Eidolon

For those looking for more concrete information about Roman history, a classics professor I know has written a really in-depth two part series about immigration in the Roman Empire over at a new online classics journal called Eidolon: https://eidolon.pub/barbarians-inside-the-gate-part-ii-c22c5becd228 Granted, he's writing about Republican Rome so it doesn't directly relate to the 5th century, but it deals with similar themes in a thoughtful way. And I agree that it would be better for everyone if we collectively just ignored the 2015 incarnation of Niall Ferguson, but unfortunately being a tenured professor at Harvard (and now Stanford) gives you quite the bully pulpit! His first book is actually good, but it's been a downhill slide into largely fact-less political assertions and nasty ad hominem attacks since then...

I'll repost an older comment of mine here on the Humanities and their struggles: Eidolon is a now defunct online magazine specifically about the classics. The last thing they did was publish a 'fail' essay. In it the head editor, who holds a PhD from Princeton in the Classics, goes through all the challenges, mis-steps, and lessons they all learned. 'Fail' essays in tech are a dime a dozen. But in the classics, they tend to be rare. As such, Eidolon's essay is a goldmine. Two things stuck out to me the most: 1) This passage was particularly worrying: "I’m not going to downplay the extent of the problems we’re facing. In addition to the concerns facing Classics specifically and the humanities more widely, there are also enormous and terrifying problems facing higher education in general. Even before the massive disruption of the Covid-19 pandemic, these problems already looked insurmountable: on one side the student debt crisis, which has financially crippled an entire generation, and on the other side the increasing precarity of the academic workforce has made teaching Classics (and every other discipline in academia, really) a terrible professional prospect. This is not to mention academia’s endemic problems with classism and sexual harassment." 2) The author/head editor was Donna Zuckerberg. If that name sounds a bit familiar, it's because it is. She is the sister of Mark Zuckerberg, one of the richest people in history. That her assessment of Eidolon's efforts is so…

It's always amusing to know what's going on with "the latest" in classics, however, modern classicists are, to put it kindly, almost all completely full of shit, preferring to publish contrarian, obvious bullshit to the difficult task of examining the evidence and drawing new and interesting conclusions (I dunno; someone like Gregario Maranon's examination of the character of Tiberius seemed to add to the conversation). For example; it's presently wildly popular to believe that the Germanic invasions were peaceful multiculturalism, rather than, you know, a civilization ending event. I assume because the twee nincompoops who populate modern Classics departments are made uncomfortable by the parallels with present day barbarian invasions of Europe. There is zero actual evidence for this; in fact, looking at the archaeological, numismatic and philological evidence; it's abundantly obvious [0] that Rome wasn't peacefully transformed by Teutonic multiculturalism, but was in fact, sacked by barbarians and ruined forever. Similarly, while I'm no Nero expert, and I think it would be interesting if Nero was a misunderstood bunny rabbit and his witch of a mother a "hidden figure" who would have made a great Elizabeth, I strongly suspect the ancient and later writers and views on Nero and Aggripina will turn out to be more accurate than something out of modern nincompoop Classics departments, populated with the likes of Zuck's dumb younger sister[1]. I could be wrong! And Smithsonian…

The fragments may or may not be fake (consensus seems to be that the poem is probably genuine), but the provenance was certainly covered up. See https://eidolon.pub/the-murky-provenance-of-the-newest-sappho-aca671a6… It's all quite scandalous and is connected to the theft and sale of biblical papyri to the Museum of the Bible. See also https://www.theguardian.com/news/2020/jan/09/a-scandal-in-oxford-the-c… and https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/apr/16/oxford-professor-arres…