The Endless Knot Mark Sundaram & Aven McMaster

Buried deep under volcanic ash lie hundreds of burnt scrolls containing texts from the first century. A new project is driving the work to try to read these chunks of carbon, to uncover new works and open new doors into the past. We spoke to one of the leaders of this project, Dr. Stephen Parsons, about the Vesuvius Challenge, the technical aspects of ‘virtual unrolling’, the possibilities of new classical texts, the development of new ways of doing scholarship, and more.

We talked to Dr. Karen Carr about the global history of swimming — in myth, folktale, and history. Who swam, who didn’t, and how do the stories different cultures told reflect these patterns? We also talked a bit about Dr. Carr’s next book, all about silver, women, and textiles.

We discuss the language and history of the ecological sciences, all the way back to the ancient Greeks, and the development of the food chain and food web models of ecological systems. And apologies for the unscheduled hiatus!

We talk to Melanie Racette-Campbell about her new book, “The Crisis of Masculinity in the Age of Augustus”, and discuss why Roman elite men were particularly vulnerable to a societal transformation that changed their role in the state. What did it mean to be a good man in ancient Rome, and how and why did that change?
Melanie’s book is available here
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The word “chauvinism” is an unlikely eponym, but it turns out that the story behind it has all sorts of interesting connections. And our discussion of those connections also leads us into the long history of misogyny in the western world, from Eve and Pandora to the Virgin Mary, courtly love, and Victorian womanhood.
Cocktail: Pandora’s Jar, from Nectar of the Gods
“By Jingo” song
Hesiod’s Works and Days
Hesiod’s Theogony
Semonides 7
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We look at the history of English’s conceptualization of time, and update Mark’s research on spatiotemporal metaphor. Also, words for arrows, the surprising origin of ‘toxic’, and a bit of Latin poetry!
Blue Arrow cocktail
Bow and Arrow cocktail
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