IRIS

From Adrian Murdoch’s Bread and Circuses blog comes this….
Some light relief for a Friday. Rules for writing about late antiquity. Feel free to send in any more:
• Anything that happened in Britain, happened in AD 410.
• Any Western coin hoard must contain half a dozen bronzes of Honorius and [...]

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The end of Plato’s Phaedo gives a detailed account of Socrates’ slow, dignified death by hemlock. Many scholars, however, have rejected Plato’s account, believing that Plato’s version omits the harsh details of the violent death associated with hemlock poisoning. The controversy, however, seems to have been settled by Enid Bloch who, through a thorough investigation [...]

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John Seabrook has penned a major article on the Antikythera Mechanism for the New Yorker. The incipit:
In October, 2005, a truck pulled up outside the National Archeological Museum in Athens, and workers began unloading an eight-ton X-ray machine that its designer, X-Te Systems of Great Britain, had dubbed the Bladerunner. Standing [...]

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