Briefly Noted: Gods Behaving Badly, the humanities under fire in Sweden, the pleasures of Seneca

Marie Phillips' novel Gods Behaving Badly is becoming a movie with an A-list cast. Maybe this is the decent movie about ancient Greece I've been hoping for. I've put her novel on my Kindle: it's about the Olympian gods, their worship long since faded away, working as dog-walkers and TV psychics in London (New York in the movie; Hercules in New York, anyone?)

A business group in Sweden has recommended that grants to humanities students be reduced. Swedish college students receive study grants, and the Confederation of Swedish Enterprise urges that students who study high-demand subjects such as engineering receive larger grants. This story reminds me of an articulate defense of humanities study that I hope to blog about later this week.

Neil Steinberg has an enjoyable piece on the pleasures of the reading Hesiod and Seneca in their Loeb Classical Library editions. I enjoyed his description of Seneca ("as useful as a pocketknife"); Seneca, the Roman philosopher whose uncompromising Stoic ideals helped him cope with the Emperor Nero, would doubtless have considered it a compliment.

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