- On the Greeks’ treatment of plagues, via TLS: “[Pantelis] Michelakis shows that such superstitious attitudes probably extended even to the word for plague, loimos. Although these narratives are directly concerned with plague, the word itself is barely used, appearing once in Homer and Sophocles, and four times in Thucydides. The first chapter reveals the complex ways in which these authors instead communicated ‘plague’ through inventive and euphemistic language, a feat that, Michelakis argues, reflects the overwhelming nature of epidemic itself. He demonstrates how the chaos of plague infects the language of Sophocles, who compares it to a ship- tossing storm and a fire-bearing god, resulting in ‘an amalgamation of various types of hostile, non-human agency’. Epic, tragedy and history all share this emphasis on figurative language for their epidemics.”
- A review of an investigative history of Hilter’s “long” death notes that “the endless squabbles over his remains deprived postwar generations of a sense of closure. Those squabbles will persist as long as there are ambitious journalists and restricted archives.”
- The role of Charles Lennox, the third Duke of Richmond, in the American Revolution…
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