By Selima Aousheva “And first place in Advanced Latin Oratory goes to…Selima Aousheva.” That was the last thing I expected. Yes, I had poured hours into memorizing an excerpt from Cicero’s Against Verres and perfecting the style of Roman oration that it demanded, but this was my first time trying my hand at reciting […]
Category: Articles
The Spelunking History: Tartt’s The Secret History and Plato’s Allegory of the Cave
By Maggie Yuan Pur. Ever the dramatist, Richard, the narrator of Donna Tartt’s novel The Secret History, points to this Greek word for fire as a concept that is threaded through the ancient Greeks, a “strange harsh light which pervades Homer’s landscapes and illumines the dialogues of Plato.”1 Although The Secret History is set […]
A Comparison of Frederick Douglass and Socrates
By Griffin Pitt In July of 1852, Frederick Douglass posed a profound question to a congregation at Corinthian Hall: “What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?” His speech laid bare the hypocrisy of a nation that celebrated freedom while continuing to uphold slavery. Similarly, millennia earlier in ancient Athens, Socrates stood […]
The Caesar-Catullus Mashup No One Asked For
By Selima Aousheva Gaius Julius Caesar (100–44 BCE) and Gaius Valerius Catullus (84–54 BCE). A Roman statesman and a prolific poet. A dictator for life and a scandalizer for life. Two men who, despite living in a common time and place, were otherwise polar opposites. What if the two men were combined in one? […]
The Poetics of Athletics
By Eden Riebling
Gregory Nagy has lost count of how many times he has visited the Museum at Olympia. But during each visit he stares in awe at the broken sculptures that once graced the Temple of Zeus. In the second century CE, the traveler Pausanias saw those same statues in all their intact beauty, and his descriptions anchor Nagy’s intriguing and intricately argued new book.
Returning to the Aeneid at Cumae: Aeneas’ Visit to the Underworld
Over fall break, I had a top-ten life experience. My visit to Parco Archeologico di Cuma (Cuma Archaeological Park), located in the ancient city outside of Naples, Italy, transported me back to the eight years I spent studying Latin. With newfound knowledge from Dr. Tartaron’s Introduction to Mediterranean Archaeology course, I explored the secluded yet rich remains of the first Greek colony and its ties to Rome’s founding.
By Janet Pearce
England’s Ancient Roman Public Bath Remains: A Glimpse of Early Roman Ingenuity
Ruins of an Ancient Hypocaust “This isn’t the hypocaust at the Stabian Baths, but it is a good example of what they look like. You can see the pillars which supported the floor, and the remains of the floor. The arch at the rear of the room was where the furnace was, and where the […]
A Tunnel That Appears in the Moribund Hour
Despite hailing from different backgrounds, Antigone and Socrates ultimately meet their ends in similar manners, claiming their places in classical history as some of its earliest depictions of civil disobedience. As it were, their motives and the actions that led to those moments are explored in the dialogue created below, as well as the similarities and differences in their approaches to religion, rebellion, duty, and death; thus, the purpose of this preface is not to re-discuss these notions in redundancy.
Food for Thought: Women’s Domestic Roles through the Culinary Iconography of Archaic Greek Terracotta Figurines
Photo: The collection of Archaic Greek terracotta figurines at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA), image courtesy of author. Food for Thought: Women’s Domestic Roles through the Culinary Iconography of Archaic Greek Terracotta Figurines By Camille Blanco Among the corpus of ancient Greek artifacts found in the eastern Mediterranean, ceramics and pottery remain […]
The Mēchanē in Prometheus Bound: Recognizing the Role of Technology on Stage
The Mēchanē in Prometheus Bound: Recognizing the Role of Technology on Stage
By William Gerhardinger
Prometheus Bound, henceforth PB, poses an insoluble scholarly puzzle. In addition to its authorship and date—and, in fact, intertwined with them—matters of its stagecraft have given rise to a heated scholarly debate. Most prominent among these is the question of how Oceanus’ seemingly aerial mode of transportation (284-87, 394-96) was achieved. Alan Sommerstein suggests the effect was achieved by using a flying-machine—namely the mēchanē, a sort of crane which lifted actors…