A thread with some Classics-themed Valentine’s Day messages for you and yours.

Birde on the sunlit branche outsyde myne office wyndowe You have no internette connectioun, reade no newes Litel surpryse that you are singing

In the UK academic recession, you will be at one of these stages since many unis buy the same cuts model from the same consultancies. It is always the same process: *Talk of belt-tightening *Incidental savings (e.g. printing, refreshments) *Travel budgets cut *Promotion freeze (1/4)

Saw this just as I was coming out of teaching a class on Xenophon’s Oeconomicus and… yes. Feeling this quite hard.

We’ve still got a few open places for this brilliant hands-on mosaic making training event next week at @ics.bsky.social in London! Come along to have fun making, while thinking about ancient/modern practice and research with leading experts Ruaidhri Ryan and Will Wootton. @sas-news.bsky.social

Physics is under the cosh, Astronomy and Chemistry in peril, Geography is losing territory, English, Modern Languages and History are among the many shrinking UK disciplines. Surely it's time to have a concerted, structured conversation about universities and the national research base.

2026 calls for More W.H. Auden and Poems On The Underground are on it.

Ah the inevitable email to say the entire department’s heating is out again. Just what I want to cheer up my intercity commute on this grey January day. #academiclife is such a joy…

Long day long week but infinitely cheered by an afternoon spent reading Pollux on all the different ways to say ‘Baa’ 🐏🐐

When it comes to academic writing, which is my best (so to speak), my position is that there currently is no responsible way to engage with AI. Put another way, I don’t appreciate being lectured by credulous corporate shills for taking a principled stance grounded in research and practice.

Omg depths of Wikipedia did a Classics and I love it and also I have actually published about this, it’s genuinely an excellent joke (poor Hegelochus tho)

SCAM ALERT – IMPORTANT The cat has already been fed.

wikipedia turns 25 today! the last unenshittified major website! backbone of online info! triumph of humanity! powered by urge of unpaid randos to correct each other! somehow mostly reliable! "good thing wikipedia works in practice, because it sure doesn't work in theory" - old wiki adage

My mum asked how my day was and I gave her this nugget only for her to reply OH BUT HORSES DRINK BEER IT’S A WHOLE THING. And it is! People routinely give their horses beer. So maybe Andromache in Iliad 8 is right and all the ancient commentators are getting their knickers in a twist over nothing!

Pollux side-eying Homer for his claim that horses drink wine has absolutely made my morning. From a short chapter on horse food (Onomasticon 1.183): “and horses also eat fodder, and also according to Homer wheat grains, and, if indeed we believe him, they drink wine.”

Really looking forward to this! I’ll be giving the pre-performance talk on Tues. 3rd, book your tickets asap to hear me think out loud about why Clouds makes me so uncomfortable despite having some really very excellent and funny jokes (incl. what is maybe the funniest in all of Aristophanes imho)

Good reading. 'How the financial problem is described is not neutral. It reflects and reinforces a particular way of understanding what a university is....If the financial situation is framed as a classic demand-and-cost problem....the obvious actions are to emphasise tight cost controls'. 1/4

Important announcement for my fellow itinerant academics: thetrainline has a massive sale on and my eye-watering January train expenditure has been made slightly less eye-watering. Run don’t walk to book before the prices go back up to ‘I need another mortgage’ from merely ‘taking the piss’

Clio cat heading into 2026 with the energy we all need

Hanukah protest at the Foreign Office, London, tonight

Latkes incoming (my daughter declares grandma’s to be superior which yeah no probably fair)

The wiki entry for Euripides Thyestes is slightly bonkers pls enjoy

Today I have gone down a weird rabbit hole of Hubert Parry’s incidental music for Greek plays. 1/

Please enjoy this excellent manatee and also maybe ask yourself what chaos might have unfolded if the Old Comedians had known about manatees just think of the possibilities for a chorus of singing manatees Archippus would have had a field day.

The Classics and Ancient History subject meeting Tues 16 Dec, 10am-4.30pm In person at Senate House: shorturl.at/7diQK Including discussion with colleagues across the UK, updates on REF, and Spotlight talks from: Professor Katharine Earnshaw (Exeter) and Dr Anna Walas (ICS).

🎉 SOLIDARITY SATURNALIA! 🎉 IO SATURNALIA! Our annual festive giveaway is here! 12 bundles of gifts, and all you have to do to be in with a chance of winning is: 🎄Follow us, 🎄Repost this thread, 🎄And fill out this form: forms.gle/zMcHKZqGNC... Read on for prizes and T&Cs (UK&I only)...🧵

We are very excited to announce that Professor Shelley Hales, IGRCT board member has just published "Mirrors and Masks in the Roman Empire: Encounter, Performance, and Metamorphosis" with Bloomsbury. www.bloomsbury.com/uk/mirrors-a...

This is an absolutely essential read for anyone wondering why even apparently rich institutions are in such a panic about cost savings

We are about one news cycle away from "AI discovers long-lost 'cathedral' buried in Glasgow. The forgotten building, believed to be a pagan shrine, was identified when physicists applied a cutting-edge ChatGPT subscription-only edition to a dusty archive..."

Cum semel occideris et de te splendida Minos fecerit arbitria, non, Torquate, genus, non te facundia, non te restituet pietas; infernis neque enim tenebris Diana pudicum liberat Hippolytum, nec Lethaea valet Theseus abrumpere caro vincula Pirithoo.

The removal of individual institutions’ student number caps was a disaster.

Six weeks since the PM said Britain faced a choice between decency or division and our bad, obviously, for not understanding that he was in fact Team Division

It’s right before lunch so obviously today’s daily dose of Pollux has just brought me a chapter named ‘on the forms of bread’. Looking forward to a deep dive into how you might shape a loaf.

Clio cat is all tuckered out after a busy day interrupting all my online meetings (much to the delight of my students)

I am so spectacularly excited about this. Come along it’s going to be amazing!

UK universities cannot thrive while continually cutting academic staff No amount of wellness webinars, Lego play workshops, communal climbing events, bounce back sessions, desk yoga, jigsaw puzzle nights or Vice Chancellor's Special Awards for Resilience can change this

Nearly two years of showing the realities of the gambles taken by these managers, ministers, and their consultants on the people who do the work of keeping the sector afloat: qmucu.org/qmul-transfo.... Yet outlets still fail to even consider that they might need to include staff in their coverage?

🏊‍♀️The women who swim at Kenwood Ladies Pond have already made their decision. In 2024, almost 900 members voted to keep their trans-inclusive policy - a policy that has worked peacefully since 2019. Now, a small campaign group is seeking to overturn that democratic decision through the courts. 1/5

In all seriousness if anyone on here knows anything about sailing ships and would be able to cast an eye over a short (c.100 word) attempt at a translation of a passage on masts, let me know! Or even just any good bibliography on ancient rigging. Anyone know anything about rigging? 😬

Today’s adventures with Pollux have me learning names for parts of boats. What I have mostly learned is that there are too many names for parts of boats.

Outstanding work.

this seems related en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telling...

Final days to apply: ICS Public Engagement Grants Apply for up to £500 to support Classics-themed public engagement activities, demonstrating aspects of research in Classics in ways that are accessible, enjoyable & understandable for non-specialist audiences Deadline 1 Nov: shorturl.at/BRqqU

So JSTOR now offers me an AI research tool MAKE IT STOP I just want to read the sodding article with my brain is it really so much to ask no I do not want to ask your chatbot a question ARGH

Remember guys, @pcsunion.bsky.social staff at the BL are on strike for the next two weeks. Please don't cross the picket line to go to reading rooms, attend exhibitions or anything else. They've endured so much on low pay since the cyberattack in 2023 and the least we can do is have their backs now.

I have *feelings* about the scribe who wrote Parisianus Grec. 2646. None of them good.

The response of UK universities to this is, almost universally, to say "Tch, what can you do?" Or in some cases, to very overtly decide that the thing to do is join in...

Today I found myself surprised at how little Pollux has to say about the weather. Surprisingly little weather-content in the Onomasticon tbh. Do you think my feelings that there should be More Words For Rain makes me English enough for the Tories not to deport me as a threat to cultural coherence? 🤔