Thanks to a link-back, I came across the Unhistorize blog. This seems to have started this summer.
The blog has posts about What Orphica did the late Neoplatonists read? and Proclus on Atlas and the Pleiades (and the Muses) etc. There is also Attis-related material, curse-tablets, and excerpts from Sallustius.
The author has made the first English translation of the anonymous On Herbs: An Anonymous Greek Poem, the first English translation of the so-called Carmen de herbis, of which he she posts some extracts here.
All very useful, and very welcome. I hope the author persists!
Thank you very much for sharing my blog with your readers – I do intend to persist! However, I see that I left you to guess about my gender by never finishing the about page. I would be grateful if you changed ‘he’ to ‘she’.
Gladly! It’s a splendid project. Some overview of the area and authors targeted at the general reader might be a useful idea too. Such as “who is Proclus?”
I followed your excellent suggestion and wrote up a (historical) explainer: https://unhistorize.wordpress.com/2021/09/28/who-is-proclus-what-is-late-neoplatonism/. A philosophical explainer to follow sometime in the future, perhaps.
Goodness me, that’s good stuff! Thank you!
One other question that our imaginary educated but non-specialist reader might ask: “why do I care about these people?” (It’s a hard question to answer for any of us, but an interesting one!)
I’ll have to think on that one!
Hahahaha! Yes, it’s quite a tough one. Something about how later neoplatonism shaped thinking in the middle ages, which still influences us today?
That’s certainly one reason, but I think another would be how *different* it is from how we think, or how the medievals thought. But most of the arguments I have would presume that someone is already interested in how to read Plato. In that case Proclus can open up many new possibilities (much like other neglected pre-modern commentary traditions).
Well… you could say “If you’re interested in Plato then you should find much of interest here in these late antique commentators.”?
And now this blog is gone.
Hmm.