2014

2014 News & Events Archive

Ancient Science Technology Projects 
Open House provides glimpse into past


Visiting Scholar Presentations - November 2014

Classics Department welcomes two visiting scholars in November:

Dr. Victoria Wohl
​Living the Law in Classical Athens

Pericles’ Citizenship Law of 451 BCE defined a citizen as the child of an Athenian father and an Athenian mother. This law thus created a sharp distinction between legitimate and illegitimate marriages and between legitimate and illegitimate families. But when we look at court cases from Classical Athens, a murkier picture of family life emerges, full of mistresses and prostitutes, bastard children and secret love-affairs. Here the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate is policed not by the law but by neighbourhood gossip. While the court cases show Athenians living their lives in the gray areas left by the law’s black-and-white distinction, Athenian tragedy widens the gap between lived reality and the law in order to show the high cost to the individual of transgressing the law and the high cost to society of upholding it.

Dr. Kyle Gervais
Writing and Reading Violence in Statius' Thebaid

Following a century of unjustifiable neglect, Statius' imperial epic poem, the Thebaid has enjoyed a resurgence of interest that encompasses a wide variety of scholarly approaches, including philology, sociology, intertextuality, metapoetics, gender studies, political studies, digital humanities, and reception studies. Dr. Gervais presents an overview of several of these approaches as applied to the end of Thebaid 2, where the hero Tydeus violently repels an ambush of Theban soldiers. He argues that the Thebaid can reward scrutiny ranging from the most traditional to the most experimental--from textual criticism to comparisons with the films of Quentin Tarantino.

Classics grads key players in Franklin Expedition Discovery


Classics professor, Dr. Barbara Reeves, and team discover ancient rock carvings in Jordan
Read the full story here...


Visiting Scholar Presentation - September 17, 2014

Dr. John Dillon, Trinity College Dublin
Alexandria Quartet: Callimachus, Philo, Origen, Cavafy