Tags: army, battle, cost, examples, greek, hoplites, isyp, journal, mantinea, medium/format, military history, models, sparta, stop-motion, video

Battle reconstruction: option 1 - models 

"HaT Industrie" hoplite models 

Photos from Plastic Soldier Review - fantastic page with lots of info and tips, e.g. what to use for the spears. Makes it seem as if the production of the figures has been really carefully thought through: "The figures in this set wear varying amounts and styles of armour, which normally reflected their position in the phalanx - those with the heaviest armour being at the front. From the angle that they hold their spears it is possible to see that the most lightly armoured figures in this set are modelled to be at the back, and the most heavily armoured are at the front of the formation."

• Talks about them as Greek mercenaries in Alexander's army - any different from what Spartan hoplites would have looked like in the 5th century? How much does it matter? 

48 soldiers in a box - cheapest I have found per box so far is £6.25 at Wonderland Models  (compare £7.99 on Amazon and £11.39 at 1001 Model Kits). Have to think about how the 48 would be arranged to form a phalanx... But Noon's illustration of the lochos forming up at Mantinea envisages 512 soldiers, which would require 11 boxes i.e. £68.75 - and that's just one side of the battle. (Campbell & Noon 2012: 43 - calculations on p.42) 

What could I do instead (still using physical objects rather than drawings/computer graphics)? 

• use 12 mm counters (500 for £13.00 at Patriot Games) or 24 mm [height rather than circumference?] 'pawns' (500 for £32.50 same place - haven't checked for comparative prices) - obviously creates a very different effect - more like a moving diagram than an 'animation' - but could be used to demonstrate the manoeuvres 

but the models are so nice... :-( 

• buy one box, use the same 32 figures to film the movements of each enomotia and then composite the footage - how difficult is that going to be??? 
• film the movements of just one enomotia because that will be difficult enough in itself and useful to show the complexity of the manoeuvre - proof of principle for a larger project? 

TO PAINT OR NOT TO PAINT (would be lovely, but time??? might not matter that much for a top-down animation...)

Or can I persuade RPGsoc to apply for funding to buy the models and make the film as an educational project??? Recruit helpers to do the painting? 

other options to think through: real people (will never get more than 32!), drawing, computer-generated 

Tags: clytemnestra, diary, fiction, isyp, journal, medium/format, mythology, novel, short story, writing

I feel really inspired by Margaret Atwood's Penelopiad and I love diving into historical fiction and swimming around for a while in an alien culture! Of course I can't compare myself to the creator of A Handmaid's Tale and Alias Grace and so many others... But I'd like to try my hand at writing fiction. What I can't decide at the moment is whether to try and come up with something that would be complete in itself - a short story, or a series of diary-entries that would cover the whole story-arc - or whether to write a fragment of something longer, like a sample chapter from a supposed novel. I'm researching Clytemnestra as her story has some parallels with Penelope's - as one of the Achaean wives waiting at home for the end of the Trojan War - but is sufficiently different that I don't feel so much in Margaret Atwood's shadow! 

Clytemnestra in the underworld, looking back on her life - is that too much like the Penelopiad? 

Penelope is at least as clever as Odysseus; Clytemnestra is almost certainly cleverer than Agamemnon (unless I take a really radical approach and make her somehow an innocent victim??) 

diary-entries - feels a bit naff, but in some ways would probably be the easiest thing to do... 

themes: her pain at the loss of her daughter, her bitterness at being abandoned, her difficult relationship with Electra, ... 

variations in the myth:

• who actually killed Agamemnon, her or Aegisthus? 
• her being married to Tantalus first, always hated Agamemnon 
• mad idea that Iphigenia was actually the daughter of Helen and Theseus (!!!) 

--- the only way I can think of right now to try and get in multiple versions is to do something focused on the people of Argos and have different rumours flying round, nobody's sure what actually happened up at the palace. That would be very different from the first-person protagonist narration of the Penelopiad, but it could be interesting... (Downton Abbey - the masters and the servants?) 

Alias Grace - amnesia???? 

I'm going to stop there for the moment... Lots to think about! 

Two radically different images of Clytemnestra: the murderer and the mother 

https://alchetron.com/Clytemnestra       http://reviewsbyamoslassen.com/?p=48686 

Teaching ideas 

I know I want to do something related to teaching to make my PGCE application stronger next year. I could write a revision guide for a GSCE/A-level topic, or create a series of lesson-plans for that topic. I don't know if it's going to be possible to arrange to teach a class as NoCOut involves primary schools and it's secondary I'm interested in; however, if I could teach a class that'd be really fun, but I wouldn't be able to cover as much material as I would if I just do the lesson-plans. Or I could talk to teachers to find out what kinds of classroom resources it would be useful to have: flash-cards for learning art & architecture terminology, wall-posters, work-sheets, on-line collection of images that could be used. (Copyright problems with that last idea, or do websites designed for educational use get a free pass???) 

I'm going to talk to my mum (French teacher) about the kinds of work involved in these different possibilities. 

Tags: authenticity, booklet, clothing, craft, drawing, fashion, greek, illustration, journal, journalism, medium/format, museums, product, sculpture, teaching, vases, vlog

First ideas about my Product 

The area of the classical world I am exploring is Greek clothing & fashion. Possible media/formats that I could produce are (trying to think about as many possibilities as possible): 

• fashion magazine for Athenian women: the hottest new fabrics (silk from one of the allied islands?), hair decorations, spring colours, ... 
• dress-up dolls from different periods (I mean those paper dresses you cut out and fit on to a cardboard body with folded tabs) - copying different sculptures/vase-paintings 
• produce a booklet with passages from literature that mention the way the characters are dressed, accompanied by images of appropriate ancient artefacts showing the way the clothes would actually have looked - would help the reader to envisage the scene 
• series of vlog-posts critiquing the costuming of various films set in the ancient world and showing more authentic images that could have been imitated instead (NO TROUSERS!!!) 
• booklet to be bought by visitors to the British Museum, giving the vocabulary for describing the costumes on the statues on permanent display, and explaining some of the history of the garments  
• lesson-plan for teaching a primary-school class about ancient costume 
• actually make a costume!!! 

Things to think about: 

• I haven't sewed anything in years so how good am I going to be at making a costume? 
• The lesson-plan idea doesn't really excite me, but I suppose it can be a fall-back if none of the other ideas work out... 
• What would I use for images for the magazine? photographs would require me to make costumes and do hair & make-up - and persuade people to be models and learn photography... Using scanned images of vases and sculpture could end up looking very inconsistent... I'm not the best artist in the world, but would my own rough sketches be good enough to get the idea across? If I think of my Product as focused on content rather than layout/finish, I could write more articles and present my material as something that the other people working for the magazine would create the accompanying images for. But am I actually going to be able to find out enough to write enough articles for the word-count, if I don't spend some of my time on the images??? 
• The dress-up dolls would involve copying existing images, which I think I could manage. But is this really a very effective idea? 
• I don't think the booklets or the vlog-posts would create the same problems in terms of images - mixing and matching sculpture, vases, and drawings from books on costume (e.g. Croom 2010) would be perfectly normal in these kinds of media. 

Probably one of those three then. Keep them in mind while I continue with my research, and see if what I find fits better with one idea than either of the others? Watch some films & tv (Troy - Fall of a City and Atlantis?) and think about whether there's enough there to actually do anything with! 

(image from: https://www.ducksters.com/history/ancient_greece/clothing.php) 

Tags: achilles, ajax, ancient vs. modern, diomedes, greek, hector, heroism, homer, iliad, isyp, knowledge of classical world, literature, odysseus

We studied Homer last year, and although I've always loved the Odyssey, I became more interested than I had been before in the Iliad and the idea of heroism. I'd like to explore the contrasts between the kind of heroism we see in epic and modern ideas of what a hero is. Things to think about: 

• the 'heroic code' - does it exist? if so, what is it? 
• Achilles - hero or anti-hero? 
• is Hector the real hero of the Iliad? for Homer? for us? 
• other heroes: Ajax, Odysseus, Diomedes 

Bibliography (from what we were given in Q81LIT): 

• Cairns, D. L., ed. (2001) Oxford Readings in Homer’s Iliad. Oxford. [CHECK CONTENTS] 
• Edwards, M. W. (1987) Homer: poet of the Iliad. Baltimore MD. [INTRODUCTORY?] 
• Foley, J. M. (2010) ‘Reading Homer through Oral Tradition’, in K. Myrsiades (ed.): Approaches to Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, New York. [USEFUL IF PEOPLE THINK HOMER'S PICTURE OF HEROISM IS SHAPED BY THE ORAL TRADITION...] 
• Ford, A. (1992) Homer. The Poetry of the Past. Ithaca NY. [ANCIENT GREEK IDEA OF HEROISM: BELONGS TO THE PAST, NOT THE PRESENT???] 
• ***Nagy, G. (1999 [first ed. 1979])The Best of the Achaeans. Baltimore MD. [IMPORTANT! DIFFICULT?] 
• Parry, A. (1956) ‘The Language of Achilles’, TAPA 87, 1-7. 
• ***Schein, S. L. (1984) The Mortal Hero: an introduction to Homer’s Iliad. Berkeley CA.

Tags: gladiators, isyp, knowledge of classical world, roman, social history

I love the film Gladiator and I want to know more about gladiators. Books I read about them as a kid tended to focus on categories like retiarius and secutor, with detailed drawings of the equipment used by each type. And I've picked up one or two facts (or are they just ideas?): gladiators were low status but had a kind of glamour - especially for women (?!); most fights weren't actually to the death because training gladiators was expensive; there is a controversy about what the actual meaning of the thumbs up/thumbs down signal was; the emperor Commodus fought in the arena as a gladiator (I think); something about an Etruscan origin (???). But as a scholar I really don't know very much about the topic: what is the actual evidence? Are there narratives of individual fights or accounts of what it was like in a gladiatorial training school? Or are we putting together a composite picture from tiny snippets of references here and there? There must be lots of visual material I suppose, for all those children's book-illustrators to copy. Do we have anything - even just the odd bit of graffiti? - produced by gladiators themselves, or does all our evidence come from elite groups looking down on them? What are the areas that scholars agree on and what are the areas of disagreement? Need to find some starter bibliography... 

Image found at: https://www.hindustantimes.com/hollywood/russell-crowe-s-gladiator-armour-sells-for-rs-62-lakh-at-auction/story-KiT9EcZe6ZM8kgtNBSL7PI.html