Literature
Odi et amo
Catullus 85 is two lines long and refuses to explain itself. That refusal is the poem.
The culture of language - the language of culture.
Letting language loose on the history of words, classics, and music. Deadly serious about wordplay.
Writing
Essays
Philosophy
The question is the instrument
Socratic dialogue is less a store of doctrines than a way of pressing a definition until it comes apart in the speaker’s hands.
Mythology
Daphne, afterwards
The laurel on a classical portrait is not a blank ornament. In Ovid it is what Daphne becomes when pursuit leaves her no other exit.
Music
Not a flute
The aulos is a reed instrument, usually a pair of pipes. Calling it a flute is a good way to mishear the ancient stage.
Christianity
A hymn is also a poem
When Prudentius writes a hymn in classical metre, Christianity is not stepping outside the schoolroom. It is using it.
Philology
What a scholion is for
A scholion is a note in the margin of an old book, written by someone who was trying to keep a reader company.
Catalogue
Instruments
Ancient Greek
Aulos (tibia)
A double-reed wind instrument, played as a pair of pipes. The Roman name is tibia. It is not a flute.
Ancient Greek
Chelys
The tortoise-shell lyre. Hermes’ invention in the hymn, and the classroom string instrument of the Greek imagination.
Balkan folk
Gaida
A Balkan bagpipe: a bag, a chanter, and one or more drones. The name and the bore change from valley to valley.
Medieval
Psaltery
A flat plucked string instrument of the medieval world, cousin to a wide family of zithers and to the qanun.
Teaching
Educational projects
Visiting classrooms · LogoFil
The instrument table
One or two real instruments, taken to a classroom, so a reed and a string do not remain vocabulary.
Ljubljana · LogoFil
A page of Homer
Slow reading of the opening of the Iliad. One line, then the next, with the scholia allowed to interrupt.
Ljubljana · LogoFil
Greek verbs, aloud
A workshop that speaks the paradigm instead of only printing it. Aspect first, then the endings.
Social posts
Notes from the margin
Notebook
Before you wear it
Before the wreath is a prize, it is a plant that used to be a person. Read Daphne first.
Letter
Aorist, briefly
The aorist is not the past tense with a fancier name. It is a way of looking at an action as a whole.
Margin
Not a display case
A word is not a display case. It is a door.
Notebook
Letter, sound, sense
Philology is slow reading: the letter, then the sound, and only then the meaning.