The ancients had opinions about all of this. We are just printing them.
Scrolls & Trolls is a satirical journal of Classics and philosophy: each piece sets an ancient text beside something modern and lets the two argue.
Twenty-six, Libya, looking for something real, comfortable with snakes preferred, and absolutely no heroes. Written as a dating profile, it is a study in the voice of someone insisting she is not dwelling on it, in every clause.
Read the full piece →Two lines, eleven words, and a reading that takes excrucior down to crux and shows the poet sitting as the object of his own sentence. Not a parody: this is the scholarship the jokes stand on, and it argues that the Romans needed the language of crucifixion for what we now call a situationship.
Twelve catastrophes, from a father’s death to a collapse in a Turin piazza, each one rated five stars by a man who meant amor fati literally. The review format is the argument: nothing on the list can be marked down without giving up the whole position.
Estimated at three weeks, took ten years, and Scylla and Charybdis were drawn as a pleasant blue line with no warnings. The complaint is played completely straight, which is why the line about the dog lands as hard as it does inside a one-star review.
A short-term rental listing for the Labyrinth: unlimited bedrooms, no map, torch-based heating, and a host who is always home. The relentlessly upbeat, structurally evasive listing voice carries the whole thing, and Asterion’s own five-star reply at the bottom turns it sad on purpose.
Ninety-six thousand minutes streamed, half of them from a location the servers can only identify as “below,” and a most-replayed song that is about the choice she made. The algorithm’s brittle customer-service cheer set against an annual abduction does the work, and the letter at the end from her top artist is where it turns.
Achilles opens the symptom checker at 9:14 p.m. and reaches the fulfilment of an ancient prophecy by 10:19, by way of plantar fasciitis and bone cancer. It is an accurate rendering of the three-hour search spiral, and the prophecy was always going to be the diagnosis.
Tartarus Inc. sits employee #Z999 down for his quarterly review: uptime perfect, peak altitude stalled at 99.9%, core synergy with the boulder high. Eternal punishment turns out to be indistinguishable from a management framework, right down to the pivot to Boulder-as-a-Service.
Dionysus reviews a non-alcoholic botanical apéritif, waits on his ottoman for the jalapeño to take him, and instead organises his amphora collection. Two stars: the drink is competent, calming, and a personal insult to the god of ecstasy.
All 17 pieces are on The Essays.
The comic register. Ancient rhetoric pointed at modern absurdity, in the line from Juvenal through Swift. Where the jokes live.
The creative register. An original suite setting Homer, Sappho, Catullus, and Vergil in the original Greek and Latin. The same texts, scored instead of roasted.
