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Broadening course offerings, without sacrificing literary analysis and close-reading skills, is central to the vitality of Classics departments. In this talk, I discuss how I am using Aristophanes’ Acharnians, among other comedic plays, to illuminate ancient Greek economic practices through the lens of New Institutional Economics and its wide appeal to students from diverse backgrounds and colleges across campus.

Despite advancements in digital commentaries, platforms like Dickinson College Commentaries fail to capture the browsability of reference texts and yield the fusion of philology and material culture. In this talk, I’ll explore ways in which multimedia, such as an integrated, dynamic interface, can generate more fruitful interactions with Plato’s Crito (for which I’m producing a commentary) than the traditional “sidebar.”

How do we assess or compare the difficulty of texts, or map the level of difficulty within a text? Stats is a web-based dashboard in The Bridge ecosystem that displays and compares measures of lexical and syntactic difficulty for Latin texts, allowing instructors to identify more readable texts and sections, more intentionally select readings, and more effectively plan reading activities.

This project began as a collaboration between the Directed Independent Study program at Germantown Friends School and Breakthrough of Greater Philadelphia. The foundation of the project was an interest in exploring Latin grammar and Greek mythology with middle school students who attend charter and public schools in Philadelphia. These students are part of the Breakthrough Program of Greater Philadelphia.

It is easy to forget how radical Roman declamation was. As part of rhetorical training, elite young men dramatized moments of extreme crisis in domestic or political life, while impersonating people more socially vulnerable than themselves. Recent work on the genre has shifted away from a ‘norm-based approach’, according to which declamation taught men the values of patriarchal mastery and self-control, and has focused instead on the genre’s propensity for melodramatic excess (Connolly 2015), or its elements of class and gender transgression (Stoffel 2017).

An influential interpretation of Roman assemblies holds that voters approved essentially any proposal put before them (Mouritsen; Flaig). This implies that voters’ decision-making role was illusory and largely predetermined. However, this view is contradicted by several considerations, including the role of political theater at the assembly itself.

This paper argues that Pseudo-Quintilian’s Major Declamation 12 uses cannibalism to explore how disaster might destroy familial relations and permanently affect survivors. In this fictional oration, the speaker prosecutes a legate who failed to return to his famine-struck city with grain in time to prevent the inhabitants from resorting to survival cannibalism, which the speaker describes in gory detail.

The heroine’s apparent death is a common narrative pattern in the “ideal” novels – Chariton, Achilles Tatius, and Heliodorus display at least one scene where the male protagonist believes his beloved to be dead and laments over her body (Chall. 1.5.1-2; Leuc. 3.15, 5.7, 7.3-4; Aeth. 2.4.1-4). However, her death is illusory – the audience soon finds out that the woman is alive, usually because another woman died in her place.

The proposed 20-minute paper focuses on the Passio prior of Galaction and Episteme (BHG 665), a Christian work from late antiquity or Byzantium (Braginskaya; Alwis). This text presents itself as a sequel to Achilles Tatius’s novel, Leucippe and Clitophon, and narrates the marriage and conversion of (G)leucippe and Clitophon as well as the life and martyrdom of their son and his wife.

In the prologue to his Verae Historiae (VH, 1.1-4), Lucian declares that everything that he will utter is a lie, and that no reader should believe him. While this passage has been traditionally interpreted in relationship with Lucian’s satirical intents, particularly in reference to the historiographical tradition (Clay-Brusuelas, Georgiadou-Larmour), in this paper I suggest a new interpretation, considering it in relationship with Aristotle’s Poetics.