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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.

Update on My Graduate School Applications, 10 April 2022

As many of my readers are already aware, since I have mentioned it in various places, unless something goes horribly wrong at the last minute, I am going to graduate from Indiana University Bloomington with my BA in history and classical studies (Latin/Greek), with an honors thesis in history, on 7 May 2022. I am naturally very excited about my upcoming graduation and the completion of my degree that I have worked so hard for.

In December 2021, I applied to four PhD programs in ancient history: the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate Group in Ancient History (GGAH), the University of Michigan’s Interdepartmental Program in Ancient History (IPAH), the Princeton University classics department’s Program in the Ancient World (PAW), and the University of Chicago classics department’s graduate track in ancient history. Later, in February of this year, acting partly on the advice of one of my professors, I applied to Brandeis University’s terminal MA program in Ancient Greek and Roman Studies as a backup plan in case I was not accepted to any of the PhD programs.

I have now officially heard back from all the graduate school programs to which I applied. I would therefore like to update my readers on how the process went and give some information about what I will most likely be doing this upcoming fall semester.

Announcement: I Am Now Implementing an Official Policy on Comments

I have an additional announcement, which is that, as of today, 3 January 2022, I am implementing an official policy on comments. For the first few years of this blog’s existence, my policy on comments was basically that I would approve any comments anyone made that were not obviously spam. By summer 2020, though, it had become apparent to me that this policy was a disaster. I won’t go into details, but let’s just say that I had some comments sections that were real dumpster fires.

Over the course of the past year and a half or so, I have slowly developed an informal policy on comments. Now, it is a new year and I just announced in my previous post that I have started a Patreon. I therefore think that this is a good time for me to post my policy on comments publicly in a formalized manner. Because I know that old posts have a tendency to get buried, I have also posted the following policy as a separate page, which is accessible via a link underneath the “Pages” sign along the right side of the website.

Announcement: I Now Have a Patreon!

Hello, everyone! I have an important announcement, which is that I have now created a Patreon page. If you would like to support me and my blog, you can become a patron. I only have one tier for now, which is for a regular donation of three dollars a month. I do not currently offer any benefits for becoming a patron. I may decide to offer some benefits of some kind at some point in the future, but, for now at least, I’m still trying to figure out how this whole system works, and I still don’t really know what kinds of benefits for patrons would be simultaneously practical for me to offer and desirable for patrons.

You can become a patron if you want to, but don’t feel like you have to. I plan to continue posting articles on this blog that everyone can read for free, exactly as I have been doing for the past five years. It is very important to me that my writing is accessible to as many people as possible, so I am not going to put any of my articles behind a paywall.

May Not Be Able to Publish as Frequently in Coming Months, 21 August 2021

I am writing this note to let all my frequent readers and email subscribers know that my courses for this semester are set to begin on Monday, 23 August 2021 and they will last until mid-December. I will be taking some extremely difficult courses and I will almost certainly be extremely busy. I will try to continue posting as often as I can, but I will most likely not have enough time this semester to post anywhere close to as frequently as I have over the summer.

It is likely that I will only be able to post maybe one article each week at the very most and there will probably be some weeks when I will not have time to post anything at all. My articles may also need to be shorter because I won’t be able to spend as much time working on individual articles.

New YouTube Video for ‘The Study of Antiquity and the Middle Ages’, 19 August 2021

I’ve previously mentioned on this blog that I’ve done a couple interviews with Nick Barksdale for his YouTube channel “The Study of Antiquity and the Middle Ages.” Today, Nick released a video of an interview with me in which we discuss the question of whether it is fair to judge historical figures by so-called “contemporary standards.” My argument in this interview is loosely based on an argument I made in an article I wrote back in November 2019 titled “Should We Judge Historical Figures by Contemporary Standards.” Here is the video itself:

The article about Persephone that I mention in the interview is one that I was working on about a month ago in response to Overly Sarcastic Productions’ video on the subject. I haven’t finished it and I’ve set it aside for the moment in order to work on other things.