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!
Read More
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…
Read More
Culina Quarantina: A Series of Roman Recipes – Roman Toast and Laganum
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!
Read More
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…
Read More
Culina Quarantina: A Series of Roman Recipes – Roman Porridge 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!
Read More
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.
Read More
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…
Culina Quarantina: A Series of Roman Recipes – Dill Chicken
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!
Read More
Discentes’ Senior Send-Off: Reflections from Penn Classics’ Class of 2020
By Elizabeth Vo-Phamhi
Over the last two months, students have dealt with massive uncertainty amid the coronavirus outbreak. Yet for the sixteen seniors in Penn Classics, one thing has certainly remained constant: the importance of classics.
At the end of April, the Classics department held its annual Senior Colloquium, a roundtable discussion celebrating the seniors’ research. Central to the discussion was the question: “What does it mean to study Classical Studies and Ancient History?” When participants were asked to come up with a single word to describe the nature of classics, these were their responses…
Read More
A New Chapter of Discentes: A Letter from the Editorial Team
Reflecting upon the first half of 2020, it would be an understatement to say that the world around us has changed immensely. As individuals, as classicists, and as an editorial team, we have experienced a global pandemic, faced an abrupt ending to our semester on campus, and, most harrowingly, witnessed unthinkable acts of racism and hatred in our country. At the same time, we have also seen benevolent acts of kindness, watched the fight for justice rise even greater than before, and found moments of light even during these uncertain times…
Read More