Introduction The Classical Language Toolkit (CLTK) is software that brings natural language processing (NLP) to the languages of ancient, classical, and medieval Eurasia. This paper chronicles CLTK’s participation in Google Summer of Code (GSoC), a program run by Google to encourage the growth of open source software. Google pays a… Read more
In her seminal article about “Doctors’ literacy and papyri of medical content” (2010), Ann E. Hanson showed how the multifarious evidence provided by the Greek papyri from Egypt bears witness to a widespread medical literacy in the Graeco-Roman world.* This term—“medical literacy”—is used to encompass… Read more
Introduction The figure of the ancient “flute girl,” once thought to be merely an entertainer-prostitute, is problematic and complex. Flute girls [1] or more accurately, aulêtrides (female aulos players), are often considered mere prostitutes in classics scholarship [2] due to… Read more
The Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies, University of Iceland More than fifty years after the publication of The Singer of Tales the book and the ideas therein still serve as a fresh wind in the textually-oriented field of Old Norse Studies where very few have taken up the issue… Read more
Introduction The purpose of this paper is to give a first attempt at exploring the connections of Sappho with Egyptian love poetry. The reasons for this are that there seems to be a similarity in form with the way in which desire is expressed in the feminine voice, and it… Read more
Introduction Sapphic imagery is abundant in the novel Daphnis and Chloe written by Longus in the second century CE. When Gregory of Corinth refers to the following images used by Sappho and Anacreon, we recognize the same imagery in Longus as well: “οἷον τὰ Ἀνακρέοντος, τὰ Σαπφοῦς, οἷον γάλακτος λευκοτέρα,… Read more
About halfway through Aristophanes’ Knights, the play’s two main characters, the Paphlagonian and the Sausage-seller, call out to Demos, who emerges from his door: [1] ΔΗΜΟΣ τίνες οἱ βοῶντες; οὐκ ἄπιτ᾽ ἀπὸ τῆς θύρας; τὴν εἰρεσιώνην μου κατεσπαράξατε. 730 τίς, ὦ Παφλαγὼν, ἀδικεῖ σε;… Read more
Glory in ancient Greek epic was often reserved for two groups: warriors who earned their kleos through heroic feats on the battlefield and bards who increased their own renown by recounting fighters’ daring exploits. Warriors and performers tended to be men so kleos was typically denied to women. To be… Read more
Anne Carson and Ellen Greene offer disparate theories of the erotics at work in Sappho’s surviving corpus. Carson maintains that Sappho’s erotics are in line with those of the dominant culture that frames lovers and beloveds as occupying two drastically different roles in a pederastic, homosexual relationship, viz. as active… Read more
As Wilamowitz set out to write about the hymns of the late antique neoplatonic philosophers Proclus and Synesius of Cyrene, he began by remarking on why the texts may have been overlooked in scholarship, “High poetics especially, or even simple verbal artistry are not expected from babbling philosophers, and a… Read more
