I shall probably not be awake at midnight, so let me wish everyone a happy new year now. Since one of my abiding memories of 2015 is singing Auld Lang Syne, stone cold sober, in the early afternoon in an Edinburgh University lecture theatre at the EAHIL workshop, I offer below Auld Lang Syne in…

I’m no drama critic. I lack both the necessary theoretical background and, an infrequent theatre-goer, the practical experience, to do a decent job. However, as far as I can see no one else has tackled the recent King’s College London Greek Play, so I shall have a go. I saw the first night, preceded by…

This blog is starting to become formulaic. The pattern seems to be something like this: Step 1: your author reads something in the paper that annoys himStep 2: your author rushes to the keyboard and, frothing at the mouth, pens words of savagery that they make Jonathan Swift and Martial look like Godfrey WinnStep 3:…

Νῦν ὑπὲρ πάντων ἀγών: now you fight for everything. These words, from the messenger's description of the battle of Salamis, spoken by the Greeks as their ships are about to engage the Persians are, according to Simon Goldhill's pre-play lecture at the KIngs College London Greek Play, the motive and reason for the Greek victory.…

‘The Loeb Library, with its Greek or Latin on one side of the page and its English on the other, came as a gift of freedom…The existence of the amateur was recognised by the publication of this Library, and to a great extent made respectable…The difficulty of Greek is not sufficiently dwelt upon, chiefly perhaps…

I’m going to see Aeschylus’ The Persians, the Kings College London Greek Play, part of the University of London Festival of Greek Drama next month. I thought I’d better bone up on the text and, while I have the very fine Scriptorum Classicorum Bibliotheca Oxoniensis edition, by Denys Page, my faltering Greek needs a parallel…

Not a description of me after Christmas, but an example of the hours of fun to be had in the titles of academic papers. This year’s Classical Association Conference boasts two sessions that are particularly fruitful. Doctor Who and the Classical world: Time -travelling beyond Pompeii Panel Convenor: Tony Keen (Open University) Melissa Beattie (Cardiff)…

A disturbing example of the misuse of Google's power, one hopes through incompetence rather than malevolence, is demonstrated by the case of the Bryn Mawr Classical Review's blog. The Bryn Mawr Classical Review is an online journal of impeccable academic credentials, the second oldest online scholarly journal in the humanities.  Since August 2008 articles have…

There’s a special issue of Digital Humanities Quarterly on the theme Transforming Classical Studies Through Cyberinfrastructure in memory of Ross Scaife, the founder of the Stoa Consortium for Electronic Publication in the Humanities, with lots of fascinating stuff, but the article that caught my eye is by Neel Smith on citation in the classics. I…

I held forth on performances of classical Greek drama in the original language a few days ago. I now have more information, for which I'm very grateful to Amanda Wrigley at the Archives of Performance of Greek and Roman Drama, based at Oxford, and to Mr D Jones, archivist at the Perse School. Mr Jones…

I'm annoyed. I can't go to the Kings College Greek play next week, They're performing Lysistrata, as part of the University of London Festival of Greek Drama, the only production of the festival to be performed in Greek. I have been to the triennial Cambridge Greek play, Medea in 2007; I missed the Oxford one…