New Euripides fragments! I'm unable, however, to find their actual text, translated or un-.

Livestream of Aeschylus' The Persians. 7/25/2020.

Ancient Greek punishments teach typing.

Yeah.

This is fantastic!

FRAGMENT OF A GREEK TRAGEDY

by A. E. Housman

CHORUS: O suitably-attired-in-leather-boots
Head of a traveller, wherefore seeking whom
Whence by what way how purposed art thou come
To this well-nightingaled vicinity?
...
CHORUS: Go chase into the house a lucky foot.
And, O my son, be, on the one hand, good,
And do not, on the other hand, be bad;
For that is very much the safest plan.

That μέν/δέ right there is just the best. This is Prawne family level stuff.

From Twitter, someplace.

The last Greko speakers of Calabria

Speakers of archaic Greek in northeastern Turkey:

The community lives in a cluster of villages near the Turkish city of Trabzon in what was once the ancient region of Pontus...

Linguists found that the dialect, Romeyka, a variety of Pontic Greek, has structural similarities to ancient Greek that are not observed in other forms of the language spoken today. Romeyka's vocabulary also has parallels with the ancient language....

"Use of the infinitive has been lost in all other Greek dialects known today – so speakers of Modern Greek would say 'I wasn't able that I go' instead of 'I wasn't able to go'. But, in Romeyka, not only is the infinitive preserved, but we also find quirky infinitival constructions that have never been observed before – only in the Romance languages are there parallel constructions."

The villagers who speak Romeyka, which has no written form, show other signs of geographic and cultural isolation. They rarely marry outside their own community and they play a folk music on a special instrument, called a kemenje in Turkish and Romeyka or lyra as it is called in Greek....

Romeykas-speakers today are devout Muslims, so they were allowed to stay in Turkey after the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, when some two million Christians and Muslims were exchanged between Greece and Turkey.

If you're interested in this region, I highly recommend revisiting this post (which we blogged in 2008) on Kazim Koyuncu and Black Sea Ethnorock.

Via Cronaca, of course.

A roundtable discussion of Xenophon's Anabasis. As long as we're shouting, "Thalassa!" (ht)

Having failed miserably to supply content in Peculiar's absence, I shall send at least one charming discover our readers' way: Anne Carson's An Oresteia. Aeschylus' Oresteia is the only complete trilogy of plays we have from the Greeks, and so it takes a certain amount of sand to translate only his Agamemnon, and follow it up with Sophocles' Elektra and Euripedes' Orestes. She really only hits her stride with Sophocles, but all three plays are solidly done, and all have moments of brilliance. Her Cassandra I found moving; and the end of it all, Euripedes' mad tragi-comic wrap of an impossible mess, was perfectly toned.

She does tend towards simplicity in language, even when the original is deliberately vague. But this is less a fault if we imagine her plays performed--and they are clearly written with that in mind. For sheer dramatic potential, I'll take her translation over any other I've encountered.

This is very nice. I'll try to post a verse translation in a week or so.