The Classics Christmas Charts

As term draws to an end, as Cambridge receives its first wintry snowfall of the year and as Christmas draws ever nearer, how do Cambridge Classics postgrads keep themselves occupied? Without our weekly dose of seminars, teaching and Faculty yoga, what keeps us ticking? The answer, it turns out, is a bit of festive fun: … Continue reading →

Review: Romano-Germanic Museum, Cologne

When I’ve not been busy visiting Christmas markets, eating Currywurst, or wearing Lederhosen, I’ve been using my weekends in the Rhine-Ruhr region to do a bit of sightseeing. Although you might not expect it from the heart of industrial Germany, there’s certainly plenty on offer here for the ancient historian or archaeologist. Bonn’s LVR-LandesMuseum, for … Continue reading →

GIS 17/11 – The roles of women in the Trojan war and of the chorus in the Oresteia

Marc Bonaventura opened last week’s GIS with an analysis of the role of women in “De Excidio Troiae Historia”. This account of the Trojan War is presented in the form of a historiographical prose composition attributed to Dares Phrygius which is thought to be a 5th century AD Latin adaptation of a Greek original written … Continue reading →

GIS 10/11 – Sardinian ‘misspellings’ and Religious (mis)handling in the 4th c. CE

On Friday 10th November, the GIS hosted two talks that continued the strong interdisciplinary focus of the seminar in this term. First, Lucia Tamponi, a visiting student from Pisa, presented her research on an epigraphic corpus of inscriptions from the island of Sardinia, in a paper entitled ‘Sociolinguistic research on Latin inscriptions from Sardinia: building … Continue reading →

GIS 03/11 – “Horses for Courses” and two acrostics in Horace

Thomas Nelson opened last week’s GIS with his talk “Horses for Courses: The Metapoetics of Horse- and Chariot-Riding in Roman Poetry”. Thomas presented how widely extended and prolific is the use of images of horses and horse riding as a metapoetic metaphor with numerous examples taken from Roman poetry. These were very varied and showed … Continue reading →

GIS 27/10/17 – Timing Death and the ‘Birth’ of the Greek Alphabet

On Friday 27th October, the GIS hosted two papers that nicely complemented each other in their mutual emphasis on the shortcomings of clear ‘beginnings’ and ‘ends’. With a paper titled ‘Timing Death: Questioning the chronology of Romano-British tombstone reliefs’, Hanneke Reijnierse-Salisbure kicked off with an overview of some tombstone reliefs, which have usually been examined … Continue reading →

GIS 20/10 – Aristotle’s philosophical questions and social class in Daphnis & Chloe

Alessio Santoro opened last week’s GIS with a talk about Aristotle’s 11th aporia, that questions whether Unity and Being are substances of things or if they have a different nature. Alessio took us through the structure in which Aristotle presents the aporiai in Metaphysics B, to clarify the display of this particular aporia that is … Continue reading →

Art and a dead author

In Plutarch’s Life of Alexander, Alexander is faced with taming a horse he rashly claims he can handle better than any of his father’s attendants. Waging the full price of the horse, he sets to taming the ferocious beast and does so by turning the horse’s face towards the sun. Alexander, it turns out, has … Continue reading →

GIS 13/10/17 – Graduates at the Museum of Classical Archaeology and Syriac retellings of the Fall of Troy

The first GIS of this term started out on Friday 13th October, with two truly interdisciplinary papers. First, Alina Kozlovski, a fourth-year PhD student, briefly presented two current graduates schemes at the Museum of Classical Archaeology at the Faculty of Classics, the ‘Grad Tour’ and the ‘Grads Curate’. The ‘Grad Tour’, which has been met … Continue reading →

Review: Archaeological Museum of Thebes

Reporting live from the trowel’s edge… For the next six weeks, Ricarda and I are sweating it out in the middle of the Greek countryside, all in the service of academic discovery and for the advancement of human knowledge. We’re part of a team excavating a Mycenaean chamber tomb in Boeotia, a synergasia (collaboration) project … Continue reading →