eheu!!!

Vivian greek & latin major, socialist, decadent bisexual 📖 lavinia

[galina]

It must be spring 🥐🌼

[violetsnotebook-archive]

20.04.21 / found an antique shop on my way to the bookstore yesterday. everything that needed to get done most certainly did not get done but I still made progress, and that still holds as much merit regardless of pace or outcome. i just have to try again today. hope you have a lovely week ahead. take care ♡

[blackchantilly]

I keep thinking about this guy I saw in Dallas.

[biclassics]

03/14/24

I’ve been so over the moon for the last week because I found out I got into my top choice master’s program! One step closer to becoming a Latin teacher :)

[fluentisonus]

genuinely inconsolable I can't have one of these pompeii bread plushies fr.

[rukafais]

Blorbo from my mosaics.....

[modmad]

[biclassics]

03/10/24

Went to the opera this week! Big fan of Sarah Ruhl’s work in general, and I can’t wait to see the play version when my school does a production later this spring.

[slettlune]

you may have seen achilles in his miserable blanket burrito but have you seen odysseus Sitting Like That while appealing to achilles in his miserable blanket burrito

achilles looking all "make him stop make him stop make him stop"

[finelythreadedsky]

it's so great that in greek tragedy there are only three paradigms for a woman leaving her house (her wedding, her funeral, and maenadic rites) and they're all kind of the same thing also

[finelythreadedsky]

every woman in greek tragedy is simultaneously a bride, a corpse, and a maenad

[ourfewremainingfriends]

Not to cross contaminate the classics posting, but there's so much of this in traditional Chinese literature! Look up Xiaoqing from the late Ming, and there's an absolutely gorgeous poem about a wedding send off that shortly preceded a tragic death, and her parents are writing about the similarity between the two. Also, her mother was a published author, which was becoming more common in that period, and is a fascinating phenomenon. There's fewer maenad equivalents in this period though.

[biclassics]

02/27/24

went to the library last sunday to read some seneca by these marble busts of people who used to live in boston

[thecinamonroe]

Marilyn Monroe on the set of “Some Like it Hot” in Los Angeles, 1958. Photographs by Richard C. Miller.

[skiffst]

i love when academics are like this

from the translator's introduction in my copy of antigone... she's his blorbo.... <3

[wallflowerstudies]

090224

I love studying in coffee shops but a part of me screams "IN THIS ECONOMY?!!"

[nikoisme]

penelope but with gray hair <3

[biclassics]

Seneca: It’s much more manly to be dry and sober while the rabble are drunk and vomiting, and it shows your control over yourself if you don’t excuse yourself from festivities or stand out from the others while not blending in with them, and doing the same things they are doing but in a different way; since it’s perfectly fine to party without extravagance

Me, drinking a mimosa on a Sunday afternoon while doing my Latin homework: yeah for sure dude

[currentlycryingaboutlancelot]

so don’t get me wrong because a lot of arthurian stuff is super misogynistic. but it’s never really in the damsel in distress way you expect. like the most helpless damsel is lancelot trapped and crying in a tower, completely useless, until this random girl who made him behead a guy in front of her fifty pages ago rolls up with a pickax and rope and is like “ok I’m minecrafting you out of here.” and this works.

[maniculum]

Another direction you’ll see this go is, like… okay, so in Arthurian texts, violence is very much The Province of Men. But women often want violence done for one reason or another, so they’re out there asking knights to fight such-and-such for them & the knights are of course honor-bound to accept under certain conditions, which by genre convention are easy to engineer.

All of this means that one of the standard female roles in Arthurian romance is “quest-giver”. And in some texts, this can drift from “these are damsels in distress and the knights must help them in various ways” to “it kind of seems like the women are the ones who actually know what’s going on & the knights are just being led along to wherever they’re supposed to be”.

It’s still ultimately an example of misogyny and strict gender roles, but it ends up often looking pretty different from the stock “damsel in distress” scenario people expect.

[thedupshadove]

...Is the woman in Arthurian myth who Wants Violence Done but must conscript a man to actually do it the literary ancestress of the modern Femme Fatale? Discuss.

[maniculum]

She slipped into my office that night like a demon into the mind of a pious monk, seductive and dripping with heresies. Her gown and headress were of rich silk befitting a maiden, but her eyes were cold and sharp as the executioner's sword, and her lips as red as the apple that tempted Eve. Her legs, presumably, went all the way up, but the aforementioned gown was floor-length, so it's hard to say. Also she'd ridden a horse into the building for some reason, which was quite distracting.

"Sir Knight," she said, dismounting and retrieving something from her saddlebag, "I have a job for you." She tossed a severed head onto my desk.

I peered at the severed head. It had noble features, and had managed to land exactly on top of one of the stains left by previous severed heads. "How did you find me?" I asked. "I swapped my red shield for a blue one; the disguise should be impenetrable."

"The hermit told me where you'd be", she answered in a voice like the bells on a horse's harness before battle.

That tracks. Those hermits are always poking their noses into my business. "How may I serve you, fair lady?" I asked. "I'd kneel, but my armor's gone a bit rusty in the legs."

"The Baron D'Iverjoure has slain my lover," she said, gesturing at the head, the rings on her fingers clinking like manacles in a wicked king's dungeon. "I need you to avenge him."

"I have no quarrel with the Baron D'Iverjoure," I said, knowing as the words echoed in my helmet that I was saying them just for the form of it and I'd end up taking this quest regardless. "I have heard he is an honorable man."

"That may be," said the damsel, in tones as lovely as a reliquary and just as filled with death, "but you took an oath to obey the next lady to ask you a favor, and I'm calling it in."

I silently cursed my habit of swearing rash vows. They always get me in trouble. But you know how that goes. "Your wish is my command, milady."

She nodded and remounted her horse with the help of her two servants who I hadn't bothered to mention before now. "I will listen for news of your success," she said as she left.

That's the way it is with damsels; they always know about the oaths. Even the ones you spoke into a dented chalice, empty of wine, after everyone else had left the feast. And now I've got another quest I can't turn down without losing my honor.

[maniculum]

#as lovely as a reliquary and just as filled with death is a BANGER OF A LINE

I'm glad you appreciate it. I was wracking my brain trying to come up with enough "beautiful but dangerous" similes to fill this out in the over-the-top way I wanted -- the reliquary one was the only case where I stopped and thought "that's actually not bad; i should remember it." Probably needs workshopping, but I like it in concept.

[biclassics]

2/20/24

I have been so bad at posting on here consistently but I took these pictures while visiting my cousin in Philly this weekend and they were too pretty to not share!! If any of you are in the area and like old books, I highly recommend touring the Rosenbach Museum and Library. Full of old books, from Cicero to Cervantes to Lewis Carroll to Dickinson to Joyce. The second picture is a recreation of Marianne Moore’s living room. She was the editor of the Dial, a poet in her own right, and a friend and mentor to many literary figures of the 20th century, like Elizabeth Bishop and Allen Ginsberg.

[thoodleoo]

love this egyptian figurine of a woman baking bread in the brooklyn museum. she looks exactly like me while i'm waiting for my food to be done in the microwave. truly an eternal experience

[somecunttookmyurl]

alright i have permission to derail this so im derailing it

this figure is fucking. wild. a sequence of events: me and @thatlittleegyptologist seeing this immediately: okay not the point but she is NOT egyptian. that woman eats olives. she does not drink chunky beer. she does not believe the sun is rolled around by a unit of a dung beetle. she is GUH-REEK brooklyn museum: greek greekity greek btw she's in the egyptian collection us: ok why though. look i'll grant this does look like egyptian baking scenes but SHE isnt egyptian. and 5th century BCE is far too early for greek-egyptian shenanigans. something isnt right here @ikchen: do they just not have a separate collection for classical and this where it gets. more? fucked up you, i, and every other normal person would from a museum read "egyptian, classical, ancient near east" as three separate designations applied to the same object. egyptian. classical. ANE. which can absolutely be the case! things can be more than one thing

but no. that is, in fact, all one collection. that's not three links that's one link. all of classical and near eastern civ is contained within egypt. thutmose would be thrilled.

there is a minoan tentacle vase on display in the egyptian old kingdom room. there are greek coins and wreaths in an egyptian art exhibition

egyptian is always listed first. half the shit in it never saw egypt.

there is a link to ask them questions and im tempted to ask if they're aware that greece is not located within egypt

[thoodleoo]

thanks to the egyptology crew for figuring this out! i figured it was greco-egyptian but yeah, the time period is totally off. which is 1. not particular clear 2. not something that the average museum goer would probably know. so, like. wild!!