Agesilaos -- Thanks. Part of the problem is simple lack of time to do much online stuff beyond job-specific. Uni service has eaten my life. Right now, I'm not teaching this summer as my (90-year-old) father is staying with me, but I'm finishing up an article (on ATG and the destruction of the Branchidae), plus another project that I'm not at liberty to discuss. If it goes through, I will announce it.
In the fall, I'll be taking over as grad chair, plus I just started up a new minor in Ancient Med Studies, so I'm doing double-duty as GPC and Director of AMS, plus regular teaching (and research), so my online time is quite limited. (Not to mention I have a teen son, who keeps me pretty busy and sometimes drives me crazy with this or that crisis.) So in short, I'll have dozens of emails in my box a *day* related to uni work. (This is why I resist department chair, as our current chair said he routinely gets 50+ emails a day!)
Demosthenes ... I actually don't remember the original sources detailing Demosthenes sending an envoy to H. while the army was in Egypt, and I'm not in my office to check. I've got it cited somewhere in my work; I believe it was one of the main sources, but can't be sure. As I recall, it wasn't something that was automatically dubious, but there are a variety of reasons why D. may have sought out H., although Waldy also noted it in his own article on the inscription, too, and the suggestion of the Athenian tie originated with him (due credit where credit is due).
As always with supposition such as any possible Athenian ties for Hephaistion, it rests on a "freight of evidence" rather than any single certain piece. This is why I tend to be cautious about the suggestion ... although I should note that
not everybody who quotes me on it is--which I find a tad annoying. I think it quite possible, again for a variety of reasons that sort of fit together like a jigsaw puzzle, but as I repeatedly say ... a single discovery of a heretofore unknown graveyard in Macedonia with
stelai naming a bunch of Amyntors and Hephaistions could blow the theory all to hell. This is the simple reality of doing work in history. It's VERY important to maintain a sense of "quite likely/virtually certain," "likely," "probable," "possible," and "an interesting possibility." As for the A-H Athenian tie, I'd rate that somewhere between "probable" and "possible," but without further conclusive evidence, not more than that.
It's the sort of detail one plays with in fiction, but doesn't bank on in history.
In terms of keeping up with journal articles, to be honest, even I'm not very good at that. I do understand the difficulty in finding stuff (and knowing what is reliable), as I faced the conundrum at Emory in the mid-80s before I started my phud at Penn State. Now, with the explosion of e-media and the internet, the lay of the land has changed considerably--even since my Ph.D.--for both good and ill. Online searches are MUCH easier. I used to combe through every AH journal in the Emory, and later PSU library, every couple of months, to see what had come out recently. These days, one can accomplish a LOT via JSTOR...but which journals any given JSTOR subscription has access to varies by uni, and some of the more obscure journals just aren't on there. In which case,
perusing bibliographies of books/articles one has is the way academics do it, honestly. But even that misses stuff, depending.
My best advice is for folks to run searches and purchase a subscription to JSTOR, or if near a university, one might be able to request (probably for a minimal monthly or yearly fee) access to the university libraries and databases, which will sometimes include not just access to JSTOR, but also to ebook versions of various academic books. Sometime in the next couple of weeks, I will try to compile a list of some recent publications of note, including (et al.) the new Blackwell Companion to Ancient Macedonia, plus Waldy's festschrift. I'm seeing fewer articles on Macedonia/Alexander in journals these days and more in conference proceedings and festschrifts, in part because we've had a slew of retirements and such. But I make no promises (time).
Yet honestly, even I can't keep up with stuff unless I'm pursuing it for research or in prep for a course. I did a grad seminar on Argead Macedonia a while back, for which I compiled a massive bibliography of articles relevant up through that year. But that's pre-Alex. I only taught through Philip with the expressed desire to "Teach my students Philip Love."
It worked! One of the students in that class went on to write her master's thesis on Philip's military influences, and just successfully defended in May. I directed, and Graham Wrightson also sat on her committee.
ANYway, re: Calgary ... Waldy is retired, and so his website and biblio and such are no more. In fact, a number of uni's are removing faculty webspace (although in Waldy's case, it had more to do with lack of time and retirement), in favor of more regimented control of what university online space looks like. (growl, snarl) That's what happened to my previous sites, and why I now have my own domain. I resisted buying one for a while, as 1) academics with their own webspace without good reason (e.g., lots of books, etc.) has always struck me as a tad pretentious, and 2) I warn my own students to distrust educational sites that aren't .edu or have some other well-known affiliation, given the large amount of crap on the web, and the fact undergrads rarely have the sufficient background to sort chaff from wheat. But I finally broke down and got a site, so I could put up my CV the way I wanted it (not within the narrow confines of the uni auto-formatting), and so I could return the Hephaistion site (and perhaps do some other stuff later). Right now, I'm converting a lot of class material previously in HTML/on websites to Power-Point because of the university removal of my webspace. And that's yet ANOTHER time-eating chore, but some of the stuff needs to be updated, so it's a mixed blessing.
"Beyond Renault" wont' be back for the foreseeable future, just because I don't have time to keep up with it. Again, my time online is severely limited with teaching, administrative duties, and parental duties.
So my order of "What needs to be done" depends largely on, 1) Is it asking to be fed/clothes washed/etc. (kid, Dad, cats), 2) Is something broken in the house that needs a repairman, and 3) is somebody paying me to do it (job)? Ha. Anything else is relegated after the above--which is usually quite minimal time. ;> There are days I don't get to my email until the evening (no joke!).
