Culina Quarantina: A Series of Roman Recipes – Egyptian Sweetmeat and More

Culina Quarantina: A Series of Roman Recipes – Egyptian Sweetmeat and More
By Alicia Lopez

Recently, I’ve been doing a lot of cooking and baking to help pass the time in quarantine, so I decided to look into what cooking would have been like in Ancient Rome. Here are some of my favorite ancient recipes to help get you through quarantine. Bonam fortunam!

“A Widow in the Halls”

An Examination of the Lamentations of Hector in the Iliad
By Abhinav Suri

Classical epics share many characteristics, among which is an expression of loss: lamentation.  From a literal perspective, a lamentation is an expression of sorrow or mourning. However, in the context of the epic, it takes on a far greater meaning in the storyline. As Murnaghan puts it, “Lament … confers praise … on the actions of heroes, and more particularly of dead heroes who have earned their right to be praised through the manner of their deaths” (Murnaghan 1999)…

Culina Quarantina: A Series of Roman Recipes – Sweet Cabbage and Cato’s Roman Bread

Culina Quarantina: A Series of Roman Recipes – Sweet Cabbage and Cato’s Roman Bread
By Alicia Lopez

Recently, I’ve been doing a lot of cooking and baking to help pass the time in quarantine, so I decided to look into what cooking would have been like in Ancient Rome. Here are some of my favorite ancient recipes to help get you through quarantine. Bonam fortunam!

The King, the Soldier, the Slain

The King, the Soldier, the Slain
By Sara Chopra

When I read the final book of the Iliad in Greek this spring, this scene between Priam and Achilles stood out to me for its distinct portrayal of the two; the passage defines these characters by their humanity rather than by their societal positions or opposition in war. In my free-verse translation, I aim to emphasize the core of each character in this moment…

Sappho’s Shadow: Reading Ovid’s Heroides 15 as Reconstruction

Reading Ovid’s Heroides 15 as Reconstruction
By Clare Kearns

Ovid’s Heroides are fundamentally paradoxical. As a collection of letters that take on the point of view of spurned mythological heroines writing to their former lovers, the poems purport to express the sadness, fear, and anger felt by the heroines from their own perspective—though, of course, the Heroides is the work of male poet Ovid…

Snow on the Battlefield

Iliad XII.278-289
By Cate Simons

In this translation piece, I created a lyric poem based on a simile from Homer’s Iliad. In his epic, Homer uses this simile to compare Zeus’ snowfall to stones careening on the battlefield; Zeus’ blizzard highlights the terrible expansion of the Trojan War. In my piece, I wanted to emphasize the contrast between the snowstorm’s silence and the clamor of battle.

Slaves in Free Spaces

Open Dimensions of Space, Socioeconomic Mobility, and Anxiety About Identity in Classical Athens
By Elizabeth Vo-Phamhi

1. Introduction.
World history from antiquity to the present day has abounded with examples of classism and xenophobia as counterforces against socioeconomic mobility and the democratization of opportunity. Societies with servile components are particularly rich in these narratives, and classical Athens (508 – 322 BCE) presents an interesting case of inter-class dynamics involving socioeconomic tensions formed around a spectrum rather than a binary of servile and free statuses…