Dissertation Spotlight: Vicinitas in Urbe: Neighborliness and Urban Community in Mid-Republican Rome
By Jordan Rogers | February 7, 2022
In Plautus’s Mercator, the senex Demipho, the archetypal lecherous old man, attempts to justify to his son his purported decision not to purchase the puella Pasicompsa as a maid for their household. While the audience understands Demipho’s dissimulation — he will, as we know, purchase the girl to satiate his lascivious desires — the old man must trot out a believable excuse to the lovelorn adulescens, whose own parallel obsession with Pasicompsa motivates the plot of the play. Rather than appeal to expediency or even to economics, Demipho argues that the presence of the girl in their household would bring shame to the family and harm their reputation:
Blog: Ista Tempora! Isti Mores!: January 6th, A Year Later
By Joel Christensen | January 6, 2022
At 2:00 pm on January 6th, 2021, a mob made its way up the steps of the U.S. Capitol following a morning of brinkmanship, speeches, and speculation. I sat in my office at home, logged into a Zoom session, watching Twitter and a streaming news channel on one screen, all while pretending to be engaged with the beginning of an SCS Panel, “The Powers and Perils of Solitude in Greek Literature.”
Blog: Sallust at the Insurrection
By Ayelet Haimson Lushkov | January 5, 2022
What do you read for an insurrection? Classics offers plenty of material for revolutionary bibliophiles: compilations for the budding revolutionary, handbooks for coups both successful and failed. The Capitol rioters certainly had their Classics before their eyes, as Curtis Dozier outlined shortly after the event: Caesar and Xenophon, Vergil and Herodotus.
Blog: Dissertation Spotlight: Humor in the Historical Works of Tacitus
By Emma Warhover | December 27, 2021
It is a truth universally acknowledged that humor ages poorly. Jokes tend to be topical, and to be based on the social expectations of a particular group at a particular moment. The deterioration of humor over time is often a matter of changing contexts as well as changing tastes: ideas that once made a coherent joke cease to fit together.
Blog: Exploring the Newly Reopened Domus Transitoria, Nero’s First Palace on the Palatine Hill
By Agnes Crawford | October 11, 2019
Years of restoration work on the Palatine Hill and in the Roman Forum which—together with the Colosseum—now make up the Parco Archeologico del Colosseo has been coming to fruition over the last few years. After decades of sporadic work, rusting scaffolding, and locked gates, a fabulous flurry of activity has yielded an ever greater number of visitable sites.
Many of these are accessible as part of the SUPER ticket, which provides access to the Palatine Hill and the Roman Forum (but not the Colosseum), and includes access to eight excellent “bonus” sites: Santa Maria Antiqua, Temple of Romulus, Palatine Museum, the Neronian Cryptoporticus, the Aula Isiaca and Loggia Mattei, the Houses of Augustus and Livia, and—most recently—the Domus Transitoria.
Blog: Will Reading Fiction Make You a Better Ancient Historian?
By Carlos Noreña | July 22, 2019
I have always been a proponent of reading outside of one’s own field. We are all pressed for time, of course, and keeping up with the scholarship in our own areas of expertise is itself a constant challenge. But reading outside of our traditional areas of study is one of those intellectual activities in which even a little goes a long way towards exposing us to real and imagined worlds that can allow us to better reconstruct the ancient Mediterranean.
Blog: Domestic Violence in Ancient Rome and Game of Thrones
By Serena Witzke | May 27, 2019
Friends, Romans, Countrymen, I want to talk about domestic violence and Game of Thrones.
Blog: Narrative Podcasts about the Classical World
By Christopher Polt | December 25, 2018
In order to prepare for the SCS’s upcoming sesquicentennial at the annual meeting in San Diego from January 3–6, 2019, the SCS blog is highlighting panels, keynotes, and workshops from the schedule. This week we are focusing on the Podcasting the Classics panel (8:00am–10:30am on Saturday, Jan. 5) by pointing to some resources for those who want to explore the medium more fully.
Today we feature a set of podcasts in which the host(s) present material about the ancient world directly to audiences, focusing variously on history, biography, culture, literature, archaeology, and reception. We’ve tried to select series that represent the enormous chronological, topical, and tonal variety that can be found in classics podcasts today (but there are so many available options that we simple couldn’t list everything here, so apologies to all the excellent podcasters we didn’t get to include!).
Blog: Teaching Ancient Slavery in the South
By Samuel Flores | November 23, 2018
What is it like to teach a course in ancient slavery within a region where the reminders of antebellum American slavery still loom so large? Understanding servitude through the lens of slave systems in the ancient Mediterranean can challenge students to think about Greece and Rome in a less romantic light—and to recognize how they influenced American history too.
My course in ancient slavery came about three years ago, while I was a Visiting Assistant Professor of Classics at Kalamazoo College in Michigan. My colleagues asked me if I would be interested in teaching a special topics course on slavery in Greece and Rome. My previous experience in this topic was limited, but I was excited to take this opportunity to explore it.