09/18/2017Patrick Hogan
Intermediate Latin students typically encounter Latin poetry for the first time with Vergil’s Aeneid. After a brief tutorial on the rules and patterns of dactylic hexameter, they plunge in with arma virumque cano. They learn scansion not only for the sake of tradition and proper understanding of the poem, but also so that they can appreciate its rhythms and artistry—the same reasons English teachers have for teaching their students iambic pentameter for Shakespeare. The symphony of “longs and shorts” can seem forbidding to students at first, and the remedy for this is most often simply...
09/11/2017Angeline Chiu
This article was originally published in Amphora 11.1. It has been edited slightly to adhere to current SCS blog conventions.
“Zero to Hero, in no time flat … Zero to Hero, just like that!” The Muses’ song from the Disney film Hercules could apply equally well to the sudden, spectacular rise of Hercules in pop entertainment of the late 1990s. Those proved lively years for the hero in American film and TV, spearheaded by the 1997 Disney animated movie and by television’s Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, starring Kevin Sorbo (1995-99). The two quickly spun off more TV series:...
09/05/2017Carole Raddato
As an amateur photographer and ancient history enthusiast, I have spent countless hours exploring ancient sites throughout the Mediterranean. In the process, I accumulated a very large number of photographs that I wanted to archive, edit, and share with the world. In 2009, after 3 years of traveling, I decided to start uploading my photos to Flickr. This photo-sharing site was founded in Canada in 2004, and acquired by Yahoo and moved to the US in 2005. As of fall 2016, the site reportedly had 122 million users in 63 countries and was the repository of 10 billion images, with a million more...
08/28/2017Rhodora Vennarucci
Strolling through the ruins of Pompeii is an evocative and multi-sensory experience that has inspired generations of visitors to imagine what life was like in a small Roman town. Unfortunately, most American students cannot afford to visit in person, and attempting to recreate that transformative experience in the classroom is challenging. The recent emergence of Virtual Reality (VR) headsets as serious platforms for scientific visualization, however, is transforming our ability to develop experiential learning environments for our students.
In spring 2017, my colleague David...
08/21/2017Patrick Burns
Latinists enjoy ready access to online texts collected under names like Perseus, PHI, and the Latin Library, collections which are now as much a fixture of scholarly workflows as OCTs, Teubners, and Loebs. Descriptive data and statistics about these texts are harder to find. How many times does Lucretius use the future imperative? How many ablatives absolute are there in Cicero’s De amicitia? Where does ensis appear in Caesar’s writings? (Answers at the end of this post.) Opera Latina is a search interface from the Laboratoire d’Analyse Statistique des Langues Anciennes (LASLA) at the...
08/14/2017Yongyi Li
This article was originally published in Amphora 11.1. It has been edited slightly to adhere to current SCS blog conventions.
On a wintry day in 1996, I was thumbing through catalogues in a deserted corner of the library of Beijing Normal University when my attention was suddenly seized by some titles in a language strangely familiar. I could easily decipher them because of their resemblance to English words, and I knew the names of the authors as I had read them in translations. Latin! My instinct told me. I relayed this discovery to my teacher of Shakespearean plays, a BA in...
08/07/2017Gregory Crane
The English academic term Classics has conventionally designated the study of Ancient Greek and Classical Latin. The department from which I received both of my academic degrees makes the point explicit: its official name is “the Department of the Classics.” The department focuses upon Greek and Latin and the addition of the definite article asserts that these are the only Classical languages.
I do not believe that a single current member of that department would express any disrespect for Classical Chinese, Classical Arabic, Classical Persian, or Classical Sanskrit—the department’s...
07/31/2017Christopher Nappa
Catullus Online is a freely available digital edition of the poems of Catullus. It can be accessed simply as a Latin text of the poems—in editor Dániel Kiss’s own edition—or with each line linked to a full apparatus. Many poems can also be viewed in photographs from important manuscripts (such as O, courtesy of the Bodleian Library). This is a useful project for its intrinsic value as a new text of Catullus, for its ease of availability, and for the directions it implies for new tools in the study of very old texts. Here I will review it briefly as a text of Catullus, as a website, and...
07/24/2017Laura Gawlinski
The Packard Humanities Institute’s Searchable Greek Inscriptions revolutionized the accessibility of ancient Greek epigraphic texts, first in CD-ROM format and then online since 2005. David Packard, Jr. initiated the project in the late 1980s as a collaboration between teams of scholars at Cornell University and The Ohio State University, and supported it financially through the Packard Humanities Institute (PHI). The original intent was to produce searchable texts of the well-over 200,000 inscriptions published in volumes like Inscriptiones Graecae (IG). The PHI editors did not aim to...
07/17/2017Scott Arcenas
Digital Augustan Rome is a web-based platform that provides a visual synopsis, with textual commentary, of contemporary scholarship on the topography of Rome, c. 14 CE. On the project’s homepage, the director David Romano emphasizes that DAR is in only the second of four planned stages (as of April, 2017). Even at this stage, however, DAR already constitutes a significant contribution to scholarship on the topography of Augustan Rome. I would highly recommend a visit to the site.
DAR is a digital successor to the 2002 print volume Mapping Augustan Rome.[1] In its current form, it relies...
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