edithmayhall.bsky.social - Profile | ThreadSky | a Reddit-style client for Bluesky

Not everything in the USA right now is joyless, repressive & environmentally irresponsible. This week the Texans of Port Aransas celebrate the return of whooping cranes to their wintering habitat. Here's a mother crane in a 12th-c. bestiary by Gerald of Wales protecting her young

submitted 10 hours ago • 0 comments

Full text of my review of two London productions of Sophocles in this week's Times Literary Supplement.

submitted 11 hours ago • 1 comment

Blog on this week's fascinating filming in Italy on women gladiators edithorial.blogspot.com/2025/02/loca...

submitted 11 hours ago • 1 comment

On #WalkTheDogDay I’m still sad I’ve not been able to walk beloved Finlay since he went to doggy heaven six months ago. Consoling myself with this neo-Babylonian perfect partnership of human and hound

submitted 1 day ago • 0 comments

Naples airport waiting for flight home. Can’t stop looking at these gods on oil lamps in Campobasso. Jove, Diana. Faunus. So much nicer than IKEA bedside lamps.

submitted 1 day ago • 0 comments

my review of Rami Malek as Oedipus and Brie Larson as Electra www.the-tls.co.uk/arts/theatre...

submitted 2 days ago • 0 comments

Thrilled to have seen Ummidia Quadratilla’s proud boast from the Amphitheatre she funded in Montecasino today. What a woman! She also owned a troupe of pantomimes

submitted 2 days ago • 0 comments

In Campobasso Museum supposedly on the trail of gladiators but LOOK at this ivory portrait of Dionysus. Hauntingly beautiful

submitted 3 days ago • 1 comment

Ouch Ryanair seat. Off to Naples to make TV documentary about women gladiators. I hope I’m asked to do a reenactment with someone even more decrepit than me. More soon!

submitted 4 days ago • 0 comments

I'm to Italy to film for a TV documentary about women gladiators tomorrow, and am delighted to find this pottery pendant, perhaps a love token celebrating the love of an actress [? LUDIA] called Verecunda and a gladiator called Lucius, found in Leicester! Aww

submitted 5 days ago • 0 comments

Smug to have dound a single vase for THREE things said to have dedicated days on Feb 18: #DrinkWineDay, #ThumbDay & #PlutoDay. Here is Hades/Plouton drinking out of a shallow wine cup, one thumb perpendicular, with Persephone present, on a BM wine cup painted in Athens 5 c. BCE

submitted 5 days ago • 2 comments

On #CrabDay2025, here's Karkinos, the gigantic crab sent by Hera to fight against Heracles and in support of the Hydra. Heracles trod on him but he was rewarded by being transformed into the constellation Cancer. Also a lovey crab on a hoplite shield.

submitted 6 days ago • 2 comments

Not the happiest subject, but what a brilliant book this is! Edith Hall is an excellent classicist and writer.

submitted 21 days ago • 0 comments

What a line: 'Odysseus is one of antiquity’s few exclusively heterosexual heroes' (Edith Hall, Introducing the Ancient Greeks: From Bronze Age Seafarers to Navigators of the Western Mind)

submitted 11 days ago • 1 comment

Noon today, Radio 3. Lots of Greek blues, Handel, Schubert, Mozart, Beethoven, Joan Baez and Gluck and what they have meant to me. www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/...

submitted 7 days ago • 8 comments

On #AlmondDay2025, an excuse to celebrate Phyllis, the wife of Athenian king Demophon, who wasted away waiting for her him to return and died. An almond tree grows where she is buried, but it never flowers until he embraces it. So says Servius commenting on Vergil, Eclogue 5.10.

submitted 7 days ago • 0 comments

Would it take someone obsessed with Apollonius' Argonautica to appreciate this brilliant map of Colchis drawn by Becky Brewis for chapters 1-2 of my forthcoming Medea: A Life in Five Acts? The body-bags hanging from the osier trees! The River-God Phasis! The temple of Artemis!

submitted 8 days ago • 0 comments

Carle van Loo, btd 1705, in 1760 painted Mademoiselle Clairon at the climax of Hilaire-Bernard de Longepierre’s tragedy Médée; admire the searing defiance with which Clairon brandished a flaming torch & dripping dagger in Jason’s horrified face. Irresponsible patriarchs beware!

submitted 8 days ago • 1 comment

On Valentine's Day, the ancient Greeks thought that the seat of Eros was the liver, not the heart. Here's an Etruscan model for use by liver-diviners (haruspices) and (although it's a haruspicy scene) one I prefer to interpret as an Amazon making an erotic invitation to a soldier

submitted 9 days ago • 0 comments

So proud of Aaron Quill, my brilliant PhD student who ten minutes ago passed his viva with flying colours. He’s rewritten what Herodotus did with Homer. State school kid and fabulous

submitted 10 days ago • 3 comments

On this date in 1649 John Milton published the first edition of His Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, mobilising Aristotle’s stunning dissection of tyranny in his Politics to justify regicide when a sovereign has made himself accountable only to God.

submitted 10 days ago • 0 comments

The mid-19th century Medea-meditating-on-filicide statue by William Wetmore Story, btd 1819, is inspired by a tradition founded by a lost masterpiece painting by Timomachus, itself imitated in a Pompeii fresco discovered in 1828. Both going in my Medea: A LIfe in Five Acts (Yale U.P. 2026)

submitted 11 days ago • 0 comments

Max Beckmann, born 12/2/1884, was traumatised as a WW1 trench medic. "Mars & Venus", painted in 1939 when militarism & narcissistic vanity were about to wreck the world, is in Leipzig Museum der bildenden Künste. Subversive, dystopian reframing of classical images at its finest

submitted 12 days ago • 0 comments

On #WorldMarriageDay I've put the finishing touches to a book about Medea, who probably had the Worst Marriage Ever. Also, the play I'm going to see on Valentine's Day is about the most scandalous love story ever--Oedipus Tyrannus. What's a bit of filicide and incest between ancient Greek friends?

submitted 14 days ago • 0 comments

On #WorldMarriageDay, two ancient hen parties. I know which one I'd rather be at. The veiled bride on the right looks terrified and unconvinced by the little winged Eros trying to get between her and the bossy woman on the left.

submitted 14 days ago • 0 comments

I love this loving 1637 Allegory of Painting and Sculpture by Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, known as Guercino (he had a squint), son of a Po Valley peasant who transcended his lack of education/training to produce paintings of a luminous naturalism fused with classical equilibrium.

submitted 15 days ago • 2 comments

We're spoilt for choice of scintillating classical images by Henry Fuseil, born Feb. 7 1741, but to me Tiresias Appearing to Odysseus (Odyssey) and Achilles Shearing his Hair Over the Corpse of Patroclus (Iliad) evoke the grandeur of Homer's gloomiest purple patches to perfection

submitted 16 days ago • 0 comments

I had a wonderful time lecturing at TCD yesterday, because I was reunited with Prof Ahuvia Kahane, whom I first met FORTY YEARS ago at a terrifying Oxford seminar on Greek textual criticism. When it comes to friendship, the oldies really are the goodies

submitted 17 days ago • 2 comments

Ancient History has been taught at Cardiff with innovative brilliance for decades. Don't let it be abolished. Save Cardiff University Ancient History Degree - Sign the Petition! chng.it/PrGZzkVcCT via @UKChange

submitted 17 days ago • 0 comments

My lame excuse for posting this spectacularly lovely mosaic of a duck from the House of the Faun in Pompeii is that nationaltoday.com/february-6/ tells me February 6 is #LameDuckDay. But the duck could not glide so gracefully if lame.

submitted 17 days ago • 0 comments

At Durham Professor @edithmayhall.bsky.social is leading a campaign to put Classics education back on the UK curriculum. www.durham.ac.uk/news-events/...

submitted 18 days ago • 0 comments

On #ShowerWithAFriendDay, it doesn't need to be sleazy. Here's a 19th-century drawing in the Wellcome Collection of an Attic black-figure hydria c. 640 BCE in the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden, Leiden (museum no. PC 63). I use trees to dry my washing too.

submitted 18 days ago • 0 comments

It’s #WickerBasketDay2025. Here is a massive wine mixing bowl in Athens Archaeological Museum with wicker baskets being used by satyrs to carry and tread the grapes that make the wine that goes in the bowl. Cheers!

submitted 19 days ago • 0 comments

#WomenPhysiciansDay needs Athenian Agnodike: dressed as a man, studied medicine at Alexandria, worked as obstetrician, revealed her true gender when accused of sexual harassment, was tried but acquitted for violating ban on women doctors-her women patients supported her. Kudos!

submitted 20 days ago • 0 comments

On #WorldWetlandsDay2025 let us praise Artemis, whose temples were often built in marshes where waterfowl and small game were abundant, as at Brauron (Vravrona) near Athens. Her virginity represents untilled land. My favourite goddess

submitted 21 days ago • 0 comments

Fantastic time talking the continuing power of ancient myth and literature to help us think about modern anxieties with interviewer Vincent Woods and author Yiannis Gabriel last night in Dublin. The city went wild because Ireland won the rugby !

submitted 21 days ago • 0 comments

Vielen Dank!

submitted 22 days ago • 0 comments

Hilarious. But why were you reading this boring text?

submitted 22 days ago • 1 comment

Well in the USA it’s national serpent day, which is an excuse to show this mosaic of a boy playing with snakes from Syria, 5th century CE in the Louvre. He’s clearly inspired by the myth of the infant Heracles but needs to be very careful…

submitted 22 days ago • 0 comments

It's #InternationalZebraDay. This is a fine mosaic from the Villa of the Amazons at Halepli Bahçe, Edessa (Urfa), Turkey. I'd rather she wasn't on a chain but most ancient depictions are being nastily assaulted by lions. I like the way the stripes are picked up in the pantaloons

submitted 23 days ago • 1 comment

A heads-up to those interested in the initiative I co-run with @profarlenehh.bsky.social Advocating Classics Education, bring Classical Civilisation & Ancient History to state education, prisoners and OAPs, that we have a Bluesky account @aceclassics.bsky.social where I'll be posting regular updates

submitted 24 days ago • 0 comments

On #FreethinkersDay, my favourite presocratic, Xenophanes of near Miletus, who thought humans created gods in their own images, that horses and cattle would invent horse4-gods and bull-gods if they could, and that meteorological events had natural causes. He was also funny.

submitted 25 days ago • 0 comments

📣🗓️ 5 February 2025 (in person and Zoom) @ 17.30 We are delighted to welcome Edith Hall (Durham University) ‘Classical Greeks Scripting Slavery in Two Lead Letters from Berezan and Athens.’ Please join us for this term’s research seminar series which is on the theme of Subaltern Scripts. 1/2

submitted 28 days ago • 1 comment

New book arrived. We must save the planet, comrades; Homer can help us a little. Thanks to Tim Whitmarsh for telling me to pay attention to the gods, Katrina Kelly for the title, @rickypo.bsky.social for tree-hugging with me and Heather Gold @yalepress.bsky.social for believing in the project

submitted 27 days ago • 1 comment

Royal Navy calling its new submarine Achilles rather than Agincourt to avoid "annoying the French" What about annoying the Trojans?https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14328885/Royal-Navy-attack-submarine-HMS-Agincourt-Achilles-French.html

submitted 27 days ago • 3 comments