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…
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…
Beyond Translation: The Benefits and Drawbacks of English-to-Latin Composition
By Lily Nesvold
In an advanced Latin course my senior year of high school, my teacher gave the class an assignment that was deceptively simple: to compose four “correct” lines of dactylic hexameter, a quest which would result in an automatic “A” for the trimester. Naturally, we were all very excited about the grading scale for the task. What we failed to recognize was how difficult it would be…
Everything Old Is New Again
Returning Translations to Their Original Meanings
By Olivia Wells
Have you ever wondered what’s lost in translation? Now, I could mean this literally or figuratively—here, I ask it literally, in a Classical sense. Is there a straight path from Ancient Greek or Latin to English? Does the context or background of a translator matter? How much faith should we put into a particular translator’s work…
By Mati Davis
Sappho 31 and Catullus 51
These two poets focus on the same theme as the previous part of this series: love’s pains. Catullus’ poem 51 hovers somewhere between allusion and direct quotation of Sappho’s poem 31. These two are as interesting for their similarities as for their differences. Even though they follow nearly the same formula, Catullus deftly contrasts Sappho’s romantic euphoria with his own frenzied agony…
The Hive
By Cate Simons
During quarantine, I’ve spent much of my time outdoors. Outside, surrounded by nature, I’m able to slow down and separate myself from some of the anxiety I’ve lately felt about the general state of the world. In the last few months, this passage from Vergil’s Georgics has been very much on my mind, and I’m especially drawn to Vergil’s efforts to portray bees in human terms…
Bar the Dawn from My Bed
By Alicia Lopez
One of my favorite parts of studying Classics is stumbling across little nuggets of relatable content. While of course, there are always big themes that span most works of literature (heroics, sacrifice, love, loss, etc.), I treasure the little similarities, like wanting to stay in bed, that are still wildly relatable thousands of years later…
Catullus 85 and Philodemus AP 5.131
By Mati Davis
The famous saying by Horace, “Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit (In being conquered, Greece herself conquered her ferocious conqueror)” (Book II, epistle 1, lines 156-157), describes the way in which Greek art and culture seeped into Roman society and inspired Roman authors, artists, and architects…
The Ethics of Excess: Food and Satire
By Clare Kearns
Food and eating have always figured prominently in the work of satirists. That food plays upon the somatic realism of satire is evident, but the relationship between food and satire’s moral criticism is more slippery. What, if anything, makes food consumption an appropriate vehicle for the satirist’s moral commentary, rather than other forms of consumption and excess?