Henry P. Colburn

I’m in China right now (about which more later), which is relevant for this post only insofar as I spent a lot of time on a plane to get here. To pass that time I started reading Don Quixote in the 1949 Samuel Putnam translation. (I read some of it in Spanish as a schoolboy, but that was a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.) To be quite honest I haven’t gotten very in it, as I had to dedicate a significant portion of my travel time to finishing my conference presentation, but I’ve discovered a delightful pun, which Putnam passes over in silence in his otherwise thorough notes.

In Part One, Chapter 18 (‘In which is set forth the conversation that Sancho Panza had with his master, Don Quixote, along with other adventures deserving of record’), Don Quixote, having mistaken two flocks of sheep being driven towards one another as armies preparing to engage in combat, describes one of the combatants whom he believes he sees: “the ever victorious, never vanquished Timonel de Carcajona, prince of New Biscay, who comes with quartered arms—azure, vert, argent, and or—and who has upon his shield a cat or on a tawny field,” that is, a yellow cat on a yellow background.

He adds, furthermore, that the shield bears the inscription ‘Miau,’ which he explains is the abbreviation of the name of Timonel’s lady love. Although it’s been some time since I’ve heard a Spanish cat vocalize, I’m pretty sure this is what they sound like. Thus, unlike the rest of Cervantes’ humor (again, keeping in mind that I’m not very deep into this very large tome), which is largely satirical in nature, this joke actually has a punchline. This, I reckon, is why the classics endure.

Especially when she’s talking about Greek myth. She was interviewed for the podcast Lasting Legends: Greek Myths Surround Us earlier this summer. I listened to the interview when it came out, and really enjoyed it, but since we were about to leave for Türkiye in early July, I never mentioned it here as I had intended to do. Then when we got back I had to finish writing the paper I was supposed to have written before we left, and before long it was the end of August, my paper was still not done, and suddenly I have to whip up (er, I mean craft lovingly and attentively) a batch of syllabuses for the fall term. As Eric Temple Bell said, “time makes fools of us all” (thought I strongly doubt this is what meant by it).

Incidentally, the podcast is wonderful. Its host and creator, Cole S., sounds exactly like the kind of student ever professor wants to have in class: knowledgeably, wildly enthusiastic about the material, and capable of producing good quality work. If only cloning were easier (and ethical)… I look forward to seeing what he comes up with next!

Have you ever wanted to read my book, but thought it was 315 pages too long? If so, I have good news. Thanks to The Egyptian Society of South Africa, I have written a three-page précis of it for their newsletter Shemu, which they have kindly made available here. I really love sharing my research with the public; I consider it to be my sacred duty, and it’s always rewarding to reach a interested audience!

I assume Saint Paul was thinking of this when he wrote “speak every man truth with his neighbor; for we are members one of another” (Ephesians 4:25).

Seen along the highway between Kula and Uşak:

Now I know where to go the next time I need a gross of libation vessels!

As it says at the top, I delight in the truth, and I especially delight in this truth, that I’ll be teaching in the Department of Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology at Bryn Mawr College (whose motto is veritatem dilexi) in the 2025-26 academic year. It is merely in the capacity of a sabbatical replacement, I’m afraid, so it will only add to my plethora of email addresses rather than consolidating them. Still, it is a splendid opportunity to spend a year on a beautiful Collegiate Gothic campus with students, faculty and library books of the highest caliber. More importantly, it is an essential break from the mind-numbing and humiliating grind that is life as an adjunct professor. After what I can only imagine with be a paradisiacal year, I should have the mental fortitude to face those horrors once more.

If you need to contact me, all of my previous email addresses (except for NYU) still work and will still be monitored by me and my staff (who, as you can see from the picture, are, as usual, asleep on the job).

While being an adjunct is not a salubrious experience for anyone, it does offer one the opportunity to directly compare very different types of students. For example, there are striking differences in the use of AI at two institutions where I have recently taught. The comparison is, I think, instructive.

At one institution, which we shall call B, I have had a remarkably high rate of inappropriate AI use. In one class more than 10% of the students submitted AI-generated papers, despite being told clearly not to. (I have no trouble spotting these, by the way. In addition to being vague and a little too pat, they are inevitably at variance with the rest of the student’s work.) Most of my students at B are business and finance majors, and my theory is that they have learned such things as how to be efficient, get ahead, and maximize short term gains. They have not been encouraged to think about what it means to be the kind of person who takes shortcuts or how their actions may affect other people. And they certainly don’t think about what the value of actually doing the work may be.

At another institution, which we’ll call C, I’ve never received an AI-generated paper, nor in fact even the faintest whiff of academic impropriety. My students at C are mainly artists, though there are sometimes architects and engineers in the mix as well, and I believe my conclusions apply to them too. I think that it doesn’t even occur to these students to use ChatGPT or its ilk for the simple reason that they take pride in their work, regardless of what it is. Because they are encouraged to be creative, these students recognize the value of experience. The same goes for reading; they want to read a text in order to get whatever they can out of it. That’s not to say that they always do the reading or that they always put a great deal of effort into their writing, but I think it would horrify them on some level to pass off someone else’s work (even if that someone is a chatbot) as their own. They also tend to be much more impressed by the environmental ramifications of power-hungry AI data centers; they are, in other words, concerned with how their decisions affect other people.

The difference in attitude, I think, boils down to a concern for results (B) versus experience (C), that is, an emphasis on doing something rather than being done with it. This is what the humanities teach us. Why read the Iliad? If you have to ask, then you’re missing the point of education altogether.

I’m on a boat! I’m on a boat! Take a good, hard look at the motherf***ing boat!

As my Bard Microcollege students know, I am currently in Greece looking for great bread. (I made one comment about how good the bread is in Copenhagen, and now they think I spend my vacations traveling the world in search of baked goods.) Along the way I have managed to visit many museums in Athens, with some startling results. We all know that the ancient Greeks invented western civilization (just look at any Great Books course), but I had no idea that they invented so many other remarkable things. I provide a list below of examples, culled from a single day of museum visits.

1. The First Thumbs Up

(Take that, Fonzie!)

2. The First Field Hockey Game

(Very dangerous, especially prior to the invention of the first jockstrap.)

3. The First Huddle

(“Arsinoe, go deep for a Colossus of Rhodes play.”)

4. The First Pith Helmet

(“What ho! Could one of you strapping acorn-eaters carry my luggage to Megalopolis?”)

5. The First Piggy Back

(“Get off me, Clytemnestra!”)

6. The First Piggy Bank

(Since coinage was not invented for another two millennia, this seems a bit premature.)

7. The First Case of Indigestion

(“I should not have had the chicken ceviche.”)

8. The First Little Red Riding Hood

(You’ve seen it. Now you cannot unsee it.)

9. The First Depiction of Benedict Cumberbatch

(From an audition tape for an as yet unproduced biopic of Walt Whitman.)

10. The First Palantír

(“We do not know who else may be watching.”)

And last, but surely not least:

11. The First Squatty Potty

(Note the extremely useful didactic graphic.)

Have you ever wondered what happened in Susa and Persepolis after Alexander? Then look no further than my contribution to the newly-published Oxford Handbook of the Hellenistic and Roman Near East, edited by Rubina Raja. (Actually, I highly recommend looking further, as this chapter is only an overview that covers a great deal of material at a breakneck pace. However, it is a good place to start looking.)