If you find time to visit only one of Athens’ many museum collections, make it the Acropolis museum. Right in the centre of the historic city, this award-winning museum houses over 4,000 objects from the Acropolis — the fortified hill in Athens, most famous for its fifth century B.C. marble temples. The Parthenon, in particular, … Continue reading
Thatched roofs, cream teas, sonnets and soliloquies: Stratford-upon-Avon really is a wonderful pocket of Englishness nestled in the West Midlands. One could do much worse than to break away from the helta-skelta-of-wherever and pay a quick visit, as do 2.5 million people every year – and as I did for a weekend as my ‘summer … Continue reading
This week, GIS truly lived up to its name, as we listened to two very interdisciplinary talks by Albert Bates and Peter Swallow, which engaged with literature, philosophy, art history and reception. Does Lucretius make us think of such images? In his presentation on “Artistic images in Lucretius’ DRN 1” Albert Bates looked at the … Continue reading
At the first GIS of the term we had two excellent presentations, which gave us insights into ways of restoring classics in two very different areas: while Ed Millband showed us how some textual issues in the Pseudo-Senecan Octavia may be solved and the text thus restored, Aleksander Musiał showed us what kinds of aggressive … Continue reading
While doing research for my PhD thesis I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea of anachronism. Broadly defined, anachronism means taking something from one historical time period and placing it in another. This can mean attributing modern ideas to ancient people, judging them by our values (or us by theirs), or it can mean … Continue reading
This week’s GIS was something special – a joint with our friends in the Classical Reception Seminar Series (ably chaired by Maya Feile Tomas and Ben Folit-Weinberg). The aim of this collaboration (no doubt the first of many), was to begin the process of opening up the world of reception studies to those engaged in … Continue reading
Your very sorry and humble correspondent comes to you as a suppliant and offers heartfelt repentance for her arrogance of three and a half weeks ago; this GIS report will be a very late bumper bonus issue, covering both the antepenultimate and penultimate weeks’ worth of seminar sessions. Continue reading
On Wednesday of this week, Trinity College hosts a production of Tom Stoppard’s play “The Invention of Love”, a biographical drama about the great classicist and poet A. E. Housman. While possibly best known for his poetic cycle “A Shropshire Lad”, Housman was also one of the foremost Latin textual critics of the 20th century, … Continue reading
Hello all, and happy Christmas from all of us in the graduate common room in the Faculty of Classics at Cambridge. Actually I haven’t consulted my fellow postgrads, but I assume they wish you a happy Christmas and are not indulging in Scroogeish disdain and bah-humbuging. I happen to know that some of my archaeologist … Continue reading
I’ve recently returned from a conference at the University of South Africa in Pretoria. A lot of people in Cambridge clearly regarded this as a rather dubious trip. The way people said ‘You’re going to a conference in SOUTH AFRICA?’, rather reminded me of the ‘A Tiger! In Africa?’ scene from Monty Python’s Meaning of … Continue reading
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