Our Top 50 Pieces to Date
Running an ever-rolling website, publishing articles as and when we feel they are ready for the wider world, makes it difficult to step back and see what pieces have captured our readers’ interests and imaginations the most. So, to take stock of where things are in our 28th (!) month online (July ’23), we have pulled the lever to get the crude count of our 50 most read articles: these represent some 15% of our output to date, and have shared a couple of million readers among them. So here they are, counting down to our (perhaps unassailable?) Number One:
50) A Showman’s Odyssey by Milly Ayers
49) The Italian Job: Lucretius in the Renaissance by Luke Slattery
48) Lorem ipsum: Filler Fail, Killer Tale by David Butterfield
47) Where do the Classics come from? Or, the Apparatus Criticus and You by Maxwell Hardy
46) Tres Leones: Singing โThree Lionsโ in Latin by Hayley Canham and the Antigone XI
45) Julius Caesar’s Last Words by Jaspal Ubhi
44) Seneca and Nero: How (Not) to Give an Emperor Unwelcome Advice by Catharine Edwards
43) Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man and the Measure of All Things by Pablo Irizar
42) What Can We Learn from Seneca Today? by David Fideler
41) Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation: A Personal View by the Antigone team
40) Love and the Soul: the timeless tale of Cupid and Psyche by Stephen Harrison
39) Socrates and the Ethics of Conversation by Frisbee Sheffield
38) The Song of Seikilos: a Musically Notated Ancient Greek Poem by Armand DโAngour
37) Learning Foreign Languages in Antiquity: How Did They Do It? by Eleanor Dickey
36) First Thoughts on the “New Naso” by the Antigone Rapid-Response Unit
35) Platoโs Cave, Narniaโs Wardrobe: How to Escape the Zeitgeist by Edmund Stewart
34) Richard Porson: Scholar of a Different Class by David Butterfield
33) The Greeks, Afghanistan, and the Buddha by Bijan Omrani
32) The Music of Sophoclesโ Ode to Man by Armand DโAngour
31) The Battle of the Classics: The Humanities without Humanism by Eric Adler
30) Pandemics, Plagues, and Philosophy: Moral Lessons from Antiquity for the Modern World by Martin Ferguson Smith
29) Gilbert Highet, the First Celebrity Classicist by Robert Ball
28) Uncancelling Tiberius by John Roth
27) Sponsian: Another Lost Emperor by Alfred Deahl
26) Classics in UK Universities: cui bono? by David Butterfield
25) Weโre All Political Animals โ and Thatโs a Good Thing by Josiah Ober
24) Classics in Translation? A Personal Angle (Parts I and II) by Wolfgang de Melo
23) An Introduction to Greek and Latin Metre by David Butterfield
22) The Classic Classic? Antigone Hits 250 by 40 friends of the Antigone team
21) Socrates on the Blessing of Being Refuted by Andrew Beer
20) “A Great Ox Stands on my Tongue”: the Pitfalls of Latin Translation by Jaspreet Singh Boparai
19) Money Talks: A Very Short History of Roman Currency by Alfred Deahl
18) Looking for Antinous by Carole Raddato
17) The Ghost of Classics Yet to Come by Stephen Fry
16) Learning from the Master: Socratesโ Examined Life by Chad Bochan
15) What did Classics do to Christianity? by Simon Goldhill
14) Gender in Latin and Beyond: A Philologistโs Take by Wolfgang de Melo
13) The Enduring Appeal of the Stoics by John Sellars
12) The War that Made the Roman Empire: An Interview with Barry Strauss
11) Will the Wise Man get Drunk? An Ancient Philosophic Controversy by John Dillon
10) Shakespeare’s Latin and Greek by Tom Moran
9) The Ends of History by Michael Bonner
8) Ancient Greek Accents in Ten Rules by David Butterfield
7) Living Descendants of Mark Antony by Theodore Kopaliani
6) Ancient Cybersecurity? Deciphering the Spartan Scytale by Martine Diepenbroek
5) The ‘Helps’ page of free online Classics resources curated by the Antigone team
4) What You Need to Build a Greek Temple by Edmund Stewart
3) Understanding Friendship through the Eyes of Aristotle by Anika Prather
2) What Did Ancient Languages Sound Like by Nicholas Swift
1) No Laughing Matter? What the Romans Found Funny by Orlando Gibbs (~200k views)
These lists are awkwardly unforgiving, of course. Just missing this rather arbitrary cut-off are David Konstan on Sophoclesโ Antigone and human ethics, Mary Beard on Romeโs Caesars, Fitzroy Morrissey on Greek philosophy and Islam, Sjoerd van Hoorn on Heraclitus, Tom Holland on Suetonius, Nina Triaridou on the Lamia and Keats, Dan Billingham on the Nika Riots, Mateusz Strรณลผyลski on Ukraineโs ancient past, David Butterfield and Gavin McCormick on the history of football, Rosaria Munda on editing Homerโs first draft of the Iliad, Jaspreet Singh Boparai on St Jerome and the Latin Bible, and the Antigone team on Raphaelโs School of Athensโ. And that is to say nothing of the other 250 articles, which have all found a four-figure readership!
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