The agreeable eye

an eudæmonistarchives

More specifically concerning: archaeology

28 June

28 June 2001, around 14.13.

What is one looking for in these cases, anyway? One could find an object lesson, an unexpected symbol, but one is unlikely to find what it all meant; it is a void, then, and scholarship a waste of time? Perhaps. One little thing, this fixation on an object, whether worthy or no; wisdom and understanding […]

capital

3 July 2001, around 15.59.

Lustral Basins, or the Archaeology of Remembrance

7 August 2002, around 13.29.

We stood in the sun, which was sharp and swimmingly white, though not quite directly overhead. The only thing brighter than the sunlight was the dust, which swirled and eddied low around our feet, stirred by the rare breezes. The olive trees and other low, scrubby plants were soaked in this dust, and seemed nearly […]

The Topless Towers of Ilium

23 October 2002, around 16.59.

Archaeologists are a fiesty bunch. Take, for instance, this argument about Troy. How many people, really, would exchange insults about the size of ancient Troy? How big was Troy, really? Huge? Perhaps. Just the citadel? Maybe. Can we say? Depends about what era you’re talking about, I suppose. Like most cities, what once was Troy […]

Lavatory

15 March 2003, around 9.02.

Palace of Nestor, Pylos, July 2001

Loot

17 April 2003, around 16.18.

Such dim-conceived glories of the brain Bring round the heart an undescribable feud; So do these wonders a most dizzy pain, That mingles Grecian grandeur with the rude Wasting of old Time—with a billowy main— A sun—a shadow of a magnitude. —John Keats (‘On Seeing the Elgin Marbles’) Allow me to sound heartless for a […]

of doubtful origin

10 August 2003, around 8.21.

Provenance unknown.

Citation (42)

2 April 2011, around 10.14.

derring-do among the philologists…

added too freely

8 June 2014, around 11.41.

In his ‘History of Ancient Art,’ of which the first edition appeared in 1764, Winckelmann gave to the study of the antique an impulse along a line which it has never wholly deserted; his theory of the ‘beautiful’ as manifested even in these Græco-Roman copies to which his imagination often added too freely the missing […]

17 September 2016 – Bibracte

17 September 2016, around 19.43.

Day 11. Our first real ‘excursion’ – to the Gaulish site of Bibracte on Mont Beuvray in Burgundy. Abandoned after the Roman conquest of Gaul (in favor of the town of Autun, which some scholars had believed to be the site of the battle of Bibracte – where Caesar defeated the Helvetii in 58 BCE), […]

megrims, firks and melancholies

15 June 2022, around 11.03.

The weekend started so well: I got up early on Saturday and went for a run – not my usual day, but the book group was meeting that evening, which meant a (relatively) late night, which led me to go for my run a day early in the hopes of cultivating greater flexibility in my schedule […]

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