Tom Roper's Weblog

Open access in ancient studies

Ober J, Scheidel, W, Shaw B, Sanclemente D
Towards Open Access in Ancient Studies: The Princeton-Stanford Working Papers in Classics
Hesperia 2007 76(1): 229-242
if your institution doesn't subscribe, there's a copy in Princeton's repository

Ancient Spaces

Games are not usually my thing, but Ancient Spaces, to be launched this summer, looks an exception. I came across it in Wired. Ancient Spaces is a collaboration between Oxford and the University of British Columbia, and originally the idea of Michael Griffin, an Oxford graduate.

Cui dono lepidum novum libellum

In the latest D-Lib magazine there's an article on the issues raised by the potentially huge size of digital libraries, of special interest as many of the examples are taken from the classics. Thus the author, Gregory Crane of Tufts, Editor-in-Chief of the Perseus digital library, illustrates the possibilities of recombinant texts with the Catullus poem whose first line is the title of this post.

Crane, Gregory
What Do You Do with a Million Books?
D-Lib Magazine 12 (3) March 2006

 

Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Political Thought

Vicky Roupa draws my attention to the new Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Political Thought.
The introduction may be downloaded free of charge.
Vicky has an inspection copy and draws attention to the chapter on Herodotus, Thucydides and the sophists, in particularProtagoras, who is quoted this: "It is just for the poor and the demos there to have more than the well-born and wealthy because it is the common people who man the ships and confer power on the city -helmsmen, signalmen, captains, look-out men, and shipwrights - these are the ones who confer power on the city [...]. Since this is so, it seems just to allow everyone access to political office [...]".

Young Hegelians

Vicky Roupa, who teaches the classical Greek class I attend and shows exemplary patience in the face of our collective ignorance of syntax and failure to practice basic drills, now has a web site.
There's a very fine picture of the West Pier, to say nothing of lots of stuff about Hegel.

For more West Pier pictures, see Flickr

Once more on the new Sappho poem

I've discovered a very rich discussion on the new Sappho poem on languagehat, including several different translations and some debate about the text.
The whole of languagehat looks fascinating, though obviously for cleverer people than me.

New Sappho poem: update

Having picked themselves up from the floor after laughing at my shoddy transcription of the new Sappho poem, several Hellenists, were kind enough to point out some of my errors and I've now posted a revised and corrected version, with particular thanks to Vicky Roupa who teaches the classical Greek class I attend.
One point though: I use GreekKeys, which is splendid, but for some reason the initial upper case upsilon with acute accent and smooth breathing renders correctly in Word, but when put into the blog it renders as a odd backspace character, thus ....not sure why. A lowercase one works perfectly: ὕ.

New Sappho poem

A new poem by Sappho has been found and is given in the latest Times Literary Supplement:
West, Martin
A new Sappho poem
TLS June 24 2005 5334: 8
Here's the Greek:

ὕμμες πεδά Μοίσαν ἰσκόλπων κάλα δῶρα, παῖδες,
σπουδάσδετε καὶ τὰν φιλάοιδον λιγύραν χελύνναν

ἔμοι δ’ἄπαλον πρίν ποτ’ ἔοντα χρόα  γῆρας ἤδη
ἐπέλλαβε, λεῦκαι δ’ἐγένοντο τρίχες ἐκ μελαίναν

βάρυς δέ μ’ ὀ θῦμος πεπόηται, γόνα δ’οὐ φέροισι,
τὰ δή ποτα λαίψηρ’ ἔον ὄρχησθ’ ἴσα νεβρίοισι.

τὰ μὲν στεναχίσδω θαμέως · άλλα τί κεν ποείην;
ἀγήροαν ἄνθρωπον ἔοντ’ οὐ δύνατον γένεσθαν,

καὶ γάρ ποτα Τίθωνον ἔθαντο βροδόπαχυν Αὔων
ἔρωι φ..αθεισαν βάμεν’ εἰς ἔσχατα γᾶς φέροισαν,

ἔοντα κάλον καί νέον, ἀλλ’ αὒτον ὒμως ἔμαρψε
χρόνωι πόλιον γῆρας, ἔχοντ’ ἀθανάταν ἄκοιτιν.

Akropolis World News

At last! The news in classical Greek: Akropolis World News.

David Bain obituary

Times obituary of David Bain. I'm off to read Apotropaic Farting and Six Greek Verbs of Sexual Congress.
Lest anyone think I'm mocking, I assure you I'm not. This sort of scholarship is more useful and interesting than anything else I can think of and I think we're much worse off without David Bain