sophia > Recent Status Updates

socrates strikes a chilling blow to aesthetes everywhere

GLAUCON: That, too, is no doubt correct, but what exactly do you mean by it?
SOCRATES: Yeah, just like that

this is probably not great for my mental state but also. i already hate it. so two wrongs make a right?

socrates: justice is an ars so i get to be an arse. did u consider the virtue of that??

WHATEVER. rereads anne boyer “what resembles the grave but isn’t”

SPEAK HER NAME • IPHIGENIA IPHIGENIA IPHIGENIA

“I see no end in sight,
I am a charioteer — the reins are flying, look,
the mares plunge off the track —
my bolting heart,
it beats me down and terror beats the drum,
my dance-and-singing master pitched to fury — ”

i would die for you clytaemnestra. it’s all one

“Rejoice if you can rejoice — I glory.
And if I’d pour upon his body the libation
it deserves, what wine could match my words?
It is right and more than right. He flooded
the vessel of our proud house with misery,
with the vintage of the curse and now
he drains the dregs. My lord is home at last.”

yeah yeah whatever he deserved it.

“our child is gone, not standing by our side,
the bond of our dearest pledges, mine and yours;
by all rights our child should be here…
Orestes.
You seem startled.”

i can read books and even understand them

“It is significant that the cultivator associates with a murder the essentially peaceful
labor that insures his existence, whereas in societies of hunters the responsibility for slaughter is attributed to another, to a ‘stranger.’ … The food plant is not ‘given’ in the world, as the animal is. It is the result of a primitive dramatic event.”

this is craziness y’all 😫

“If a man has retired into exile in a situation where reconciliation is possible and is then accused of killing or wounding someone, his case is heard in the court of Phreatto, and he pleads his case from a boat anchored near the shore.”

oh virro… peius quam tu nemo facit

“Poor little household gods, / whom I supplicate with a pinch of incense or barley meal, / or a tiny garland — when while I ever lay by enough / to insure my old age against the indigent beggar’s / bed-roll and crutch?”

juvenal needs to have a looooong talk with boccaccio

“I detest / the sort who are always thumbing — and citing — some standard grammar, / whose every utterance follows the laws of syntax, / who with antiquarian zeal quote poets I’ve never heard of: / such matters are men’s concern.”

he’s kind of like fran lebowitz to me

“But in Rome we must toe the line of fashion, spending / behind our means, and often on borrowed credit. / It’s a universal failing: here we all live in pretentious / poverty.”

if conformist and regressive then why so DIVA?? tunes may change by satire vi but satire i has me SOLD

“it’s harder not to be writing satires; for who could endure / this monstrous city, however callous at heart, and swallow / his wrath?”

girl WHATEVER!!!

“Juvenal’s particular dilemma, like that of many another laudator temporis acti yearning for some mythical Golden Age, is that he is living by a set of moral and social assumptions that were obsolete before he was born.”

odysseus’s “blameless soul”….. riiight right right

oh aristotle… never get less exhausting… thank u for the phye story though. i too have seen a woman and thought she was a god

“As a basic unit for political life, the deme was much smaller and radically different from those used before; thus the reform cut across and broke up old alliances and power blocks.”

if clst 312s doesn’t run i might cry

“Launch out on his story, Muse, daughter of Zeus,
start from where you will—sing for our time too.”

goodbye xenophon the orator and xenophon the historian and mr oxyrhynchus… now it’s time for nasty old aristotle and his rancid takes.

“The dissatisfaction which had spread through the Boeotian confederacy by 386 probably arose not from any unfairness in the arrangements … but from a theoretical dislike of anything which interfered with a city’s total autonomy.”

women in sparta have my sympathies. i would be pissed to have rights only bc of eugenics

maybe the real schrodinger’s cat is the cicero we used for quellenforschung along the way

“Pinpointing a source, or a shared tradition, is not equivalent to interpreting a thought.”

aristophanes as a source for the realities of democratic athens should not have surprised me as much as it does. anyways bye bye mr old oligarch

“…atimia, the loss of political rights, which could be partial or total.”

i think the festival proponents were onto something. & thucydides’ made up speeches are everything to me

“To have any form of election involved ‘aristocracy’ in the Greek sense—the selection of the best men for the job—and this was not democratic.”

so my 2026 longread begins! so exciting!

“Doing philosophy had more and more turned into exegesis…”

ladies, ladies… “it was this tenderness, love of nature and a natural piety, rather than his belief in Rome’s majestic imperial mission that led many later to feel that Virgil was the most ‘Christian’ of the pagan poets.” from objective historian #1, h. h. scullard!

dear mr. scullard, how am i supposed to trust you when you refer to thucydides as objective

"Thus the authority of Augustus was re-established on two foundations: tribunicia potestas, which gave him civil authority in Rome itself, and proconsular imperium maius, which gave him control of the armies and provinces."

completely thrown by the use of the phrase “to throw up the sponge.” what

“[Sulla’s] epitaph recorded that no friend ever surpassed him in kindness, and no enemy in ill-doing.”

i read seven pages y’all… clap for me. but also for marius, RIP my boy marius

that “que” in spqr is doing some seriously heavy lifting

“The People, also were ready to use any stick with which to beat the Senate.”

sponsored by my need to ask the smartest questions in roman civ

okay! we’re getting somewhere!

“But, in every way, the shared metaphors we use of female access to power – ‘knocking on the door’, ‘storming the citadel’, ‘smashing the glass ceiling’, or just giving them a ‘leg up’ – underline female exteriority. Women in power are seen as breaking down barriers, or alternatively as taking something to which they are not quite entitled.”