Paleothea.com is no longer made by Ailia Athena

Hello all,

This is a long delayed post, but I figured I should share. Paleothea.com is no longer my website. I do not have access to it, I cannot update it.

I began the site as a free Geocities account in 1996 and made up the pseudonym Ailia Athena because my mom was scared about me putting my real name online. Over the years, I painstaking scoured AltaVista, then Google, for images and artists and the names of goddesses and ancient queens who I could tell other people about. I bought books, then added what I learned there to the site. I went to college, majored in ancient Greek language and literature, and then added what I learned there to the site. And eventually, I changed my path. I started going in new directions and decided that I no longer had the energy or inclination to keep updating the site.

So http://www.paleothea.com now belongs to Ezoic.com. It's the end of a major chunk of my life and I was sad to say goodbye. But I'll still occasionally post here or as a guest blogger on Bubo's Blog.

Olympus Baseball Team

 DUDE!!! Breakfast With Pandora has served up a friggin' fantastic post (imho) imagining Greek Gods as members of a baseball team. Love. It.

Check it out: http://myth.typepad.com/breakfast/2011/04/olympus-baseball-team.html

What sports do YOU imagine the gods into?

Also, look at what I photoshopped! Hephaestus At Bat!

Same-sex relationships in history

O.M.G. My previous life as someone who thought all the time about reading queer contemporary U.S. stuff back into ancient Greece totally became relevant again today! I was watching a presentation on some research on same-sex relationships between adolescents, and the presenter mentioned, off the cuff, that these relationships are now "more visible than at any other time in history."

I'm an anthropologist now, so I could have talked about lots of groups and times and places where various visions of what is meant by "same-sex relationships" aren't stigmatized (e.g., in any number of African or Melanesian groups). But it was clear that his ethnocentric vision of "any other time in history" meant Western history. And that was wrong, too. So I got to say so.

Because, DUH, ancient Greece was totally down with the same sex relationships - especially when they involved youth! I think wikipedia's entry on Homosexuality in ancient Greece covers it better than I could, though, so I'm not gonna bother.

Relevance!