The Next Generation: Papers by Undergraduate Classics Students

A profound personal examination, Augustine’s ​Confessions​ pays tribute to the art of rhetoric which was central to a large part of the saint’s life. Though we are continually made aware of Augustine’s mixed feelings regarding his former craft and its ultimate disappointment, he nevertheless incorporates rhetorical devices—particularly that of paradox—in a way that expresses philosophical substance, rather than the sophistical emptiness he often condemns.

Lucretius has been enduringly relevant to mathematics, because of his presence in the intellectual background of scientists during the development of classical physics and because of the similarities between Lucretius’ atomic motion and a stochastic dynamical system. Newton and Leibniz, physicists and mathematicians who simultaneously developed calculus, both engaged with Lucretius in their writing. Newton wanted to use certain passages of Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura to prove that the ancients understood the concept of inertia.

The city-states of ancient Greece during the time approximately spanning the beginning of the Persian Wars in the 6^thcentury B.C.E. to the rise and fall of Alexander the Great in the late 4^thcentury created many of the largest building blocks of what we now recognize as Western Civilization.

This paper explores the complex relationship between the Odyssey and the manifold sufferings it details in its protagonist. In examining the suffering that Odysseus deals with and endures, as well as the grief of his household, we gain insight into how Homer constructs identity on levels individual and communal, as well as understanding of how response to suffering defines heroism in the poem.

The Hercules cycle of Cubiculum N of the Via Latina catacomb provides a window into late antique Roman culture by reflecting the interactions of Christians and Pagans. Based on archaeological evidence for the type of burial, scholars have argued that the Hercules cycle evidences either Pagan, Christian, or some synthetic eschatology. Although the conclusions have differed, scholarship has been united in approaching the Hercules cycle through the eyes of the commissioners. However, interpretation based upon contextual evidence about the patrons is problematic for two reasons.

This paper will use sociolinguistic information about Hellenistic Greece to shed light on the cultural and metapoetic significance of the exchange between Praxinoa and the unnamed stranger in Theocritus’ Idyll XV. For centuries, Ancient Greek, unlike most ancient and modern languages, had no standard variety.

In Aristophanes’ play Acharnians, produced in 425 BCE, the chorus of Acharnian old men are the rural, nationalistic antithesis to the peace-loving protagonist Dikaiopolis. When Dikaiopolis tries to end the Peloponnesian War by making a personal peace treaty with the Spartans, the men of Acharnae come in arms to stop him and are stubbornly resistant to any of his reasoning. Aristophanes leads us to believe that this reaction is just what we should expect from these men hardened by many years of labor producing charcoal in the foothills of Parnes.

The vocality of women—their rage, their grief, their emotion—is, as America has recently been privileged to witness, a uniquely formidable phenomenon. This is no less true of the women of Attic tragedy, for whom displays of emotion are often the only available method of public resistance.

Throughout the extant fragments, Parmenides uses two different terms to refer to his Goddess: he uses the term θέα once only at 1.22, and he uses the term δαίμων twice at 1.3 and 12.3, respectively. Most translators of Parmenides, such as McKirahan, Hermann, Gallop, and Tarán, translate both words as referring to the same entity: the “Goddess,” It is my contention that Parmenides intended a distinction in the role of his Goddess by the use of his terms.

This paper explores the baffling exit of Aeneas from the underworld by the ivory gate of “false dreams.” Why Vergil sent Aeneas—a real person who had just witnessed an accurate prophecy of Rome’s history—through this gate has puzzled readers for millennia. Scholars have conjectured variously and still come to no ruling consensus about what he meant. This paper attempts to answer that question. I consider three broad camps of interpretation and then construct a specific answer that borrows insights from several different scholars.