Weekend Reading: October Chaos

Not much from me this week, I’m afraid: I have Things To Draw!

As I may have mentioned before, I’ve been co-organising the October initiative which we call #ClassicsTober (yes, it’s a silly name – but it’s based on Inktober and Drawtober, and we honestly couldn’t think of a better one!). Every day, people all around the world create something – a drawing, poem, photograph, or something else – based on the day’s prompt word, and then post it on social media using the hashtag #ClassicsTober. So if you drop into Twitter (you don’t need an account) and put #ClassicsTober in the search bar, you’ll see all the amazing stuff that people have been posting.

Our prompts for the month, put together by the fabulous Greek Myth Comix

It’s all just a bit of fun, but it generates all kinds of lovely things and it gives people a push to create and research.

For my contribution, I thought I’d try to do a book-style illustration every day, featuring a passage of Latin literature related to the day’s prompt. I asked a friend of mine (@DocCrom on Twitter, who posts the loveliest ancient stuff every day, always with impeccable referencing) to do the translations. My own translating skills are effective but definitely not elegant!

I’ve been having great fun selecting the passages, and catching up with authors I haven’t thought of in years (I can’t even remember the last time I ran into Silius Italicus)! Here are my first week’s contributions. They’re all a bit rushed, as you can imagine, but I hope you like them! More next week…