Musings on Daily Life in the Ancient and Early Medieval Mediterranean By Sarah E. Bond
‘I have come from the City. I bring you a welcome gift with a sharp point that you may remember me. I ask, if fortune allowed, that I might be able (to give) as generously as the way is long (and) as my purse is empty.’ (trans. Tomlin 2019)
As the pandemic known as COVID-19 grips the globe, thousands of instructors in the United States and elsewhere have been asked to transition their courses online for the remainder of the semester. To some instructors, such as the superb Classics professors at the Open University, distance learning has become a normalized pedagogy. To many others... Continue Reading →
This semester, I am incorporating more epigraphy into my undergraduate and graduate level courses. The University of Iowa has a top-flight classics program (if I do say so myself), but we do not have a proper squeeze collection to work with (something I took for granted while at UNC-Chapel Hill). As such, in addition to... Continue Reading →
Another year of blogging is almost in the proverbial books and I must say that while 2016 was a wretched year socio-politically, it was professionally quite satisfying. My first book, Trade and Taboo was published and I even began writing for Forbes regularly. There is no doubt that I have much to be thankful for as... Continue Reading →
Over on the Forbes blog this week, I wrote a bit about how social anxiety can be viewed through magic. In the case of curse tablets involving charioteers, we see an incredible amount of energy invested in sports. The culture of athletic competition and rivalry in chariot racing is not all that different from the... Continue Reading →
Over on my Forbes blog, I explore the history of religious tattoos. This post stems from my interest in the use of various stigmas--legal, social, and even corporal--against marginalized individuals. Tattoos in Greco-Roman antiquity were often linked to servility, but could also advertise one's religious convictions. I spoke with tattoo historian Anna Felicity Friedman about pilgrimage tattoos in... Continue Reading →
When I was a kid, I was obsessed with collecting the signatures of the Atlanta Braves baseball players. It was a point of pride to show my friends the signatures of John Smoltz or Greg Maddux, and they provided me with a little residual cachet. Turns out that Romans had much the same reaction. The natural... Continue Reading →
The Renaissance (ca. 1330-1600) is often remembered for its revival of Classical literature. Modern books like The Swerve celebrate the Renaissance era book hunters such as Poggio Bracciolini, who travelled to hidden monasteries in search of Latin manuscripts of Virgil or Cicero, and uncovered lost works, such as Lucretius' De rerum natura. However, the Renaissance was also a time for rediscovering Latin and Greek... Continue Reading →
The first line of Euripides' Bacchae reads: 'ἥκω Διὸς παῖς τήνδε Θηβαίων χθόνα' I, the child of Zeus, have come to the land of the Thebans Although it was written by the playwright at the end of the 5th c. BCE, while in Macedonia, the words of Euripides continued to echo in schoolrooms throughout the Mediterranean.... Continue Reading →
I miss Milwaukee sometimes. On warmer nights, I used to run along Lake Michigan and wait for the sunset, before jogging home to work on the book. One of the best things about those runs was looking at sculpture against the backdrop of the Wisconsin sunset. What always caught my eye was a piece by Catalan artist Jaume... Continue Reading →
History From Below 