Palladas once more (A.P. 9.489):

Γραμματικοῦ θυγάτηρ ἔτεκεν φιλότητι μιγεῖσα
    παιδίον ἀρσενικόν, θηλυκόν, οὐδέτερον.

A grammarian’s daughter, having known a man, gave birth to a child which was masculine, feminine, and neuter.

(translated by W. R. Paton)

I just uploaded three jokes to the Ioci Antiqui page, which still leaves me five days behind. Next week is ‘Winter Break’, so I should be able to catch up soon. Now I have some Interim reports to compile before I go to bed.

I just uploaded the 100th joke to the Ioci Antiqui page — actually two versions of the same joke, by Lucilius (or Lucillius) in Greek and Martial in Latin. Like today’s Greek joke, tomorrow’s joke, from a prose author not yet quoted here, will feature a pun on the adjective oiktrós. Can anyone guess which joke I mean? I once posted it on another site, if that helps.

Earlier today I uploaded six jokes to the Ioci Antiqui page, covering February 1st through 6th. These are in a new PDF file for February, here.

The last of the January jokes is now up, and I suppose I will go ahead and start a February PDF file tomorrow night. I won’t have time to test HTML Greek display before the weekend.

I’m putting the finishing touches on the six jokes necessary to bring Ioci Antiqui up to date. They should be up in an hour or so. I’m still mulling over how and when to make the transition to posting jokes as ordinary blogposts. That mostly depends on how easy it will be to display accented Greek correctly on all of your monitors without asking any of you (or me, for that matter) to spend any money or do anything at all complicated. Further experiments are likely. I’m also thinking of adding MP3 recordings of at least some of the Greek and Latin originals, though I can’t promise much in the way of quality, either vocal or technological. More in a little while.

Update: (11:45 pm)

The jokes are now up. Feel free to comment on them here.

I spoke wrote posted too soon. The Ioci Antiqui page is again behind, though by only one day, since I have deleted the epigram of Martial that I’d already used for November 23rd. I’ll try to catch up tomorrow.

As promised, January’s Ioci Antiqui are now caught up through tomorrow (Monday), with five new jokes for the 19th through the 23rd, of which one or two are actually funny — opinions may differ as to which one or two. I hope to shift the jokes to HTML blogposts soon, most likely February 1st. That will allow comments on each individual joke.

Sorry about the missed days: I’ve been under the weather and bogged down in end-of-semester grading. I will post five more ancient jokes by midnight tonight to make up the deficit. These will be in the usual PDF file. At some point, I will also post one or two of the Greek jokes as HTML here to see if I can solve the problem of displaying the Greek with all the accents.

Philárguros diathékas gráphwn heautòn kleronómon étaxen.

A greedy man writing his will made himself his own heir.

This is Philogelos 104. Not very funny? It’s actually better than average for the collection. Underlined e and o represent eta and omega respectively: this allows inelegant but unambiguous transliteration. It will have to do until I can figure out how to display accented Greek text.

I hadn’t planned to start posting these as ordinary posts, but Filezilla is refusing to upload my PDF file. Is 118k too big? I’ll try again in the morning — or perhaps the afternoon, since it’s the first day of the second semester. In the mean time, I will shortly post today’s joke in HTML so you can judge whether it is better or worse than PDF. (I think Filezilla fried my January PDF file while trying to overwrite it, but November and December are still there for comparison.)

Now that I have my laptop back and have found a temporary and partial fix for my spam-comment problem (more on that soon), it’s time to start posting more regularly. But first I have a question for my readers. I’m wondering whether I should make my ‘Ancient Jokes of the Day’ (Ioci Antiqui) ordinary blog-posts instead of (or as well as) adding them to the monthly PDF files. There are various pros and cons to consider:

1. Pro: Most readers find HTML a lot more pleasant to read than PDF. Category archives make it easy for (un)interested readers to read the jokes and skip the rest of the site. I could even have separate categories for Greek and Latin jokes, so readers could read either or both.
2. Con: Individual jokes could not be printed out so easily for classroom use. Perhaps I should continue to collect them in PDF files even if the HTML version is primary.
3. Pro: Comments could be posted on each joke.
4. Con: Greek could be transliterated, but making it appear as accented text is not so easy. Does anyone know a relatively foolproof method of doing this? It would have to work on various hardware using various browsers and with various fonts installed. I find it frustrating that Greek does not appear the same on the same site using different machines or the same machine viewing different sites.

No doubt there are other pros and cons to consider. As always, advice is welcome and may be placed in the comments or delivered by e-mail.

It’s not quite midnight as I write, but I have uploaded the Joke of the Day for January 2nd. Just click on Ioci Antiqui in the left margin, and then click on ‘January’ for the PDF file. At the moment, the January file contains one five-year-old joke for the 1st, and one new one (a good one) for the 2nd. Though tomorrow’s is from the Philogelos, I will be posting far more Latin than Greek jokes until I get my laptop back from HP, since my old computer has gotten quirky and is forcing me to add every single accent and breathing as a ‘special character’.

Starting Monday, I will continue my Ioci Antiqui series, begun five years ago and interrupted after two months by press of other work. For the first time in five years I have means, motive, and opportunity all at the same time: motivation has been there all along, but my current job is very pleasant and provides some free time (opportunity), and all my books are finally out of storage (means).

Each day I will post an ancient joke, with Greek or Latin text, English translation, and (when necessary) brief explanatory notes. The original series, which ran from November 1st, 2000 through January 1st, 2001, can be found under Ioci Latini in the left margin, and new jokes will be added there. In order to make the accented Greek readable on any machine, I put the texts into PDF files, with a separate file for each month and a single page (or sometimes two) for each joke. Each day’s joke will be posted just after midnight Eastern U.S. time. I may also try posting them right here as ordinary WordPress posts, but that depends on whether I can come up with some easy way of displaying Greek so that all my readers can read it.