A possibility I had considered: bsky.app/profile/bret...

Also, see something like Troy (2004) for a, uh, very different take on the Briseis-Achilles relationship.

This clearly shouldn't be my first response, but I just find myself so remarkably annoyed not by the fact that my field is being co-opted by the worst people, but that it is being co-opted by the dumbest people, just the thickest, most arrogantly superficial 'trousered apes' imaginable.

Oh, so a poem about Jason, late in life?

Things we were typing at exactly the same time!

Yes, I think you are exactly right.
bsky.app/profile/bret...

Of course what you can tell is that Musk hasn't engaged with the actual poem, he's engaged with school-boy summaries of Trojan War mythology, so he's thinking about Paris and Helen (neither really central characters in the Iliad) and/or the movie adaptations.

Folks fixate on Achilles' book 9 descriptions of Briseis as like a wife to him that they miss how much that is obviously a pose and how Briseis herself instead (in bk 19) represents *Patroclus* as the one who was kind, not Achilles.

Achilles is at no point doing right by Briseis, nor trying to.

At least, that was what I was taught, I don't work directly on pre-history.

My understanding is that it is also generally accepted that India had its own pristine/primary states on the Indus, so not the same state tradition as Mesopotamia or Egypt.

Wheat and barley agriculture in India, while using the same plants, is generally thought to be an independent development, rather than an expansion of the Egyptian/Mesopotamian wheat farming tradition.

An online, updated, searchable form of the MRR would be a great digital classics project for someone to undertake, of course, but for now the PDFs serve well and honestly, including the corrigenda from 1960, there's not much new that's missing from the list.

Oh indeed and I am just noting the absurdity of that. If Classical Athens is the West, Byzantium must be as well, and the whole of the Roman Empire.

My complaint is with the arbitrary nature of these distinctions, which are mostly drawn to try to exclude less successful countries that belong.

My only modification to this is I'd argue they played a bad hand...fine, I guess? Not good. Not badly.

The shutdown visibly damaged Trump and they've left the door open to doing it again a few months when (not if) they don't get their ACA compromise.

Huh, that problem doesn't exist in its original context.

Wikipedia's maps copy-paste poorly, generally, I ought to have screenshotted.

Almost certainly a fair bit but I suspect there's also, "we don't expect to ever get paid out so f*** it." in there. I'd love if it they also showed gen-X and millennials.

My sense from my Millennial co-generationalists is no one expects to see a social security dime.

Spain. Portugal. Italy.

The exceptions easily overwhelm the rule.

I think it plays a part in people's minds, but if they mean NATO they should say NATO.

Yeah, there's a lot of importing assumptions from a large-scale nuclear exchange to a single missile happening here, especially when exactly two countries are capable of the kind of attack volume necessary for a first strike to risk second strike capability.

To be frank, from here in the United States, I wonder if our politics might not be healthier if we thought of Mexico as being as much of our 'brother country,' so to speak, as Spain or France and of Iraq and Syria not as infinitely distant 'others,' but as 'cousin-countries' as it were.

So as a contemporary category, I don't know 'the West' has much value.

As a category for structuring a history course, I think a definition of 'Western History' on the above lines - wheat farming, near eastern states, Roman legacy - works, if we are honest about what it includes.