Cleaning out the inbox yet again:

At the Smartset, Tony Perrotet writes about the debaucherous get-togethers of humanity's top thinkers...

The Spoof has some (potentially offensive) parodic content on the Antikythera Mechanism

Some Colorado College students participated in the Nemean Games

The IHT was reconsidering the 'peaceful' image of Hadrian ...

Ancient Monsters on Ancient Coins ...

I think the jury's still out on this possible Roman coin 'prank' find ...

Romans are marching along the Danube again ...

There's an update to the Kalos Greek dictionary software ...

The BBC has a radio program (available for five more days as of this writing) on the Ancient Novel ...

A German Radio station that isn't Radio Bremen has a page of Latin stuff to accompany what appears to be a regular radio program in Latin ...

At the home page of Harvard's Center for Hellenic studies there's an announcement of The First Thousand Years of Greek ... here's the first bit:

The First Thousand Years of Greek aims to create a corpus, to be made available under a free license, of TEI-compliant texts and lemmatized word indices coordinated with the on-line Liddell-Scott-Jones lexicon from the Perseus project. The coverage ultimately should include at least one version of every Greek text known to us from manuscript transmission from the beginning of alphabetic writing in Greece through roughly the third century CE.

... elsewhere on the same site is a nice collection of online books and dissertations ...


And, in case you didn't get enough of the Olympics, we have an item on nudity at the ancient games ... we can also close with Peter Jones' comments in the Telegraph on what ancient Olympic victors were referred to as:

I asked Dr Peter Jones, The Spectator's classicist, about the use of "hero" for athletes. He said it's nothing new, this over-adulation of runners and jumpers.

He quoted Aristotle to show that, no matter what this Government says, sport is not a general civic benefit, nor will it inspire our overweight slob generation to win gold. "The athlete's style of bodily fitness does nothing for the general purposes of civic life, nor does it encourage ordinary health or the procreation of children.

Some exercise is essential, but it must be neither violent nor specialised, as is the case with athletes." But would the Greeks have called the last man standing after the wrestling match a hero? He said: "Well, its main meaning is a warrior, though Homer uses heroes really widely for anything from a soldier to a butler. Heroes were semi-divine beings, who were heroised after their death. A great warrior could be heroised for his achievements on the field of battle."

So the classical Greek for a Medalled One at Beijing would be what? "It would be ho nikon, the winner. Nike trainers are winners' trainers."