February 2012
4 posts
“We come from a dark abyss, we end in a dark abyss, and we call the luminous...”
– The opening lines of The Saviors of God, by Nikos Kazantzakis, begun in 1922 and revised up until 1944. In Greek: Ερχόμαστε από μια σκοτεινή άβυσσο· καταλήγουμε σε μια σκοτεινή άβυσσο· το μεταξύ φωτεινό διάστημα το λέμε Ζωή.
Having just read these lines for the first time, I was immediately...
Cosmic voyeurs
This epigram was attributed to Plato, but is probably Hellenistic:
ἀστέρας εἰσαθρεῖς, ἀστὴρ ἐμός· εἴθε γενοίμην οὐρανός, ὡς πολλοῖς ὄμμασιν εἰς σὲ βλέπω.
You are gazing at the stars, my star: I wish I could become the sky, to look at you with many eyes.
It reminds me of Catullus 7: aut quam sidera multa, cum tacet nox, furtiuos hominum uident amores, or as many as the stars which, in the...
The Aporeticus: Argos, dog of Odysseus →
mills:
At the end of The Odyssey, Odysseus returns home in disguise after two decades of war and wandering; his old swineherd, Eumeaus, taking him for a stranger, walks him across his property and nearby his old dog, occasioning one of the earliest sentimental descriptions of the human-canine bond…
I’ve always loved this passage for exactly the reason Mills points out....
“The empirical basis of objective science has [ … ] nothing ‘absolute’...”
– Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery
January 2012
24 posts
“Apart from the thoughts of people, the only process known to be capable of...”
– David Deutsch
“Linguistic science is a step in the self-realization of man.”
– Leonard Bloomfield
“A scribe whose hand matches the mouth, he is truly a scribe.”
– Sumerian inscription
“The profit motive, when it is the sole basis of an economic system, encourages a...”
– Martin Luther King, Jr.
“In the face of the Communist challenge we must examine honestly the weaknesses...”
– Martin Luther King, Jr., How Should A Christian View Communism?
As well as remembering all that he did, today is about recognizing what remains to be done.
“Criticism may be said to continue the work of natural selection on a nongenetic...”
– Karl Popper, Unended Quest
“I think that the demand for a theory of successful thinking cannot be satisfied,...”
– Karl Popper, Unended Quest
“I fully agree with you about the significance and educational value of...”
– Einstein to Thornton, 7 December 1944
“A previously identified linguist who, when asked, “How many languages do you...”
– SpecGram—How Linguistics Got Her Groove Back—Gunnr Guðr Entgegenlächeln (via chryselephantine)
December 2011
10 posts
cursiteen asked: Hi! Theancientworld brought me here. I'm currently studying my first classical philology year in the University Autonomous of Barcelona. Do you think that this kind of studies will disappear soon? How do you see our future? People always say to me that my degree is useless or that I won't have any job offers when I graduate...
carriedawayy asked: Are you studying at the American school of classical studies in athens??
“As the great classicist Moses Finley often liked to say, in the ancient world,...”
– David Graeber (via azspot)
“We typically react quickly very to any departures from the expected sequences...”
– John Ingram, Neurolinguistics, 2007
November 2011
6 posts
Above the Clouds, Gangstarr
“Due to the extensive coverage of the site and the variety of the methods...”
– In two days I’ll be explaining this and fifty other similar paragraphs to a group of professional archaeologists. Step 1: Find out if these are even real things. Step 2: Get one of those Indiana Jones hats.
“A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.”
– Max Weinreich (kinda)
October 2011
1 post
September 2011
17 posts
“Not to know what happened before you were born is to be forever a child.”
– Marcus Tullius Cicero (via azspot)
Some of the things I've done in my first week at...
Examined 5,000 year old skulls excavated near Marathon.
Observed some protests at Syntagma Square.
Read from Schliemann’s diaries, including the entry in which he describes the discovery of the golden burial masks from Grave Shaft A at Mycenae.
Handled an edition of Homer’s Iliad from 1488 worth more than I’ll probably make in my lifetime.
Went inside the Temple of Hephaestus...
“Better the occasional faults of a government that lives in a spirit of charity...”
– F.D.R.
