Letter from the Editor, Daisy Dunn

It was wonderful to meet so many of you at our special celebration of ten years of ARGO at the Hellenic Centre in March. I relished the opportunity to put faces to so many names and to hear what you are enjoying and looking forward most to seeing in these pages in coming issues.

We toasted ARGO with drinks and Greek food and enjoyed a delicious birthday cake by esteemed Society President Margaret Mountford. We were thrilled to have Victoria Hislop, one of our many illustrious contributors, attend the party and give a speech. Margaret encouraged all guests to subscribe to the magazine, and I reminisced about the birth of ARGO and its happy weight-gain from the slimmest of publications to something quite robust. If you couldn't join us this time, I hope there will be other occasions for us to get together in the future.

We are still in a celebratory mood as we launch this issue - the first of a new decade of ARGO. Edith Hall has written our cover story on the environmental issues thrown up by the Homeric epics and their reception. Have you ever thought about how many trees were felled to build those ships, funeral pyres, why, the Trojan Horse? We certainly don't read of any soldiers replanting what they have taken. The legacy of that tradition has been felt across the real Mount Ida and other landscapes. (Continue reading)

Contents

ANCIENT

ARGO’S 10TH BIRTHDAY PARTY in pictures
LEONIE BREEDS investigates the ideograms used as part of the Linear A and Linear B scripts to search for evidence about the Minoan and Mycenaean ways of life
EDITH HALL explores how the Iliad might encourage environmentalism while documenting a long history of devastation and deforestation
EMMA HEAGNEY joint winner of this year’s Hellenic Society Undergraduate Essay Prize, finds mutual aims in two of the great monuments of the ancient world
JULIAN MORGAN makes an odyssey to Ithaca and finds far more than ‘a simple nurse of men’

MODERN

BRIAN LAVERY recounts the seminal adventures by a bold company of Classics teachers
DAVID WILLS examines English-language travel literature since the 1940s
JOSHUA BARLEY writes a memorial for Michalis Ganas
PAUL WATKINS explores a significant Greek tradition
ALICE DUNN looks at the Greek Culture Ministry’s declaration of 2025 as the Year of Mikis Theodorakis
DIANA BENTLEY feels the mysterious allure of the abandoned city of Kassope
CAROLINE DORITI is on the pulse of the latest trends in cuisine across Greece and the changing palates of its people

REVIEWS

A round-up of recent and forthcoming books
VIOLET MOLLER is impressed by a biography of the engineer-mathematician that recognises the singularity and endurance of his achievements
COSIMA CARNEGIE welcomes a well-rounded if tentative biography of a woman all too commonly dismissed as a striptease
J. W. BONNER enjoys a quirky travel guide to Syracuse, one of Sicily’s jewels
DIANA FARR LOUIS is deeply moved by an account of one woman’s ordeal but also
recovery, learning and reflection in Greece

SOCIETY

HELLENIC SOCIETY NEWS HIGHLIGHTS
FIONA HAARER delves into the difficult but ultimately fruitful working relationship of W. M. Ramsay and A. C Blunt