Dido’s Ambiguous Depictions: Powerless or Empowered?

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…

Demonstering: A Postcolonial Reading of Aeneid 3, & The Practice of Humanizing Monsters in Ancient Literature

Demonstering: A Postcolonial Reading of Aeneid 3, & The Practice of Humanizing Monsters in Ancient Literature By Anna Coopey   Introduction Virgil was a witness to colonization and imperialism. He grew up in Mantua, and experienced, as a young man, the results of the civil wars where Augustus’s allies carved up the land for themselves. […]

The Hero’s Journey

The Hero’s Journey
By Lily Nesvold

​​As a modern, musical interpretation of Virgil’s Aeneid, “The Hero’s Journey” is an instrumental track created using GarageBand, a digital audio workstation, combined with Renderforest, a music visualizer service. I created this piece as my final project for CLST-143, “Great Books of Greece and Rome,” taught by Professor Alison Traweek…

Minute-Long Myths

Minute-Long Myths – CLST 100 Crash Course
By Alicia Lopez

Your time in Classical Mythology may be coming to a close, but preparing for the final exam doesn’t have to feel like a Herculean labor. Welcome to your CLST 100 crash course, featuring memorable minute-long renditions of each myth on the syllabus…

The Indo-European Hero

A Comparative Study of the Aeneid and the Mahabharata
By Kushal Modi

The cultures of Ancient Rome and Ancient India are descendants of a common Indo-European culture that flourished in the steppes of the Caucasus several thousand years ago. As several world cultures developed from this proto-culture, they retained certain shared Indo-European cultural and linguistic characteristics…