Penelope’s Wait: A Translation of Ovid’s Heroides Book I Lines 1–50
By Erin Schott
Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey have endured for thousands of years because they tell stories still true to the human experience. The Iliad recounts the horrors of war and the egotism of those in power, while the Odyssey narrates an arduous homecoming to a place that is not the same as before…
Orpheus as a Muse
By Maggie Yuan
What do a tragic love story, the Can-Can, and a critique on industrialization have in common? All are rooted in the ancient tale of Orpheus and Eurydice. Everybody loves a good love story, and as far as the Greeks were concerned, the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice represents a version of true and pure love devoid of any ill intentions. At the core of the story, however, is the importance of divine faith, even over such passion…
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…
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…