classics

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• 6/4/2023
  

  Recovering the Story of the Empress Messalina After a Roman Cancellation

  by Honor Cargill-Martin

  After the empress Valeria Messalina's fatal fall from favor with her husband Claudius, her name and image were stricken from public and private spheres, an episode that reveals the tightly-regulated dissemination of imperial women's images (and puts current "cancel culture" panic and whisper networks into perspective). 

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• SOURCE: The Atlantic
  5/12/2023
  

  Cleopatra's Daughter and Other Key Figures of the Multicultural Roman Empire

  by Mary Beard

  Jane Draycott relates the stories of figures like King Juba II of Mauretania in north Africa, who was reared in Rome as a captive and installed by Augustus to lead a puppet buffer state, which shed important light on the diversity within the empire and the multiple ways that Rome exercised power over its vast dominions. 

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• 11/13/2022
  

  Are the Modern Stoics Really Epicureans?

  by Emily A. Austin

  The Modern Stoicism movement has embraced the classical philosophy, often as part of project of disciplining emotion with rationality. Perhaps adherents should consider the rival philosophy of Epicureanism, which is even more in line with the modern embrace of science. 

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• SOURCE: Antigone Journal
  10/15/2022
  

  Adventures in Decoding Cicero's "Consolation"

  by Mike Fontaine

  After scholars argued inconclusively for centuries about whether a treatise on grief attributed to Cicero was a forgery, a computer program suggested it was. The author says the computer got it right, and expands on his own investigation. 

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• SOURCE: Jewish Journal
  8/8/2022
  

  What Does Dante Tell Us About the End of the Ukraine War?

  by Tad Daley

  In "On Monarchy" Dante offered the first proposed solution in literature to the problem of war – a world government. 

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• SOURCE: The Guardian
  9/29/2022
  

  Joyce Reynolds Transformed History of Imperial Rome

  Using painstaking archaeological methods, Reynolds laid a new foundation for understanding how Rome related to its eastern provinces. 

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• SOURCE: Humanities
  9/5/2022
  

  All History is Revisionist

  by James M. Banner Jr.

  "The collective noun for a group of historians is an “argumentation,” and for good reason. At the very dawn of historical inquiry in the West, historians were already wrestling over the past, attacking each other."

• 
• 7/3/2022
  

  What Americans Might Learn About Political Collapse from the Classical Greeks and Romans

  by Daniel Noah Moses

  The right traces political turmoil in the US to the supposed abandonment of the classical canon. But reading those works might not teach the lessons they want about hierarchy, authority, and political collapse. 

• 
• 6/12/2022
  

  As an Island, Britain Became a Stage for Roman Politicians

  by Richard Hingley

  The conquest of Britain mattered to Roman emperors not for the island's strategic significance, but because it signaled a ruler's mastery of the ancient deity Oceanus and thus his worthiness in domestic politics. 

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• 4/3/2022
  

  More War Crimes Will Follow in Ukraine

  by Fred Zilian

  To those who believed that war and war crimes in Europe in the 21st century had become unthinkable, Thucydides offers us a simple yet powerful statement: “War is a violent teacher.”

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• SOURCE: Society for Classical Studies
  3/14/2022
  

  Sampling the Epic in Kendrick Lamar's "Mortal Man"

  by Justine McConnell

  Remembering the essential orality of classical epics can help to understand them as works that have been sampled and remixed, and to place contemporary popular culture in dialogue with that tradition. 

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• 3/13/2022
  

  Deadly Cucumbers and Roof Tiles: The Lines Separating Civilians from Combat Have Always Been Blurred

  by Nadya Williams

  Stories of ordinary Ukrainians resisting invasion are framed as heroic, but this can conceal the trauma and violence inflicted on civilians in warfare, both modern and ancient. 

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• SOURCE: Public Books
  2/7/2022
  

  Finding Nowhere: Mapping the Future Study of Antiquity

  by Stephanie Wong and Sarah E. Bond

  This is a conversation inaugurating a broader discussion about considering the ancient world beyond the fragmented histories of Greece, Rome, or "the west." 

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• SOURCE: WGBH
  1/4/2022
  

  New Boston MFA Exhibit Shows Museum's Complex History of Censoring Queer Desire

  by Erin L. Thompson

  "When I first visited Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, as a young and deeply closeted queer college student, I found myself wondering if the museum possessed ancient Greek vases decorated with anything other than sex scenes."

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• SOURCE: Chronicle of Higher Education
  12/3/2021
  

  A Descent into Textual Paranoia

  by Christopher S. Celenza

  "Doing one's own research" in an environment of proliferating information and few gatekeepers isn't new to the internet age. 

• 
• 12/5/2021
  

  What if Hannibal Had Won?

  by Philip Freeman

  Historians' dependence on the accounts of Roman historians has distorted modern understanding of Hannibal, the Carthaginians, and the different possibilities for the world if he had succeeded in defeating Rome.

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• SOURCE: Black Perspectives
  11/11/2021
  

  Mapping Black Antiquity

  by Sarah Derbew

  Ancient Greek literature is full of depictions of African people that affirm their participation in classical antiquity. Why have these been submerged? 

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• SOURCE: Foreign Policy
  11/1/2021
  

  Boris Johnson’s Roman Fantasies

  by Mateusz Fafinsky

  Boris Johnson's recent statements that the collapse of Rome was caused by open borders are well out of step with historical understanding of the fragmenting of the Roman empire, but in line with a long legacy of political misappropriation of Rome as an allegory for the danger of immigrants.

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• SOURCE: Inside Higher Ed
  9/20/2021
  

  Why a Liberal Education is Worth Defending

  by Steve Mintz

  Roosevelt Montas’s forthcoming "Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation" makes a powerful case for engagment with the Great Books as a way to subvert hierarchies and promote equity. 

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• SOURCE: National History Center and Woodrow Wilson Center
  9/17/2021
  

  Stoic Wisdom: Ancient Lessons for Modern Resilience (Thursday, 9/23)

  Nancy Sherman addresses the Washington History Seminar to discuss the maladaptation of Stoicism to the modern self-help industry and a fuller understanding of the lessons of the school. Zoom, September 23, 4:00 EDT.