Pasts Imperfect (12.12.24)
The Annual Classics Gift Guide, Reviewing The Return, Mesopotamian Bodily Emotion, Ancient Chinese Rice Beer, Ancient South Asian metaphysics & much more.
This week, our favorite classicist and personal shopper, Tori Lee, brings back her Classics Gift Guide. Then, theologian and film buff Thomas M. Bolin reviews a new Homeric take, The Return (2024). Plus, a miniature bust of Cleopatra VII surfaces at Taposiris Magna, celebrating Edmonia Lewis, feeling love in ancient Mesopotamia and today, rice beer from ancient China’s Lower Yangzi region, medieval Islamic metaphysicians, and much more. Enjoy our last newsletter of 2024! 🎁
Classicist’s Gift Guide 2024: For That Special Classicist in Your Life by Tori Lee
Nota Bene: As per usual, the entirety of this gift guide—which is honestly even better than the annual “Hater’s Guide To The Williams-Sonoma Catalog”—is available in its eminent totality on Prof. Lee’s Medium site and at Eidolon.
Sorry I’m late with this year’s gift guide.
My give-a-fucks have run out of time!
And I want this one thing that I won’t be buying,
Cause I haven’t finished this draft of my book chapter so I am allowed zero rewards.
Too bad that Loeb don’t do it for ya!
These gifts will dream-came-true it for ya!
The candles are perfuméd for ya!
Now we’re on
A shopping spree, every night oh, isn’t that cheap? I guess so!
Nothing is free, baby I know, that’s that capitalism-o.
Scrolling up, down, left, right, oh, add it all to your cart-o.
Say you can’t sleep, baby I know, might as well read the gift guide!
Low budget, high satisfaction
Greek Mythology Printable Guess Who
$3 for PDF
I suggest questions like “Is your person a person?” and “Is your person one unified being or actually an amalgamation of any number of speakers within an oral tradition?” and “Is your character featured elsewhere in this very gift guide???”
This photo got me. The little head!!!
Hieroglyphic Stencil
$5.95
This looks so fun???
Copper Ingot Merchant Magnet
$10.10
Holding space for Ea-Nasir.
Cats and Emotions Latin Poster
From $9.99
The only one they’re missing is panis, for a loaf cat.
Medium budget, high satisfaction
Plastered Cocktail Napkins
Set of four, $48
The product description says “This statue is not stone cold sober,” which is Kind of Funny!
For pretending you’re a wealthy 18th-century colonizer.
SomeBODY once told me this shirt was absolutely unhinged
Grecian Bust Mini Incense Holder
$20
Dissociate, but make it ✨classics✨
Iliad and Odyssey Earrings
£52.00
You love to sea it.
Ionic Column Creamware Candlestick
$90
I’d column myself obsessed with candles, but I don’t want to wax poetic.
High budget, high satisfaction
Demi Pots Dress
$134, sizes XS through 5X
Become your own orange-figure Muse!
For your classical cocktail recipes.
Sprayground: Met Medusa Statue Head Bag
$125
The neon pink is sold out; who says polychromy is unpopular?!
Fascinus Signet Ring
$3,600
This isn’t technically marketed as a fascinus, and it won’t come in time for Christmas, and it’s $3,600, but oh my god, it’s a ring with a fucking diamond penis on it, of course it’s going in the gift guide.
Best Friends Graffito Necklace
From $262.50
To give your bestie, orrrr keep for yourself.
High budget, low satisfaction
For someone with one (1) single eye for design.
Ancient Roman Relief Wallpaper
From $24.50
“If you want to both live inside a sarcophagus and fight amazons in a quasi-erotic but also kind of Patrick Bateman way? This wallpaper is for you.” — Sarah Bond
Seletti Column Side Table and Lamp
€490
Just going to quote the product description here: “The capital lights up with a life of its own, lights up like an idea, freeing the object from any structural pretext, to return to a fragment of memory that brings light into the darkness of oblivion.” I’m not kidding that’s really it.
Tori Lee suggests you also check out the Working Classicists Gift Guide!
Movie Review: The Return by Thomas M. Bolin
The conflicting emotions wrapped up in νόστος (nostos)—the epic theme of returning home—are difficult to write and to film. In the new movie The Return (2024), directed by Uberto Pasolini, actor Ralph Fiennes is reunited with Juliette Binoche. Most viewers will remember the two from their turn in Anthony Minghella’s 1996 film adaption of Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient, which itself combined two separate narratives: one with Binoche as a WWII combat nurse, and the other with Ralph Fiennes telling the story of his great love (framed by his attachment to Herodotus’ Histories). But not all returns are infused with joy or even optimism.
The Return has removed the gods from its retelling in a manner akin to Wolfgang Petersen’s 2004 Troy). Even without gods, the heroes in Troy were dazzling. In contrast, the entire feel of The Return is one of languor and decay. Everyone is grimy, except for Telemachus (Charlie Plummer) who most resembles a depiction of Jesus from 19th century Northern Europe. Ithaca is slowly dying from a malady that is the result of Penelope’s willful neglect. We hear the constant buzz of cicadas in a washed-out landscape that Marius Panduru’s cinematography renders like a retro 1970s Instagram filter. Here the dawn is never rosy-fingered, nor is the sea ever wine-dark. It is just bleak.
The somber atmosphere suits the pacing of the film. For decades, English translations of Homer have sought to capture a rhythm that is most often described as brisk or propulsive—think of Richmond Lattimore’s or, more recently, Emily Wilson’s renderings. Pasolini’s visual translation of Homer moves slowly and with few words. The director relies on the strength of his two principal actors to convey the story’s epic dimensions. Fortunately for us, Binoche and Fiennes are more than up to the task, and both give breathtaking performances. The reunited pair’s shared scenes allow the actors to spar back and forth, more with looks and silences than winged words. These scenes keep the viewer rapt and, as in the epic poem, Penelope and Odysseus are equally matched in wit and wisdom.
And as in the poem, what drives this tale is suffering. But it is not the intense, demonstrative pain-as-catalyst that we see in Homer. This is the bone-tiring ache of life trapped in a never-ending cycle of futile waiting and painful existing. Fiennes’ Odysseus is a man haunted by what his actions have made him, irreparably broken by every act of violence that brought him closer to home. When he slays the suitors, there is no boasting, no jealous fires of rage. He calmly shoots them with arrows, one by one, with a resigned demeanor that seems to say that this is all that a man who possesses a certain set of skills can do when confronted with obstacles.
At the end, the suitors are dead and the great hall cleansed (the film elides the brutal murder of the enslaved women). Odysseus and Penelope then think about what comes next. They agree to tell each other their respective stories, their odyssey and penelopiad. That way, Penelope says, they can then forget them together. This resignation and grim determination to carry on without nostalgia reminds me more of Bernard Rieux, the doctor in Camus’ The Plague, than a hero we find in Homer. Both stories present a bleak world devoid of deities and meaning and, like Rieux, Odysseus and Penelope can only do what needs to be done without any lights to guide them but a past that often is more of a burden than a guide.
Given the future that stares back at us every day, it’s just as well: the toxic nostalgia of the far-right and the overwhelming number of systemic crises that surround us don’t tend to inspire hope. This Odysseus is an object lesson of the dangers of letting the past determine the present. Pasolini’s Odysseus offers a good example of the need to face the world with a dutiful focus on the immediate next step. He clearly isn’t the hero we want, but he is most likely be the one that we need.
Global Antiquity and Public Humanities
Cleopatra is in the news once again. According to a press release from the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities وزارة السياحة والآثار, an Egyptian-Dominican archaeological project led by Kathleen Martinez in collaboration with the Universidad Nacional Pedro Henríquez Ureña (UNPHU), has found two new busts, a hoard of 337 coins, and a number of ceramics at the Taposiris Magna Temple, West of Alexandria. Although Martinez believes the bust is Cleopatra VII, not everyone agrees on the ID (e.g. Zahi Hawass). Regardless, the Ministry underscores the importance of the site and finds to understanding late Ptolemaic history in general. NB: Never forget the brilliance of Shelley P. Haley discussing Cleopatra!
In Cleopatra-adjacent news, there is a great podcast episode of Sidedoor out now, exploring the work of African American and Native American (Mississauga) sculptor Edmonia Lewis. As they note, her famed 3,000-pound masterwork, “The Death of Cleopatra,” was a tribute to “another powerful woman who broke with convention… and then the sculpture disappeared.” Speaking to Lewis experts Marilyn Richardson, Kirsten Pai Buick, and Karen Lemmey, the pod explores the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM)’s exhibition, “The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture,” which displays 82 artworks focused on race in America made between 1792 and 2023.
Over at Philosophy Now, political essayist Musa Mumtaz discusses “two maverick medieval Muslim metaphysicians.” In his analysis of the medieval Islamic writings of Ibn Arabi and Shihabuddin Suhrwardi, he argues they provided the foundations for Sufism. In Psyche, Jessica Frazier, Lecturer in the Study of Religion at Oxford, explores the liberatory and transformative aim of ancient Indian metaphysics.
Where do we locate love, anger, happiness in our bodies? A new study proves that we feel emotions in similar body parts as the ancient Mesopotamians. The researchers analyzed “one million words of the ancient Akkadian language from 934–612 BC[E] in the form of cuneiform scripts on clay tablets” and looked at where people noted they felt their feels. I love that anger for Mesopotamian men was associated with their feet. (Thanks to Philip Thibodeau for this tip on this piece!).
Hello, we were not invited to this cool reconstructive astrolabe workshop but wish we had been. Please invite us to all future astrolabe workshops. Thanks ahead of time.
We must stan translator, poet, and classicist Anne Carson—and this New Yorker Q&A demonstrates why. The look on her face when they ask her what was the best writing advice she ever got? Amazing.
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The true identity of the 13th century Thessaloniki painter Μανουήλ Πανσέληνος appears to have been revealed. As the ABC News reports, “Crime-solving techniques applied to a medieval illuminated manuscript in Paris may have solved a centuries-old puzzle: The true identity of a leading Byzantine painter who injected a human touch into the rigid sanctity of Orthodox religious art.” Let’s hear it for Astrapas!
Researchers examined artifacts from ancient China’s Lower Yangzi region and found residue of rice beer from about 10,000 years ago. The study, published in PNAS, was led by Stanford’s Li Liu. She and her co-authors found that “The emergence of this fermentation technology is attributable to the early development of rice domestication and the arrival of the wet-warm Holocene climate, which was favorable for fungal growth.” 干杯” (gān bēi)
Over at the ANS Long Table series, Postdoctoral Researcher at the Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents (Oxford), Leah Lazar, discusses the DH numismatic project CHANGE, which “researches the economic and monetary history of ancient Anatolia.” Lazar looks at “how the project’s new datasets of coin hoards and site finds can illuminate the use and circulation of coinage in Anatolia over the centuries.” Gotta say that the interactive maps alone are fascinating.
Finally, AI is really messing with our art history in negative ways, but I am not mad at this (clearly) fake dinosaur mosaic posted by Fishbourne Roman Palace. As they say: Rerum dinoscere causas! — Virgilsaurus Rex. (Side note that Neville Morley reviewed Gladiator II and hopefully the next one will just be a musical that is full Monty Python rather than purporting to be anything remotely historical). Although Fishbourne didn’t cite the AI artist, my (Sarah here) sleuthing says the original seems to have been created by Reddit user u/danruse in the r/weirddalle forum.
New Antiquity Journal Issues (by yaleclassicslib.bsky.social)
American Journal of Archaeology Vol. 128, No. 4 (2024)
Annali online Unife. Sezione di Storia e Scienze dell'Antichità Vol. 3 (2024) #openaccess NB Robert Nelson “‘He did not say X but Y’: a Byzantine trope that makes negative theology a figure of speech”
Journal of Anthropological Archaeology Vol. 76 (December 2024)
Karanos. Bulletin of Ancient Macedonian Studies Vol. 7 (2024) #openaccess
Antiquity Vol. 98, No. 402 (2024) NB Emma Brownlee & Alison Klevnäs “Where is everybody? The unburied dead in late Roman and early medieval England”
Journal of Ancient History Vol. 12, No. 2 (2024) Social Biographies of the Ancient World
Dictynna Vol. 21 (2024) #openaccess International Ovidian Society en Europe III
Jahrbuch des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts Vol. 139 (2024) #openaccess
Journal of Medieval Monastic Studies Vol. 13 (2024)
Manuscript Studies Vol. 9, No. 2 (2024) #openaccess
International Journal of Hindu Studies Vol. 28, No. 3 (2024) NB Patrick Laude “Non-dual Reality and Empirical Existence in Advaita Vedānta and Ghazālī’s Metaphysics of Unity”
Zeitschrift für Assyriologie und Vorderasiatische Archäologie Vol. 114, No. 2 (2024)
Archäologischer Anzeiger 1. Halbband (2024) #openaccess
Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum = Journal of Ancient Christianity Vol.28, No. 3 (2024) NB Julia Doroszewska “Saints in the Latrine: Between Revealing and Relieving in the Late Antique Miracle Collections”
Arion Vol. 32, No. 2 (2024)
Euphrosyne Vol. 51 (2023) #openaccess
Journal of Egyptian Archaeology Vol. 110, Nos. 1-2 (2024)
Gerión. Revista de Historia Antigua Vol. 42 No. Esp. (2024) #openaccess Nuevas bases documentales para el estudio de Sicilia e Hispania en época romana
Lectures, Workshops, and Exhibitions
The “Medical and Philosophical Physiologies (5th century BCE - 5th century CE)” webinar continues. January 10, 2025 from 2.30 pm - 4.30 pm, UTC+1), Laetitia Monteils-Laeng (Université de Montréal) will speak on “Physiologie du vieillissement dans la physique géométrique du Timée.” Then on March 21, 2025 at 2.30pm - 4.30pm, UTC+1, Catherine Darbo-Peschanski (Centre Léon Robin, CNRS) will discuss: ‘Qu’est-ce qu’un lieu du corps ?’ The sessions will be conducted via Zoom video conference (connection link upon request).
Tomorrow at 3:00 and 7:00 pm at The Met, for the first time, there will be a “live performance [that] is an integral part of a major exhibition,” for Flight into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt 1876–Now. Composer and bassist Luke Stewart will mine “the histories and mythologies surrounding Blackness,” in his Kemetic Hymns.
The Pasts Imperfect team is looking forward to seeing many of you at SCS-AIA in Philadelphia in January! We will be having a book launch for Sarah’s and Joel’s new books, so please send us a note if you are interested in attending.
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Loved it, Fiennes, plushies and the importance of next step...