A Brief History of Common Latin and Greek Sayings
By Adrian Altieri
As a language rich in vocabulary, English is often able to encapsulate many complex ideas on its own. A large proportion of English vocabulary is derived from Latin via French, and many other terms are descended from Ancient Greek. However, in certain cases, it is best to leave phrases in their original languages, allowing for a faithful transmission of…
Why Classics: Antiquity Lives on in Modern Society
By Ryan Burns
Latin was a compulsory class in sixth grade, and no one was excited. “Isn’t it a dead language? What’s the point of learning Latin if we can never speak it,” my fellow students would say. I was one of these people. When we got to class, we started learning an endless list of vocabulary on body parts and animals, and…
A Case Study in How the Plague Plagues Cities:
Sickness in Oedipus Rex and The Gods Are Not To Blame
By Lily Nesvold
Many are familiar with Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex; however, fewer know its modern adaptation, Ola Rotimi’s The Gods Are Not To Blame. Published in 1971, the novel is set in the Yoruba kingdom and tells the story of Odewale, king of Kutuje, in three acts, much like the original Sophoclean play. Oedipus Rex and The Gods Are Not To Blame portray how illness plagues the respective cities of Thebes and Kutuje. Additionally, the action in these stories…
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…
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.
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…
The Thrill of Classical Languages
By Angela Nguyen
During the heat of the Florida summer, I find myself curled up in my air-conditioned bedroom, plunging into pages of Roman literature and unraveling a tedious but thrilling ancient language. Scanning the first sentence of Plautus’s Miles Gloriosus, I search for…
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…
Spoken Latin: Equus and What it Means to Live
By Alicia Lopez
In my senior year of high school, all seniors were required to take an English seminar, a one semester class that explored some “passion project” of a member of the English department. One teacher taught detective fiction, another taught…
A Tiered Ranking of Roman Emperors: Buckle Up
By Maggie Yuan
Though some Roman emperors have become a mainstay in American culture, such as Nero and Augustus, other emperors’ accomplishments have been all but lost to history. Here, I have compiled a list of facts and accomplishments of the Roman emperors in an attempt to rank them.