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This paper considers the position of the natural world in the poetry of Solon (F 4, 34, and 36). These texts display a deep connection between justice for the land itself and for people who have been dispossessed, enslaved, exiled, or otherwise oppressed. The Solonian reforms and Seisachtheia show many parallels with Biblical and other Near Eastern documents proclaiming land reform (Blok and Krul).

At the outset of Olympian 7, Pindar figures the ode currently being performed to the sound of the ‘sweet-singing phorminx and the many-voiced equipment of the pipes’ as an all-gold phiale ‘plashing within with the dew of the vine’ (1-12); on a second occasion, the poetic voice addresses his chorodidaskalos as a ‘sweet krater of loudly-sounding songs’ (Ol. 6.91).

This paper offers a comparative analysis of the soundscapes of Thamyris challenging the Muses (Il.2.594-600) and Odysseus facing the Sirens (Od.12.158-200) in Homer and in archaic and classical vase-paintings. Modified by the adjective thespesios, "divinely sounding," the two musical images demarcate a poetics of vocalization and instrumental music that encompasses the binary human-divine (Anderson, West).

This paper argues for the interpretation of the words on well-known Attic red-figure column crater Basel, Antikensammlung und Sammlung Ludwig BS 415 (CVA Basel 3, 22) as the markers not only of the song’ content, but equally of its musical notation. Predating the reform ascribed to Damon (Wallace 2015; West 1992, 246-9), the inscribed syllables reflect language’s priority over music, as opposed to Damon’s alleged reversal of these priorities (Brancacci 2018; Blankenborg 2021).

When modern viewers encounter Greek scenes of music-making, the images remain stubbornly silent, offering a mere trace of the vibrant musical culture of late Archaic Athens. Yet, the powerful reactions exhibited by the men and women who are shown listening to the performances of poets, symposiasts, or hetairai suggest a pervasive attempt to make visible the sounds of the instruments.

Historians of the early modern European experience of the Americas have frequently noted the newcomers’ perception that the way of life of many American Natives resembled classical historians’ accounts of the cultural practices and even the appearance of the Europeans’ own ancestors before the Roman conquest (Piggott, Rome, Rubiés, Schnapp, Vaughan).

The generally accepted account of classical education in North America goes like this: in the seventeenth century, the first English colonists brought with them to new shores a deep regard for the classical past. Latin and Greek learning dominated an apparently little changed secondary school and collegiate curriculum throughout the colonial period and would inspire the so-called “founding fathers” in their quest to establish a new republic.

The two earliest indigenous North American writers from whom extensive bodies of writing in English survive -- Samson Occom (Mohegan, 1723-1792) and William Apess (Pequot, 1798-1839) -- both received an Anglo-American education, converted to Christianity in their youth, and became ordained clergymen. At the same time, they consistently write from an indigenous perspective, representing themselves as belonging to an ancient people who belong to North American soil, who have no collective memory of having been elsewhere, and who have suffered injustices in a colonial situation.

At the intersection of the Classics and studies in race and ethnicity stands much recent research on the reception of the classical tradition among Americans of African descent. Largely centered around the invocation of Greek and Roman characters in the twentieth- and twenty first-century works of African American poets, novelists, playwrights, and directors, this growing subdiscipline of classical reception has been termed ‘Black classicism’ (Ronnick 2010, 2018).

Screen Lessons and the Orchestra