I love this thread, and can't resist adding a fuller discussion of the sculptures from Tiberius's grotto at Sperlonga, one of which appears near the end. Large sculptures of scenes from the Trojan Cycle were set up in the shadows of a cave. A dining platform appeared just beyond the cave, but (1/)

Flint Dibble@flintdibble.bsky.social · 6d ago

Everyone's comparing Nolan's Odyssey to Homer, but I think there's much more richness The ancient Greeks adapted the Odyssey into ART While these images might appear static to us, I want to walk through how an ancient Greek saw art: AS DYNAMIC STORYTELLING like our films 1/13

Adding to my to-read list: press.princeton.edu/books/hardco...

Slaving States

A pathbreaking new perspective on the ways ancient societies were shaped and transformed by slave trading

press.princeton.edu

I love this thread, and can't resist adding a fuller discussion of the sculptures from Tiberius's grotto at Sperlonga, one of which appears near the end. Large sculptures of scenes from the Trojan Cycle were set up in the shadows of a cave. A dining platform appeared just beyond the cave, but (1/)

Flint Dibble@flintdibble.bsky.social · 6d ago

Everyone's comparing Nolan's Odyssey to Homer, but I think there's much more richness The ancient Greeks adapted the Odyssey into ART While these images might appear static to us, I want to walk through how an ancient Greek saw art: AS DYNAMIC STORYTELLING like our films 1/13

Christopher Nolan, just in case he hasn't already mentioned it:

the sea peoples did nothing wrong

Finally read my spring course evaluations, and a very high # of students in my Roman archaeology class said that I was funny. Students never say that I am funny! Yay? On the other hand I seem to have been downright funereal in my Aeneid class. (TBF is it possibly to be otherwise with Vergil?)

Inspired by the summer film and Discourse, some freshman are going to show up to register for classes in Ancient Greek and Ancient History only to find that those courses and faculty no longer exist.

"There are no sex scenes, and all the food looks horrible." Which film is this a dismissal of? Wrong answers only. I’m gonna say “Star Wars”.

In France, even the trees are revolutionary

amc is trying to sell a trojan horse popcorn bucket and man i ain’t fallin for that

‘Thousands of university job cuts in humanities and social sciences are creating widespread cold spots for languages, classics and theology degrees, the British Academy has warned’ www.theguardian.com/education/20...

Humanities among degrees being ‘extinguished’ by hard-up universities

Exclusive: Experts fear rise in education ‘cold spots’ and social immobility as 4,000 academic posts lost in one year

theguardian.com

the energy im bringing to the day

An important article on local alienation from archaeological sites in Syria, in no small part due to the hidden but always present influence of the police and intelligence services and close ties cultivated between leading western archaeologists and the Assad regime.

Jen Baird@jenbaird.bsky.social · 3w ago

What is the long-term legacy of foreign excavations in places like Dura-Europos in Syria? Out today and open access in @antiquity.ac.uk with my colleague Adnan Almohamad: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

It does make me think about Augustus' bragging that his togas & tunics were personally made by Livia, Octavia, & Julia, as well as Livy's stories of Lucretia. Were goods _not_ made by enslaved labor (but only by subjugated free women) an explicit status symbol? Is it pride in familial skills?

Is it possible to tell if artefacts from Roman antiquity *were not* made by enslaved hands? In the Oxford Handbook of the Comparative Archaeology of Slavery, my co-authors and I think comparatively about objects made by the enslaved.

This is the most hardcore a villain has ever been. Ever.

You ever have an idea that sticks in your head and won’t leave until it’s complete? Well, that was me and my idea for a Latin reader based on the Roman values listed on the AP syllabus. So here it is: an anthology of Latin exempla, free to use and enjoy! magisterconway.blogspot.com/2026/07/more...

“Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.” (Dickens, David Copperfield) Lots of other great ones in replies and quotes

Jodi Pickens 🏳️‍🌈🖖✨@jodipickens.bsky.social · 4w ago

Writing question ✍️ What's the single best opening line from a book, movie, television show, or play that you've ever encountered?

Oh, have I not told this one here? Okay. So Grandma had The Charisma.

Hipster Viking Amy@lasrina.bsky.social · 4w ago

Summoning @tkingfisher.com to tell the story of her grandma getting like five marriages annulled.

Fascinating, not just for what it reveals about AI use but also for what it (potentially) reveals about the impact of AI use on learning. The final scores weren't just way below the midterm scores but also way below the historical average.

Kieran Healy@kjhealy.co · 4w ago

lol

Searching for endnotes in a book. #academicchatter

If roughing up a girlfriend and locking her in a room was a virile, authentic a rejection of “smoothgroined” “HR lady” politics, but a rape is too far, then what’s at stake is not a principled rejection of violence against women but a cynical assessment of how much violence a man can get away with.

AdotSad@adotsad.bsky.social · last mo.

Oh its OVER OVER

A terrific read from @bhgreeley.bsky.social in the new FT Wealth: what wealth meant to Americans in 1776 www.ft.com/content/6bc0...

What wealth meant to Americans in 1776

Land, credit and enslaved people made up people’s fortunes on the eve of revolution

ft.com

Why do we talk about the “history of collection” when whole sites were torn apart and dispersed across the globe? Is it a collection, or a breaking apart? Read about Palmyra’s dispersal, out now in AJA www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

Collecting Palmyra: The Global Dispersal of Palmyrene Funerary Reliefs | American Journal of Archaeology: Vol 130, No 3

Palmyra has been pivotal in archaeological and historical research due to the wealth of material and the long history of fascination with the site. Its material culture can be found on every continent...

journals.uchicago.edu

The fundamental test of birthright citizenship is this: if someone illegally trafficked people to this country and forced them into bondage and then those people had children, would those children have rights to object to continued servitude? If you answer isn't "yes, they have rights" you lose.

Wish I could share an example of an AI-generated paper we receive all the time because they are *weird*. Mechanical manucripts that tick the boxes as academic content but really contribute nothing to knowledge. If AI has benefits for research, we're not seeing it. Just seeing shoddy autoscholarship.

Super interesting paper. Open access. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

This book sounds wonderful. I'd like to see something like "textiles and economic time" added-- textiles as collateral for loans, textiles in wills & inheritance, production time from an economic and not just domestic angle. bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2026/2026.06...

He published it as a LinkedIn article. And any staff member and manager in #UKHE should read it and keep bringing it up in any meeting about cutting into departments.

The Cost Allocation Death Spiral and the University

The Cost Allocation Death Spiral and the University Accountants, as people whose business it chiefly is to bring hard news to powerful people, generally avoid emotional terms. They prefer softer, nuan...

linkedin.com

QM_UCU@qmucu.bsky.social · 2y ago

On the other site, Jonathan Mills shared this article about the Cost Allocation Death Spiral. It will hit too closely to anyone paying attention to accounting in UK Higher Education. May we all find ways to convince our governing bodies that our executives are inflicting harm. x.com/Muinchille/s...

It knows exactly how good it looks

c0nc0rdance@c0nc0rdance.bsky.social · last mo.

It's so satisfying when something is named right. So you'll know how happy I am to say this is the GLORIOUS FLATWORM, Pseudobiceros gloriosus, native to the benthic zone of the Indo-Pacific. They lack internal organs: no heart or blood vessels, no gills. But /reproduction/ is where it gets WEIRD.