBook, Liveright Publishing Corporation. Available at: Kindle. (Accessed: 16 September 2024).Hölbl, G., 2001. A History of the Ptolemaic Empire. London: Routledge.Jordan E.A. and Jordan, J.W., 2021. The War Queens. New York: Diversion Books.Llewellyn-Jones, L., 2023 d. “The Cleopatras – Part 4: The last Cleopatras.” The Past. Available at: https://the-past.com/feature/the-cleopatras-part-4-the-last-cleopatras/ (Accessed: 13 September 2024).Samson, J., 1985. Nefertiti and Cleopatra. New York: Barnes & Noble, Inc.Stanwick, P.E., 2014. Portraits of the Ptolemies. eBook: University of Texas Press. Available at: Kindle. (Accessed: 16 September 2024)
the many cleopatras: cleo the formidable and her sister wife-daughter
By Camilla Richardson
Cover image courtesy of Mathildehamm
Cleopatra I’s adoption of the Egyptian notion that keeping things in the family would further solidify the Ptolemaic pharaoh-monarchy did not always work in the household’s favor. One could argue it made things rather messy, as “The High Hellenistic Period is a time in which personal ambitions, struggles, and jealousies steered the course of empires and families like never before” (Llewellyn-Jones and McAuley, p. 7-8). Her manipulations over her children Cleopatra II and Ptolemy VI to marry each other in a mirroring of the sibling-lover gods (Ager 2006, p. 165) and share power turned into a massive feud among them and their younger brother Physkon, whose name means Fat Man (Stanwick). But Ptolemy VI died suddenly in a battle with a Seleucid ruler, taking him out of the sibling rivalry. His widow, the “formidable Cleopatra II” (Stanwick), not unlike her mother, was eager to fill the power vacuum herself.
She and Fat Man married to legitimize themselves as ruler sibling-gods next (Stanwick), though they had been political enemies most of their lives (Llewellyn-Jones b). The war that ensued behind closed doors never stopped. It seems ironic that their mother, Seleucid Cleo I, had married their Ptolemaic father for the sole purpose of peace (Llewellyn-Jones a). Obviously it was a peace that didn’t last, even among the children.
Unfortunately for Cleo II, another Cleopatra, her daughter, soon entered the power struggle. Not satisfied with the arrangement with his sister-wife-enemy, Fat Man married Cleo III, his first wife’s daughter. Cleo III was his own full-fledged niece. Hard as it is to believe, Fat Man was indeed married to both mother and her daughter at one time. The three rulers “shared the throne” for public eyes, but went from pretending unity temporarily, to fighting openly and brutally for supremacy once again (Stanwick).
Cleo II, a dominating figure, decided that the monarchy was getting crowded, and showed why she was so formidable, as she managed to scare her siblings into fleeing to Cyprus, leaving her as sole ruler for a time. While intimidating, she perhaps had not inherited her mother's prudence (Mahaffy 1899, p.166), to her great tragedy. For her son was with his departing father Fat Man, who murdered him, his own child, in revenge against her. He then sent the cut up pieces of the twelve year old’s body to arrive the day before her birthday (Stanwick, p. 5). It was a costly price for the ruling headdress, but Cleo II wanted all the power of Egypt in her own hands. These gruesome events were extreme even for the murderous ruling class, but this family is anything except short on dramatic and inconceivable acts.
Eventually, Cleo III became ruler alongside her fearsome but aging mother, and was no less eager to share her rule. She was forced to name the next heir, her own eldest son, Ptolemy IX, whom she called Chickpea (p. 5). This natural succession seems straightforward, but Cleo III had an unusual hatred for Chickpea out of all her children. There is some conjecture that her reason for despising Chickpea was due to his wife, her own ambitious daughter Cleopatra IV, in that she worried about being replaced as Queen (Llewellyn-Jones c) through this new generation’s sibling marriage. Deciding to take matters into her own hands and following in her royal family’s footsteps of manipulation, Cleo III forced her son to divorce, and remarry his younger sister Cleopatra Selene, who was only sixteen at the time and more obedient to mother dearest (Llewellyn-Jones c).
By no means done with her machinations, Cleo III conspired to exile Chickpea to continue her reign with her preferred son, the younger Ptolemy X (Stanwick). Quite the self appointed matchmaker, Cleo III coerced Cleopatra Selene into then divorcing the exiled Chickpea and marrying Ptolemy X (Llewellyn-Jones c). Her ambitions knew no end and she clearly had no problem using her offspring as pawns in her power plays to stay on top.
These constant murders and vies for ascendancy are almost unbelievable were they not recorded history. In some ways they read more like a melodramatic soap opera than a true historical family, but the facts remain. Still unfinished in her quest for control, Cleo III decided on yet one more marital arrangement, forcing her granddaughter, the child of Chickpea, to be renamed Cleopatra V Berenike III, and then to marry Ptolemy X, the girl’s own uncle. Meanwhile, as if all of these Cleopatras weren’t enough, the other co-current women of the family, Cleopatra IV and Cleopatra Tryphaena, married Seleucid rulers and died struggling against each other for dominance in that rival territory (Llewellyn-Jones c). If you’ve been counting, that’s six Cleopatras so far in just a few generations. It’s dizzying keeping up with them all and their similarly ambitious manipulations.
Finally, Cleo III ruled with her favored son Ptolemy X, and she thought all was bliss. Until he murdered her for her constant conniving, but not before she had left quite the dynastic impression. As ruler she had elevated the status of Queens in Egypt to a previously unseen height in her hunger for dominance, even giving herself androgynous titles to portray both a masculine and feminine ruling force (Llewellyn-Jones c). It’s noted, “She was enormously powerful and assumed many royal male prerogatives, including going into battle.” (Stanwick).
She may be remembered as a villain to historians, despising and exiling her own son, forcing her children to marry and divorce at whim and controlling the reign instead of letting it pass to her descendants, but she was a Ptolemaic ruler and a Cleopatra at that. I can’t help but wonder, while she was obviously power hungry, would the commentary on her life read differently were she a man? One can only guess. While her tale is jaw dropping for its drama and brutality, she is but one Cleopatra among many with similar histories, a descendant and mother in a line of women who followed in the same footsteps as ruling female-Kings.
BibliographyAger, S.L., 2006. “The Power of Excess: Royal Incest and the Ptolemaic Dynasty.” Anthropologica, vol. 48, no. 2. Canadian Anthropology Society, pp. 165–186..Llewellyn-Jones, L., 2023 a. “The Cleopatras, Part 1: Cleopatra I the Syrian.” The Past. Available at: https://the-past.com/feature/the-cleopatras-part-1-cleopatra-i-the-syrian/ (Accessed: 12 September 2024).Llewellyn-Jones, L., 2023 b. “The Cleopatras – Part 2: Cleopatra II.” The Past. Available at: https://the-past.com/feature/the-cleopatras-part-2-cleopatra-ii-traditionally-untraditional/ (Accessed: 13 September 2024).Llewellyn-Jones, L., 2023 c. “The Cleopatras – Part 3: Cleopatra III, the female king.” The Past. Available at: https://the-past.com/feature/the-cleopatras-part-3-cleopatra-iii-the-female-king/ (Accessed: 12 September 2024).Llewellyn-Jones, L. and McAuley, A., 2023. Sister-Queens in the High Hellenistic Period. New York: Routledge.Mahaffy, P.E., 1899. A History Of Egypt Volume IV. New York: Cambridge University Press.Stanwick, P.E., 2014. Portraits of the Ptolemies. eBook: University of Texas Press. Available at: Kindle. (Accessed: 16 September 2024)
the many cleopatras: cleo the prudent
By Camilla Richardson
Cover image courtesy of NYPL
The Ptolemaic age was one of the darkest reigns in history, and one that isn’t often discussed due to the surrounding timelines of the Roman Empire and Greece's golden era, despite its abundance of melodrama. Fraught with sibling marriages, murders, subsequent revenge killings and a constant familial battle for power, the Ptolemies created a tumultuous kingdom in Egypt. Before the famously depicted Cleopatra, popular in modern and classic media, her own female lineage bore that same name, and they were royal figures no less powerful or manipulative than she. From Cleopatra I, known as “the Syrian”, to Cleopatra II and VI, their political savvy as queens cemented their legacy—not as pawns to their societies—but powerful rulers, no less brutal in their quest for dominance than their male counterparts.
To understand the history of the enigmatic Cleopatras, one must first grasp the start and significance of the Ptolemaic reign they arose from, which began shortly after Alexander the Great’s death in 323 BC (Erskine 2003, p. 2). Ptolemy I Soter had been one of Alexander’s closest companions since childhood, though a decade his senior. He was an impressive and elite military leader, even becoming Alexander’s second in command (Walter 2003, p. 3-4). Given these recommendations, Ptolemy was one of the likeliest successors, and described as “...shrewd, if not particularly humane…” (Fraser 1972, p. 115). An assessment flattering for a general, indeed. Regardless that Alexander had a son and several qualified military generals, or rather because of this, a feud quickly broke out for supremacy upon his death. Out of the chaos and several bloody battles later (Braund 2003, p.23), Ptolemy emerged victorious, having founded one of the three standing dynasties that divided Alexander’s empire. This was the Hellenistic period, the time between Alexander and the start of the Roman Empire. And Ptolemy had won for himself the Egyptian satrapy – a governed province – (Erskine, p. 2) and begun a reign that would last almost three centuries before Rome came to crush it.
Both Ptolemy’s inhumanity and shrewdness were quickly displayed, as he stole Alexander’s body, burying it in Egypt in an attempt to legitimize his status as successor (Fraser 1972, p. 15-16). In all of this tumult, the first Cleopatra became known in Egypt. She was none other than Alexander’s own sister and close friend. Upon her brother’s demise, suitors lined up in hopes of securing her hand and with it, legitimacy of their claim to power. Ptolemy, true to form, sought political advantage and won that struggle. Cleopatra set off on the journey to wed him, only to be killed by a traitorous female attendant on the way, likely paid by one of Ptolemy’s rivals (Braund p. 28).
The legend had begun. As the conqueror’s sister, her name became a title associated with myth, and using it gave credence to the queens that followed (Llewellyn-Jones, 2023 a). Several Cleopatras of royal lineage came after her, seven of whom became Egyptian queens. In this first of the series, we’ll be covering the first to queenship, Cleopatra I, who we’ll call Cleo I, for brevity’s sake.
Hailing from the rival Seleucid Empire (Llewellyn-Jones a), another new dynasty succeeding Alexander’s death, Cleo I was a princess in her own right, and she’s remembered as a prudent Queen (Mahaffy 1899, p.166). Called “the Syrian”, she was wed at just eleven years old to Ptolemy I’s descendant and the new King, Ptolemy V, in an effort to make peace between the battling kingdoms. Though young, Cleo I came from a militaristic family, and had apparently been trained well in politics, for she quickly made powerful allies and formed strong relationships in her new realm. It seems to have worked in her favor, as both Greek and Egyptian documentation show her being named in honorary ways, proving that although a foreigner, she was seen alongside her Hellenistic husband as a true ruler. She faced and overcame a rebellion, did a PR tour, birthed three heirs – always a win for any monarch to have successors – and made offerings to the traditional Egyptian deities, firmly placing herself in the people’s culture as a benevolent Queen (Llewellyn-Jones a). Her husband was eventually poisoned – an occupational hazard – making Cleo I sole regent until her children came of age, a role in which she remained until her own death (Stanwick 2014) – not an easy feat given the familial competition for leadership. So powerful was her influence over her children that her son was called Theos Philometor, meaning ‘Mother-Loving God’ (Llewellyn-Jones a).
One of the problems the Ptolemies faced as rulers was that they were racial imposters, being Greco-Macedonian posing as Egyptian deities, and they therefore needed every affection of the ruled Egyptian class that could possibly be gained. During her reign, Cleo I recognized that sibling marriages modeled native preferences (Ager 2006, p. 165), as the Egyptian gods, Osiris and Isis, were sibling lovers. Though not a close relation of her husband, she took to being called not just his wife, but also his sister after his death, further securing favor among her subjects (Jordan and Jordan, 2021). This “Lady of the Two Lands”, as Cleo I was often called, arranged her own children’s marriage next, making her daughter, the “formidable Cleopatra II” (Stanwick), and Ptolemy VI aka Mother Lover, wed each other and continue their god-like status (Llewellyn-Jones b). These incestuous unions became a marker of the Ptolemaic dynasty (Fraser 1972, p. 115).
Cleo I’s influence cannot be overstated, and her son Ptolemy VI, ever the mama’s boy, set up a place of worship for her when she unexpectedly passed, naming her “Cleopatra the Mother, the Manifest Goddess” (Llewellyn-Jones a), in true filial devotion. This first Cleopatra to become an Egyptian Queen, set quite the precedent. She managed to endear herself to a people that could easily have seen her as an usurping foreigner, and she led with confidence and pragmatism. Female monarchs equaling in the level of control she achieved, are somewhat rare in history, especially prior to England’s Queen Elizabeth, making Cleo I’s ability to lead the satrapy successfully and with such a sure hand, quite the marvel.
The first in what would go down in history as a line of female-kings, Cleo I was a woman both produced by her time and completely outside of it. She was brought between two battling kingdoms to make peace and instead took control. While the outcomes of her familial manipulations had far reaching and catastrophic consequences that we’ll uncover in the follow-up to this first article, her ability to make others bend to her will is nothing short of prodigious. She goes down as a woman who prudently forged her own destiny, an uncanny predecessor to Cleopatra VII of Egypt, whom we know so well.
BibliographyAger, S.L., 2006. “The Power of Excess: Royal Incest and the Ptolemaic Dynasty.” Anthropologica, vol. 48, no. 2. Canadian Anthropology Society, pp. 165–186.Braund, D., 2003."After Alexander: the Emergence of the Hellenistic World, 323-281." In: A. Erskine, ed., A Companion to the Hellenistic World, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, p. 23, 28.Erskine, A., 2003. "Approaching the Hellenistic World." In: A. Erskine, ed., A Companion to the Hellenistic World, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.Fraser, P.M., 1972. Ptolemaic Alexandria: Volume I. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Jordan E.A. and Jordan, J.W., 2021. The War Queens. New York: Diversion Books.Llewellyn-Jones, L., 2023 a. “The Cleopatras, Part 1: Cleopatra I the Syrian.” The Past. Available at: https://the-past.com/feature/the-cleopatras-part-1-cleopatra-i-the-syrian/ (Accessed: 12 September 2024).Llewellyn-Jones, L., 2023 b. “The Cleopatras – Part 2: Cleopatra II.” The Past. Available at: https://the-past.com/feature/the-cleopatras-part-2-cleopatra-ii-traditionally-untraditional/ (Accessed: 13 September 2024).Mahaffy, P.E., 1899. A History Of Egypt Volume IV. New York: Cambridge University Press.Stanwick, P.E., 2014. Portraits of the Ptolemies. eBook: University of Texas Press. Available at: Kindle. (Accessed: 16 September 2024)Walter, M.E., 2003. Ptolemy of Egypt. London: Taylor & Francis.
uncertain landfalls
By Grove Koger
Originally published in Amsterdam Quarterly 31 (June 2021)
Cover image by Robert Wilkinson, courtesy of raremaps.com
Along with a myriad translations into a myriad languages, a small library of books have been written about the Odyssey, one of the two ancient Greek epics credited to a Greek poet named Homer.
But we don’t know whether Homer actually existed, or even when, although the epics themselves seem to have assumed their final form in the eighth century BCE. We don’t know how much of the works he (or she) might actually have composed, but it seems likely that they combine individual traditions that had been handed down orally for generations. In the case of the Odyssey, we have no reason to think that Odysseus (or, to use the Latinized form of his name, Ulysses) actually existed or, if he did, that he underwent any of the experiences that he’s credited with. We can be sure that he and his men didn’t encounter a one-eyed Cyclops, but, on the other hand, his voyage from Troy just might reflect ancient Greek sailing techniques and knowledge of actual places.
As Ernle Bradford puts it in Ulysses Found, “Anyone who has ever fallen under the spell of the Odyssey is likely to ask himself … whether the whole poem must be regarded as fiction or may have some basis in fact.”
People have been asking themselves that question for millennia, and their answers have ranged widely. Ancient Greek geographer Strabo thought that some of the locations in the Odyssey lay in the Atlantic Ocean, beyond what we know as the Strait of Gibraltar. Closer to our own day, nineteenth-century Belgian lawyer Théophile Cailleux argued for similar settings, and placed Troy on the coast of Great Britain. Serbian commentators have identified the locations of Odysseus’ adventures within the Adriatic Sea, which, after all, lies within a few days sailing time of Odysseus’ home on the Ionian island of Ithaca. A Brazilian professor thinks that Odysseus reached South America.
I’ve mentioned Bradford because, of the legion of writers on the subject, he was one of the few with sea legs. A veteran of the Royal Navy, he could boast of experience aboard vessels ranging from a twenty-ton cutter to fishing boats. “For at least three years,” he writes, “I sailed the Mediterranean with the Odyssey in one hand and the charts and Admiralty Pilots … in the other.”
There’s little point in trying to work out the details of the exact route Odysseus and his men might have taken as they sailed down the Aegean Sea from Troy. Their goal lay off the western coast of Greece, so it would have been necessary to round the entire Peloponnesian Peninsula. However, a north wind carried them southward past the peninsula, and nine desperate days later they reached the land of the Lotus-Eaters. And it’s here, as Bradford admits, that both he and Odysseus are “entering upon a world of speculation.” Having said that, Bradford makes the traditional identification of the land of the Lotus-Eaters with the Tunisian island of Djerba, which lies far to the southwest on the African coast. As for the forgetfulness-inducing fruit itself, he suggests that the sweet, plum-like Cordia myxa or the jujube, Rhamnus ziziphus, might fit the bill, although here his guess is no more convincing than anyone else’s.
The route of the Greeks’ eventual escape lay to the northeast, toward Ithaca. Instead, they reached the land of the Cyclopes—and it’s at this point that they may have re-entered a geographically identifiable world.
“I find that the navigations of Ulysses from now on bear the distinct hallmark of truth,” Bradford explains. “So many of the places, weather conditions, and even geographical descriptions seem to be accurate.” He goes on to identify the land of the Cyclopes as the western shore of Sicily, and the much smaller island where the hungry Greeks slaughtered goats as Favignana. Lying about four miles off Sicily itself, Favignana was, it turns out, actually known as Goat Island in classical times!
Still striving to reach Ithaca, the Greeks next made landfall on the island of Aeolus, King of the Winds. Bradford argues in this case for the little island of Ustica north of Sicily. He thinks that the hapless Greeks were then blown northwestward to the port of Bonifacio in southernmost Corsica, where they encountered the cannibalistic Laestrygonians. When they made their way eastward once again, across the Tyrrhenian Sea, they reached Circe’s island, which Bradford identifies as Cape Circeo on the coast of Italy. While Cape Circeo is not an island, Bradford points out that, from a distance, it appears to be one.
The next leg of Odysseus’ travels took him (in Robert Fagles’ translation) to “the outer limits, the Ocean River’s bounds”—in other words, to the edge of the known world. Bradford explains that the ancient Greeks had no direct knowledge of the western Mediterranean or the Strait of Gibraltar. They had, however, heard frightening stories from the Phoenicians, who controlled those seas and aimed to keep others out. Bradford also suspects that this episode, in which Odysseus visits the underworld, represents a separate tradition that Homer incorporated into the larger framework of his epic.
Odysseus’ remaining adventures return us to a recognizable world. Bradford argues for the Li Galli Islands (otherwise known, suggestively, as the Sirenusas) off the southwestern coast of Italy as the lair of the deadly Sirens. He then identifies the Strait of Messina, between Sicily and the toe of the Italian boot, as the setting in which the Greeks encountered the monsters Scylla and Charybdis, and the island of the Sun God as Sicily itself. Calypso’s island is Malta or nearby Gozo, both of which lie directly south of Sicily—another traditional identification. From there, a course of east by northeast would have taken Odysseus home.
Bradford’s reconstruction is something of a Grand Tour of the Mediterranean, but he argues from personal experience. It is, after all, the “accuracy of the framework” of the poem that concerns him. The same could be said of another British writer/sailor, Tim Severin, whose book The Ulysses Voyage: Sea Search for the Odyssey also attempts to retrace Odysseus’ route.
Severin specialized in actual recreations of epic voyages, and was a winner of the Founder’s Medal of the Royal Geographical Society. He also had a particular advantage: he was sailing a 54-foot replica of a Bronze Age galley. His expedition turns out to be a circumscribed one confined to the waters of Greece and the African coat south of Greece. But he concludes to his own satisfaction that “the Odyssey is demonstrably true to the realities of sailing and rowing a galley in the Mediterranean.”
Severin agrees with Bradford and others that a strong north wind blew Odysseus’ fleet past the Peloponnesian Peninsula. He believes that they continued southward under a “controlled drift” for nine days until they reached the land of the Lotus-Eaters on the coast of what is now Libya. This location is much farther east than Bradford and others have argued for, but Severin believes that most commentators have misjudged the abilities of the Bronze age Greeks.
When it comes to the actual fruit that the Lotus-Eaters consumed, Severin, like Bradford, suggests the jujube, but adds that “why it was supposed to make men lose their memories is not clear.” The problem identifying the lotus highlights the dilemma that any writer on the subject of Odysseus faces: what to accept as possibly genuine and what to ignore as folkloristic embellishment.
Since Severin locates the land of the Lotus Eaters farther east than other commentators, he places the land of the Cyclopes farther east as well, on the southwestern coast of Crete. He then makes the case for the island of King Aeolus as tiny Gramvousa, off the northwestern corner of Crete. According to the Odyssey, it was here that Aeolus gave Odysseus a leather bag holding the winds—a bag that the foolish sailors later opened while Odysseus slept. Gramvousa was once known as Korykos, which might seem to be of little consequence except that a korykos signified a leather bag to the ancient Greeks!
Where was the land of the Laestrygonian giants? Severin finds a possibility in the harbor of Mezapo on the Peloponnesian Peninsula. And Circe’s island? The little Ionian island of Paxos fits the bill. But Paxos lies farther north than Ithaca, as do the remaining sites that Severin links to Odysseus’ voyage. The renowned wanderer seems to have “sailed straight by his homeland.” How can that be?
Severin believes that here we’re reading another interpolation, a “separate cycle of tales” involving the Ionian Islands. He finds confirmation among the geographical features of particular islands and the folktales associated with them, but he doesn’t explain the skewed geographical order of these final adventures.
Severin supplies a more satisfying answer to a larger question: How did the “sites of Ulysses’ adventures, which are first on the logical coasting route homeward-bound from Troy and then in his native archipelago, come to be transferred hundreds of miles [as in Bradford’s reconstruction] to the western Mediterranean?” He theorizes that as the Greeks spread westward into Sicily and southern Italy, “they took their folktales with them,” pushing the mysterious edge of the world farther and farther west.
Severin’s reconstruction of Odysseus’ travels is a departure from previous ones, and, after Bradford’s Grand Tour, it’s something of a letdown. That’s no argument against its validity, of course, and it’s not the last word on a subject that, after all, can have no last word. It would be gratifying to listen to Bradford and Severin debate the subject some evening in a seaside taverna, but, alas, Bradford died in 1986 and Severin in 2020.
And that, in turn, leads to yet another consideration. The great Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges wrote that at the moment of his death, Shakespeare learned from God that he, like God Himself, was “everything and nothing.” Studied and debated for millennia not just by geographers and explorers but by novelists, poets, anthropologists and philosophers as well, Odysseus, it seems, is everywhere and nowhere.
BibliographyBradford, Ernle. Ulysses Found. Hodder and Stoughton, 1963.Homer. The Odyssey. Robert Fagles, trans. Viking, 1996.Severin, Tim. The Ulysses Voyage: Sea Search for the Odyssey. Hutchinson, 1987.
Grove Koger is the author of When the Going Was Good: A Guide to the 99 Best Narratives of Travel, Exploration, and Adventure, and Not, a chapbook of poetry. He’s Assistant Editor of Deus Loci: The Lawrence Durrell Journal and blogs about travel and related subjects on his website.
roman glass - a wonder of the ancient world
By Dr Sally Cottam
Cover image from Vassil on Wikimedia Commons
The manufacture of glass is one of the outstanding industrial accomplishments of the Roman period. Glass was not a new discovery; it had already been used for objects and vessels for around fifteen hundred years, but the Romans transformed glass production in terms of the quantity of glass produced, the uses to which it was put, and the artistic excellence that they achieved.
1. How was Roman Glass made?
The production of glass in the Roman period was divided into two stages. The first stage involved producing glass from raw ingredients. Once this raw glass had been created, it could then be transformed by glassworkers into vessels, windows and objects which were used across the Roman world. The basic ingredients of Roman glass are very similar to those used today. The largest component was silica in the form of sand, to which soda was added. Soda acted as a flux, allowing the silica to melt at a lower temperature. Lime, probably present as shell fragments in the sand, is also found in Roman glass and acted as a stabiliser. Extremely high temperatures, over 1000℃, were needed to transform these ingredients into glass. There is archaeological evidence for large furnaces making raw glass in Israel and Egypt and analytical work examining chemical isotopes has shown that glass made in the eastern Mediterranean was traded throughout the Roman world.
2. What was it used for?
In the Roman period, glass was mainly used to manufacture vessels. These ranged from everyday storage vessels such as bottles and flasks, through to exquisite and highly decorated artworks, epitomised by items such as the ‘Portland Vase’ in the British Museum. Whilst glass vessels were never as common as ceramic wares, they were used by all sections of society. One of the major consumers of glass was the military, and large groups of glass fragments have been recovered from forts in Britain and across the Roman world. Items of jewellery made from glass, such as beads, bangles and rings are frequently found on Roman sites, and glass was also used in considerable quantities to make windows. Although the glass in windows was never crystal clear, it was able to let light into buildings whilst keeping heat inside. This was particularly useful for heat retention in the caldarium of Roman bath houses. The archaeologist Janet Delaine calculated that about 3,400m^2 of glass was used in the windows of the Baths of Caracalla in Rome, but even small bath houses in forts and villas were equipped with glass panes. Glass tesserae in mosaics and glass inlays in an array of colours were also used in the decoration of floors and walls of private and public buildings.
3. What sort of colours were produced? How were the colours developed?
The Roman period was one of the most innovative and imaginative in the use of coloured glass. When glass was manufactured from raw ingredients it naturally had a bluish or greenish hue because of impurities, such as iron in the sand from which it was made. The majority of glass vessels and windows retained this natural colouring. However, the colour of glass could be modified by the addition of minerals, giving the Roman glassworker a multitude of colours to exploit, from deep purples and blues, through to yellows, reds, greens and browns. Different shades were often combined to create multi coloured vessels, as seen in a complete polychrome bowl from Nijmegen in the Netherlands (figure 1). Strong colours were at their most popular in the early Imperial period when Roman diners would have been presented with glass vessels in an array of bright shades. In the later 1st century CE, strong colours fell out of favour whilst natural bluish/green vessels were widely used alongside an increasing number of colourless vessels. Colourless glass was produced by adding a decolouring agent to the glass mix, such as antimony or manganese. Clear colourless glass was used from the later 1st century for good quality tablewares. Among the most distinctive earlier forms, which made full use of the refractive qualities of colourless glass, were facet-cut beakers such as the example from a cemetery at Barnwell near Cambridge (figure 2)
Fig. 1 A polychrome ribbed bowl from the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden, Leiden (Sally Cottam)
Fig. 2 A facet-cut beaker from the British Museum collection (Sally Cottam)
4. How did the manufacture of Roman glass evolve over time?
The Romans were impressive innovators in the production of glass. Perhaps the most significant development in glass vessel production, the discovery of glass blowing, occurred in the middle of the 1st century BCE, in the eastern Mediterranean. Within a few decades, knowledge of glass blowing had spread right across the Roman world. Glass blowing had the advantage over earlier methods of vessel production in that it became much easier to form many shapes and sizes of vessel, from open forms such as cups and bowls, to closed forms like jugs and bottles. Previous production methods included ‘core-forming’, an ancient technique where small containers were made by coating a core with molten glass. This technique had gone out of use by the 1st century CE. Glass cups and bowls could also be created by sagging or slumping discs of hot glass into or over a hemispherical form. Ribbed bowls, such as the bowl from Nijmegen mentioned above, were one of the latest forms produced in this way, before blowing glass eclipsed all previous technologies.A direct off-shoot of the discovery of blown glass was the development of mould-blown vessels. This technique involved expanding a bubble of hot glass into a mould with a pre-formed shape and decoration. Mould-blown glass was an enduring technology, used to produce a variety of vessel forms. Amongst the most decorative examples are the ‘sports cups’ of the 1st century CE, such as the cup from Colchester, now in the British Museum, depicting a chariot race (figure 3).
Fig. 3 A mould-blown glass vessel from the British Museum collection (Sally Cottam)
5. What role did Roman glass play in Rome's long distance trade relations?
Both raw glass and finished glass vessels and objects were traded over long distances. There are several sources of evidence for this trade. Scientific analysis of glass has shown that the sands used to make Roman glass came from the Eastern Mediterranean. This glass then travelled across the Roman world, as raw chunks and finished items. Shipwrecks containing cargoes of glass have been found throughout the Mediterranean Sea. A cargo of chunks of raw glass was found off the coast of Croatia and is now in the Museum of Ancient Glass in Zadar. Wrecks containing glass vessels have been recovered off the south coast of France, including a shipment of glass bowls from the Augustan period near the Îles de Lérins. A later wreck, from the 2nd century CE, known as Embiez Ouest 1, contained raw glass, glass vessels and windows. There is also evidence that glass fragments were transported for recycling. A ship which sank in the northern Adriatic Sea in the 2nd century CE, known to modern archaeologists as the Julia Felix, was carrying barrels of broken glass, presumably to be re-melted and re-used in glass workshops.As well as being traded within the Roman world, small quantities of glass also found their way to much more distant locations. Glass vessels were traded and exchanged along the Red Sea coast and across the Indian Ocean as far as modern India and China. Roman glass is also found at sites along the Silk Road. Excavations in the 1930s at Begram, north of Kabul in Afghanistan, uncovered a hoard of Roman artefacts, including glass vessels of the 1st and 2nd centuries CE.
6. How was recycling utilised in the production of glass art?
The transformation of glass into vessels and objects was practised in every province of the Roman Empire. As well as using raw glass, the Romans were enthusiastic at recycling glass. We know this from observations made by authors about life in Rome and from analysis of trace elements in Roman vessels. Brief references by Martial (Epigrams I, 41) and Statius (Silvae I, 6) suggest that in Rome at least the collection of glass fragments had some limited commercial value. In areas where raw glass was more difficult to source, glassworkers may have relied heavily on recycled glass, or ‘cullet’.
7. How did foreign cultural influence manifest in the production of Roman glass?
The Roman Empire was a diverse collection of peoples with a multitude of languages and ways of life. However, despite this variety, and bearing in mind that glass vessels were made at local workshops in all parts of the Roman world, there is often similarity in vessel forms from one end of the Empire to the other, particularly in the early Imperial period. Convex ribbed bowls, such as the example mentioned above from Nijmegen, were one of the most common forms of the 1st century CE, and are found in every province, from Britannia in the north-west to Syria in the east. During the Roman period, some localised vessel forms and decorative techniques developed, however, even during the late Roman period there was consistency in many types of vessels throughout the Empire, a testimony to the continuing ability of ideas, skills and products to spread across long distances.
8. What is the role of the Association for the History of Glass?
Anyone with an interest in Roman glass, and glass of all periods, might like to consider joining the Association for the History of Glass. The AHG is a charity based in the United Kingdom which promotes the study and appreciation of ancient and historical glass. The AHG hosts meetings and events several times a year on a range of topics relating to glass. Recently the AHG hosted a session at the Roman Archaeology Conference held at University College London in April 2024. The Association also provides small grants to support research into glass. More details about the association and how to become a member can be found on the AHG website here.
Sally Cottam completed her PhD on glass of the 1st century CE at King’s College, London in 2019. Previously she was the Research Assistant for the English Heritage funded 'Romano-British Glass Project' and worked on glass from numerous sites in England and abroad. She now works as a freelance specialist, concentrating on glass of the Roman period.
the ancient ruins of the roman villa of sant’andrea: sardinian sea and archaeology
By Viviana De Cecco
Baia dei Pescatori is a quiet corner of the coast in Flumini di Quartu, just a few kilometres from Cagliari’s Poetto beach on the island of Sardinia. Driving along the busy coastal road that leads to the popular tourist resort of Villasimius, only a keen eye can see the symbol of a road sign that stands a few metres from a restaurant and, although recently defaced by the hand of vandals, indicates the presence of an archaeological site among the streets on the right.
Turning onto a small white road that winds between holiday homes and reeds, you come to a kind of esplanade overlooking the Gulf of Angels, where a few local fishing boats are dried out next to cars parked in front of the entrance to a tourist office.
It is amazing how one is immediately immersed in an almost primordial atmosphere, where history and nature come together in a suggestive landscape dominated by the sound of the surf and the cries of cormorants resting on the rocks.
A few steps away from the small square, some blue benches offer shade and rest to weary tourists, while another gravel road, bordered on the left by the boundary wall of a private house and on the right by rocks overgrown with pungent wild fennel, leads to a concrete roundabout, built in modern times to ensure that visitors can admire in complete safety the ruins of the Roman villa of Sant’Andrea and a 16th century Spanish tower.
An iron railing allows you to lean out without fear to observe the fascinating play of light that the morning sun creates on the remains of the walls that rise from the water in their decaying splendor. At the mercy of the incessant dance of the tides, sometimes they are almost completely swallowed by the advancing sea, at other times they appear as strange visions of stone rising from the shallow uncovered seabed. Some of the walls that have survived sea erosion are just over a meter high and seem to form a kind of aedicula, flanked by two circular wells, only one of which is clearly distinguishable. On the west side, however, an incredible barrel vault roof can be seen, where terracotta slabs still support the floor of what must have been an upper floor.
Although a probable floor plan of the building has been reconstructed on the signs on the site, there are several hypotheses as to what the actual layout of the rooms was. The presence of small open areas, such as the aedicule or the wells, and other more enclosed spaces suggest that the villa was organized according to a varied pattern of covered and uncovered areas, sometimes not even connected to each other, and that it developed in a linear fashion, in the recurring pattern of maritime villas of the Republican or Imperial age.
In 238 B.C., at the end of the First Punic War, Sardinia had passed from Carthaginian to Roman rule, and Cagliari (Karales) itself was considered both a strategic military point and an important commercial crossroads. The town of Quartu itself took its name from the four miles that separated it from the capital.
It has not yet been possible to determine the exact period in which the villa was built, but the technique used for the masonry, consisting of the alternation of bricks and small ashlars, typical of Sardinia between the third and fourth centuries A.D., has been considered a valuable clue for dating the villa. Another important piece of evidence is the discovery of wall surfaces made of opus lateritium (from the Latin later, meaning unbaked) bricks, made of clay or mud dried in the sun and bound with mortar, which had begun to replace tufa blocks in the imperial period, and of those made of opus vittatum mixtum, a technique in which bricks are alternated with rows of sandstone blocks.”
On the scaled map it is clear that the villa was not of the same size as its more famous "colleagues" in Pompeii or Anzio, but the linear course along which it was built recalls, at least on paper, the architectural scheme often adopted in all the maritime dwellings of the period, which seemed to want to follow the straight orientation of the coast without excessive labyrinthine sinuosity.
It is therefore not surprising to conclude that the Villa of Sant’Andrea, unlike the rustic villas in the city or at least in the hinterland, is a rare example of a summer residence of a Roman family in the imperial age. It is well known that patricians on holiday liked to enjoy all the pleasures that life had to offer, and one wonders if this house, in its heyday, had at its heart the carefree licentiousness of the grandiose parties that no member of the wealthy classes would ever renounce.
However, some believe that it was not just a private place, but was also used as a thermal bath or for the production and breeding of fish.
Roman baths usually consisted of a frigidarium (cold bath room), a calidarium (hot bath room) and a tepidarium (tepid bath room). Underwater archaeological research has revealed a number of tegulae hamatae (terracotta tiles with projections used in the cavities of the calidarium to ensure the circulation of warm air), confirming the first hypothesis.
The second hypothesis, on the other hand, would be supported by the presence of some structures that appear to be small rooms with a square plan, rather small in size. Descending along a wooden walkway that serves as a guiding path, it is possible to realise how cramped these rooms, which appear on the northwestern slope of the site, were. Walking at a slow pace to observe them carefully, you can see the lines that sharply demarcate their boundaries, and it is not difficult to understand why the archaeologists concluded that they were probably not intended for domestic use, but rather for storage.
Since the villa of Sant’Andrea seems to fit these characteristics, it could be an interesting example of how part of the fish production was reserved for the owners, while the greater quantity was marketed throughout the Mediterranean. Along the coasts of the peninsula, it was not uncommon to find seaside villas that were more like a hybrid building, somewhere between a summer residence and a facility for rearing fish, preserving them in salt or sending them directly to the kitchens to make garum, the sauce made from entrails and salted fish that the ancient Romans loved and that was very popular in Sardinia. There was no lack of salt. The Romans had chosen an area of Quartu (called Cepola) to settle the slaves who would extract it in the nearby Molentargius pond. The villa of Sant’Andrea could easily have fit into this context of exploitation, becoming a warehouse.
Unfortunately, most of the remains have been partially covered by terracing to support the nearby watchtower, built by the Spanish in the 16th century to defend the coast, especially against corsair raids, and demolished in the 1960s. On the one hand, it is unfortunate that it was erected on top of the older ruins; on the other, it partially protected them from erosion and their total disappearance. The landscape has also been disfigured by the unrestrained cementing of modern people, who, in their greed to steal space that does not rightfully belong to them, have ruined the pristine face of the coast.
At the end of this short tour, it is necessary to take a break. Sitting on the long seats covered with wooden planks, arranged in a semicircle facing each other in the centre of the rotunda, there is a feeling of peace and serenity. Perhaps, almost two thousand years ago, a Roman matron walked on this very spot, enjoying the coolness of an otium evening, when the mistral wind blows fiercely from the north, while her husband composed some poems in front of the fiery sunset, which has been lost in the waves of the sea along with the other vestiges of a lost time.
Viviana De Cecco is an Italian writer and translator. She works as a content writer and book reviewer for Tint Journal and NewMyths. She writes historical and cultural articles for several American/English and Italian magazines, including the Italian magazine InStoria about history and tourism archaeology. Her poems, translations, short stories and photography have appeared in Yuvoice.org, Poets' Choice, The Sunlight Magazine, Seaside Gothic, Grim&Gilded, Hiraeth Publishing, Pressfuls Press, Dark Holme Publishing, The Polyglot Magazine, and Azonal Translation. Since 2013 she has published more than 50 short stories, poems and novels of various genres. Her articles and short stories can be found here.
ao3, myth, and the power of fan-fiction
An exploration into how modern fan fiction can impact the classical field, and vice versa.
Samantha Ng (EIC)
Julia Neugarten
Julia Neugarten is conducting PhD research at Radboud University to explore how fan fiction from Archive of Our Own (AO3) transforms, retains, or rewrites elements from Greek mythology.
Why did you choose to explore the link between Greek Mythology and fan fiction?When I was doing my master’s in literary studies, I gradually became frustrated that we were almost exclusively talking about literature that was part of the western literary canon, while in my free time I was almost exclusively reading fanfiction. I knew that there was this beautiful, productive, creative, and fascinating literary community out there that literary scholars were often overlooking. I became interested in applying methods and theories from literary studies to fanfiction. I spent quite some time applying to PhD-programs with that idea, and in the end I was inspired by the Anchoring Innovation project to dive into fanfiction about Greek myth. Turns out that it's an absolute treasure trove of fascinating stories!I also think there are similarities between the way the storyworld of Greek mythology is structured and the way fanfiction is being written and read online these days. Myths change their meaning and shape from one author or source to the next, and there isn’t necessarily one definitive version of each myth. Rather, all the different retellings offer varying perspectives, and because audiences often know many different versions of a story or myth, these layer over each other and all contribute to an overarching understanding of the storyworld, its characters and the associated plot events. Fanfiction can function similarly by placing different versions of a story or character in dialogue with each other.
What sort of methods are you using in your research to analyse fanfiction?I have a very large corpus of fanfiction – more than 5000 stories. In total, it’s almost 28 million words. It would probably take me about seven years to read all of that, and I have four years to complete my PhD. So aside from some of the methods that are common to literary and cultural studies – close reading of individual works, their stylistic choices, narrative form, the way they represent selected themes and concepts – I am also applying some methods from computational literary studies to discern large-scale patterns in the corpus.My dissertation is structured around three concepts: power, emotion, and repetition. I’ve noticed that fanfiction often shifts or rewrites elements of Greek myth to explore power relations, particularly between men and women. While these myths frequently contain unequal gendered power dynamics with men overpowering women and women having little agency, contemporary fanfiction often turns these dynamics on their head. In the chapter on power, I am examining several case studies that represent gendered power dynamics in different ways, and I am also looking into computational approaches to extract power dynamics from text. The emotion chapter looks at the ways characters’ emotions are represented and explored in fanfiction, but also at the emotional ties that fans have to Antiquity and the way fanfiction communities feel attached to mythology. Finally, the repetition chapter will chart how (re)writing the same or similar stories over and over again functions as a mechanism for creatively exploring and questioning culturally dominant representations of power and emotions.That’s just how I’m envisioning it now, about halfway through the project. So any of that may still change.
Can you explain what anchoring innovation is?The concept (or rather, concepts) of anchoring innovation essentially describe a process of embedding the new in the old. The idea is that innovations in culture, society or technology need to be sufficiently anchored in what is familiar, understood or known within a particular cultural context if these innovations are to be successfully taken up.An interesting example of anchoring innovation is this advertisement, cited by Ineke Sluiter, the leader of the Anchoring Innovation project in a 2018 article.
The advertisement reads ‘Plants are the new cows.’ Thus, a product that is new or innovative (note how it literally says ‘nieuw’, the Dutch word for new, at the bottom), namely a plant-based milk, is advertised by linking it conceptually to a product that is already known or familiar to prospective buyers: milk that comes from cows. The innovation of introducing a plant-based staple into your diet is made to seem familiar by its connection to something that is already known. This is anchoring innovation. More broadly, the concept(s) of anchoring innovation can be used in the humanities and social sciences to study cultural change, shifting societal norms, and changes to what is considered familiar or new, stable or innovative in different periods of history.
What role does anchoring innovation have in the relationship between mythology and fan fiction?That question is central to my dissertation, and it’s something I’m still grappling with. On the one hand, fanfiction about Greek myth seems to be innovating stories that are culturally very familiar and old (the myths). If you look at it that way, mythology is the anchor and something like a feminist retelling, or a work of fanfiction that centers interiority, individuality and emotionality rather than a large-scale societal drama like the Trojan War, is a contemporary adaptation or innovation of that anchor.But when I read fanfiction about Greek myth I sometimes get the sense that the tropes and narrative structures that are popular in fanfiction communities, things like enemies-to-lovers stories or the coffeeshop alternate universe, are actually more familiar to those communities than antiquity is. If that’s the case, then those fanfiction staples can be considered the anchors while introducing a mythological figure like Hades or Zeus into that storyworld is more of an innovation from the community’s perspective. I think these dynamics are different in every story, and they also differ between readers and writers; what is familiar or known to one person may be completely innovative and surprising to someone else.
Do you think fan fiction can provide people with a pathway to classical studies? Why or why not?Yes, definitely!People navigate their fanfiction-reading in lots of different ways. Archive of Our Own, the website that my research focuses on, currently hosts over 13 million stories (Rebaza 2024) so people have to filter and select stories based on personal preferences such as particular characters, storyworlds or tropes. In an interesting survey conducted by Fansplaining, 31% of the 6.744 respondents said that they sometimes (or even always!) read fanfiction while they weren’t familiar with the source material, often because someone they trusted recommended it, or because the story contained a trope they enjoyed. And 50% of respondents reported that this then led them to have a look at the source material later. This makes me pretty confident that fanfiction can sometimes lead people to dive into mythology, and maybe even into its academic study.
Do you have any thoughts regarding how access to classical studies can be improved?This is a difficult question for me to answer, because the cultural, infrastructural, and economic factors that influence access to classical studies differ vastly between countries. Personally, I am based in the Netherlands, where Classics (both Latin and Ancient Greek) have a relatively large role in secondary education compared to other European countries or the USA. I think this also leads them to have a more firmly entrenched position in universities, and while those seeking a university education certainly face barriers to access, I think these barriers are probably relatively similarly distributed across all humanities disciplines and not specific to classics.I will say that studying fanfiction about Greek myth has made me keenly aware that I have been socialized to value some types of knowledge and practices over others: academic knowledge over affective or fannish knowledge, scholarly writing over creative writing, classical culture over popular culture. The more fanfiction I read about Greek mythology, the more I think these hierarchies of knowledge and skill are elitist and silly, and they exclude valuable, original, and surprising ideas and insights and the people who produce them. In October I’ll be organizing a small conference titled Fanfiction and the Ancient World Together with my colleague Amanda Potter. We’re hoping to create a space where scholarly and fannish knowledge can enter into dialogue with each other.
Can you tell us about how you were introduced to the classical world?My mother is a classicist. When I was a child, she would read me retellings of Greek mythology by Dutch author Imme Dros. Later I read Percy Jackson and the Olympians by Rick Riordan, and then I went to the type of secondary school – a ‘gymnasium’ – where they teach Latin and Ancient Greek. So I was introduced to the classical world from an early age, and then developed that interest further in secondary school and beyond.
What's your favorite fan fiction?Ooh, that’s difficult. I read lots of different types of fanfiction for lots of different reasons. Additionally, there is, or at least there used to be, a pretty strong social norm within fanfiction communities that you shouldn’t point ‘outsiders’ to works of fanfiction because that might lead to unwanted attention or even criticism and ridicule.Keeping that in mind, I’m going to go with Subliminal by Speranza. The story was included – with permission from its author – in Francesca Coppa’s anthology The Fanfiction Reader: Folk Tales for the Digital Age, which I take as a kind of blanket permission for people not well-versed in the readerly norms of fanfiction communities to have a peek at it.It’s a story based on the BBC’s TV adaptations of Sherlock Holmes, Sherlock, from the 2010’s. I was an avid reader of Sherlock fanfiction for a while, and Subliminal has all the features that made this fandom, and fanfiction in general, so appealing. In the story, Sherlock solves a mystery through his cleverness, and throughout his interior monologue, observations and deductions are documented through a mix of footnotes and smaller print. This way, the story visually communicates what it feels like for Sherlock’s brain to go a million miles an hour and to follow multiple trains of thought simultaneously. Thus, the story alludes to both the content-level source material of Sherlock (by narrating a mysterious crime), and the TV adaptation’s visual language (by integrating Sherlock’s thought processes visually in the story, just like the TV show did). Finally, the footnotes and small print insertions also bring together the different elements that make much Sherlock fanfiction so fun: they integrate the subtextual attraction and romance between Sherlock and his roommate John Watson into the action-packed whirlwind of their lives. I love this story because it skillfully incorporates exactly what makes fanfiction so great; your enjoyment reading Subliminal is greatly increased if you’re also familiar with the source material it’s transforming and you can spot all the little references and allusions. Additionally, the story makes clever use of fanfiction’s online means of distribution, where differences in font size and insertion of footnotes are easily formatted.As a sidenote, Speranza is kind of famous in fandom circles for contributing intensively to the infrastructure that has made (online) fandom possible, so they deserve all the acclaim they can get.
Finally, what's your favorite myth?For some reason this is the question I struggled with most. I don’t feel a very strong emotional or fannish connection to many myths, although I am a huge fan of Madeline Miller’s novel Song of Achilles and everything fanfiction communities have done with it. Through reading so much fanfiction about Greek myth, my appreciation for the Hades and Persephone myth has also grown. Although when I first encountered it in school I was horrified, I think fans are finding interesting ways to reclaim power in rewriting that myth.
More information about Julia Neugarten's work can be found on her personal website and on Anchoring Innovation's website
keeping our share: why the elgin marbles need to stay where they are
By Dr Mario Trabucco della Torretta
The marbles in the British Museum, photo from Arthur Dunn
After more than 200 years of incessant debate on the collection of sculptures assembled by the 7th Earl of Elgin on the Acropolis of Athens, you can almost say that arguments in favour of sending them back to Greece have assumed a formulaic nature. They must invariably contain copious references to Lord Byron, appeal to the good nature of the reader to hear the plight of an “oppressed” nation, generously spread unqualified terms like “looting” and “stealing”, duly mention the “cleaning scandal”, and attack the “slippery slope” argument by arguing that the Parthenon is a unique case. But above all, whatever the circumstances, they must vigorously deny any credibility to the so-called “firman”. These are the mandatory ingredients. There are also optional ones: a parallel between the Turks and the Nazis, a depiction of Lord Elgin as a greedy social climber (favoured more by opportunity than by his own wits), commentary on his divorce and contingent financial difficulties, allegations of bribery, and so many more. Try that yourself: ask any large language model to produce an essay on the Elgin Marbles along those lines, and you will be greeted by a text that is virtually indistinguishable from the countless journalistic articles on the same subject you can easily find on the web. Mr Wexler’s piece in this magazine mixes the mandatory and optional ingredients in his particular recipe, avoiding the more openly polemical bits, and seasoning the whole with a modicum of spicy decolonisation sauce. Alas, for all his evident skill, he cannot escape the original sin affecting all of those ingredients: they are entirely false. Let’s start with the firman. Though we do not possess the original Turkish document, we know virtually everything about it: who drafted it (Rev.d Hunt), who wrote it (Bartolomeo Pisani), who translated it into Italian (Antonio Danè), what it said (thanks to the translation), who brought it to Athens (the imperial commissary Rashid Aga), who received it (the Voivode and the Chief Judge of Athens) and who acted upon it (the Acropolis commander). Not bad for a “ghost document”, eh? But there is more: John Galt affirms to have seen the Turkish original, and Byron, Dodwell, Mary Nisbet and Hobhouse all mention it as the authority for the removal of the antiquities from the Acropolis. Historians such as William StClair and Edhem Eldem accept the authenticity of the so-called firman as a real historical document, reinforced by references to it in both British and Ottoman official documents from the archives. Also legal scholars like Alexander Herman do not dispute the legal efficacy of the instrument, saying that “on the balance of evidence” any court of law would be bound to find in favour of the UK. In the face of the historical evidence, Elgin’s story holds up pretty well. And why wouldn’t it? Imagine the opposite scenario: a bunch of foreigners waltz into a military base and start taking down building materials, reworking huge marble blocks, shipping everything away for months and with hundreds of hired labourers, and the soldiers there do… nothing? Ludicrous. The reality is that neither the existence nor “the veracity of the firman” is really in doubt, and any attempt to impeach its legal validity ends up in failure. Bribes? There is literally zero historical evidence to support this. Permission granted by an occupying power? Even more ridiculous. The right of conquest was a prominent feature of international law until well into the 20th century. Occupation is also codified in law as a concept, requiring that its nature be temporary and that the occupied people not switch allegiance in the meantime. Can anyone really maintain (and document) that the people of Athens in 1801 were still loyal -after 343 years- to the Florentine dukes of Athens, the rightful sovereigns of the crusader state created there in 1204 and overrun by the Ottoman conquest in 1458? Considering the evidence with honesty and impartiality, only one interpretation is possible: the Ottoman government, the legitimate and internationally recognised sovereign authority over Athens, had willingly decided to alienate some bits of public property and give them to the British ambassador as a gift. To sum it up, they did what was in their own right to do. I know that staring at this fact makes us baulk in horror. Yet, we must not make the mistake of thinking that people in Athens two centuries ago had the same kind of regard and sensibility about the cultural heritage we have today. As historians, we have a duty to get to know our subjects, their ideas, and their morals and try to explain with those elements why people from the past made this or that historical choice. The acquisition of the Elgin Collection makes no difference; as a historical fact, it has a context and it may be successfully explained without the use of concepts and norms that were not current in that particular time and place. The Ottoman documents found by Eldem mention that “there is no harm in ceding” the Marbles to Elgin and that “there is no harm in granting permission for the transport and passage of the said stones”, the main reason being that “stones of this kind, decorated with figures, are not held in consideration among Muslims, but are appreciated by the Frankish states”. From their point of view, they were closing the deal of a lifetime: giving away something that had relatively low value in their eyes while getting political goodwill from a powerful ally in exchange. It wasn’t much different for the Greek-speaking population of Athens. The Archbishop had been very generous with Elgin and his family, gifting them antiquities found in or around various ecclesiastical properties. Ancient monuments did not receive much love from the Orthodox hierarchies, who considered them to be relics of a pagan past that was best ignored by good, God-fearing Christians. Emblematic of this attitude is the case of the temple of Artemis Agrotera on the Ilissos river: the little building, a smaller version of the temple of Athena Nike, was initially converted into a country chapel and seen in this state by Stuart and Revett in 1765. Only three years later, the building had been dismantled with the blessing of the Archbishop so that the building materials could be split, partly used to build a new church and partly passed to the Voivode to reinforce the fortification wall around the city. The leading men of the city, the demogerontes, were all very supportive of Elgin’s mission as it brought a wave of prosperity to the city in the form of wages for the hundreds of labourers needed to move, cut, and transport the heavy marbles slabs. This attitude should not surprise us too much. In 1801, nobody in Athens shared the appreciation and reverence shown by the Western travellers for the antiquities of the city. The authors of the Greek Enlightenment lament, still in the first decade of the 19th century, how “our people do not have any idea not even of their ancestors” (Sakellarios), noting that “the publication of [Greek] writers is totally new to us” (Korais). This does not mean that there were no protests when Elgin’s men removed the statues and friezes from the citadel: we know there were some from both Greeks and Turks. Yet these protests were not motivated by a genuine antiquarian preoccupation to safeguard a shared heritage seen as the physical embodiment of a common cultural identity (which was instead Elgin’s main preoccupation, in the face of impending dilapidation), but rather by the fear of losing elements impregnated with magical connotations and whose departure could have endangered the welfare and wellbeing of the community. Many travellers recount stories of popular attachment to statues and inscriptions seen as foci of thaumaturgic power, channels of chthonian energies, or guarantors of soil fertility so long as they remained in their place. Some of the stories even support their removal, narrating of ancient spirits chained within the sculptures that could only be set free once away from the lands dominated by the Turks. For many years, these stories have been brushed off as inventions made by locals to impress gullible Western travellers or even constructs engineered by those same travellers to justify the extraction of antiquities in the name of colonialistic superiority and Eurocentric “scientific” knowledge. The reality is that dismissing these stories is the true colonialistic act, and, as argued by Yannis Hamilakis, it is only by recognising these “indigenous archaeologies” as legitimate modes of knowledge that we truly start to “decolonise Greek archaeology”. Read in this light, the Ottoman gesture of granting Elgin his wish to take away “any pieces of stone with inscriptions and figures” must appear not only legitimate but also fully justifiable and consistent with the culture within which it originates. No imperial strongarming, just a free and mutually beneficial exchange between consenting parties acting as equals. To talk of imperialistic coercion, colonialistic exploitation, and peoples with no voice just to make sense of an act that we cannot possibly contemplate from our point of view here and now would be a failure to recognise that -in the words of L. P. Hartley- “the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there”, and we should just respect that. Sure, let’s even accept what happened in the past -I hear you say- but “there is a thing called progress”, to quote a prominent Greek repatriationist. Should we be stuck in a situation whose fundamentals we no longer share just because it may be argued that it made sense two hundred years ago? I shall suggest three reasons why we should. When it comes to museums, I see two main reasons why we go to great lengths to collect, preserve and display all this “old stuff”, and the choice of reason is dependent on the nature of the object. There are items coming from distant places, in time or space, which we keep to remind ourselves that other ways are possible, to educate our intellects on the idea of diversity. These are usually objects that cannot be reconciled with our own Western cultural identity, like a war drum or a moai. On the other side of the spectrum, there are objects that tell us, one way or another, who we have been, how we used to do things and think about the world. We keep these items to tell us about ourselves. From this second perspective, the Elgin Marbles truly belong in a British museum, as they illustrate aspects of our own culture that are still present today after two and a half millennia of cultural evolution: the beauty of the human form, democratic ideals, the preservation of order from the attack of chaos and entropy. These were the same reasons that prompted Elgin to bankrupt himself in an effort to save what he rightly considered as important relics of our past on the point of being obliterated. Even this effort is a story in its own right, the story of our love and reverence for our ancient past, the Grand Tour, antiquarianism and the birth of scientific archaeology. These are stories of British people (and of all Westerners in general) that you can rightly explore in the British Museum. The Elgin Marbles are not out of place in those rooms; there is a historical and cultural reason why they are there and not still in Athens or converted into dust at the foot of the Acropolis. And since their acquisition, they have been reigniting our cultural discourse time and again, renewing the arts in Britain and beyond (just as Lord Elgin had intended) in a story of Classical reception and reuse that we are still in the process of fully untangling. Even if you were to struggle in hearing these remarks, even if you -against all evidence to the contrary- still considered the acquisition of the Marbles a robbery and a historical wrong to be righted, I would tell you there is a place for them in our museums. Museums are not just there to enlighten us about what we like about ourselves. They sometimes show us our darkest side and prompt us to confront it, to enter into a dialogue with a difficult past so we can learn a valuable lesson. In our museums, we learn about all the hundreds of different ways we kill each other, we learn about slavery, torture, and humiliation. The items that exemplify those stories are not there as a celebration but as a memento. It would be dishonest of us just to present an edulcorated and idealised version of our history, sanitised and stripped of all the items that make us blush. Contested heritage, when legitimately and legally acquired (as in the case of the Elgin Marbles), is much more valuable as an educational tool in our museums than it would ever be as a celebration in the country of origin. This last point is even more important when returned heritage is sought as a prop for a narrative that is more ideologic than historical. Museums, because of their role in displaying identity, have deep political connotations and are prime targets for distortions and instrumentalisations. Since the very birth of the modern Greek state, Greek antiquities have been the embodiment of an idea: that the new Greek people are the inheritors of the cultural legacy of the ancient Greeks, passed to them in an unbroken cultural (and genetic) line through the centuries, and justifying their possession of the land that was their forefathers. The new Greeks immediately started to assert control over this legacy of highly symbolic objects, enacting legislation and creating museums, universities and bureaucracies around them. The trouble is that -as Stathis Gourgouris affirms- “the Hellenic civilisation as we know it was in effect the invention of the ‘science of antiquity’, of Classics”. And not just any idea of Classics, but one born and nurtured in that German-speaking world that would express the first kings and elite of the new nation-state. In this framework, the return of the Elgin Marbles would only be a tribute to the desired image of the modern Greeks, one of the missing pieces in the Bavarian propaganda project started by Leo von Klenze when he razed to the ground all the post-Classical history on the Acropolis. It would be the finishing touch to a colonial project the insurgents voluntarily embraced in order to obtain their independence, one which still weaponises the past in order to justify the present. The Elgin Marbles are where they are legitimately and with reason. Not only have we no cause to remove them from London, but to be authentically anti-colonial and genuinely Philhellenic, we should reject any idea of ever returning them to Athens.Reading suggestions:- Edhem Eldem, “From Blissful Indifference to Anguished Concern: Ottoman Perceptions of Antiquities, 1799–1869”, in Z. Bahrani/Z. Çelik/E. Eldem (edd.), Scramble for the Past. A Story of Archeology in the Ottoman Empire, 1753–1914, Istanbul 2011, pp. 281–329
- Alexander Herman, The Parthenon Marbles dispute, London 2023
- Yannis Hamilakis, “Decolonizing Greek archaeology: indigenous archaeologies, modernist archaeology and the post-colonial critique” in D. Damaskos and D. Plantzos (eds), A Singular Antiquity, Athens 2008, pp. 273-84.
- Stathis Gourgouris, Dream Nation: Enlightenment, colonisation, and the institution of modern Greece, Stanford 2021.
- Elizabeth Marlowe, "From Exceptionalism to Solidarity: the Rhetoric of the Case for the Parthenon Sculptures' Return," Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal 41 (2023), 125-50.
whose marbles? britain, greece, and the parthenon
By Dominic Wexler
Twitter: @djwexler
The Parthenon Marbles, photo from the BBC
By natural law it is just that no one should be enriched by another's loss or injury.1
- Sextus Pomponius, Roman Jurist.2 Here at Aôthen, through our Artifacts Project, we are committed to raising awareness about cultural artifacts whose ownership is contested. So, the campaign to return the Parthenon Marbles to Greece falls well within our ambit. Indeed, it compels us to join the Greek cause and lobby for reunification. Greece’s long crusade for restitution began right after its independence in 1832, and yet to this day the British Museum and its abettors insist on keeping the Marbles in London. Greece has been denied the natural right to its cultural heritage in a tragedy spurred by a diplomat and maintained by a museum. Between 1801 and 1812 the workmen of Thomas Bruce 7th Earl of Elgin—otherwise known as Lord Elgin—hacked away at Athena’s temple. Elgin sought social aggrandisement, and the fragments he had carved off of the Parthenon served as an avenue to finance his climb up the English class system. So, he bundled what he had taken from the Parthenon onto ships, ferried it over to England, and sold it to the British Parliament. Sections of the frieze, metopes, and pedimental figures–the Marbles–were then transferred to the British Museum for safekeeping. The museum’s official position in the ownership dispute can be found under their webpage for the ‘Parthenon Sculptures’: Lord Elgin, after being granted a “permit”, “removed about half of the remaining sculptures from the ruins of the Parthenon”3. The Marbles were acquired, bought, and are held lawfully. Only an Italian copy of the supposed permit (or ‘firman’) authorising Elgin’s ‘removals’ has been found. When translated into English, the document clearly limited Elgin’s workers to taking moulds and measurements of the Parthenon, along with a general right to collect rubble and stones littered around it. This contradicts the British Museum’s narrative that pieces of the Parthenon were allowed to be “removed” (a euphemism for ‘sawn-off’). Moreover, the veracity of the firman is in doubt. At the time of Elgin’s despoilment, Greece was under the control of the Ottoman Empire. This meant the Parthenon fell squarely under the jurisdiction of the Sultan, whose formal decrees were adumbrated in the firmans. Yet the firman assenting to Elgin’s expedition does not adhere to official protocols, this indicates the Sultan never gave his approval. The decree is not dated in Arabic, its formal preamble is missing, and the Sultan’s emblem and monogram are entirely absent. The evidence establishes that Elgin’s permit was illegitimate. The firman did not sanction Elgin’s project, and it certainly did not authorise his vandalism. Still, despite there being no valid legal claim to the Marbles, the British Museum clings to the idea that they ought to remain in London. Four key arguments are associated with this position: the “encyclopaedic museum”, the “slippery slope”, the “matter of law”, and the “Elginisation” objections. Each appeals to the colonial impulse, and each has been repudiated by academics4, lawyers5, and writers6. Curators like James Cuno7 appeal to the “encyclopaedic museum” for justification. Apparently, keeping the Marbles in the British Museum makes them more accessible to the public. By presenting the metopes, frieze, and pedimental figures alongside cultural pieces from Africa, Italy, and Asia, visitors can appreciate the Marbles in a global (hence encyclopaedic) context. Encyclopaedists contend that this arrangement facilitates Greek culture far better than a united Parthenon ever could. But the Marbles, by definition, cannot be authentically appreciated until they are reunified with the Parthenon from which they were wrenched. They exist in a Greek context only, not in the global context Cuno and his supporters thrust upon us. Filling museums with broken segments of architecture does not advance culture, it dilutes it. The British Museum must substitute the Marbles with plaster casts like those Elgin was originally commissioned to make. Others fear that reunification will trigger a slippery slope: if the British Museum returns the Marbles, where do they draw the line? Must every demand for restitution be satisfied? These questions would carry little weight unless those expressing this concern were aware that entire collections had been dubiously acquired. The confession is implicit in the question. If there is sufficient reason to return a stolen artifact it ought to be returned. As for the Marbles, reunification does not engender a dangerous precedent because the Parthenon has no analogue: Greece endures (unlike, say, Carthage), the Marbles are not a complete work (they are pieces), and the Acropolis Museum in Athens has a dedicated space for them once they are repatriated. Accordingly, fears of an ineluctable declension are unfounded. In late 20238, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and leader of the Conservative Party dodged the issue. He assessed the Parthenon dispute as being ‘a matter of law’. According to Sunak, whether or not the Marbles are repatriated is a decision for the museum trustees, not for the government. But a majority of the trustees (15 of the 25) are appointed by the Prime Minister. Consequently, all Sunak needs to do is pack the board with trustees eager to return the Marbles to Greece. Although it is true the British Museum lacks authority to cede museum property carte blanche, the government can amend the 1963 British Museum Act. By repealing Section 3(4) of the Act, the trustees appointed by Sunak would become authorised to de-accession the Elgin Collection. In fact, this would not be the first time the government used legislation to circumvent de-accession restrictions: the Holocaust (Return of Cultural Objects) Act of 2009 established the right of British Museum trustees to return artwork stolen from Jewish owners by the Gestapo during World War II. So Sunak should appoint new trustees and amend the law. Simple. However, do we need to consider the British Museum’s 200 year conservation of the Marbles? As custodians, has London generated a greater right to the Marbles than Greece? This is the ‘Elginisation’ argument, and of all the arguments against reunification, it is the most repugnant. Its logic would exempt a burglar (and his or her beneficiaries) from returning stolen property provided they were responsible. It would mean that so long as a requisite standard of care is maintained over a sufficient duration of time, theft transmogrifies into ownership. This perversion of property rights is, prima facie, wrong. You cannot excuse plunder because the looter happens to be a better steward. Ergo, Elgin cannot be exculpated with appeals to the British Museum’s record, and even if you could, the British Museum has never been a responsible custodian–it has neither protected nor conserved Elgin’s spoils9. In the 20th century, the Marbles were ‘whitened’ with scouring agents and copper rods in what came to be known as the ‘Duveen cleaning scandal’. During the whitening, original surfaces were cut away, hammered at, and scraped off. The harm was deemed so egregious that an internal inquiry found the damage was “obvious and cannot be exaggerated”10. The notion that the British Museum at any point in time generated an entitlement to the Marbles is baseless on both moral and factual grounds. Evidently, the British Museum has profited from illegal taking. Museums fatuously described as ‘encyclopaedic’ are conglomerations of mass larceny rebranded as temples of edification; that was not their design, it is merely post hoc rationalisation. The Marbles and the Parthenon have no equivalent–historically, culturally, or architecturally–meaning reunification will not bring about a slippery slope. Legislative fatalism is another red herring. Amending British Museum policy is as achievable as the UK government is willing. And finally–and most obviously–stealing is wrong, no matter how conscientious you might be. Not one of the aforementioned arguments are compelling enough to override Greece’s enduring right to its culture. A fortiori, Greece’s claim to its cultural heritage is legitimate and incontestable. There is no case for keeping the Marbles in London and every reason to return them to Greece. Here at Aôthen, we enjoin the UK government to give back what was never theirs.— Mortal! — — 't was thus she spake — — that blush of shame
Proclaims thee Briton, once a noble name;
First of the mighty, foremost of the free,
Now honour'd less by all, and least by me:
Chief of thy foes shall Pallas still be found.
Seek'st thou the cause of loathing? — look around.
Lo! here, despite of war and wasting fire,
I saw successive tyrannies expire;
'Scaped from the ravage of the Turk and Goth,
Thy country sends a spoiler worse than both.- The Curse of Minerva, Lord Byron on the Parthenon and British depredations.11
1 Jure naturae aequum est neminem cum alterius detrimentum et injuria fieri locupletiorem.2 Jack G. Handler and James Arthur Ballentine, Ballentine’s Law Dictionary, 1994, http://ci.nii.ac.jp/ncid/BA22885743.3 “The Parthenon Sculptures,” The British Museum, n.d., https://www.britishmuseum.org/about-us/british-museum-story/contested-objects-collection/parthenon-sculptures.4 Professor Vassilis Demetriades, “Was The Removal Illegal?,” n.d., http://www.parthenon.newmentor.net/illegal.htm; “Profs. Zeynep Aygen & Orhan Sakin | Ottoman Archives for the Acropolis,” The Acropolis Museum, February 19, 2019, https://www.theacropolismuseum.gr/en/multimedia/profs-zeynep-aygen-orhan-sakin-ottoman-archives-acropolis.5 Geoffrey Robertson, Who Owns History? (Random House Australia, 2020).6 Christopher Hitchens, Robert Browning, and Graham Binns, The Elgin Marbles: Should They be Returned to Greece? (Verso, 1997); Christopher Hitchens, Imperial Spoils: The Curious Case of the Elgin Marbles (Hill & Wang, 1988).7 OxfordUnion, “We Should NOT Repatriate Artefacts | Dr James Cuno | 4 of 6,” January 10, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmY6tkTBaks.8 Aletha Adu, “Sunak Says Retaining Parthenon Marbles Is Matter of Law as He Denies ‘Hissy Fit,’” The Guardian, December 1, 2023, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2023/dec/01/sunak-parthenon-marbles-matter-of-law-denies-hissy-fit.9 William St Clair, “The Elgin Marbles: Questions of Stewardship and Accountability,” International Journal of Cultural Property 8, no. 2 (January 1, 1999): 391–521,
https://doi.org/10.1017/s0940739199770803.10 Neils, Jenifer. “Cleaning and Controversy: The Parthenon Sculptures 1811-1939. By Ian Jenkins.” American Journal of Archaeology 107, no. 3 (July 1, 2003): 507–9. https://doi.org/10.1086/ajs40025412.11Lord Byron, The Curse of Minerva, 4th ed. (Galignani, 1820).
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about aôthen
Aôthen Magazine is a magazine that celebrates archaeology and history by publishing a wide range of work on the ancient Mediterranean. This ranges from creative writing and visual art to academic essays. We derive our name from the Doric Greek term ἀῶθεν, which means ‘the earliest dawn’.We aspire to create a welcoming environment that inspires the public to engage with the ancient world, regardless of educational background. Aôthen also encourages the exploration of modern, abstract, and non-traditional perspectives on the ancient world.
about the editor-in-chief
Aôthen Magazine is run by Samantha Ng, a UCL Classical Archaeology and Classical Civilization student. Her experience as a WOC student struggling to engage in classics fuelled her desire to create an environment where classical studies are made accessible. Samantha has been published twice in Ethos Magazine (HK). She has worked as an editor at Coexist Lit and Incognito Press and is currently the communications co-lead at the Saving Ancient Studies Alliance. Apart from writing, she enjoys graphic design, listening to music, and walking through parks.
about the team
Kaitlin Smith is an early career academic. She is currently pursuing her MA in literary studies at Georgia State University where she works as a graduate teaching assistant. Her research interests include 19th-C. British Romanticism, Classicism, and Ancient Greek tragedies. She holds a BA in English - Creative Writing and a BIS in Classical Studies. Connect with Kaitlin on Twitter and on Instagram @kaitlin_writes.
Dominic Wexler is an Australian law student who writes about history, literature, politics, and the law. He has had multiple essays published and advocates for the rights of writers with the NGO PEN Sydney. Dominic has a particular interest in late republican Rome and Greco-Roman political philosophy. You can find him on Substack, Instagram, and Twitter @dominicwexler.
Abby Masucol (she/her) hails from the Chicago suburbs. She recently graduated college and is pursuing publishing, amongst various interests and passion projects in digital media. Abby also writes poems and short fiction in her free time. When she's not writing, she works as a part-time (glorified) librarian, collects prints, and reads fantasy series. Find her on Twitter & Instagram @abbytama_.
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issue one
contributors
Steph Harris
Brian Sheffield
Prosper Ifeanyi
Irina Novikova
Helen Jenks
Amanda Williams
Ginger Hanchey
Jonathan Rentler
Enna Horn
Megan Hamilton
Ame McLachan
Clem Flowers
Kaitlin Smith
Michelle Rochniak
Josephine Weaver
Courtney Felle
issue two
contributors
K.B. Rich
Tom Farr
Andy Vandoren
Livia Meneghin
Niamh Mcnally
Noll Griffin
Natalie Vestin
Megan Jones
Abi Deniz
Hana Kim
Hilary Tam
Paulin Lim
Louise Mather
Khushi Jain
Irteqa Khan
issue three
contributors
Michelle Janowiecki
Kahina
April Yu
s. g. mallett
Tamiko Dooley
Muhammed Olowonjoyin
Italo Ferrante
J.W. Wood
Rebecca Ferrier
Justin Cruzana
rebecca herrera alegria
Anthony O'Donovan
Nupur Shah
Alev Adil
L.M. Cole
Poppy Waterman
K.T. Clark
issue four
contributors
Bob King
Ella Bachrach
Ellen Zhang
Lauren Michelle Finkle
Mary Kuna
Elizabeth Sharpe
Inez Santiago
Paxton Grey
Rin Yang
Stephanie Holden
Amy Oates
issue five
contributors
Adesiyan Oluwapelumi
Lux Alexander
Elaine Server
Ciaran O'Rourke
Kathryn McGrane
nat raum
Laura Nuckols
Emily O Liu
Edith Friedman
Emily Mather
TJ Bradshaw
Lilirose Luo
Bex Hainsworth
Serena Piccoli
issue six
contributors
Sophia Lang
Sadee Bee
Thomas Farr
Emily Hay
Emma Neale
Paul Hostovsky
C. C. Rayne
Classfan
Sam Crain
Pritikana Karmakar
D.A. Nicholls
Sultana Raza
issue seven
contributors
Diego Calle
West Ambrose
Calvin Jones
Matthew Nisinson
Neile Kirk
Zainab Rao / Raoeey
Christine Costello
Ali Choudhary
Natalie Korman
lolo elleri
Euri Carreon
issue 1 - spring '22
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issue 2 - summer '22
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issue 3 - autumn '22
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issue 4 - spring '23
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issue 5 - summer '23
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issue 6 - winter '23/24
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issue 7 - summer '24
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interview with melanie faith
beating writer's block, getting published, and more
Samantha Ng, EIC
Melanie Faith, MFA, Author
Thank you for joining me for an interview today, Melanie! I see that one of your books is titled From Promising to Published, so my first question for you is: What advice do you have for people who are looking to get their work published?
No matter what setbacks arise, keep at it. By this I mean: work on multiple projects and set a recurrent goal with a date attached (such as submitting monthly on the first or last day of the month).Also, know that getting an acceptance letter is rarely a “one and done” process. Most of the published writers I know submit their work numerous times (ten, twenty, forty, fifty or more) times until it finds the perfect-fit agents, editors, or publishers that publish their work. Many, many writers give up after submitting work just two or three times. If you believe in the work, keep submitting it. Perseverance goes a long way towards publication, as does writing and sending works to editors on a regular basis. The more you write consistently, the more you submit consistently, and the more you believe in your work consistently while learning craft through reading books and taking classes or workshopping or getting suggestions from a beta reader, the better chances you have at publication. You can do it!
That’s some good advice! But when you have to write consistently, how do you work around creative/writer’s block?
Great question! I work on multiple projects at once. I alternate between poetry and prose as well as one-off/individual pieces and book-length work. Whenever I’m at a standstill or whenever a draft needs some breathing room before a new draft, I create individual pieces on unrelated subjects or in a different genre to give the muse room. So far in 2022, I’ve been working on two poetry books with very different historical settings, a third draft of my contemporary novel, the first few essays that might become a nonfiction book sometime in the future, and numerous individual micro flash fictions with food themes.An advantage of working on different projects is that, when I return to a resting project after a few days or weeks, I can see the draft with fresh eyes, noting what is actually in the draft compared to what I thought I’d put in there. I have to say also that teaching and taking creative writing classes as well as having writing friends and beta readers who encourage and champion projects are ways that I’ve worked around creative/writer’s block and which I’d recommend to other writers as well.
What inspires you to write books for writers?
When I first started out as an unpublished author, there weren’t a lot of resources online or offline about how to become a creative writer or how to reach a target audience after publishing. I love sharing what I’ve learned about developing my writing, editing, publishing, and marketing skills with other creative writers who may not yet know of all of the exciting possibilities for their writing and publishing careers. As a longtime teacher, I’ve learned so much about the struggles and joys that writers in all stages of the writing life experience and then persevere to make their dreams come true. My favorite days are when I receive emails from readers, students, editing clients, and friends who have gone on to get acceptance letters for their work. Also, writing books to spark creativity and writing fulfillment has always been a dream of mine. Writing about the writing process enhances and inspires my own creative path. Each craft book I write reminds me both of what I’ve learned in my writing practice and also makes me curious about what I want to explore and/or learn next. All of these ingredients go into the recipe for making my craft books for writers. Text
What brought you to explore the relationship between photography and writing?
I’ve always loved cameras and photography. Not only does photography document life but also it has amazing storytelling possibilities. I’ve been taking photos since I got a robin’s egg blue Kodak 110 camera from my parents for Christmas in high school.After grad school (MFA in Creative Writing, Concentration in Poetry), I started to learn digital camera techniques and placed several of my photographs with literary magazines. When I created an online photography class a few years ago that specifically focuses on photographic imagery from a writer’s POV and how the two artistic disciplines can enhance each other, I searched for a class text that explored both arts in reference to each other. I found many wonderful books about photography and many other stellar books about writing, but there weren’t any books about photography from a writer’s very unique set of skills and talents like I wanted to combine them. I saw an opportunity to write my own book about the topic and to fill a gap in the market. I had a lot of fun compiling the book, dreaming up prompts, personal essays, and tips to make practicing both arts an even more meaningful, inspired process.
Your work definitely seems to encompass a lot of depth! What do you hope readers will take away from your books?
I aim for my readers to reconnect with the joy of writing and/or creating art as they read my books. I want to remind them of why it’s hopeful, challenging, and fulfilling to be a writer. I hope that my books give writers new suggestions that fire them up to continue to fill pages with prose and/or poetry. I fill my books with practical tips that writers can apply to real-world drafting, editing, and submitting goals, so I also aspire for the books to cheer on readers and encourage them that, despite the rejections slips that we all get (I’ve gotten over 900 over them over the years!), there is endless possibility and quite often great camaraderie in the writing life. Also, I want my books to communicate that readers have the talent and the knowledge they need to keep writing and to meet their writing and publishing goals.
resources
aôthen artifact project
The Aôthen Artifact Project is a drive to raise awareness about artefacts with disputed ownership, especially those that have been placed in museum collections as a consequence of colonialism. The project has two aims; to raise money for various BIPOC archaeological funds and to encourage critical thought about museum ethics. Helping this project is very simple and comes at a benefit to you. Aôthen will be selling bags, prints, pins, clothes, and more with the below designs on Redbubble. By purchasing a product, you are funding donations for charity and signalling support for the cause.The specific charities are the Society of Black Archaeologists, the Native American Relief Fund, and the Ancient India & Iran Trust. 100% of profits will be split equally between the charities.Protect heritage, think critically, and decolonize archaeology.
1. The Bust of Nefertiti is an Egyptian limestone bust sculpture of Nefertiti, the Great Royal Wife of Pharoah Akhenaten. Found in the Egyptian archaeological site Armana, the German Oriental Country took the bust in 1912. It is now part of the Egyptian Museum of Berlin’s collection. It is
regarded a cultural symbol in both Berlin and Egypt.2. There are an estimated several thousand bronze plaques and figurines from the kingdom of Benin, collectively called the Benin Bronzes. The Royal Leopard Benin Bronze symbolizes the Oba’s (king’s) authority and high status. A significant portion of the Benin Bronzes are held in Britain,Germany, and the United States of America.3. Parthenon Metope South 31 is one of the parthenon marbles removed by Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin and acquired by the British Museum. It depicts a centaur and a lapith fighting. UNESCO has called on the United Kingdom to return all the Parthenon Marbles to Greece, and Greece does not recognize the legality of the marbles’ removal from the Parthenon.4. Priam’s Treasure refers broadly to the various artifacts found at the alleged site of Troy in north-western Anatolia, the most famous of which is the larger diadem (the Jewels of Helen). All of Priam’s Treasure was discovered by Frank
Calvert and Heinrich Schliemann. The diadem is now displayed in the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow.
classics resources
recommend a resource
courses
textbook pdfs
book pdfs
interview with ari lohr
Exploring their debut full-length collection, "Gravity", being queer, and the experience of writing
Samantha Ng (EIC)
Ari Lohr
Do you think that writing Gravity changed the way you view your experiences and queer existence? In what way?Gravity is, as you’d expect, at its core a way for me to cope with and explain the trauma which I experienced as a queer adolescent. If anything, writing this book simply reinforced many of the notions I’ve had about the queer community; namely, that our contemporary access to other queer individuals — particularly on apps such as grindr — has in many ways merely compounded the trauma that queers of past generations struggled with. Growing up in a progressive area, my queerness took on a cosmopolitan, yet undeniably melodramatic quality, with the oppression levied against previous generations becoming increasingly subtle, and increasingly integrated with the very social institutions which the queer community originally created to shelter itself from a violent and oppressive civilization. All of this is to say that the permeation of queerness into more mainstream cultures, and the broadening inclusivity and inter-connection within queer circles, has found its benefits to be coupled with a profound cost: many queer adolescents, particularly young gay men such as myself, feel extremely isolated, a sensation which appears to be different from yet remarkably similar to the overwhelming sense of danger that previous queer generations faced. From the ages of 16 through 18, I met, hooked up with, pined after, and was abandoned by a dozen young gay men, many of whom were experiencing a similar sense of isolation as myself, and yet nonetheless opted to go on grindr in a desperate, self-effacing bid to feel less alone — even as queerness, and its many dimensions, became more and more represented in popular culture.
Many poems in your collection have quite abstract structures, is there a reason for this, or something you hope the reader takes away from the abstraction?
I feel as if a lot of my writing takes place via association. In Gravity, I spend a lot of time trying to make sense of scattered memories and emotions, and hence a lot of the poems can feel quite jarring to read. The structure of the book itself reflects this as well, as one poem might be about an anti-queer hate crime and another might be about something comparatively mundane, such as my teeth. In hindsight, Gravity feels like a conglomeration of all the angst and anxiety I felt as a teen, boxed in yet bursting at the seams, a quiet paroxysm. For readers, I imagine that the vivid-ness of Gravity can be quite uncomfortable, if not for the experiences of which I write, then simply because the mere act of reading a book this raw is an incredibly voyeuristic act. If anything, I think I want the structure and form of the poems to reflect all this, as if the reader were peering directly into my thoughts, poetic and rich or whatever but also very rough around the edges, almost lacking.
Which poem (or line) was the most emotional for you to write? Why?I don’t know. I honestly don’t really feel emotions as I write. Despite the language of this collection, I’m so detached from these experiences now that I can only remember them with the benefit of hindsight (or simply when I’m not focused on producing ‘book-quality’ work). “Getting High in Your Car” is one of the most recent poems I’ve written, and it almost wasn’t included in the book because of this. Although it takes place near the beginning of the book, it was originally written in reference to my current relationship, which I am so grateful to say is both healthy and fulfilling, at last, at last. So I guess I would say that this poem was the most emotional for me to write — because it’s one of the only poems in this collection that truly comes from a place of hope and healing (despite the narrative it takes on in this collection). As for a particular line? “This / is death / before death.” from the aforementioned poem, simply for the sake of the spiritual quality which it takes on. The line is a spin on the phrase ‘Die before you die’, which has become a beacon for how I want to live my ‘life’.
Which poem (or line) is your favorite? Why?I hate this question! Thank you! As if I did not have enough reasons to be pretentious, I must jerk myself off further by directly referencing my favorite line and / or poem in my own book. In all seriousness, “Gravity”, the poem from which this book derives its name, is probably my favorite piece in this collection. Although many of this book’s poems (particularly “Essay On Leaving”) touch on similar subjects with much more sophisticated language, “Gravity” was the first poem that I wrote for this collection that truly stuck; it was the inspiration, and catalyst, behind 100 more pages of work, and for that I’m infinitely thankful. (It’s also lovely to perform on stage, which my friends in the slam poetry community are quite well aware of).
As someone who has just published a collection of poems that focuses partially on the queer experience, what advice can you give to other younger queer writers?I spent a considerable amount of time limiting myself regarding the narratives and experiences that I felt I was ‘allowed’ to draw from for my art. I felt guilty writing about events such as pulse, or the suicide of a romantic partner, or other narratives with which I lack the tangible, direct experience that those who do not understand poetic license believe are ‘necessary’ to have in order to make art about these subject matters. But writing Gravity, as well as simply growing older, have both taught me that experiences and emotions overlap; rather than boxing particular experiences and emotions into ‘categories’ of availability, the emotions an individual experiences from, say, a particularly traumatic breakup, often parallel and even correspond with the profound sense of grief that another experiences from the death of their partner. As someone with borderline personality disorder, romantic abandonment feels like death — death of another, death of identity, death of self — and so I write about death as a way of expressing the true gravity (no pun intended) of what this feels like in my own subjective mind. Similarly, anti-queer hate crimes reverberate throughout the entire community, including to those among us who thankfully do not maintain any specific memories of anti-queer oppression levied against themselves. I would suggest that young queer writers — and, in a sense, all writers — experiment with the subjects and narratives that they write about, and try to limit the guilt that they might feel for doing so. You’d be surprised with what you can learn, both about others and about yourself, in writing about that which you don’t directly ‘understand’.
Is there anything you would've liked to know before starting this collection?That I would visit my childhood home for Christmas 2022, long after having submitted my final manuscript for this book, and feel nothing except that I had left it, and I would leave it again.
ARI LOHR
(any pronouns, get creative with it)
is a queer poet and English Education major at Boston University. Xe is a Brave New Voices semifinalist, Slamlandia finalist, Portland Poetry Slam champion, and a 2021 Best of the Net nominee. Focusing on the mystical intersections between power, sexuality, and identity, Ari’s poetry appears in the Northern Otter Press, Opia Lit, and more. They are the author of EJAY., a confessional love letter / poetry chapbook, and Gravity, their debut full-length with Gutslut Press. They are also the managing editor of the Bitter Fruit Review and the editor-in-chief of the Jupiter Review. Xe believes truth is malleable, professionalism is violence, and arrogance is sexy. Ari can be found at arilohr.com, or @arilohr on twitter and instagram.
interview with wendy mulibane
A discussion about inspiration, stigma, and modern academia.
Samantha Ng (EIC)
Wendy Mulibane
Wendy Mulibane is a Latin student studying in South Africa.
Can you tell us about how you became interested in ancient studies?There are a few factors that contributed to my interest in ancient studies.My two uncles whom I stayed with during primary school often watched documentaries, when they were not watching the news or soccer channels. Out of those three, I preferred documentaries. We watched a wide variety of them including aircraft investigations, crime, animal, political and religious documentaries. Although I admired the journalists, historians, and archaeologists who featured because they spoke with great authority, at the time, I neither knew nor understood [their] occupations. However, I cherished the idea of being a pilot because it was the second most popular career choice in my class after doctor. Reflecting on my childhood with my uncles, I believe that the seed of interest in history was sown quite early.The words archaeology and carbon-14 dating were my biggest takeaways from the first history class in high school. That was when I discovered that one can pursue a career in the field of ancient history. Thereafter, I had two choices, I wanted to be either an aviator or an archaeologist. After high school, I took a gap year and the Covid 19 pandemic struck. During that time, I watched a sizable number of documentaries, beginning with the religious ones because I had been wondering who wrote the Biblical texts and why. The ancient Greek and Latin manuscripts were often referenced with estimated timelines, and I took interest in both languages. I further watched Greco-Roman documentaries out of curiosity about different ancient rulers who lived before, during, and after the manuscripts. Having started with Gaius Julius Caesar, I stopped at emperor Domitian, and I often wondered about things that happened before and after those two figures. That was when I began the university applications for a Bachelor of Arts in Ancient Languages with Classical Studies.
Did you experience any pushback from society when you decided to pursue ancient studies?Yes, I did experience pushback and I still do, sometimes. When I first informed friends and relatives about my decision, most of them did not understand even after I explained and gave examples. They often suggested that I should pursue a career in other fields, and it was not too late to change. At the university, I met some students who applauded my career choice and others who advised me to change courses and align with what is in high demand. This is because of the stigma associated with learning a degree in ancient studies. While other degrees are often promoted from an early age, there seems to be a lack of awareness and high endorsement of careers in the field of ancient studies. Although my mother did not understand what I was studying at first, she had always been supportive, together with my young sister. That meant a lot to me.
Why did you choose to study the ancient world?I believe choosing to study the ancient world was a continuous process and my reasons gradually increased. Initially, I wanted to be able to read and understand the untranslated primary sources and their historical contexts hoping that I may one day discover something new and crucial to our understanding of the ancient world. I believe that the history of the ancient world, whether it be African, European, or any other part of the world, is the history of humanity and it has shaped our world to what it is today. In my second year of undergraduate studies, it became clearer to me that I wanted to be a classical archaeologist, simply reading, and understanding the text was not enough for me. I was inspired (and I still am) by the idea of going out to sites in search of ancient remains to connect with the physical world of the past and learn more about it. So that I may join the men and women who strive to help bridge the gap between the past and the present through archaeology. While also highlighting the contrasts and similarities of cultures for an enhanced understanding of both our world and the ancient one.
Do you believe that learning ancient languages is vital to archaeological studies? Why or why not?Yes, I believe that it is vital. The knowledge and comprehension of ancient languages give archaeologists an upper hand in their endeavours, and it makes them more credible sources. For archaeologists to determine what or who they are looking for, I believe they consult primary sources before excavation to be sure of the sites to look at. Although modern translations of the texts are available, revisiting the text in its original language may shed light on small but crucial details that are sometimes lost in translation. Upon discovery, in cases of inscriptions, they can easily read and identify valuable information on the spot. Furthermore, I believe there is a sense of awe and accomplishment for having done the job thoroughly and confidently.
Do you have any thoughts on how students who are interested in the ancient world can be better supported?The first step would be making students aware that there are career fields that specialise in the ancient world. This may be accomplished through a career expo where people in the field can visit high schools and talk to students. Secondly, students may be given an opportunity to learn ancient languages before going to university. Although such programs exist in schools overseas, there are close to none in South Africa. Such a program will be beneficial to students since they will be able to build up their knowledge of the ancient world on the basics they would have already covered in high school. Finally, given the current dwindling number of the students who pursue ancient studies in universities, building a network where they can interact with each other on provincial, national, and international levels will be helpful. Having workshops or international exchange programs for undergraduate and honours students too will provide a sense of community, spark healthy competition amongst them and most importantly keep them interested in the ancient world.
How do you think the attitude towards ancient studies has changed over the years in South Africa?I believe the attitude has changed both negatively and positively. While there has been a significant decrease in the number of enrolments in ancient studies, a few universities have completely shut [the] doors of the faculty. This suggests that either people have lost interest, or they remain uninformed of the available career opportunities. I believe it is due to the latter reason than the former because there is not enough visibility. On the other hand, there has always existed people that are determined to carry the torch of ancient studies and pass it on, few institutions and organisations that lend a helping hand to the few students who have been able to discover ancient studies courses. I believe this reflects a positive attitude in keeping the faculty alive and attracting students, even if it is only a few.
What advice would you give to someone in high school who is hoping to pursue ancient studies?Use the internet to your advantage and browse through the accessible ancient studies material, like academic books, documentaries, and lectures. This will help you determine your points of interest and give you an idea of what to expect in your university lectures. You should start inquiring with universities about the programs they offer for ancient studies and make sure that they align with what you are looking for. Once you enrol, there will be external and internal pushback but stay strong to your convictions. Most importantly, never stop enjoying ancient studies!