Felix dies natalis nobis!
And so, today, we turn three! Antigone has been hosting Classics articles, and making them freely available to all, for three years. Alas, that is not an easy number to celebrate: thirty per cent of a decade? sixty per cent of a lustrum? escape from our “terrible twos”, entry into the wide-eyed excitement of toddlerdom? Well, whatever it does or does not mean, we are very proud to hit the birthday mark, and that you are here to read about it.
Rather than flood you with the usual pile of statistics about how the site’s content has grown (400th article due in spring!) and its reach has spread (Germany is our fastest growing readership!), we’ll settle instead for something a little simpler. As you will know, in order to help make the immensity of Classics a little more navigable for our readers, we sort our pieces across ten separate categories (although they so often overlap). For the first time we can reveal the most-read piece in each category:
Ancient Religion: Simon Goldhill on what Classics did to Christianity.
Greek Language: Nicholas Swift on what ancient languages sounded like.
Greek Literature: David Konstan on ethics in Sophocles’ Antigone.
History: Martine Diepenbroek on the riddles of the Spartan scytale.
Latin Language: Wolfgang de Melo on grammatical gender in Latin and other languages.
Latin Literature: Orlando Gibbs on what the Romans found funny in Plautus.
Material Culture: Edmund Stewart on how to build a Greek temple.
Philosophy: Anika Prather on Aristotle’s distinction between different kinds of friendship.
The Classical Tradition: Tom Moran on Shakespeare’s Greek and Latin.
The Future of Classics: Stephen Fry on the ghost of Classics to come.
These ten have attracted some 600,000 readers between them. So if you haven’t yet read any of these fine pieces, there may be worse things to do in the world. And since in some cases it remains a very close fight for the palm of victory, please do explore our categories by clicking the magnifying glass on the menu above to seek out some other articles up your street!
2024 is certainly going to be an exciting year for Antigone, and we look forward to announcing news as soon as things can happen. In the meantime, let us thank you: we are so grateful to the friendly, humorous, curious and kind supporters that we have met along the way so far. Our little team works very hard, late in evenings and early in mornings, week in and week out, when space can be eked out from work hours and family life. And we do that because we are driven to share far and wide the fascinating cultures of the Greeks, the Romans, and the worlds they inhabited.
As you know, we do all our work here for free, and by paying for costs mostly from our own pockets (although thank you to our kind occasional donors: you too could be one!). And we keep the site entirely free of advertising or tracking cookies or anything that gets in the way of spreading the subject. And why do we bother? Because we love opening up the subject for those who deserve to learn about it – which is everyone. And because we are thrilled at how positive an impact we have had on individuals – which is everything.
Always onwards!
The Antigone Team
