Back in business and boy oh boy have I been down some weird rabbit holes today, the ancient Scholia on Aristophanes are full of such odd stuff I love it (and clearly so did Pollux, who is defs using the ancient commentaries on Aristophanes).
Sad to report that the scholia have very little to say about oyster dredging nets, what a terrible disappointment. The scholiasts on Aristophanes would never overlook such a gloriously peculiar object wtf ancient Aeschylus guys what were you thinking?
A hand holding a book, entitled Scholia in Aeschylum Pars I (edidit O L Smith). The colours in the picture are very pleasing: the book is bright orange, the nails of my hand are painted cranberry pink, and you can just see the bright red sleeve of my cardigan.
In which I continue to ignore what I’m actually supposed to be doing in favour of a deep dive into some scholia
Begging folks with open ended academic jobs not to forget there’s a whole underclass of permanently casualised academics who’ve been facing redundancy as standard for years. 12+ in my case.
I get it’s awful facing redundancy ofc! Just…this isn’t unprecedented for us. It’s the norm.
They did! It was sold when the family retired, but despite reassurances the new owners closed the restaurant and opened a tiny parlour which didn’t even make the ice cream on site (which the restaurant did!! All in house!!) then closed even that 🙁
Saturday open days can get in the sea. This was Not A Thing when I was a teenager looking at universities. Signed: tired, got home from Bristol at 9pm last night, now wrangling two small children solo because my other half is his dept’s admissions officer so has to do EVERY SINGLE SATURDAY OPEN DAY
Classical Philology Vol. 121, No. 2 (2026) www.journals.uchicago.edu/toc/cp/2026/... @chicagojournals.bsky.social Transmediality and the Classics
@drnaomiscott.bsky.social
I miss Marine Ices so much 😭
Also there’s a gift link if anyone needs it
www.journals.uchicago.edu/eprint/MSR6X...
#classicsbluesky #ancientbluesky
Seriously the image rights were such a saga you can consider this my first and last word on the topic of Greek vases because omfg never again 😂
www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...
Getting this article to press has been an absolute mission and involved my bestie @elliemackinroberts.net DRAWING A VASE FOR ME after Sotheby’s proved exactly as helpful as you’d expect Sotheby’s to be about image rights, pls admire her gorgeous artwork here
A page of the scholia on book 21 (Φ) of the Iliad
Scholia on book 21 finally located. I get muddled juuuuust around the letter Φ so let’s hope the rest of today requires only the earlier books 😬😬
The practice of referring to books of Homer by Greek letter instead of number really reveals that more than twenty years after I first began learning Greek, I still (STILL!) cannot reliably recite the letters of the alphabet in order 😂
This is so great!!!
I love that so much! Kind of like a lot of Ancient Greek fish names (sea weasel!! sea pig!! MOUSE FISH!!!) but cuter.
Animals named after a different animal — truly one of the great genres of animal names. Grasshopper ❤️
A picture of a word document with a list of fragments and quotations and their location in Pollux’s Onomasticon, some of them highlighted, and a long quotation from Eustathius.
Those are some top notch organised notes! Mine are…. Considerably less attractive, I clearly have work to do 😂
Yes and often ones I did not in fact write (I like horses. Horses are great. Don’t otherwise know a thing about them, did not write a book about them, but thanks! Glad you liked it?)
I’ll totally start tomorrow but today maybe I could organise my notes by highlighting them in different colours??
Me to my students: just write your dissertation, no amount of further reading and research will advance your ideas, you can only shape your thoughts by putting them on the page.
Me: just one more book tho and then I’ll start this article hey I wonder if I could find another example from Sophocles
A very easy step the Secretary of State could make is to shut down the use of consultancies in #UKHE. It leaks SO MUCH money out of the (public) sector to for-profit firms, is creating a truly dangerous monoculture, and is so seemingly obscure none outside the sector will be pissed off.
The startled face of a cat emerges from under a duvet cover
Happy #caturday from
Clio cat, who likes to sleep *under the covers* and does not appreciate being disturbed.
Also I did not see ‘becoming a scholia nerd’ in my horoscope but we are where we are and I’m not mad about it ngl
Can report that a week spent hunched over the Homeric scholia has done my back in.* A scholar’s life, huh?
*ok lifting my toddler probably isn’t helping either.
Oh this is lovely!! Thanks so much for sharing!
raise your hand if wikipedia has higher standards than your own university
It’s often like this working with Pollux, you go down some mad rabbit holes but at the end of it you have a sense of how he is working and what he is reading.
Well more than that for me!! It’s (yet more) important evidence that Pollux is keyed into contemporary debates about the interpretation of Homer, and is reading a lot of scholarly literature as well as ancient texts. Though it is also entertaining!
The scholia are happy it means ‘very strong’, but Athenaeus and Plutarch both report alternative explanations including that the wine is hot rather than unmixed
So it looks like they’re just upset about a line of Homer which suggests Achilles and co drinking unmixed or at least v strong wine, so a bunch of dubious explanations were invented to explain an adjective as meaning something other than ‘very strong’ 🤷♀️ Pollux knows this but rightly says it’s wrong