Departments

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Classical studies

  • SOURCE: Chronicle of Higher Education
    2/23/2021

    No, Classics Shouldn’t ‘Burn’

    by James Kierstead

    A classicist offers a rebuttal to a recent critique of the field, arguing that practitioners are justified in evaluating a "western civilization" but do so from a multitude of perspectives.

  • SOURCE: Inside Science.org
    2-26-13

    Geneticists Estimate Publication Date of The Iliad

    Scientists who decode the genetic history of humans by tracking how genes mutate have applied the same technique to one of the Western world's most ancient and celebrated texts to uncover the date it was first written.The text is Homer's "Iliad," and Homer -- if there was such a person -- probably wrote it in 762 B.C., give or take 50 years, the researchers found. The "Iliad" tells the story of the Trojan War -- if there was such a war -- with Greeks battling Trojans.The researchers accept the received orthodoxy that a war happened and someone named Homer wrote about it, said Mark Pagel, an evolutionary theorist at the University of Reading in England. His collaborators include Eric Altschuler, a geneticist at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, in Newark, and Andreea S. Calude, a linguist also at Reading and the Sante Fe Institute in New Mexico. They worked from the standard text of the epic poem.