User:Ben iarwain

Refugee from New Jersey, my ancestral homeland, living and studying at Reed College in Portland, OR!

I prefer Thucydides over Herodotus and Tacitus over Livy. Xenophon's Anabasis is my my favorite work I've come across so far in my studies with Diodorus Siculus' Library being about the most useful to me at the moment; the Dore woodcuts in an old edition of Paradise Lost I used for class rank pretty far up there, too. I'm just getting good and cozy with my Roman sources for the first time, but I'm sure they will make their way onto the list sooner or later.

Love ancient Greece, Persia, Sumer, cultural vacuums, fixed gear bicycles, and Argus. Someday all of these will be rolled up into one epic journey when I somehow convince my school to pay for me to follow the path of the Ten Thousand from Babylon and Cunaxa to the Black Sea as described by Xenophon, only on a bike. In the interest of practicality I shall plan on leaving my dog Argus back home for that trip. In the meantime, I'm focusing on working my way into a Classics program at Rome for the next fall.

See: Metonymy, palimpsest, and ghost ship.

Many of my contributions are the products of research done for my job with the college's Classics department and for papers or other independant research sessions. I also try to help out by spending a little free time hitting the Random article link and fixing anything I come across and playing around with articles I find on the Community Portal: Opentask and Articles to be Wikified pages. Quick guide and Editing help are two pages I find very useful when I'm putting together a page.