Sometimes you are just lucky. I went to Munich, where I was invited to a conference, and we had a little bit of free time in the afternoon on the first day, and the conference finished after lunch on the second day. These were the two first beautiful days of the year. So I lost no time, grabbed my camera, and explored. I walked from the hotel in the north of the city to the Königsplatz and visited the Glyptothek through the park on Thursday, and went briefly back on Friday before visiting the Nymphenburg. It is one of those occasions on which you realize how much of the history of my field has been written and rewritten by kings, emperors and dictators in the modern period. Classics as a claim to fame. Well, no matter who they were and what they did, some Bavarian kings and some German Führers knew very well how to play this game – and it shows. It only left me thinking that modern political (yes, you read that correctly) history should be part of any university course in Classics. I should have known all of this way before, not just some vague notions of people with power continuously doing copycopypastypasty with all the Greco-Roman stuff they considered cool enough to support their application to eternity.
Miko Flohr, 02/04/2011