Weekday Greek

I know of Brent Nongbri primarily from his lively and enjoyable blog Variant Readings , a spinoff of this book on early Christian manuscripts. This monograph looks at (some) early Christian manuscripts through the lens of "museum archaeology," attempting to ascertain what can be known about their actual archaeological context. Overall a fun and enjoyable read. Some things I've learned (lots others already knew): Oxyrhynchus papyri are almost always extremely fragmentary; getting more than 1 leaf from the same manuscript is unusual, and almost never more than that. The famous Dyscolus Menander codex is part of the Bodmer papyri. Most of these papyri are Christian, maybe from a monastic or school context (though Nongbri lacks confidence in those suggestions). Later Christian monks definitely did read Menander -- apparently archaeologists found at the Monastery of Epiphanius in Thebes a chunk of limestone with lines from Menander in alphabetical order (p. 210). Great details...

  https://photos.app.goo.gl/dbS11rvmxXnJESim8 Thoughts and impressions after visiting the Manet / Degas exhibit at the Met Dec. 2023: I expected the exhibition to just pair two arbitrary impressionist paintings to get viewers, but more actual meat to the comparison than I expected. The two have very similar origins (within 2 years in age, bourgeois background), actually knew each other, degas painted manet (see photo album), had argument over that painting, competed with one another with similar paintings of same model in same cafe. After manet's death in his 50s degas lived another 30 years and collected manet's paintings, including reassembling the execution of maximilian. In 1860s (olympia especially, christ) manet clearly the critical darling in his provocative stance, degas trying to catch up. later less clear. When i think of degas i think of bold pastels of women in evening (like 1884 Singer in Green here). Degas has a wider range. his early romantic history paintings a...

He will have the name Aeneas, because pain took me when I lay with a mortal. And your line will be the most close to the immortals of mortals. Surely Zeus seized Ganymede to live with the immortals and be Zeus' winebearer, a wonder to see. Pain took Tros, and he did not know where the wind had taken his son. But Zeus took pity, and gave him feet-lifting horse, and Hermes told him everything on Zeus' orders. When he heard Zeus' messages, he rejoiced and rode the horses. So too Dawn snatched Tithonus of your line. She went to ask Zeus for his immortality, and Zeus agreed. The fool -- she did not think to ask for youth.  Agreed there's more here in these implicit comparisons, though none of them are exact parallels for Anchises' situations.  The wind is fun -- a kind of example of Jorgensen's law, where Aphrodite knows what happened (Zeus snatched Ganymede) but the mortal only guesses that it was a wind  explicit here that it's no fun to lay with a mortal; I ...