Classics Salon!

[cahn]

So yeah, anyone who has been around this DW for more than a very little while has known that we had a salon in which we discussed Frederick the Great in particular and 18th-century Enlightenment figures in general.

But nooooow we are going to have a Classics salon!

My Classics background is, er, well, I guess my Classics history is pretty much on par with or somewhat worse than my general non-US historical background (read: I know almost nothing, with some random pockets of slight layman knowledge), and my Classics literary background is signficantly worse than my general literary background (no real reason, it's not like I had a vendetta against it or anything, I think I just didn't happen to have a good entry point). I've read the Odyssey last year and the Aeneid reasonably recently, and the Iliad not so reasonably recently (perhaps this will be the impetus for me to check out the Wilson translation), and Ted Hughes' translation of selected Metamorphoses.

Please feel free to tell me what books I really ought to be looking at next! (I believe there has been some discussion of Plutarch?) Feel free to wax eloquent about your favorite translations, whether it's something I've already read or not! Also please free to tell me any of your favorite Classics history you want, because I probably don't know it :)

(This is not supposed to be just for mildred_of_midgard and selenak, although of course I expect them to be prime contributors. I know that many of you, probably all of you, know a lot about Classics that I don't know, so please inform me! Tell me your favorite things! :D )

Comments

[selenak]

Doesn’t have to be immediately, but how about us having a go at our boy Flavius Josephus, aka Josef ben Matthias? Both the Jewish War and the Antiquities would make for a fascinating compare and contrast with the Roman and Greek sources of the same events and people. I can’t remember whether Josephus’ takes include Alexander himself, but they do include some of the events in the ensuing Hellenistic in the successor kingdoms.

Re: Plutarch, here I must admit I never until now read more than excerpts, usually quoted in more modern biographies, and definitely not the biographies in the way he wrote them i.e. pairing up a Roman and a Greek guy (of course they’re always men) for compare and contrast. Given that Mildred wants to write an “Alexander and Fritz” as a modern variation of that principle, it might be interesting to check out some of those pairings in the original, rather than just one or the other.

Josephus and Plutarch

[cahn]

Josephus: Ohhhh yes I am in for this! :D :D (And as I mentioned to cenozoic_synapsid above, also interested in its attestation of Jesus-era events/people, though my understanding is that Jesus himself is mentioned, like, three times, and possibly at least one of those is a later interpolation?)

Also up for Plutarch, though if we do any of that, I think I might need a lot of historical scaffolding :P (Although I am with the right crowd for that! :D ) Part of the allure of Josephus, of course, is that Feuchtwanger already gave me that scaffolding :D

Let's talk more about this in January! I'm aware that your darth real life doesn't stop then, but hey, you reading at a darth RL speed might be... well, maybe it's only a single order of magnitude higher than my reading at normal RL speed :)