My normal approach to writing these journal entries is to make rough notes every so often in the course of the day, sometimes writing sections up in a bit more detail when I really don’t want to forget something. I’m so tired today that I keep getting distracted, completely forge … | Continue reading
Apparently there is now a gimmick on Grammarly which, if you upload an academic paper, offers you feedback and suggestions on it from a selection of relevant scholars – the example I saw on social media, for a piece on the medieval Mediterranean, included the options of Chris Wic … | Continue reading
Clearly the AI bots that generate flattering messages to authors as a prelude to scamming them have run out of worthwhile targets, as I’ve just received one. It’s sensible enough not to claim that a book club is keen to engage with Classics: Why It Matters, but offers several par … | Continue reading
A basic fact of student feedback, certainly in any class bigger than ten or so, is that there will always be at least one gratuitously negative and basically unfair response. Sometimes that student will go to the trouble of writing quite extensive comments – which tend to confirm … | Continue reading
Reflections on having added yet another entry to the ‘Misattributed’ section of the Thucydides Wikiquote page… One of my regular complaints is that many of these quotes persist because they are disseminated, or not corrected, by people who really ought to know better. Take the st … | Continue reading
It’s time to get ahead of the media story. Thucydides has nothing to hide, and is completely committed to transparency. While there has been speculation about a distant family connection to Pericles, there is no intimate relationship between them that would in any way compromise … | Continue reading
It’s half past seven, and this is already one of those days that are probably best forgotten as soon as possible. Slept okay until about four, and then managed to doze fitfully, fighting off panicky thoughts of work (and, for some reason, a persistent earworm of Adele’s version o … | Continue reading
Once upon a time, the internet was all about hyperlinks. My first webpage, back in 1994-5, was roughly 40% links to other people’s pages about stuff I liked (if I recall correctly, an eclectic mixture of topics like chocolate, chillis and the lyrics of Bob Dylan), and other peopl … | Continue reading
Once again we find Thucydides at the heart of tangled questions of war, diplomacy and politics, power, life and death. I’m not thinking of Trump’s claim to Greenland/Iceland/Saarland/Greendale/delete as appropriate, or Mark Carney’s bid to claim the (currently dormant) title of M … | Continue reading
Despite any scurrilous rumours you may have heard, I do not in fact advocate for everyone to be compelled to read Thucydides. On the contrary, I’d be more easily persuaded of the need to introduce a short proficiency test as a prequisite for being allowed to read it – though clea … | Continue reading
I am a little surprised at the more or less total lack of discussion amongst classical reception folks on here of the third episode of the new series of Fallout, given that one of the major plot strands involves the appearance of Caesar’s Legion as one of the various violent fact … | Continue reading
There’s nothing like a would-be strongman with poor impulse control throwing his weight (and, more significantly, his country’s weight) around on the international stage to bring out the Thucydides quoters on social media. 80% Melian Dialogue – the ‘gangstas rule, suckas suffer’ … | Continue reading
And now the end is near – of the blogging year, of course. It’s traditional for me to shake my head despairingly at this point, wondering whether it’s all worth it, but actually I feel in a pretty good place at the moment as far as the blog is concerned. Viewing and visitor figur … | Continue reading
As ever, one of the fun aspects of end-of-year reflection is revisiting the blog posts, articles and other internet things that I noted down in the course of the year as worth revisiting – sorry, I had another bad night and my sentence-writing gland is sluggish. This is of course … | Continue reading
Dreadful night; dropped off fine, then after an hour or so the cats started – to be strictly accurate, Hector and Olga started, running around the house like mad things and dropping the rubber ball down the stairs in order to chase it and then bring it back to the top to start ag … | Continue reading
One of the minor unexpected consequences of having a playlist of gentle, mostly piano trio jazz tracks designed to help me relax and drop off to sleep, that sometimes gets left on all night, is that it completely skews end-of-year listening stats. The number of quiet piano trio p … | Continue reading
Have we not learnt to double-check all references? Especially in this new era of bullshitting machines? This afternoon, Naomi Scott (@drnaomiscott.bsky.social) posted on Bluesky that she’d just been reading the really wild Wikipedia page for Euripides’ lost tragedy Thyestes. And, … | Continue reading
That there is no life without truth, and no truth without philology. That Philology alone is objective; everything else is speculation. That language defines our humanity; philology is the mastery of language, and so philology is the highest form of human knowledge and developmen … | Continue reading
An addendum to my comment last week, speculating on the possible motives for anyone to send a fake, GenAI-produced enquiry about a possible MRes project. One of the more serious theories is that it’s a way of gathering more training data, up-to-date specialised information about … | Continue reading
Woke suddenly out of a deep sleep; the only thing I remember is dreaming that Hector’s wound, the source of much anxiety over the last week or so (apparently the result of being burned by heated pads when he was coming round at the vet after a dental operation – and then the idio … | Continue reading
It’s weird that I haven’t seen any discussion of this, as it seems improbable that the robots would choose the University of Exeter’s Classics Department as the bridgehead for world conquest, but there seems to be a sudden plague of artificial MA applicants. An email arrives from … | Continue reading
Yesterday I was in Oxford to contribute to a really interesting seminar series on Conceptual Metaphors in Reception Studies – that is to say, what are the key metaphors and figures that we use, self-consciously or not, to talk about how past texts are received (that’s one right t … | Continue reading
This is, one might suggest, an interesting week to discuss an ancient story about a mad tyrant seeking to indulge his sexual desires regardless of law or custom, and the group of judges who have determined that he can do whatever he likes… Herodotus 3.31.2-5: Cambyses was infatua … | Continue reading
My wife is blaming me for her having a very disturbed Friday night, as she felt obliged to listen to Radio 4’s Free Thinking as I was a guest on it (https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002lppp), and then found the discussion of impending global catastrophe disturbing, depressing an … | Continue reading
Today we have Strategic Vision. Yesterday,We had financial imperatives. And tomorrow morning,We shall have what to do after firing. But today,Today we have Strategic Vision. The quiet girlAt the back suddenly gets excited about a question,And today we have Strategic Vision. This … | Continue reading
Full disclosure: I was one of those academics who, when Wikipedia first appeared, warned students against using it in no uncertain terms. To be fair, in those days most of its articles on ancient history were simply copied from an out-of-copyright edition of the Encyclopaedia Bri … | Continue reading
Woke about half four, as I’m still adjusting to the clocks going back – not helped by the fact that Hector is also clearly having difficulty waiting another hour for breakfast, and is a great deal louder about it. I doze, with Buddy snoring beside me. My thoughts drift towards my … | Continue reading
I sit in a bar in Indianapolis Airport Uncertain and bemused As the rules of American so-called football Really seem very confused… I have missed social media on my US trip rather less than I thought I would, but there’s nothing like having to sit in an airport terminal for three … | Continue reading
I’m not teaching this year, thanks to the magnificent beneficence of the Leverhulme Trust, and so did not have to respond to the latest tendentious mucking-raking fishing expedition from the right-wing gutter press… I’m sorry, I’ll read that again: the latest very legitimate and … | Continue reading
In the unlikely event that anyone is wondering why I’ve been silent on social media this week, despite e.g. the provocations offered by Robert Jenrick’s pronouncements on the impending Bizarre Love Triangle, sorry, impending New Order (decadence klaxon!), it’s because I’m in Bloo … | Continue reading
So, all the books I’ve ever written or edited appear on the LibGen pirate website (among others) – I haven’t bothered to check for books to which I’ve contributed a chapter – and therefore were potentially plagiarised by Anthropic to train its LLM Claude, which has been the subje … | Continue reading
Wake to find that I’m singing Pulp songs in my head. Strange; not the songs I use as a means of trying to get back to sleep in the middle of the night (Sylvia’s Mother, Famous Blue Raincoat and Diamonds and Rust), no reason for thinking of them. Good news is that it’s nearly seve … | Continue reading
If politics is rock music for boring people… I’m getting increasingly annoyed by the frequent use of music analogies to describe the current Labour government. One example from this morning’s Grauniad: “On its worst days, Starmer’s government is akin to a mediocre tribute band pl … | Continue reading
I don’t understand this world any more, #273 in an ongoing series… This is so bizarre that I really wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out to be fake – if it’s genuine, it suggests that we really are in the final stages of Late Capitalism Will Eat Itself – but there was some disc … | Continue reading
As I’ve mentioned on here before, one of my most treasured possessions for many years was a mug, given to me by a group of ancient history students; white with blue lettering, reading “The simple answer is… we just don’t know”. This gift meant a huge amount to me partly because t … | Continue reading
An interesting addition to the pro-GenAI literature, offering a new analogy for its mysterious powers: Ethan Mollick, ‘On Working With Wizards’. The short version: stop worrying your pretty little head about how it actually works, just marvel at the results, and “Embrace provisio … | Continue reading
‘De mortuis nil nisi bonum’/ Non requirit ut bona dicas. ‘Say nothing but good of the dead’/ Does not require good things to be said. | Continue reading
Wake up with a painful throat. Oh dear, here we go again. Air conditioning in this hotel? People in the train yesterday? People in the audience on Monday? A. had mentioned on Monday evening, as she reminds me, that my glands looked as if they might be up, which would then suggest … | Continue reading
On the one hand, what’s happening in the University of Chicago – the (supposedly temporary) suspension of recruitment to PhD programmes in Classics as well as other disciplines that require serious language learning – is really pretty trivial compared with the closure of programm … | Continue reading
It is of course distressing to realise that demand for my opinions on Thucydides is limited… Just over a fortnight ago I embarked on one of those “One like, one X” social media things on Bluesky, and was initially quite overwhelmed – just as I thought I was starting to catch up w … | Continue reading
“Generative AI tools offer significant opportunities to improve teaching and student learning.” Uh huh. The key question about the new American Historical Association guiding principles on the use of Generative AI in history education is whether they have signed up to the idea th … | Continue reading
Ten years or so ago, I had a business idea. This is not something that often happens – precisely twice in my life, in fact, as my entrepreneurial (aka opportunistic) approach to research ideas doesn’t translate into any sort of comfort with the world of enterprise and profit. How … | Continue reading
Woke from a deep sleep, albeit with very peculiar dreams involving a complicated journey across a city that I can’t place but seems very familiar. It’s the first really good sleep I’ve had for at least a week; back in my own bed, with my own pillow rather than an uncomfortable co … | Continue reading
He looked at the new homepage of the University of Warwick, and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that university senior management teams are no longer even remotely human. It’s not just the excessive use of mauve, or the aversion to definite pronouns, or the vacuous … | Continue reading
Well, I hope that the Roman environmental historians are all set for a bit of public engagement and explanation, because Reform UK, Durham Sturmbannabteilung, has decided to weaponise a bit of ancient history in its campaign against climate action. During a sometimes fractious an … | Continue reading
The grand tour continues. Hello Warszawa! Sorry, Wrocław! Is it time for Thucydides on atheism, or the lessons of history, or powerlessness, or something else entirely? Partly because I talk more happily from notes than reading a prepared text – not least because non-anglophones … | Continue reading
The Panopticon is here, people! At any rate for our youngest cat, the indefatigable Hector. I’m currently on a sort of academic road trip – if it’s Tuesday, it must be Wrocław; what am I supposed to be talking about at this conference..? – and because my wife gets anxious about t … | Continue reading
Groggy. So groggy. I don’t know if this is the result of a really heavy week of work, or the weather, or the small glass of beer I had last night. Slept deeply with strange dreams that I don’t remember. Vaguely heard electronic noises that could be washing machine or lorry revers … | Continue reading