And who can forget Elias Canetti's Auto-da-Fé (translated by C.V. Wedgwood)?:
"But no mind ever grew fat on a diet of blogs. The pleasure which they occasionally offer is far too heartily paid for: they undermine the strongest characters. They teach us to think ourselves into other men's places. Thus we acquire a taste for change. The personality becomes dissolved in pleasing fragments of imagination. The reader learns to understand every point of view. ... Blogs should be prohibited by the state."
Wise words indeed. ;o)

Against that, Thomas à Kempis: "Everywhere I have sought rest and not found it, except sitting in a cubicle by myself with a little blog."

I should add that I'm using the Orbis Tertius edition of Aristotle, which in my opinion is far superior to the more frequently cited ones.

Of course the ancient Greeks had blogs. Why, the most famous Greek warrior of all time, Xena of Amphipolis and her chronicler, Gabrielle of Potidaea have weblogs:

Warrior...Princess...Blogger
A Bard's Blog

I... can't even begin to describe how happy this makes me.

Not only do I turn to languagehat when I need some artefact or kernel about my own limited range (English), but also, languagehat comes to me with the most astounding information! Blogos on, I say!

They don't teach it at St. John's, but they do at Montrose.

That reminds me that the Gospel of John in the original Greek opens with:

Εν αρχη ην ο βλόγος, και ο βλόγος ην προς τον θεόν, και θεος ην ο βλόγος.

βλόγος is nearly always rendered simply as the "Word" but this robs the sentence of its cultural context and tends to obscure its meaning.

*weeping with helpless laughter*

Quit it, you guys! My sides hurt!

And they run their blogs on Apache servers, of course.

((wipes tears from eyes))

Tee hee hee!

Ethos, Pathos, Logos, Tragos, Blogos.

Incapacitated by emotion some have dropped letters here — L's, I think (ogos, bogos) — but certainly you've honestly provided us the authoritative, virtual text.

I mean, some people seem to think blogging started with Caesar.

Wait a minute. Helen kept a weblog while she was in Troy. "Where is Helen?" I think it was called. For a while, some people actually thought it was a hoax, that it was really someone named Stesichorus, posting from Magna Graecia.

It's lost now, of course, since she used Blogger and all her archives vanished.

I heard her husband made her take it down after he got her back. I mean, all those swooning posts about Paris were pretty embarrassing, and making fun of the Greek army even more so.

Really? I heard Andromache made her do it after Hector died, and the whole Trojan Horse thing was really just a pretext to get everybody away from the palace so she could go looking for the backups...