Maty's blog
| 2025-12-04 |
| A writer's morning |
| This morning I woke up with a clear intention in mind. I have a text I need to write on the death of Antinoos in Egypt, and I would finish it today. First thing. Well, not quite because it snowed overnight, and sleet is forecast later. Best to get the parking apron and garden path shovelled clear before the snow laying there turns into a solid sheet of ice. After a somewhat delayed breakfast, by wife reminds me that it's now December, and I promised to call my aunt at the end of November. So I call and spend a pleasant 45 minutes catching up with her news. While I'm talking I check my email and discover that an editor wants me to deal with issues on some picture captions on a forthcoming book, and the Wynd Institute needs details about a forthcoming lecture I'll be giving next week. After these are dealt with, it's time for the morning coffee break, during which the guy who is delivering our coffee phones because he's having troubles with the snow. (We get our coffee in large boxes of green beans which we roast and grind at home. It tastes much, much better than instant.) Now that all that is sorted out, it's time for Antinoos. Except we have some outstanding paperwork to deal with from my time in Oxford. Once we've dug that out of the archive, it's Antinoos time. But now it's 11.30 and I need to prep the pasta for lunch, because again, I make my own pasta from durum flour, egg and whey. So I do that and and settle down at the keyboard and then remember. It's the fourth of the month today. Time to update this blog. Farewell Antinoos. I hardly knew you. |
| 2025-11-04 |
| Winterizing |
| One of the things I love about life in the Great White North is that we get four real seasons. Unlike some countries where a bad summer's day is about the same as a mild winter one, each season here has a very distinct identity. Winter - if all goes well – is snowy and sometimes very, very cold. Spring is a buggy, boggy nightmare as all that snow thaws out and a few zillion hungry bugs go looking for blood. Summer is long lazy afternoons, hiking, picking berries and kayaking up and down lakes – all the while making sure that the go bag is ready in case wildfires mean we have to flee at a couple of hours notice. (Hey, nowhere's perfect.) Autumn is a short season. Sometimes as little as five weeks pass between my last hike of the summer and when I do the same walk over 30 cm of snow. Being short, autumn is also very busy. There's a high risk of power cuts as ice and snowload take out the power lines, so storm candles are needed. Also six months of firewood should now be split and stacked up ready to go. The garden needs to be stripped of anything that is going to break under snowload or rot in the spring thaw, and food needs to be stacked in the freezers (we have two) and the basement. In a lot of this I can feel ancient ghosts at my shoulder. People have been worrying about winter firewood supplies for tens of thousands of years since they first moved out of Africa. They did not have the advantage of stacking shelves with tins, but my large glass containers filled with rice, flour and dried beans would have been immediately familiar, as would the cold room where sacks of potatoes, onions and cabbage dangle from the rafters so rodents can't get at them. There's a certain ritualistic quality to all this, from building the first fire of the year to checking winter gear, from padded coats, snowshoes and skis to making sure snow shovelling kit is in order. Of course if I wanted to do rituals Roman style, I'd celebrate the Consualia, which celebrates bringing the harvest home, and the Ludi Romani which marked the autumnal equinox. Instead I think I'll settle for the Meditrinalia, where Romans sampled the first new wines of the year. There's some Merlot maturing in the cellar that will do nicely. |
| 2025-10-03 |
| Wandering over a text |
| Generally when I discuss AI with colleagues the general theme is how students produce essays that Gemini, Copilot or chatGPT have written for them. I agree that for educators with a class of 30 this is a problem. But that's a bug with the class system rather than technology. I generally have smaller classes, and so know my students better. When I see something very different from the usual style of, say, Mary Bloggs, my technique is to ask Mary some details about her efforts. 'Great work on describing Julia's relationship with Tiberius. What sources did you use?' But AI is more than an essay mill. For example, there's Aeneas. Who means that historians have to add understanding multimodal generative neural networks to their skillset. Aeneas - who really should be called AIneas - is the solution to reading the 1500 or so Latin inscriptions that archaeologists recover each year. (The Romans wrote a lot, from inscriptions, to letters to graffiti.) Many of these texts are in poor shape after 2000 years or so, and recovering them can take a team of skilled epigraphers rather a long time for each. However inscriptions are somewhat formulaic. When one already knows the tens of thousands of inscriptions on world databases, then given fragmentary text and an idea of the dimensions of the text surface, a well-trained AI can fill in the blanks with considerable accuracy. Google, which developed the code, reckons around 70% accuracy based on obscuring parts of known texts and getting Aeneas to look at the rest. Why Aeneas? Well, Google already has an epigraphy machine for Greek texts named after Ithaca, the home of wandering Odysseus. Therefore when going for a Latin version of Ithaca, Google's minions settled for Aeneas, Odysseus' Roman counterpart More details here: https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/aeneas-transforms-how-historians-connect-the-past/ |
| 2025-09-04 |
| Myths to Music |
| Feminist takes are big in mythology these days. So I've jumped on the bandwagon, with the emphasis on 'band'. As viewers of my FaceBook page will know, I've been working with a singer called Ainsley Blackwell. We recently did a song called 'Hera' which was well received. I wrote the lyrics which Ainsley delivered with slightly concerning psychopathic flair. You can find it on YouTube. This led to a number of re-interpretations of modern myth. Eurydice was an obvious choice and we did a song called 'Don't look back' where a woman basically shoves her one night stand out of the door. 'Wax wings' is a jazz take on Icarus where a girl contemplates a relationship with a man supposedly out of her league. Other times we just lean into the ancient myth. There's 'The Summoning' where we evoke Hekate at a crossroads. Persephone was fun, because in the song she's not just a simple victim. She's terrified of her role, but also finds a dark excitement in it. 'I dance in shadows I should have fled/Before the thrill outweighed the dread.' It's a lot of fun and it has me imagining the classics in a new way. It's easy to write the lyrics, because the themes are archetypal for a reason. They touch on basic issues of human nature and relationships. So rewriting them is almost cheating. You can see Ainsley Blackwell's site here: http://www.songsbyainsley.com/index.html |
| 2025-08-05 |
| Another Caesar myth |
| Doing the introductory chapter of a book on the Gallic wars, I wanted to include a few hundred lines of the boyhood of Julius Caesar. Rather to my surprise I found that he did not have one. No doubt Caesar was conceived, born and raised in the standard way, but we don;t know about it because no-one tells us. When writing I tend to skip lightly over anything written in the last 1700 years and go to the original sources. Some checking told me that Caesar had a Gallic tutor called Gnipho, and that he had a slight build and liked to challenge himself by riding horses bareback with hands behind him. Also, a later reference tells us that he swam a lot as a child. And there, in less than 126 words we have all that is known about Caesar's boyhood. Growing up in the Subara slum with cash-strapped parents? This is a modern fantasy. We have just one reference to Caesar living in the Subara, and that is Suetonius who tells us that Caesar lived there in his bachelor days before he moved to the Sacra Via. Growing up there? No reference at all, because for Suetonius, Plutarch and other biographers, Caesar only gets interesting around age 15 and no-one tells us where he was living at that age. Yet it is a commonplace among modern writers that Caesar grew up in an apartment block in the Subara. Yet every reference I chased down led to another reference by a modern writer who references yet another modern writer. More scrupulous historians such as Goldsworthy pass over the subject altogether. No writer can give an ancient source for this. Also, Caesar's mum was an Aurelius, a family that had two consuls (father and uncle) while Caesar was growing up. You don't get to be consul and poor, and the Aurelians would not have let their daughter live in straitened circumstances, not least because it would reflect badly on the rest of them. Therefore, as with Caesar's magical sword, or the idea that he was born by Caesarian birth, or that he conquered Britain, I'm calling BS on this one. |
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