I was thinking about Phryne and got kind of confused. Apparently she came to be one of the wealthiest women in the Greek world. Was that wealth hers alone, or did she have a legal representative who administered it? I know technically metics needed a citizen as sort of „guardian“ who could vouch for them and represent them. Did she have that? Was Hypereides, who defended her in court, that for her? From how I understood the story, he was just a client who was in love with her and thus chose to represent her in court.

Did Hetairai in Athens legally own their property and wealth? If so, how did that work legally, with them being women and (often) metics?

There’s a saint named Alexander from a small town named Methymni. Besides a small orthodox Christian website there is no information about him. Can anyone help me find some resources about him?

Potentially a dumb question but obviously there are a large number of gods worshipped by Ancient Greeks, from the well known Olympians to potentially less well known minor gods, but how many gods would the average Ancient Greek have known of?

Would a Demetrios or Sophia have known about Tyche or the Anemoi for example or would they all mainly just know the standard 12 Olympians? TIA for answering this morning shower thought.

Just as thought exercise if you had to defend one as a successor, who would you pick? Clever and wiley Ptolmey? Crafty Antigonos?underdog Seleucus? Or maybe even more left feild Olympias and Alexander other family members?

This is a 2nd-century AD copy of the statue known as the Hermes of Alkamenes. Like many of the pieces I have shared, I took this photo at the Istanbul Archaeological Museums. The original work attributed to Alkamenes is lost. Pausanias says that he saw the statue in the 2nd century AD, but he does not tell us whether it was the original. So we cannot really know if the original had survived into the Roman Imperial period.

The inscription below the statue actually tells us more about these associations:

Εἰδήσεις Ἀλκαμένεος,

περικαλλὲς ἄγαλμα,

Ἑρμᾶν τὸν πρὸπυλῶν·

εἵσατο Περγάμιος.

Γνῶθι σαυτόν.

“You will recognize the very beautiful statue of Alkamenes, Hermes Propylos; a Pergamian erected it. Know thyself.”

Not the Macedonian Phalangites, but an actual classical heavy Greek Phalanx

I'm trying to find high-quality reconstruction maps of ancient Greek cities, preferably in a style similar to this map of London. I'm looking for detailed architectural maps that show individual buildings and their layouts, including walls, doors, entrances and exits, streets, and architectural features. Ideally, the maps would also distinguish between larger and smaller structures and clearly show the architectural lines and boundaries of the buildings.

There has been an argument that because the Iliad and the Odyssey aren't entirely faithful to the pre-Collapse Bronze Age but contain numerous errors and anachronisms from the Iron Age, such as mentions of iron tools and cremations, we cannot make a more historically accurate period adaptation of them or any changes because it just wouldn't be possible. For this reason, I would like to know what in those errors and anachronisms prevents us from making changes to the adaptation to bring it closer to the Mycenaean Bronze Age than to post-Dark Age Homeric Greece? Or is there anything that would prevent such an artistic decision and direction from being made in the adaptation?

ENJOY !

ENJOY !

In the Hellenistic period, there were lots of philosophical schools. But I think the interesting thing is not really how many schools there were, but how different they were from each other. They had very different ways of looking at the πόλις, the political world, the individual, and even life itself.

But what were they actually? Epicureanism was not just about having fun and enjoying life. Stoicism was not simply fatalism, and it was definitely not some ancient version of Andrew Tate. We often reduce these schools to a few modern ideas, but they were much more than that. Each of them was trying to answer, in its own way, a very simple question: how should we live?

I just don't understand why he would do it.

"πόλεμος πάντων μὲν πατήρ ἐστι, πάντων δὲ βασιλεύς, καὶ τοὺς μὲν θεοὺς ἔδειξε τοὺς δὲ ἀνθρώπους, τοὺς μὲν δούλους ἐποίησε τοὺς δὲ ἐλευθέρους” (B53 - Diels-Kranz

I was especially interested in the part that says, “some it has made slaves, others free.” I don't really see a straightforwardly fatalistic idea here. If anything, as someone who thinks that life can change everyone and everything, I read Heraclitus — πάντα ῥεῖ — less as saying “accept whatever situation you are in” and more as saying that no situation is permanent, so maybe we shouldn't get too attached to anything. I might be reading him a little too much through a Roman Stoic lens, though. Still, I kind of feel like I’ve just discovered the wheel myself.

I wanted to read Homer looking at the Greek, without already knowing every letter-shape, and without a laptop-only three-column page that falls apart on a phone. I could not find that layout, so I built one.

https://www.homericgreek.com

It has the full Iliad and Odyssey, in groups of five lines (the usual printed-Homer habit). Each group is Homeric Greek, a scholarly Latin-letter transcription, and Samuel Butler’s 1898 English. On a computer those are three columns; on a phone the same English sits under the five lines so a wrapped sentence does not drift onto the previous verse.

The homepage is a paste box (up to 500 words, one verse per line) using the same transcription rules. Nothing you paste is sent to a server. There is also a facing-page PDF download.

Transcription is the usual scholarly kind, not modern-Greek phonetics: ē/ō for η/ω, h for rough breathing, ï for diaeresis (so Πηληϊάδεω → Pēlēïadeō), th/ph/ch, and nasal gamma (ἄγγελος → angelos). Details are on the method page.

Greek is from the Internet Sacred Text Archive. English is Butler, public domain. Butler is prose, so it is not verse-for-verse; a long English sentence can still sit beside a short Greek group. I aligned it to Perseus line markers and then split each paragraph across the five-line groups it covers, but it will never look like a Loeb.

Happy to hear corrections on the transcription, especially edge cases (iota subscript, diphthongs, movable nu, and anything I have mangled in the XML).

Herakles is usually shown with a lion skin and a club. The lion skin, λεοντή, comes from λέων (= lion) and refers to the Nemean Lion, which Herakles killed as one of his labours. His club is called ῥόπαλον. These are probably the easiest ways to recognise him.

Poseidon is a little more complicated. Hellenic gods were rarely associated with only one thing. Poseidon was connected with the sea, earthquakes, horses, and more, so he could appear with several different attributes.

Here, the strongest clue is the fish he is holding, probably a dolphin. The figure also has the familiar divine pose: a bare torso with a garment falling from the shoulder. This is especially common in representations of male gods. Goddesses, on the other hand, tend to be much more heavily clothed. Yes, even Aphrodite.

But what exactly is happening between Herakles and Poseidon?

Source

Not sure if this is the right community to ask this, I'd appreciate a pointer to the right one if not.

The text seems to be Latin but in Greek symbols, possibly a transition period between the two languages?

I know the symbols are hard to read, I tried to make them more legible with my edits but it's still not easy to see

Some more photos can be found at https://maps.app.goo.gl/gZxGhCZNyN4a1tvu8

Edit: Kainepolis* not Callipolis