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My Exciting Adventure in Greece, Part 5 (August 9th, 2023)

This post is the fifth installment in my ongoing series about my experience in the 2023 ASCSA Summer Session, covering the period from Sunday, July 9th, to Wednesday, July 12th. (Here are the previous installments, for those who may have missed them: first, second, third, and fourth.)

This post will describe, among many other things, how I went back to the Akropolis for the last time in my adventure, how I visited the ancient quarry where the Athenians quarried the stones they used to build the monuments on the Akropolis and a cave at the quarry that was a sanctuary of the god Pan in antiquity and is known today as the site of all kinds of supposed paranormal activity, how I visited two of the most famous battlefields in Greek history, and how I visited an often-overlooked ancient city that, for a brief period in the fourth century BCE, became the most powerful in mainland Greece, surpassing both Athens and Sparta. It will conclude with my arrival at Delphi, which was one of the most important sanctuaries in the ancient Greek world.

My Exciting Adventure in Greece, Part 4 (July 28th, 2023)

Hello everyone! As of two days ago, I am now back in the United States after having spent the past just over six weeks in Greece taking part in the 2023 ASCSA Summer Session. Unfortunately, while I was in Greece, I was so busy that I was not really able to keep up with my blog of my experience. Now that I am back in the U.S., though, I intend to continue posting my account of my experience until I have covered the entire six weeks. Partly on the advice of my parents, from this point onward, I intend to break up my account into shorter, more frequent posts than I have been previously.

This post is the fourth installment in my ongoing series, covering the period of Tuesday, July 4th, through Saturday, July 8th. (Here are the previous three installments: first, second, and third.) In this installment, I will describe how I got to see behind the scenes at an archaeological excavation with restricted access, how I got to go inside an astoundingly well-preserved ancient Greek temple that very few people even know exists, and how I participated in a footrace in the stadium of the ancient Olympic Games at Olympia.

My Exciting Adventure in Greece, Part 3 (July 11th, 2023)

Hello! This is the third installment in my ongoing blog of my experience in the ASCSA Summer Session for summer 2023, covering the period of Wednesday, June 21st through Monday, July 3rd. The first installment can be found here and the second installment can be found here.

In this installment, I will describe how I (among many other things) saw the mountain underneath which Zeus is said to have been raised by nymphs, tried octopus, hiked to the top of the Akrokorinth, ran in a footrace in the ancient stadium of the Nemean Games, recited ancient Greek poetry in the ancient Greek Theater of Epidauros, went down an over-three-millennia-old tunnel, and tried alcohol for the first time in Sparta. There will, of course, be plenty of photos of the various sites, monuments, and artworks that I have seen.

My Exciting Adventure in Greece, Part 2 (June 20th, 2023)

Hello everyone! I’m making this post to give a further update about all the exciting things I’ve been doing in the past week in Greece. This will be the second installment in my ongoing blog of my experience in the ASCSA Summer Session for summer 2023, covering the period of Wednesday, June 14th, through Tuesday, June 20th. The first installment can be found here. In this installment, I will describe how I (among many other things) went inside the Parthenon, walked in the ruins of a 3,500-year-old Minoan city, hiked through the Gorge of Dead, and went swimming in the Aegean Sea.

My Exciting Adventure in Greece, Part 1 (June 13th, 2023)

As regular readers of this blog are already aware from this post I made back in early March, this summer, I am participating in the American School of Classical Studies at Athens (ASCSA)’s six-week Summer Session in Greece, which began yesterday (Monday, June 12th) and will continue until July 26th. This is not only my first time ever being in Greece, but also my first time ever visiting any country other than the United States, so it is a very new and exciting experience for me. I have been obsessed with Greece for over a decade now and have wanted to go there for just as long. Now, for the first time, I am finally here.

The program is intensive and, as a result, I will not have time to research and write my usual variety of long, heavily-researched blog posts while I am taking part in it. Instead of writing my usual research posts, I have decided to write short updates about what I have been doing and seeing in Greece, along with photos I have taken myself. Thus, for the next six weeks, this blog will temporarily become a travel blog. After I go back to the U.S. near the end of July, I will resume my usual posting.

Have Been Accepted to the American School of Classical Studies at Athens (ASCSA)’s Summer Session for 2023!

Hello folks! I thought I should update you all that I found out about a week and a half ago that I have been accepted to the American School of Classical Studies at Athens (ASCSA)’s Summer Session for this summer, which is a six-week intensive study abroad program in Greece that is scheduled to last from June 12th to July 26th, 2023. The program is meant to give an intensive survey of Greek archaeology for advanced undergraduates, graduate students, secondary school teachers, and faculty who specialize in fields other than archaeology.

The program runs seven days a week from seven o’clock a.m. to seven o’clock p.m. Half of the program is spent in Athens, while the other half is spent traveling throughout Greece. Over the course of this time, participants visit basically every major museum, archaeological site, and monument in Greece, as well as many others that are not as well known, and recognized specialists give lectures and tours to them on site. Each participant is also required to research and deliver two on-site oral reports themself and participate in seminar-style discussions.

The program is both highly respected and highly selective. My understanding is that, each year, they receive an enormous number of applicants, but the total number of participants for each year is limited to only twenty people. I was therefore actually a little bit happily surprised when I learned that they were offering me direct admission without me even being waitlisted first.

“The Man, the Myth, the Pumpkin” Podcast

Hello folks! My good friend Sophia Sarro is a fellow grad student in the Ancient Greek and Roman Studies program at Brandeis University. They are strongly committed to promoting scholarly engagement with the public and, for their master’s project, they decided to do something a little different; they’ve created a podcast about the history of fictional portrayals of the Roman emperor Claudius (ruled 41 – 54 CE), spanning all the way from his death to the present day, examining how portrayals of him have been shaped by their cultural and historical contexts, how they interpret him in different ways and convey radically different messages, and how they deal with major aspects of his life, including his disability.

Their podcast is titled “The Man, the Myth, the Pumpkin” and you can listen to it here. The first episode, which just came out yesterday, is about how the Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca the Younger (lived c. 4 BCE – 65 CE) portrays Claudius in his famous satire Apocolocyntosis Claudii or The Pumpkinification of Claudius, which he wrote not long after the emperor’s death. Sophia will be dropping more episodes of the podcast over the course of the coming weeks.

I’ve just listened to the first episode and I cannot recommend their work highly enough! Sophia has put an enormous amount of time and labor into making this podcast and it really shows. Their writing is excellent and witty, their research is thorough, and their dramatic reading is spot-on. The podcast is both educational and entertaining and I’m sure that those who enjoy my blog will enjoy it as well. I personally loved listening to every second of the first episode and I eagerly await the next one.

Most of My Pictures Seem to Have Suddenly Disappeared, 13 September 2022

Hello folks! For some reason, it seems that the majority of the pictures I have featured in my posts for roughly the past six months, which used to show up completely fine, have all suddenly disappeared off this blog and are no longer visible to people reading my posts over the internet for some bizarre reason. The images still show up when I view them in edit mode and I have some vague impression of what the problem may be. Unfortunately, I am probably going to have to fix each photo individually, which will be an extremely labor-intensive and time-consuming task.

It is difficult to convey how deeply frustrating I find this. I already have far less time to devote toward this blog than I used to. I started my MA program last month and I am taking a total of four courses for credit and working as a course assistant for one additional course this semester, amounting to a total of five courses or twenty credit hours that I need to keep up with. I have also been making a lot of friends with the fellow grad students in my program and I am actually starting to have something resembling a social life for really the first time since I was in middle school a decade ago. (It’s wonderful, but it feels absolutely bizarre!)

As a result of the combination of all these factors, it is becoming more difficult to keep posting on this blog as regularly as I would like. I am still trying to make a new post at least once every week. I am planning to make a post hopefully before the end of this week about how the Epic of Gilgamesh is not the oldest surviving work of literature, in which I will discuss various works of literature that are even older than it. Sadly, this whole situation with most of my pictures randomly disappearing will most likely take up even more of my time, so please don’t be disappointed if I can’t make the post until this weekend or possibly even next week.

UPDATE: I’ve figured out the problem and have fixed most of the images! It’s taken me nearly four hours and there are still probably some images I’ve missed, but most of them appear to be showing up now. I’d like to sincerely thank my commenter Rick R for pointing out a clue that helped me solve the problem. It turns out that, as the result a new update, a method I was previously using to size images no longer works and was breaking the images.

Why I Am Leaving Quora

I have been writing answers on the question-and-answer website Quora since October 2018, I have frequently cross-posted in-depth articles answering questions about ancient history to both this blog and Quora, I have built up no less than 24,868 followers on that site (as of the time I am writing this), and I have made many friends there. It therefore saddens me to announce that I am leaving Quora for the foreseeable future and most likely permanently.

Sadly, I am leaving not because I want to leave, but rather simply because I have no choice. Even though I have scrupulously followed every minutia of Quora policy, Quora Moderation has automatically collapsed or deleted nearly every answer I have written for the past three months and now they have repeatedly threatened to ban me from the site for supposedly violating a policy that I am not actually violating.

Help Support Nick Barksdale’s Family

Those who have been reading my blog for a while are probably aware that I did three interviews last year for Nick Barksdale’s YouTube channel The Study of Antiquity and the Middle Ages. At the time Nick and I recorded my last interview with him for his channel in late July 2021, he was only thirty years old and he seemed completely healthy. Then, on 4 August, he suddenly fell gravely ill with what turned out to be a septic heart infection. He has been in and out of emergency care for nearly the past year. Sadly, on 2 June 2022, Nick passed away. His wife and two very young daughters, one of whom was born in the past year while he was in the hospital fighting for his own life, survive.

In my experience of him, Nick was an extraordinarily caring, generous, and charismatic person. I share some personal stories about my experiences with him and his kindness below, but, more urgently, there is a GoFundMe page to raise money to help support Nick’s surviving family in this trying time. If you are able, please consider donating money to support Nick’s family, who will (I presume) need to pay his medical and funeral costs and somehow support themselves in the meantime. I’ve already donated $125 of my own money, but I’m sure that any amount you can donate will help, even if it is just a few dollars.