Tales of Times Forgotten

Update (February 5th, 2025)

Hello everyone! Amid all the awful and distressing events that continue to batter our world each day, I do have some tentative good news pertaining to my personal future, which is that—after four years, three rounds of applying, and a total of eighteen applications—I have finally received my very first real, official offer of admission into a PhD program. Last week, I received an email informing me that I have been admitted to the PhD program in classics at the University of Washington in Seattle. This is a good sign, but I am not celebrating too much this early because I do not yet know whether this offer will be funded, since the department is still in the process of discussing funding. If the offer is not funded, then I will most likely not be able to accept it. The University of Washington is one of the eight total programs that I have applied to for the current application cycle; so far, I have not received any official decision from any of the seven other programs.

In the meantime, I am still working very hard on the novel I am writing. At this point, I think that the first half or so of the book is generally well polished. The current draft is 80,000 words and, as I’ve said before, I am expecting the final draft to be somewhere between 100,000 to 110,000 words. I still have a significant amount of material left to write (around 30,000 to 40,000 words concentrated in the later part of the book) and I still have quite a bit of polishing to do on what I have written of the later chapters, but I am making progress.

Update (January 10th, 2025)

Hello everyone and happy New Year! I am still working very hard on my novel and making progress on it, although progress in recent months has been slower than I had hoped. Despite being focused on writing my novel, I have also been working on a few drafts of posts for this blog, which I will hopefully post in the not-too-distant future.

I am also now waiting to hear back from the PhD programs that I applied to. Although it is still very early, the Graduate Group in Ancient History at Penn has already asked to interview me for their program. This is an encouraging sign, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that I will get into that program (or any other program), since they have invited me for an interview both previous times I’ve applied and I have not received an offer of admission either time. So far, I have not heard anything from any of the other programs.

Update (December 27th, 2024)

Hello folks! As I have mentioned in previous posts, I am applying to PhD programs yet again for a third time this year. I have already submitted my applications to the classics PhD program at Ohio State University, the Interdepartmental Program in Ancient History at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, the Graduate Group in Ancient History at the University of Pennsylvania, and the classics PhD program at the University of Toronto. Before the application deadlines next month, I will also be submitting applications to the classics PhD programs at UCLA, the University of Washington, Bryn Mawr, and University of Virginia.

As longtime readers can possibly tell, I have adjusted my strategy for applying to PhD programs this year. I am planning to apply to no less than eight programs this time, which is two more than I applied to last year and twice as many as I applied to the first time three years ago. Moreover, of those eight programs, five of them are programs that I have never applied to before.

Update (December 5th, 2024)

Hello folks! I am about to apply to PhD programs again for a third and final time this year, so I am currently working on my applications. In the meantime, I am also continuing to work on the historical fiction novel that I already announced that I am writing, which is still progressing, although it is going slower than I hoped it would be at this point.

I had intended to write posts this fall discussing the reception of classical antiquity in the Netflix series Kaos and the movies Megalopolis and Gladiator II. I wrote the majority of a post about Kaos, but I never finished it and, by this point, the series has already been cancelled and I think that the public has already moved on from it, so I doubt anyone would care about my thoughts on the series at this point. Meanwhile, Megalopolis and Gladiator II both mainly involve reception of Roman history, rather than Greek, and, from what I’ve seen, both have received mostly negative reviews, so I haven’t worked up the motivation to see either of them yet, let alone write about them. If any readers are still interested in my thoughts about these pieces of reception in media, let me know in the comments below.

I am, however, very excited about seeing The Return, which is a film set for theatrical release tomorrow that is based on the second half of the Odyssey (the half after Odysseus has arrived back on Ithaka that modern adaptations rarely devote much attention to). I promise that I will post something about it after I’ve seen it, but I may not get it posted until after December 15th, which is when the first round of PhD applications are due.

A Post-Election Update (November 17th, 2024)

Hello everyone! I apologize again for my lack of recent posts. I am still devoting most of my available writing time to working on my novel, which is slowly, but surely, progressing. I am no longer confident that I will have a complete draft by the end of 2024 due to the amount of revising I have been doing, but I am still expecting to have a complete draft by sometime in early 2025. Regarding this blog, I have had a post about Netflix’s Kaos saved as a draft for months now, but I still haven’t finished it. I am also hoping to make posts about Gladiator II and The Return, which are both coming out in the next few weeks. I have also been seriously considering the idea of trying to start a YouTube channel for a while now, but I know very little about video editing, I’ve been focused on my novel, and I haven’t gotten around to it.

Like many Americans and others around the world, I am filled with despair over the results of the 2024 U.S. elections. I thought about writing posts about the election both before and after it happened, but I feel so burned out over modern politics right now that I couldn’t bring myself to write them. Even so, I want to let all my readers know that I am currently safe and, although I expect that the situation in the United States will become much worse over next four years, I believe that I will be personally relatively insulated from the worst of it.

Related to this, I would like to announce that I am planning to delete my Twitter account in the near future, partly because I don’t like Elon Musk making money off of me and partly because the site itself has become so toxic and completely overrun with pro-Trump ads, right-wing extremist and Neo-Nazi accounts, and AI and cryptocurrency grifters that it is virtually unusable. The vast majority of the people whose content I was actually interested in have already left. The good news for those who want to follow me on social media, though, is that I already have an account of BlueSky. My handle on that site is @spencermcdaniel.bsky.social. If you want to follow me on social media, you can follow me there.

In the meantime, I am still planning to apply to PhD programs for the third time next month. This time, I am going to apply to more programs than I did the first two times and hope that I will have better luck.

An Update on My Novel in Progress (October 5th, 2024)

Hello everyone! I am still diligently working on the historical fiction novel that I started writing back in February of this year and announced that I was writing in June. Writing the novel has been my main preoccupation for the past few months and I have been spending at least ten hours most days working on it, which is a major part of the reason why I haven’t made many posts on this blog recently.

As I have continued writing, I have made substantial changes from what I originally planned (as writers usually do), but I firmly believe that all the changes I have made will result in a much better and more marketable final product. I am really excited about what I am writing and I think that regular readers of my blog will greatly love it. In this post, I will give an update on my progress and plans for the novel going forward as well as more information than I have previously shared about the novel’s historical setting, premise, and main character.

Advice on Reading Homer in Translation

The Iliad and the Odyssey are often regarded as being among the greatest works of world literature and many people have an interest in reading them—but how does one go about starting? Which translations are the best? In what manner should one read them? In this post, I will give advice in response to all these questions and discuss both the strengths and shortcomings of the most widely read translations, drawing on my experience as someone who has a master’s degree in classics, knows Ancient Greek, and has read the epics in the original Greek as well as in multiple translations.

What’s the Problem with Elon Musk’s ‘Iliad’ Advice?

On August 24th, 2024, Elon Musk, who is currently one of the richest, most powerful, and most influential human beings on the planet, tweeted, “Can’t recommend The Iliad enough! Best as Penguin audiobook at 1.25 speed.” He accompanied these words with a link to the audiobook edition of E. V. Rieu’s 1946 prose translation of the Odyssey (a different poem from the Iliad), published by Penguin Classics. This tweet has created a lot of discourse in the online classics community, with many classicists criticizing Musk while others are left wondering what there is to criticize. In this post, I will explain what the problems are with Musk’s recommendation, which basically break down into two separate issues: right-wing dog whistling and bad practical advice.

Why Greece Hasn’t Rebuilt the Agora

Almost every tourist who has ever visited Athens has at some point thought about how amazing it would be if the city’s monuments were restored to how they looked when they were new in classical antiquity. A couple of months ago, the website UnHerd, which has right-wing and libertarian political leanings and specializes in what it calls “slow journalism,” published an essay by Nicholas Boys Smith titled “It’s time to rebuild ancient Athens,” in which Smith proposes that Greece should fully restore the Athenian agora (the ancient central market and meeting place of the city) to how it looked in antiquity. This is a fairly common sentiment, so I wanted to take this opportunity to address it.

In this post, I will discuss why restoring Athens’ ancient ruins to how they looked in antiquity hasn’t already happened in the way that many tourists like Smith have hoped and the problems that such a restoration would certainly entail. Most ancient historians and archaeologists do support the idea of restoration to some degree or another, but we also recognize that restoration must be balanced with other concerns.

New Fragments of Euripides Discovered!

As I previously discussed in this post I wrote back in 2021, the vast majority of ancient Greek drama has not survived to the present day. Of the hundreds of Greek tragic playwrights who flourished in antiquity, only three have any plays that have survived to the present day complete under their own names: Aischylos, Sophokles, and Euripides. At least ninety-five plays attributed to Euripides circulated in antiquity. Of these, only nineteen have survived to the present day complete and only eighteen of them are actually his work. (One of the surviving plays attributed to him, Rhesos, is generally agreed by modern scholars to be the work of a different playwright wrongly attributed to Euripides.)

Many of Euripides’s lost plays, however, are not totally lost; fragments of them survive. Some of these fragments are preserved through quotation by later ancient writers in surviving works, while others survive on papyri that have been discovered in Egypt over the past roughly century and a half. Some of these fragments are as long as whole scenes, while others are as short as a single word. A new expansion to Euripides’s surviving corpus, however, has just arrived. On August 1st, 2024, two classics professors at the University of Colorado Boulder announced that they have identified substantial previously unknown sections from two of his lost tragedies on a papyrus recently discovered in Egypt. This is a positively electrifying discovery for the field of classics.