Estimated reading time: 4 minutes. Photo (cropped) by Juliana Malta on Unsplash.
Without further ado, let me introduce Erica Stevenson of Moan Inc. (love the name), who “dives into the mythology, philosophy, [and] history [of] the ancient Greeks & Romans” through “videos uploaded every Tuesday & Thursday (sometimes Sunday).” Overall, she “aims to show [her] viewers that the ancient world isn’t as tough or complicated to study as one may think,” and seeks to act “as the middle man between the myths we are told as children and the university lecture space you all try to avoid.”
I highlight Erica’s YouTube channel for you here, because despite—as far as I know—never explicitly aiming to give ‘ancient modern’ women or goddesses their due, or analyzing the ancient Greek and Roman worlds through a feminist lens, in practice she seems to do a hell of a lot of both. She’s also funny, has an infectious enthusiasm for her subject, and invites a lot more female than male experts to appear in her videos, which I’m guessing from all the memes is quite unusual. For instance, she recently collaborated with one of yours and my favorite book reviewers, Willow Heath of Books and Bao:
What originally brought her to my attention though, was her enthusiasm for a recent biography on Plato, due to the author’s rare acknowledgement of the difficulties in making any definitive, factual statements about someone for whom so little information was actually available. Which, indirectly, mirrors some of the ways I compensate for my background in writing and researching the subjects that I do (8:51-10:57):
My transcript:
Moving into what I thought of the book itself…I loved it. Right, to keep this as short as possible, I thought it was absolutely fantastic, and the reason why I thought that this study was so good is because…something that I worry about when reading non-fiction, [and] something that I’ve heard a lot from non-fiction authors, is that publishing houses…push authors to write more definitively, and to write clearer. So, by that I mean, you know I spoke to Tim Whitmarsh about this, that with his book, about atheism in the ancient world, there were lots of sentences he wanted to keep very nuanced, that the publishers, the editors were kind of like, “You’re going to need to hammer that down.” To be a bit more clear, to be a bit more certain, because for a wider audience, they don’t want to have to read your silly “This might be…,” or “This could be interpreted…”. You know, they just want facts basically, to leave the book with a solid story, as opposed to you over-complicating it with so much nuance in there. And lots of other authors have mentioned that to me, so, whenever I go into non-fiction I’m always trying to see like “Errrr….How much did the editor have a say in this? How much did the publisher have a say in this? Are we going to get any real nuance here…what’s gonna haaappen?”. And with this book we did not have that problem, at all.
I don’t know who Robin Waterfield works with, but they allowed him to leave all of the questions in the book, right? He makes it very clear after any ‘facts’ he puts forward about Plato, that there’s no real way of knowing that, and the reasons why we can’t know those things. Or, what other people have latched onto in order to claim that that was a fact about Plato. So, it was really fantastically well-done. There are so many wider references, there’s a huge index sort of, you know, sort of thing at the back, which you can then check what ancient works he gets things from, what other scholars did he get things from. You know, all of that was just done so well, and that’s obviously so necessary for a study like this when absolutely nothing is certain.
And which would seem a strange place to end this post on. Sorry. But, well, in a previous version, three times as long, I went on to explain the epiphanies this led to when I first watched the video in July, the confidence that gave me, the exciting plans I have for my writing now, and how enthused I was about fulfilling those. Only then I realized I was actually sabotaging those plans, wasting the better part of a day writing about my least favorite subject instead—myself:
Ahem. So, lesson learned, I’ll wisely shoehorn this ending here. And have another post up for you up very soon!
If you reside in South Korea, you can donate via wire transfer: Turnbull James Edward (Kookmin Bank/국민은행, 563401-01-214324)
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The Grand Narrative
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