you brought it on yourself miss twiddle

Tired and sick and I STILL haven't finished my paper. Or any of the other things. Yesterday was the department research-presentation day, at which I learned that one of the archaeologists whom I definitely thought was named Miranda is actually named Marenne. My office-mate gave a talk in Dutch about his new theories about the development of the Homeric dialect, which I mostly followed, and the anglo-american Byzantinist whose Christmas Party I am currently not at do to feeling unwell gave a pretty good talk as well. The other talk in Dutch was on the Diary of Perpetua, which is part of an early Latin martyrdom account that claims to be the transcription of the account written by the martyr Perpetua herself of her last days in prison and the visions she had there. So, if it should be authentic, it would be pretty much the only extended (~ 5 pages) ancient-ish prose written by a woman. Of course, many people don't think it's authentic, and this talk, which was given by a male professor, presented some "textual arguments" for why it probably wasn't written by Perpetua, but was written by a man based on her oral testimony.
( Women writers in antiquity? )