Alas the month of October has passed. October is a great month, it is the bridge between autumn and winter, the final resting point before the shops decide it’s Christmas and force the festival season down our throats until we surrender and start humming Slade’s Merry Christmas Everyone and having nightmares about undercooked/overcooked turkeys. There’s also this thing called Halloween at the end of October which bloggers feel compelled to write about.
My History Girls slot is pretty darn close to the 31st October but I’ll spare you the Halloween blog post because the Romans didn’t have Halloween. They did have ghosts and ghost stories and festivals connected to the dead but I am not going to make any tenuous links between anything they believed in and children dressed up as tiny Harry Potters escorted door to door collecting sweets.
No what I want to write about is #Classicstober ! #Classicstober as you’ll gather from the # is a Twitter, (or as it is now known X) event, it is a whole month dedicated to promoting ancient Greek and Roman history run by @GreekMythComix and @DrCoraBeth. Each day of October was dedicated to a different man or woman from antiquity offering up the opportunity for Classicists and enthusiasts alike to big them up for the education of the wider X audience. I was flattered to be asked to nominate an individual for the 24th October and as Pliny the Elder had already been nabbed I went for the poet Martial. Because I think he’s brilliant and by the end of this article you’ll think so too.