One of the most familiar “monsters” of Greek mythology is Medusa, the Gorgon condemned to have snakes for hair and turn every person she sees into stone, because Athena punished her for being raped by Poseidon in her temple. The hero Perseus later killed Medusa to use her head to petrify the sea monster and […]
Like heavy metal music, Classics, i.e. the study and reception of the ancient Greek, Roman, and Mediterranean world, does not belong to any one nation, culture, or ethnic group. The genre and field, respectively, suffer when narrowly defined as the province of “Western” culture (whatever that means, it being a modern construct). It is disingenuous […]
The fifth century CE saw the Roman Empire beset by waves of invasions by various “barbarian” peoples from the north and east of Europe. The city of Rome, and much of the Western Empire, would fall to the Goths. But what drove the Goths themselves to forsake their ancestral lands on the eastern steppe was […]
Byzantium was originally a Greek colony founded by a man named Byzas back in 657 BCE. It was established on a peninsula protected on three sides by water, and it guarded the passage between the Black Sea and the Aegean Sea. Whoever controlled Byzantium was well on their way to controlling lucrative and vital trade routes, […]
In Book 9 of Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus tells the Phaeacians of the perilous adventures on the high seas with his crew in their futile attempts to return from the Trojan War alive. Among the earlier set of these escapades was their arrival in the land of the Lotophagoi, i.e. the Lotus Eaters, men who spent […]
Modern classical scholarship is conducted in a number of languages besides English. The most prevalent are German, Italian, and French. Among other things, English is the lingua franca of metal music (the term ‘lingua franca’ is Latin for ‘French’, after all); but it by no means must be the language of choice for any of […]
Like much of Greek mythology, the tale of Helen of Troy comes in many versions, and later Greek thinkers like Gorgias and Herodotus continued to try to make sense of what might have actually happened that brought the Queen of Sparta across the Aegean to Troy, with a thousand Greek ships soon to follow. The […]
In May of 2004, the Hollywood blockbuster Troy supplied a perception of the Trojan War that endures in the popular imagination to this day. Its compression of the mythical 10-year war into a span of days, as to suit a feature-length film, offered a readily accessible synopsis of a saga told and retold in much […]
Among the prequel myths to the Trojan War, we find that of the Trojan princess Cassandra, daughter of Priam and Hecuba. So well known is she as the prophetess whose prophecies are cursed not to be believed, that her name has become a word for anyone whose forewarnings of doom (founded or otherwise) fall on […]
In the year 410 CE, less than a century before the Fall of the Roman Empire in the West, Rome was sacked by the Visigoths, the first time the Eternal City was taken by a foreign invader in over 800 years. Citizens throughout the Empire were completely shocked by the news, and tried to explain […]
Heavy Metal Classicist 