2024 Senior Sendoff
By Riley Glickman
Introduction
And just like that, the 2024 school year comes to an end. We thought it would be nice to talk with our seniors and get their takeaways on Classical Studies and Ancient History here at Penn. Congrats on graduating, and let’s dive right in!
The Egyptian Revival Jewelry Movement: Exploring the Ethics of Cultural Influence
By Angela Nguyen
Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, the allure of ancient Egypt swept across the globe. Its grand architecture, enigmatic gods, and powerful civilization sparked a worldwide fascination, which reached new heights with the 1828 release of “Description de l’Égypte,” chronicling Napoleon’s expedition into Egypt, the historic completion of the Suez Canal in 1869, and culminating in the groundbreaking unearthing of King Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922. These moments brought ancient Egyptian wonders to the forefront, which became mainstream culture via fashion, art, and architecture in a wave known as “Egyptomania.”
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Fables of Phaedrus, “The Dogs Sent Envoys to Jupiter”
By Dara Sánchez
Animal fables in ancient Rome were not viewed with high regard in comparison to other genres of literature. Yet Phaedrus, an alleged freeman of Augustus from the 1st century AD, does not allow these preconceived notions to deter his ambitions. In this feces-filled poem, Phaedrus describes to us an etiological myth that explains why dogs smell each other’s behinds. He mixes the sacred gods, Jupiter and Mercury, with the vulgarity of dogs and excrement, contrasting such different things, and playing on borderline absurdity…
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Penelope’s Wait: A Translation of Ovid’s Heroides Book I Lines 1–50
By Erin Schott
Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey have endured for thousands of years because they tell stories still true to the human experience. The Iliad recounts the horrors of war and the egotism of those in power, while the Odyssey narrates an arduous homecoming to a place that is not the same as before…
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Dido’s Ambiguous Depictions: Powerless or Empowered?
By Caroline Pantzer
Did Roman audiences view powerful female characters of myth and literature in a dismissive, simplistic manner? Or did they understand and appreciate the complexity and ambiguity of such figures? In writing the Aeneid between 30–19 BC, Vergil places himself as an author within the epic tradition’s pre-existing “literary canon” of powerful, intelligent female characters…
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Telemachus, Heredity, and the Persistent Weirdness of Parent-Child Relationships
By Natalie Dean
Poets such as Sappho and Pindar garnered plenty of attention during their lifetimes, but many of them also led rich afterlives in which they continue to influence the world of poetry. In the current pop culture scene, works inspired by or retelling Greek and Roman myths are very popular, including loosely inspired children’s books such as the Percy Jackson series and edgy, politically relevant retellings such as the musical Hadestown…
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Bull and Bull-Leaping Iconography: Knossos, Tell el-Dab’a, and Beyond
By Anna Keneally
Since Arthur Evans’s discovery of the bull leaping mural at the Palatial Complex at Knossos in 1900, scholars have worked to understand the phenomenon of bull leaping, which has been documented widely, in some capacity, throughout the ancient Mediterranean basin. Through my research, I have identified patterns and parallels between many forms of bull leaping iconography, which suggests a greater interconnectivity and continuity of theme and style within these images…
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The Faces of Psyche
By Sophia Woo
The conception of gender is heavily influenced by the societal and cultural approaches to the term at a particular place and time. The Cambridge Dictionary defines gender as the socially constructed way of behaving and the expectations for certain groups of people in society, namely, men and women
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As a Budding Classics Student, Only Frederick Douglass Can Save My Education
By Hunter Ryerson
Just before my ninth birthday, my father drove me to a Confederate graveyard deep in the American South. A statue of a gray-coated officer loomed in the afternoon light. At the time, I barely understood the profound implication behind those rows of crumbling gravestones set in the red clay ground: that these men and boys had died for a cause of oppression…
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The Anatolian Connection: Traditional Epithets of Apollo in the Iliad
By Garrett Lincoln Ashlock
Ever since Milman Parry’s foundational study on Homer’s use of traditional epithets, L’Épithète traditionnelle dans Homère (1928), scholars have recognized that Homer relied on an ancient deposit of epithetic formulae due to the form of his dactylic hexameter…
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