Professor Mary Beard has just aired the first episode of her new series, Meet the Romans. Having just finished watching it, I do not hesitate to recommend it with high praise.
Listening to the first episode, I felt like I was seeing what the new era of Classics would look like: When people first began studying the Classics in earnest, they reminisced of the ‘glory of old’ and ‘better times’. The tone was moralizing, and the focus was Continue reading
“You know, Caesar would have said ‘weni, widi, wici’,” your annoying over-educated friend tells you as you say the famous lines after a night out (or perhapas you fancied yourself clever and said ‘vidi, vici, veni’ you dirty-minded scholar, you); maybe you were the friend offering the correction. In either case, the v-pronouncing culprit may not have been far off the mark.
Let me be clear about one thing first though. In Classical Latin, V (or as I’ll be writing it henceforth, u) could definitely represent [w], and it definitely did so in Caesar’s famous lines. But whether or not Caesar Continue reading
Being in academia is hard.
Of course it requires a lot of hard work, but no one ever thinks about the difficulty of becoming an academic for those who aren’t born to it. It’s like a special sort of sedentary sport where success is measured only by survival; there is no finish line except perhaps tenure. And unless you take to your subject like a fish to water, you’re in for a very rough time of it.
The problem is that once you’ve entered academia, it’s assumed you’re a fish in water. If it turns out you’re just Continue reading
(just a tiny) Piece of the Internet 