Classics Prof doing Aristotle, visual art, Greek theatre/pots, labour/anti-racist history, prison education, Parthenon reunification. @edithmayhall.bsky.social
Durham Uni in the Cosmopolis
Joined May 2013
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Partly inspired by Albert Camus' insistence that we must imagine Sisyphus happy and embrace rather than evade life's absolute, risible incomprehensibility, my new motto and emblem, "In Absurdity, Laughter"
Pablo Picasso, born 25/10/1881, was obsessed with minotaurs. His 1935 etching Minotauromachie expresses emotional chaos when his wife Olga Khokhlova wanted to leave him because he'd impregnated the (centauress?) Marie-Thérèse Walter. Minotaurs should keep it in their loincloths!
There are so many images of Amazons being defeated by Greek males on ancient vases that it’s a joy to see the roles reversed on this vase now in the Metropolitan Museum. I love the axe. Hiding behind a tree won’t help. He had it coming.
Just a really perfect owl on a fragment of a classical Athenian vase now in the Metropolitan Museum to brighten up your day. Too-whit, too-whoo to you!
Sometimes a Greek vase takes my breath away. This vase-painter depicts a stone statue of Heracles, his lionskin being painted encaustically by an artist with pigmented hot wax melted by an attendant on a brazier. Heracles comes to inspect, his dad Zeus and a winged Victory aloft.
With two deaths during the French riots already recorded, the Jacobin 'The Spirit of France between Liberty and Death' (1794-5) of Jean-Baptiste Regnault (born this day 1754) seems sinister. Most of his paintings were of voluptuous ancient Greek goddesses and heroines disrobed.
On #WorldMenopauseDay, my favourite ancient statue of Artemis, in the Piraeus museum. The goddess who looks after women's biological transitions looks so authoritative, gracious, calm and numinous.
Arnold Böcklin, famed for his phallic paintings of the Odyssey, was born 16/8/1827. But I like his 'Centaur at the Blacksmith's' (1888), because it humorously asks how horse-human hybrids look after their feet.
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Aristoteles Bugün Hâlâ Niçin Okunmalı? – Edith Hall onculanalitikfelsefe.com/ari…
@edithmayhall retweeted
We are delighted to have signed copies of ‘Medea: A Life’ by Edith Hall.
Written by one of Britain’s foremost classicists, it tells the story of Medea, a maligned and misunderstood woman of Greek mythology. Purchase your signed copy today: blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/pr…
ALT Image shows a signed copy of 'Medea' standing upright next to a glass ink pot.
@edithmayhall retweeted
Reading the Iliad Through an Environmental Lens with Edith Hall
thecollector.com/homer-iliad…
ON #BaldAndFreeDay2026, one of my favourite comedy vases. Three actors wearing the masks of bald men stage a comedy-within-a-comedy about Cheiron the centaur (named), played like a pantomime cow by two actors with old men masks. The horse/human hybrid tries to ascend a staircase.
On #InternationalScepticDay, are you an Academic Sceptic like Carneades & deny that knowledge is possible? Or a Pyrrhonist like Sextus Empiricus and merely suspend judgement about the truth of knowledge? Or do you just trust your senses and get on with surviving life? !
At 0905 today I’m on BBC Radio 4 talking about Medea. Will be broadcast again at 9 pm tonight. Two other fascinating guests too.
On UN #InternationalDayOfTheGirlChild a gorgeous Athenian depiction of a dancing lesson. Both children have the word KALE (beautiful in feminine declension) inscribed; the youth (a big brother?) has KALOS. The directive teacher looks like my least loathed PE instructress c. 1970
I thought I could only dream of a reader so perceptive about what I was doing in this book about Medea
Vlog on Edith Hall
livesteven.com/2026/10/06/si…
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"The character Edith Hall puts forward is one who remains relevant millennia after her conception"
Read more as Daisy Lynch reviews 'Medea A Life'
bit.ly/3TtWTW2
