It's nice to have a hobby.

Last night I broke out the stylus, ink, and papyrus to practice my Greek calligraphy (also to make my wife her birthday present - the first twenty-five lines of the Antigone, the play she and I had many a study-date over as B.U. Classics students before one of us put two and two together and realized we weren't coming entirely for the sake of Sophocles!). The results were encouraging - I seem to have an honest-to-goodness knack for writing ancient Greek, and am looking forward to getting better at imitating the various styles with practice. I've already spoken to the director at The Greek Institute about offering a class in paleocalligraphy for the Fall, and she's pretty excited at the prospect. Students could bring in their favorite passages from Greek literature, which they would then copy onto papyrus in the ancient hand of their choice. I think it would be great fun, and it wouldn't even require that the students know all that much Greek. Just the alphabet would suffice!

Another thing I was thinking of doing with this new "hobby" of mine was sell passages from Greek literature on papyrus over the Internet. I'm not sure if there's a market for such a thing, but I wouldn't be surprised it there were. And what's the harm of hanging out my shingle as a scribe-for-hire?

What's really cool about getting into calligraphy is that I finally have a reason to patronize art supply stores, such as the vast multi-level Pearl Fine Art Supplies, located in Central Square. I was always vaguely envious of my brother-in-law and my wife when we'd pile into the car to find his drawing materials or her mosiac tiles, as I'd never really done anything artistic as a child, and the only time I'd gone to those kinds of stores were during the myriad times my mother dragged me and my brother to the arts and crafts stores (my mother still makes a mean wreath). Well now I can linger over the nibs and styluses - I mean styloi - and drool at the prospect of browsing through a hundred different kinds of ink, in many more colors than just the Classical red and black. I'm not so sure if Sophocles would approve of seeing his Oedipus Rex in turquoise or hot pink, though! At any rate, I bought myself a nice small bamboo pen, the closest thing available to a reed stylus. Looking forward to giving it a try...