MeFi Projects

In AD 79, Italy's mount Vesuvius erupted, covering Pompeii and Herculaneum in hot ash and lava. This was not, however, the only important event of that year. One emperor died, another succeeded, farmers farmed, politicians plotted, lawyers advocated, businessmen cut deals, life went on. In this podcast, we will follow the seasons of a typical year at the height of Rome's power from the perspectives of people high and low.
posted by BWA on Feb 9, 2023 - 0 comments

UnRoman Romans is a collection of texts with notes on various outgroups in ancient Rome (actors, athletes, dancers, sex workers, sexual non-conformists and others). [more inside]
posted by lesbiassparrow on Mar 15, 2021 - 2 comments

When English interpretations of the New Testament talk about ‘sexual immorality’ they are really translating the Greek word porneia (πορνεία), it’s used almost every time the topic of sex comes up and often when talking about the worst sins in general. If you can really grok what Paul was talking about as he uses the root for the word over and over again (it appears 32 times in the New Testament) then the rest falls into place. Now porneia has always been translated into Latin as fornication, while being understood by many conservatives to just be a 1:1 stand in for ‘any sexual expression not between husband and wife’. However, Porneia in post-classical Corinthian Greek did not mean generic sexual sin, or even sex outside of marriage, at all exactly and neither did fornication in actual Latin. The truth, like in many things, is a little bit more complicated and a lot more interesting

TRIGGER WARNINGS AHEAD FOR DEPICTIONS OF SEXUAL EXPLOITATION IN CLASSICAL GREECE, ALSO AN NSFW VASE. (SFW version)

posted by Blasdelb on Mar 11, 2014 - 3 comments

I've been working on this for some time, due to a general dissatisfaction with the readers available on Roman spectacle and their costs. So I created a reader on Roman spectacles (with a shorter one on Greek spectacles to follow) with short introductory information, and a website to host it. The website is still being added to but I'm at the stage where I would love to have the opinions of people outside academia as to their impressions and what they'd like to see changed. [more inside]
posted by lesbiassparrow on Sep 19, 2013 - 3 comments

As a companion piece to my blog, All the Saints You Should Know, I've compiled what I believe to be the Internet's most complete map of Rome's holy relics, including papal hearts, saints' skulls and preserved bodies of the blessed. The annotated map includes information about church access, locations of the relics within the church, and a few additional points of interest.
posted by Thin Lizzy on Dec 24, 2012 - 6 comments