Greeks were not squeamish about discussing sexual matters, though their degree of frankness depended upon circumstance and genre: What could be said in a comedy or put on a vase was not the same as the treatment of sex in tragedy or religious sculpture.
At present Lithuania is a tiny Baltic country wedged between Latvia and a small Russian enclave on the Baltic and Poland, with Belorussia on the southeast. There are 2.8 million Lithuanians plus another 200,000 Lithuanian-speakers outside the country, a population about the size of Dallas if the suburbs are included.
The world is full of bad news, and most of it does not require a dedicated chronicler to record and analyze. So one reads, for instance, how the music department of Oxford University announces that musical notation has not “shaken off its connection to its colonial past” and is “a slap in the face to some students,” while “musical skills should no longer be compulsory” because the current focus “on white European music causes students of color great distress.”
A Brief Chronology of later Roman History with a few quotations and citations added as the weeks go by….
In preparation for the Summer Seminar on the age of Boethius, Stephen and Dr. Fleming discuss the beginning of the end of the Roman Empire. This podcast is available to Gold and Charter subscribers. For the chronology, please see Chronology post on the website.
For cinéastes of a historical bent, Kino Lorber’s 3-disc set Gaumont Treasures 1897–1913 is a pearl almost beyond price. It showcases the earliest development of narrative cinema in one of the most fertile of its seedbeds.
What a Presidential “press conference” might look like if the U.S. had real journalists. Imagine the answers. Or even a real system of debate where the Prime Minister has to answer questions from the Opposition. Or even if we had a real Opposition party.
A podcast discussion of the most vexed line in the Lord’s Prayer–and in all the Gospels.
Now Cancel Culture even has canceled baseball. Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred moved this year’s All-Star Game from Atlanta to a location yet to be determined. My suggestion: Pyongyang.
The period of the Persian Wars and the aftermath were a period of intense political activity at Athens. In one generation, Athenians had expelled the tyrants, completely reorganized their commonwealth, and beaten back two Persian invasions. Such success was bound to inspire confidence in the Athenian commonwealth, a confidence that would lead first to to the hybris of the Athenian Empire and then to the ruin Athens suffered in the war with Sparta and her allies.
