Aristotle and the Argument for American Slavery

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Aristotle and the Argument for American Slavery
By Olivia Haynie

Throughout history, philosophers and authors from ancient Greece and Rome have inspired later civilizations and generations. Their ideas on governance, morality, and democracy have launched countless movements for political liberty and justice. However, they have also inspired proponents of bigotry: The Involuntary Celibate (Incel) Movement drew inspiration from Ovid and the Stoics, the Third Reich was influenced by Tacitus, and in antebellum America, proponents of slavery found an advocate in Aristotle.

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Book Review: Harper’s The Wolf Den

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Book Review: Harper’s The Wolf Den
By Maggie Yuan

From 2018’s Circe to the Illiad retelling The Silence of the Girls, the women of antiquity have taken the literary world by storm in a recent wave of feminist mythological retellings. Though the subjects differ, the common thread is the authors’ complex reimagining of the often one-dimensional women. Surprisingly, the lives of Rome’s most mysterious, enigmatic, and real women were…

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An Analysis of Fifty Days at Iliam

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An Analysis of Fifty Days at Iliam
By Lily Nesvold

Fusing ancient storytelling and modern art, Fifty Days at Iliam is a ten-part canvas painting that uses a mixture of oil, crayon, and graphite. Based on Alexander Pope’s translation of Homer’s Iliad, it is permanently on display at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. This unique installation recalls a story that everyone knows, classicists and non-classicists alike, and its expression packs so much meaning into so few brushstrokes.

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Seeing Bearden’s “Circe”

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Seeing Bearden’s “Circe”
By Margaret Dunn

This visual essay was created for Race & Ethnicity in the Ancient World, a course taught by Professor Kate Meng Brassel. The class sought to uncover how ancient peoples perceived both themselves and others in regard to ethnic identity, and how those perceptions were used or appropriated in the modern era. This piece studies the work of Romare Bearden, the esteemed collagist known for…

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Sacred Disease

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Hippocrates, Rationalism, and the Sacred Disease
By Ezra Chan

In the Hippocratic work “On the Sacred Disease,” the author uses a wide breadth of knowledge and logical reasoning to develop his theories on the sacred disease, also known as epilepsy, expanding his ideas with Hippocratic philosophies of the natural world and the concept of a divine origin. Although the sacred disease was widely believed at the time to have a divine cause, Hippocrates proposed…

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Electra and Clytemnestra

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Electra and Clytemnestra: Foils in the Liminal Realm
By Ashley Koca

The relationship between the characterizations of Clytemnestra and Electra in Aeschylus’ Oresteia can be visually synthesized through an Archaic shield dating back to 570 B.C. (see fig. 1). The shield itself embodies a combination of…

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