Blog: Ale Caesar! Classical Reception and the Art of the Beer Label
By Sarah Bond | December 7, 2018
Classical reception comes in many forms—including beer. Just ask Colin MacCormack, a Classics graduate student at the University of Texas-Austin. For the past few years, he has been brewing his own beer with classically inspired names and labels that he makes himself. He often serves these brews at annual lectures or at department functions.
I can attest firsthand to the fact that MacCormack’s beer is delicious, but what stuck with me longer than either his hoppy Rye Pale Ale or his Ale Caesar! Honey-Sage IPA was the time he put into his beer labels. It got me thinking not only about the way that the ancient world is reshaped in popular culture, but what role Classicists can and should have in shaping that reformulation.
Blog: Music and Mythology: A Classics Playlist for the End of Summer
By Christopher Trinacty | September 6, 2018
Classical reception is evident in pop-culture media like films and TV, but it is also a recognizable part of music. I began to ponder this recently after hearing BBC Radio 6 ask the question “What song should be on a playlist inspired by ancient history and why?” The following post details some songs that I’ve enjoyed over the years that feature references to ancient history and the ancient world more generally.
Blog: Teaching Comedy through Performance
By Serena Witzke | November 27, 2017
Ancient comedy was a thoroughly performative genre, meant to be seen and heard, not read. This point should be obvious, but it can easily get lost in a traditional college or university course on comedy in translation, given the textual nature of the transmission of comedies, their distance in time and culture, the difficulties presented by translated material, and the demands and traditions of teaching Greek and Roman literature generally. In this post I describe a comedy-in-performance assignment that T.H.M Gellar-Goad and I created and have used in teaching general-education courses at two different American universities. One of us employed it in lieu of the usual final exam and term paper; the other was bound by writing seminar standards to include a term paper in addition to the performance project.
Amphora: Labors and Lesson Plans—Educating Young Hercules in Two 1990s Children’s Television Programs
By Angeline Chiu | September 11, 2017
This article was originally published in Amphora 11.1. It has been edited slightly to adhere to current SCS blog conventions.
Amphora: The Metal Age—The Use of Classics in Heavy Metal Music
By Kristopher Fletcher | June 12, 2017
This article was originally published in Amphora 12.1. It has been edited slightly to adhere to current SCS blog conventions.
It is a great time to be a fan of both the classical world and heavy metal music: the two have never overlapped to the extent that they do right now. Consider, for example, the fact that in 2013 not one but two Italian metal bands, Heimdall and Stormlord, released concept albums based on Vergil’s Aeneid.
Amphora: Eurydice by Sarah Ruhl—The Power of Pretense
By Victoria Pagán | May 8, 2017
This article was originally published in Amphora (12.1). It has been edited slightly to adhere to current SCS blog conventions.
Amphora: Tartarus and the Curses of Percy Jackson (or Annabeth’s Adventures in the Underworld)
By Tom Kohn | April 10, 2017
This article was originally published in Amphora 12.1. It has been edited slightly to adhere to current SCS blog conventions.
Blog: Wrestling with Rhapsodes
By William Duffy | April 3, 2017
Milman Parry’s theory that the Homeric poems are the result of oral-formulaic composition, is central to the study of ancient epic. It can also be difficult to explain to students or non-Classicist friends, since the Iliad and Odyssey are now consumed primarily as books, not oral poems. Most oral traditions are at the tail end of their existence and most members of contemporary, literate societies have little experience with them. There is little to be done about the first of these issues, but we can address the second. While we may not have access to a significant body of oral composition, there are art forms created in the moment of performance that can be quite helpful in explaining how the Homeric epics were created and consumed by audiences. The most notable of these is professional wrestling.
Blog: Nondum Arabes Seresque Rogant: Classics Looks East
By Kathleen Coleman | October 16, 2016
By Kathleen Coleman, Harvard University
This paper was delivered as part of "The Future of Classical Education: A Dialogue," a panel organized by the SCS Program Committee at the 147th annual meeting of the SCS in San Francisco, January 8, 2016.
Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? by Ellen Bauerle
By Ellen Bauerle | August 2, 2014
In this issue of Amphora we are fortunate to have our Executive Director Adam Blistein’s account of his introduction to classics through a particularly gifted high school teacher and coach, Alfred Morro, and Adam’s comments on what that experience has meant to him. It was serendipity that Adam proposed his article to your Amphora staff for this issue, but his essay also fits nicely with another topic that has been under discussion among the APA’s Outreach division: thinking about our origins, about our path to classical studies, and what that tells us.