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This week Jeff and Dave talk about Milo of Croton, by all accounts the most accomplished athlete of antiquity. This incredible individual was the winner of multiple Olympiads, strongman, wrestler, supposedly deadlifting a stone of more than 1100lbs. The ancients like Pausanias, Galen, Strabo, Cicero and more were fascinated not only by his tremendous physical prowess, but equally by his enormous appetite for food and drink. Did he really eat an entire heifer in one sitting? Along the way we look at the Olympic Games, have a short travelogue to Olympia and Nemea, discuss Mohammed Ali, Babe Ruth, Michael Jordan, Michael Phelps, Flo Jo, and more. It's summer, get out, be active, and take AdNavseam along on your workout. You won't regret it. Maybe if you do enough reps you can snap your headband, like Milo, just by flexing the blood vessels in your head!?

Wait a minute…this STILL sounds like rock and/or roll, or at least the synthy stuff wants to. Join Johnny Pop Winkle and Ye Olde Curmudgeon for a look at seven songs inspired by the Classics. From Abba, to Clientele, Utopia, Perfect Circle and more, you'll get to hear Jeff's perfect aesthetic judgment tear like a buzz saw through Dave's carefully curated, gross ignorance of most "music" from 70s through to today. What rhymes with Lysistrata? And why not a song about Thesmophoriozusae? Should be catchy. Hey, it can't be all discussion of translating endusted Latin tomes, grave and staid epics, the dignity of man, and so forth. Kick back, tune in, and remember, at AdNavseam, you've got friends in low places.

This week it’s back to the bottomless well of Ovidian goodness with a walk through a couple more vignettes. The guys start off with a look at the well-known tale of Arachne.  While the “hubris-meets-nemesis” theme does seem to be at the heart of the story, there are some striking bits of context that complicate simple interpretations—is Minerva primed to punish from the tale that precedes this one? Does Arachne truly know what she’s getting into or who she’s dealing with? Then it’s on to another of Naso’s greatest hits—King Midas and the Golden Touch. As we zero in on the details reveals we find here as well a much richer tale than the usual Cliffs Notes version—How does this tale play with the "deadly wish" motif? What about the aetiology of the River Xanthus?  And, wait, where is Midas' petrified daughter? Isn’t she always part of this thing? Tune in to find out.

This week we sit down for a fascinating, lively discussion with author Margalit Fox about her 2013 book, The Riddle of the Labyrinth: the Quest to Crack an Ancient Code.  The story centers around the race to decipher the mysterious “Linear B” script. The first large supply of this script was uncovered on clay tablets on Crete by archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans in 1900, but remained a puzzle for years after Evans failed to crack it.  Young genius (and amateur scholar) Michael Ventris has long been famous for finally getting the job done in 1952, but is that all there is to the story?  Ms. Fox introduces us to classicist Alice Kober of Brooklyn College as the woman who dedicated her life to solving the mystery and is truly the unsung heroine in the narrative.  Tune in and hear how Kober’s painstaking, deliberative work paired with Ventris’ own extraordinary skills finally solved one of the great archaeological mysteries of our time.

This week Jeff and Dave take a look at the 5 canons of classical rhetoric, and how it is that great orators like Aeschines, Demosthenes, and Cicero gave their speeches to such successful effect. Was it nature? Were these men endowed with towering genius and preternatural giftedness? Yes, of course. Or was it nurture? Did they write speeches according to a fixed and carefully honed set of formulae? Yes, of course. This wide-ranging discussion has plenty of the nitty-gritty of the exordium, collocatio, etc., but we also look at some of the broader issues of what makes human communication effective – or not. You won't want to miss this one, especially if you are a teacher or practitioner of rhetoric. And as Aristotle explains, that's all of us.

Well ladies and gentlemen, this podcast within a podcast has finally come to an end: Jeff and Dave, at long last (denique, tandem, demum) have reached the final episode on the Aeneid. We start out by looking at how the end of the Iliad and the end of the Aeneid compare, verge off into some Shakespearean and Miltonian digressions, recite some beautiful Latin poetry, talk about Annie Lennox, and round it all off with a look at interpretive possibilities from a wide range of 20th century scholars. These include: Bowra, Elllingham, Brooks, Lewis, Parry, Putnam, and Commager. Who is correct in their interpretation of the Aeneid? When the ancients said that Vergil's twin purposes were to "rival Homer" and "praise Augustus all the way back to his ancestors", were they correct? Or is the man from Mantua up to something quite different and more subtle? Should we go with the revisionist interpretation – adopting Jeff's maxim "the Romans were wrong"– or side with the traditional school? Pull up your can of Campbell's Soup, make your way to your own Fortress of Solitude, and settle in for a rip-roaring interpretive ride.

This week, Jeff and Dave get back to the Aeneid after a brief, Tarzanian hiatus. As the epic nears its end, we witness the intense and interesting interplay between Turnus and the titular hero. Aeneas seems quite secure in his fate, but still he begins the move from representing civilization to savagery. Turnus, on the other hand, ricochets between the poles of Hector and Achilles: sometimes cruel and bloodthirsty, other times sympathetic and winsome. What does Vergil really want us to think about these hulking war machines? Why does Lavinia blush? What's gotten into Amata? And most importantly, why won't Jeff mow his lawn? These questions and more we will seek to answer over the course of 70 tedious, grueling minutes. Still, you might just find this episode the bees' knees.

This week Jeff and Dave wander back into the lush, crowded undergrowth of Edgar Rice Burroughs' prose, guided by the inimitable Erling B. "Jack" Holstmark. Does the vine-swinging, croc-wrestling, ape-aping Tarzan really have anything to do with Odysseus? Hercules? Neither? Or does Dave's late Prof. have a case of academicitis, "seeing what's not there"? Come along with us as we finish up looking at the abiding influence of Animals, Hero, and Themes, the final chapter of Holtsmark's 1981 monograph. And remember, "We live in a world of illusion, where everything's peaches and cream. We all face a scarlet conclusion, but we spend our time in a dream." You're going to (jungle) love this episode! Just make sure that crate of papaya doesn't wait all night by your door.

The guys are back, and this time they are taking a break from the Aeneid series to focus on the appearance of classical themes and inspiration in an unexpected place: the 20th century pulp fiction novels of Tarzan. Aided by the brilliant monograph of Dave's late grad school professor, Dr. Erling B. "Jack" Holtsmark, we examine such questions as, What standards should popular literature be held to? What makes for good diction and characterization? Is Tarzan in the mold of Achilles? Along the way we look at some structures of Greek and Latin style, including polarities, chiasmus, and parallels. If you enjoyed the Tarzan books or movies as a kid, this is a vine time to renew your interest as we burroughs deep into the jungle of Tarzaniana.

In this episode, Jeff and Dave finish off their tour through and analysis of the penultimate book of Vergil's masterpiece. Here we have the jazz-solo moment, the aristeia of the great warrior princess Camilla. She flies across the battlefield at breakneck speed, cutting down in her path every Trojan stooge who dares stand in her way – until she meets "Arruns the Dispatcher", ironically named after an Etruscan prince. But this fast-paced, high-octane action vignette raises some complex questions, the very kind academics love to dilate upon: how come Camilla never encounters Aeneas himself? Why is the erstwhile hero Turnus so passive throught this part of the story, not providing the kind of leadership expected of a protagonist? And most importantly, has anyone used double-blind, controlled studies to determine the real benefits and side effects of daily consumption of horse milk on female Volscian infants? Tune in.