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Forgetting as a form of repressive erasure has been forced upon human beings against their interests and their will throughout history (Connerton, 2011). This paper examines the relationship between forgetting and silence in the face of authority through Sophocles' Antigone. In this paper, I claim that in Antigone, repressive erasure carries a paradoxical need for a constant reminder and it creates silence based on fear rather than a natural forgetting.

Two conceptual territories bracket Europe’s imaginary geography: Greco-Roman Antiquity and the modern Balkans. According to Artemis Leontis, an “abstract principle of territorial identification” ties the political and cultural life of both modern Hellas and Western Europe to ancient Greek civilization. Rome has similarly been at the center of “a long and ongoing tradition of appropriating classical history and literature” to foster imperialist “narrative[s] of the exceptional progress” (Barnard). In comparison, the space of the Balkans seems peripheral to the project of European identity.

This paper explores how Kaite O’Reilly’s play peeling, a contemporary reimagining of Euipides’ Trojan Women originally produced in 2002, reads Euripides’ text through the lens of disability culture to examine the relationship between disability and trauma, the gender politics of disability, disabled visibility, histories of eugenics, and disabled futurity.

This paper argues that Herodotus’ unique depictions of cannibalism in his ethnographies indicate that the historian does not stigmatize foreign customs. Instead of “Othering” these groups, Herodotus depicts the nomoi—the laws and customs—of these far-away peoples to encourage his audience to tolerate foreign practices.

The second book of Herodotus’ Histories presents a deeply engaged zoological discussion on the behavior of fish in the Nile Delta (2.93). In this lengthy ichthyological survey, Herodotus opens with a handful of lexically unusual choices. He designates the swimming pattern of fish as in herds, or ἀγελαῖοι, a term limited to describing cows in extant literature contemporary and prior to his time (Il.11.729, Od.10.410, S.Aj. 175).

In his Judaean War, Flavius Josephus is both character and author. First leader of a doomed resistance at Jotapata, he becomes an advisor prophesying Flavian rule. This paper examines the programmatic scene of his surrender to Vespasian and Titus (War 3.393-397), arguing that the episode is structured around a hitherto-unnoticed Herodotean intertext. Specifically, Josephus alludes to Croesus of Lydia’s near death at the hands of Cyrus (Hist. 1.86), modelling himself as Croesus and the Flavians as Cyrus.

Elagabalus (they/them/their), the first Roman emperor of Syrian background (218-222 CE), is often depicted in existing sources through a notorious, stereotyped lens. This paper argues that Elagabalus embodies the intersection of two established tropes in ancient Greco-Latin texts: 1.) internal orientalism, which attributes internal elements discordant with dominant elite ideology to the “Orient,” (Lowrie and Vinken (2022)); and 2.) standard orientalism regarding other ethnic groups and people.

In this paper, I will explore how Latin ethnographic descriptions of India from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries engage in linguistic and cultural translations. For this purpose, I will examine the terms ‘rex’, ‘dynastas’ and ‘satrapas’ as used in early modern Latin text written by Giovanni Pietro Maffei (Historiarum Indicarum Libri XVI, 1588) and compare similar passages from João de Barros’s Decadas da Asia (1552). Additionally, I will compare the use of this term in Ludovico Varthema’s Itinerario (1510, and the Latin translation published in 1511).

Within the field of early modern classical reception, Fray Antonio de Guevara occupies an unusual position. As the author of two wildly popular—and entirely fabricated—pseudo-biographical lives of Marcus Aurelius, the Libro áureo de Marco Aurelio (1528) and its revised and expanded version, the Relox de príncipes (1529), Guevara was arguably the best-selling author of “classical” literature in the 16^th century (Redondo 1976).

Although rarely mentioned in Anglo-American literary criticism, Gregorio Hernández de Velasco’s Eneyda de Virgilio traducida en verso castellano (Toledo, 1555) represents a pivotal moment in early modern Spanish humanism. As the first complete Spanish translation of the Aeneid, Velasco’s Eneyda claims for Castilian poetry the ability to carry classical epic, while establishing Spanish humanist practice as a worthy competitor to the work produced by Italian poets and scholars.