Space Odyssey (SPOILERS for Star Trek: Picard Season 3 - and some TNG)

 In Star Trek:Picard, many veterans of the TNG era returned, including Riker and Deanna Troi. The series is set decades later, and Riker and Troi are married and have a daughter Kendra, named after the daughter that Troi's mother had lost and never mentioned until the episode of TNG in which she did mention it. The Rikers lost a son instead of a daughter on the frontier planet Nepenthe.

The name of the planet, however, is the key to the Classical connection. Although the name Nepenthe appears to be merely conforming to the classic science fiction trope of naming planet with Classical Greco-Roman names, there are deeper connections. 

The name Nepenthe means 'no sorrow', a appropriate name for a planet where parents are trying to heal, but nepenthe is also the name of a drug in Homer's Odyssey when Telemachus, son of Odysseus, goes to Sparta to meet with Menelaus and Helen (who also have a daughter, Hermione) to seek information about his father. Menelaus and Helen welcome him. At the feast, however, Helen slips the drug nepenthe into Menelaus' cup to ease the burden of his memories. Menelaus, in modern terms, has PTSD from the Trojan war. The Greek word pharmaka refers to drugs both used for healing as well as more nefarious purposes. Both Helen and Deanna are skilled healers with a daughter (Hermione, Kendra) and a husband who was second in the command structure (Menelaus, Riker). Helen drugs her husband with nepenthe, while Deanna psychically removes her husband's emotional burden on the planet Nepenthe. In neither case is consent considered despite both women's history of enduring rape, in both the abduction and the violation sense; and it is hard to overlook that the science fictional woman is named Troi!

In Defence of the Bishop of London

 During the day of the Coronation, the Right Reverend and Right Honorable Dame Sarah Mulally, Bishop of London, misspoke, saying Natharess instead of Nazareth. The bishop, considering her office and ordination, is unlikely to be unfamiliar with the name of the Savior's hometown, so it is necessary to seek an alternate explanation - and refrain from puerile mockery born of anticlericalism. The z and the th in Nazareth are both fricatives, the former voiced, the latter unvoiced. A stressful occasion such as the first Coronation in seventy years just might trigger speech errors, thankfully none in the performative speech acts - and if anybody believes that clergy never err in more frequent recitations, that person has never been next to the officiant at Mass! A pure metathesis of the fricatives would produce Natharez,  while final devoicing would change z to ss. One should be grateful that the th of Nazareth was not fronted further to an f!

Vivat Regula Variatio!

 As a Latinist and a Christian, my pronunciation loyalties are divided according to the occasion. When I read Classical texts, I generally use the Erasmian pronunciation, but when I read Christian texts, devotionally or otherwise, I prefer the Ecclesiastical pronunciation. These, however, are but two of the historical options for Latin pronunciation - musician are familiar with a third, more Teutonic variety. The French also insist on doing diction according to their own customs. Yet each country within Christendom, until the Reformation, treated the more common Latin phrases as a register of the vulgar tongue rather than an elevated idiom, by which mechanism many Latin terms were nativized. Legal formulae, in particular, have a tendency to evolve and then resist further evolution; thus the traditional English pronunciation of vivat in the formula vivat rex fossilized as waiwat rex. If the absence of v is surprising, recall the following facts: firstly, English words beginning with v are almost exclusively borrowed from French whereas w was a native English sound, and secondly, the letter u for many centuries represented both u and w as well the introduced v.

To say that the Coronation was scripted would be an understatement. The Coronation of Elizabeth II included vaivat rejaina - not identical, but note the diphthong.The choice of waiwat over vivat emphasizes the traditional, royalist, Latinate, theocratic, catholic (but not Catholic) nature of the British monarchy.

Hymn to Dionysus

 The Homeric Hymn to Dionysus is essentially a horror story, Now it's ture that Dionysus is supernaturally beautiful rather than an eldritch horror in appearence, but the result is the same. You could replace Dionysus with a squamous sea creature or giant eyeless penguin. The only thing that disguises this is the genre and the viewpoint. The genre of the Homeric Hymns varies a little bit, but its purpose to glorify the God; in order to do so one cannot turn the god into a monster. Consider, however, the story from the viewpoint of the helmsman on the pirate ship. There is no indication that he is morally superior to his shipmates except on that one point of recognizing the God. From his perspective, the pirate ship on which he is a crewmember, although perhaps not one who is treated the best, is docked at the bottom of cliff in a land where they knew they could find wealth and expensive hostages to ransom. They spot a beautiful youth, clearly not of common stock, who has foolishly decided to hang out in his sexy adolescent glory next to the sea. The seashore is the traditional place for pirates to abduct young princes and princesses and sell them in slavery - if you examine the characters in the Odyssey, even the chief slaves of Odysseus are originally of noble stock, although perhaps a petty variety. Although Dionysus is probably safer on the cliff than the princess of Phaeacia was on the boeach when Odysseus washed up, the cliffs were either not that big or the pirates had experience abducting beautiful young boys from challenging terrain. The later speculation of the crew about the destination of this young noble suggests a common excursion to foreign lands across the sea. This is consistent with the existence of pirates. If there is not extensive sea trafficc, there are no job opportunities for corsairs! Once the pirates have brought the marvelous being upon their own ship, in order to exploit him commercially, they are acting fundamentally no different than a scientist bringing a sample back to base camp or exploration vessel or a dreary town in New England. Once Dionysus easily frees himself from his bonds while mocking the sailors, the Helmsman recognizes that this is no ordinary aristocrat.