An interesting point! I wasn't thinking about Thoukydides's pirates when I wrote the review—although he describes the pirates in 'Histories of the Peloponnesian War' 1.5–8 more as a feature of the era before the Trojan War than after. (He credits Minos's navy with having greatly reduced piracy.)

Meanwhile, this is how Odysseus is depicted in a wall painting from Pompeii dating to the first century CE. (He's the man on the right with the dark skin and curly, black hair who's wearing the cone-shaped helmet.)

I'm seeing a lot of people using images of statues like these to represent "Antinous" the character from the 'Odyssey'. This is incorrect. These statues represent a completely different Antinous, a teenaged boy whom the Roman emperor Hadrian loved and sought to deify. #Odyssey #classics

Odysseus in Ancient Greek Literature Versus Odysseus in Modern Screen Media

My favorite take on the interminable Helen of Troy casting controversy. (Those who know about ancient Greek theater will get this.)

Added!

It bothered me so much that so many ancient and medieval philosophers were omitted that I remade the chart and added a bunch of ancient and medieval philosophers. Feel free to debate my placements.

Collection of humanoid figurines from the Cult Center at Mycenae, dating between c. 1250 and c. 1180 BCE. I saw these weird little guys in person in summer 2023, and I still think about them from time to time.

Trump's unhinged, apocalyptic threat that "a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again" sounds frighteningly reminiscent of the oracle that King Kroisos of Lydia received when he asked if he should go to war with Persia. It didn't end well for him, or his empire.

The claim that Freud invented the concept of individual guilt in the 1920s is the most *insane* thing I have ever heard. It's so ironic that these tech billionaires are Christian nationalists who want to bring back feudalism, but they don't seem to have heard of medieval Christian guilt culture.

Paintings from the baptistry of a Christian church at the same site also preserve some of the oldest surviving Christian depictions of Jesus. These are of similar date, but they reflect a more Greco-Roman image of a teacher and healer. Notably, this Jesus is short-haired and clean-shaven.

Below are two wall paintings of Moses from an ancient Jewish synagogue at the site of Dura-Europos in Roman Syria. They date sometime between the late second century CE and 244 CE, and they reflect how Jews in the Roman-ruled Levant in the early centuries CE imagined a religious leader.

It's crazy that Ea-nāṣir has become so universally known that even 'The Atlantic' is now riffing on the meme. It's also crazy that more people today have probably heard of Ea-nāṣir than of nearly all ancient Mesopotamian kings. www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/...

A lot of people forget that, in a real gospel passage (Mark 7:24–30 and Matthew 15:21–28), a woman begs Jesus to exorcise a demon from her daughter, and Jesus initially refuses and compares the woman to a dog because she is a Gentile. He only belatedly relents and agrees to exorcise the demon. 1/

The level of out-of-touch, craven, dishonest sycophancy among (supposedly) center-left pundits and politicians at this moment is simply unparalleled.

Here are photos of the most relevant pages of Baker's book from my copy, in case you just want to read those pages without buying the whole book (although, if you are interested in the Salem trials, I do highly recommend the whole thing, since it is very fascinating). 3/

No, but the city does have a monument of a Hui Muslim woman, a Han scholar-official, and a Roman soldier, a monument with replicas of Roman statues, and a museum where they use clips from '300' to illustrate their founding. At one point they apparently considered building a replica of the Colosseum

Pharaoh Unas in his tomb inscription:

It's like this: Fictional horror pharaoh's tomb inscription: "Whoever disturbs the pharaoh's rest will suffer a terrible curse." Audiences: Woooo spooky!!! Meanwhile, a real, historical pharaoh's tomb inscription:

"Have allowed" is a really interesting way of saying "have following laws passed by Congress mandating."

I think we have quite possibly just discovered the cringiest use of a Latin phrase in any context of all time. #ClassicsBlueSky #classics #Latin

The ancient Romans most commonly greeted each other either with a simple handshake or with a kiss, which could be either on the hand, the cheek, or the lips depending on the level of familiarity. They did not use the Nazi salute. 3/

There is only one surviving ancient depiction of a person greeting a Roman emperor with a raised hand. It occurs on Trajan's column and, crucially, the palm is held *perpendicular* rather than horizontal, with the thumb raised. This is not the so-called "Roman salute." 2/

Massive respect to the woman who rejected Gaiman's initial absurdly low offer of $5K for her to sign an NDA and move out immediately when she had nowhere else to go, told him that she wouldn't sign for less than $300K, actually got him to pay that amount, and then broke her NDA anyway.

Unlike you, I get my news from a reliable source

Around 530 BCE, Ennigaldi-Nanna, the daughter of the last Neo-Babylonian king Nabonidus, founded a museum of ancient Mesopotamian artifacts in the city of Ur. Some of the artifacts in her collection were over 1,500 years old *in her time*. There were museum labels in Akkadian cuneiform. 1/

I agree with this paragraph especially strongly.

The contrast between what Greek statue pfp accounts would think that Johann Joachim Winckelmann meant when he said we must return to ancient Greek ideals and what he actually meant. (He was, of course, very racist, but his Philhellenism had at least as much to with his homoeroticism as his racism.)