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Collaborative Annotation and Latin Pedagogy

By J. Bert Lott

Over the past two years I have used a collaborative annotation tool, Annotation Studio developed at the MIT Hyperstudio with support from the NEH (AnnotationStudio.org), to have students in intermediate and advanced Latin classes annotates digital versions of Latin readings before and after class sessions. My approach is inspired by recent interest among humanists in digitally supported “social reading” but remains grounded in the traditional form of the textual commentary, which, I believe, naturally lends itself to collaborative work.

Using Online Tools to Teach Classics in a Small or Non-Existent Classics Program

By Kristina Chew

The Internet offers many tools, from online texts to scholarly resources to technologies making

it possible to communicate with -- and teach -- students who are thousands of miles away,

to enhance the teaching of Classics. Classicists at colleges and universities with very small

programs, or without a Classics program at all, can especially benefit from these. Classicists such

Dumbarton Oaks Byzantine Seals Online Catalogue

By Lain Wilson and Jonathan Shea

Lead seals are among the most numerous artifacts to survive from the 1,100-year history of the Byzantine Empire: between seventy and eighty thousand individual specimens are estimated to have survived. Until recently, however, their publication was limited to specific categories, for example, seals with place names, family names, and particular iconographies, offices, and titles. These publications are expensive, and are not widely available outside of university libraries with extensive Byzantine Studies sections.

Pantomime Dancing and the Development of New Modes of Subjectivity

By Alessandra Zanobi

Ancient pantomime is said to have been introduced in Rome under the principate of Augustus in the year 22 A.C. There are no extant accounts of its origins and development and efforts made at tracing them remain tentative. Recently, pantomime has attracted a great deal of scholarly attention (Lada- Richards, 2007; Webb, 2008; Hall&Wyles, 2008; Zanobi, 2014), but the investigation of its relation to the wider cultural milieu has not yet been fully undertaken.

Communicating Emotion in Tragic Pantomime

By Helen Slaney

The gestural vocabulary of Graeco-Roman tragic pantomime did not develop in isolation, but tapped into a broader cultural field of body language operating across multiple art forms. While we have limited information concerning the choreographic elements of pantomime per se, it is the contention of this paper that individual components may be recovered by examining the representation of analogous content in cognate media. The gestural expression of emotions or pathē was essential to the well-attested affective capacity of pantomime.

Dancing on the Borders of Empire: The Wandering Thiasus in Catullus 63

By Basil Dufallo

The dances of the Galli, the self-castrating priests of Cybele, emblematize the dynamic ambiguity of certain dance-forms at Rome: as Beard notes, the cult and its practices both expressed Roman ties to ancestral Phrygia and distanced Roman identity from its “Oriental” antitype (Beard 83; cf. Naerebout 157). Yet no study has fully described the role of such ambiguity in perhaps the most memorable account of the Galli’s dances to survive from antiquity, Catullus’s poem 63.

Saltatores vel Pantomimi: Where and How did the Cinaedi Perform?

By Thomas Sapsford

The grammarian Nonius writing in the late 4th/early 5th century CE says of the cinaedi that in earlier times (apud veteres) they were said to be either dancers or pantomimes. Modern scholarship has most often focused on this noun's more pejorative meaning as effeminate gender deviant or passive homosexual whilst often considering the performative aspect of the cinaedus as somehow prior or secondary to that of deviant.

Choreography and Competition in Lucian, Dialogues of the Courtesans 3

By Sarah Olsen

One of Lucian’s Dialogues of the Courtesans features a remarkable dance-off between two hetairai (Dial. Meret. 3) – one of the few descriptions of female sympotic performance in all of Greco-Roman literature. Within the frame of the dialogue, Philinna, one of the hetairai, recounts the causes and consequences of that performance for her disapproving mother. On one hand, the fictional world of Lucian’s courtesans seems to be a vaguely classical-Athenian Greek past, and earlier Greek models are undoubtedly central to Lucian’s literary project (Bompaire 1958, Branham 1989).

The Herculaneum Graffiti Project: Ancient Wall Inscriptions and Digital Humanities

By Erika Damer

Roman Wall-inscriptions were the social media of ancient Roman culture. Some were painted on buildings to advertise information, while others were used by private individuals to record their experiences (e.g., through images, prayers, greetings to friends, favorite quotations of poetry) by writing with charcoal or scratching texts into wall plaster.

The Latin Papyri from Herculaneum

By Sarah Hendriks

The Latin Papyri from Herculaneum are not only fewer in number than the Greek Papyri, but also in far worse condition. Indeed, Scott’s initial assessment that they contained ‘nothing intelligible’ has been the predominant, enduring viewpoint for well over a century (Scott 1885). For this reason, conclusions about the content and nature of the Latin library at Herculaneum have been difficult to reach, especially when contrasted with the apparent uniformity of the Greek collection. However as technology has advanced, so too has our ability to access and assess the Latin collection.