Tales of Times Forgotten

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.

An Update on My Novel in Progress (June 25th, 2024)

I apologize again for my dearth of recent posts. I am hoping to get at least one real post published before the end of this month and eventually to get back to posting more regularly. There are various reasons why I haven’t been posting as much lately as I used to, but a major part of the reason is because over the past few months, I have been doing an enormous amount of reading and I have been devoting nearly all my writing time toward working intensely on the historical fiction novel I have in progress.

As of the time I am writing this update, I currently have over 36,500 words (110 pages) of the novel written. I previously had even more written, but, as I discuss below, I decided to cut the entire second part of the novel, which made my current draft much shorter than the previous one. My target length for the first complete draft is between 75,000 and 90,000 words, so I am a little less than halfway finished. Although the book has been through a few different titles in the time I’ve been working on it and the title may end up changing before it is finally published, the current working title is Mother of the Gods.

A Personal Update (June 1st, 2024)

I would like to apologize for the fact that I haven’t posted anything in nearly a month. In this post, I would like my update my readers on several recent events that have taken place in my life. The first event is that, unfortunately, I did not get into a PhD program for this year (although I came very close to getting into the classics program at UCLA). This has contributed to me being rather depressed for the past couple of months. The second event is that I passed my master’s thesis defense with honors and have now officially graduated with my MA in Ancient Greek and Roman Studies. The third event is that I am now writing a historical fiction novel set in the ancient world.

Did Julius Caesar Really Say “The Die Is Cast”?

One of the most famous anecdotes in all of ancient history holds that, when the Roman general and politician Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon stream, which marked the boundary of Italy, in January 49 BCE during his march on Rome, he declared “Iacta alea est!” (which means “The die is cast!” in Latin). A version of this story does occur in the ancient historical sources, but those sources indicate that, instead of the Latin phrase I have quoted here, Caesar actually used a Greek phrase with a subtly different meaning, which holds different implications for his understanding of the significance of his famous Rubicon crossing.

In Defense of Hegelochos

The Athenian tragic playwright Euripides (lived c. 480 – c. 406 BCE) is known for adapting traditional myths in highly innovative and sometimes controversial ways. In spring 408 BCE, his perhaps most iconoclastic tragedy Orestes premiered at the City Dionysia in the Theater of Dionysos Eleuthereus on the south slope of the Athenian akropolis. The play addresses the same myth as Aischylos’s earlier tragedy Eumenides, but radically alters the plot. In Aischylos’s play, the character Orestes stands trial before a jury of Athenians and is acquitted of the crime of murdering his own mother. In Euripides’s adaptation, by contrast, Orestes (along with his accomplices Pylades and Elektra) are convicted and sentenced to death in Argos and attempt to escape through murder and hostage-taking.

The play’s radically revisionist treatment of a classic myth, however, is not the only reason why its first performance is famous. Several ancient scholarly commentaries, known as scholia, attest that, in the first performance of the play, Orestes was portrayed by an actor named Hegelochos, who messed up one of his lines and won eternal ridicule. In this post, however, I will argue that Hegelochos may not be entirely (or perhaps at all) to blame for the infamous slip-up, which may owe just as much or more to the audience’s mishearing.