Paper 4 394 words

Teaching Classics in Community Colleges

In this paper, I will explore the role of Classics in the two-year community college education system. I will describe my personal experiences with Classics at a two-year institution, and the shared experiences of other Classicists employed at community colleges elsewhere in the country. I will also discuss the potential for instructor-based and cross-institutional outreach for enhancing the visibility of Classics at all levels of education.

Paper 3

A Seal of Biliteracy for Classical Languages (419 words)

The goal of this presentation is to provide some historical background on the Seal of Biliteracy, the purposes and goals of the seal, and efforts to establish guidelines for a seal of biliteracy that will include students of Latin and ancient Greek.

The Seal of Biliteracy movement began in California in 2008 and the state adopted guidelines for its seal in 2011. New York followed suit in 2012.

Paper 2

Communication, Cohesiveness, and Continuity: Fighting for the Survival of the Classics

536 words

Paper 1. The National Committee for Latin and Greek

(328 words) 15 minutes

This paper offers a sidelight to Paper 2 and 3 by discussing the Judeo-Christian creation of a new Alexander commonplace in ancient literature, namely the fictional story of Alexander’s visit to Jerusalem. Jews and Christians fully accepted the tale as part of genuine Alexander history, which sets them apart from the imperial ‘pagan’ writers, who never mention the visit. The story thus circulates in religious milieus as opposed to the acknowledged historiographical channels of Alexander literature, such as Arrian and Plutarch.

As Paper 2 shows, the easy circulation of Alexander-commonplaces throughout the Hellenistic Mediterranean paved the way for the Macedonian king’s use as a shared idiom for discussing kingship in varied Roman imperial literatures. Among Greek writers, Plutarch used such commonplaces to create a unique version of Alexander whose kingship, bound specifically to his status as a world conqueror, became the positive paradigm against which other Greek and Roman rulers could be measured, especially in the programmatic setting of the Lives.

This paper explores whether a set of Alexander commonplaces can help reveal a literary culture in the world of the Roman Empire that operated above linguistic and cultural differences. To do so it considers whether Alexander commonplaces can be productively viewed as a widely understood idiom for discussing kingship that was deployed in a variety of texts from the Latin, Greek, Jewish (Greek, Aramaic and Hebrew), and Demotic Egyptian literary traditions.

The author of these lines has frequently referred to what he thinks to be dead-ends in the History of Alexander the Great, for example in the following words: “Today the history of Alexander has […] reached a crisis point as it has not been sufficiently stimulated by the methodological advances which Greek history has, in the meantime, been able to adopt.

This paper investigates the distinctiveness of Roman freedmen (liberti) in provincial contexts where Roman-style manumission contrasted with local customs. I suggest that manumission may have functioned as a marker of political and cultural identity for patrons and freedmen alike. Greek discussions of the Roman slave system emphasize the unique practice of enfranchising slaves who had been liberated through formal channels (SIG³ 543; Dion. Hal. Ant. Rom. 4.22).

Recent scholarship has underlined the significance of costume with respect to self-representation in the Roman world in terms of both personal adornment and visual art. Discussions of the toga in particular often center on elite traditions, for it is their interests which drove both the history and the development of the toga. Yet the power of the toga as a marker of civic identity must have resonated especially with Roman freedmen, for whom it embodied not only citizenship, but also the restoration of legal personhood achieved through manumission.