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Classics

The gods of the Greeks are uniquely anthropomorphic; they are not only imagined with human bodies but with thoughts and feelings largely similar to our own, except for the fact that they cannot grow old or die, and are thus spared the greatest part of human pain and suffering. They can feel anger at the misbehaviour, or pity for the fate, of mortals, as when Zeus sees that his beloved son Sarpedon is about to be slain (Iliad 16.431 ff.), but compared to us, they ‘live at ease’ (Odyssey 5.122 and elsewhere).

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Homer and His Iliad by Robin Lane Fox & The Iliad by Homer, translated by Emily Wilson

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March 2024, no. 462

Fans of the Iliad have been well served recently. Late last year saw the arrival of a new translation by Emily Wilson, whose earlier translation of the Odyssey (2018) was greeted with near universal acclaim, and it was joined by a new book about Homer and the composition of the Iliad by one of the leading scholars of Greek history, Robin Lane Fox. Both works encourage us to rethink our connections to this epic poem and its value for contemporary life. Set against a backdrop of clashing Greek and Trojan forces, what does this poem about the fatal sequence of events that emerges from a disagreement between two feuding warlords have to teach us?

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Towards the end of the fourth century BCE, the Athenian orator Hyperides found himself in a difficult predicament. His client, the notorious courtesan Phryne, was on trial for her life. Facing accusations of lewd impiety, should she be convicted, death almost certainly would follow. The case was going badly. The jurors were refusing to listen to his pleas. Their minds were made up. They couldn’t wait to convict. In one last desperate roll of the dice, Hyperides called up Phryne to the front of the courtroom and, with a sudden lunge, stripped her naked. The jury were shocked, stunned into silence. Seizing the moment, Hyperides renewed his pleas on her behalf. Overcome by her beauty, the jury acquitted her.

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There was a time not so long ago when research on ancient philosophy was confined largely to the study of the great philosophers Plato and Aristotle, and their antecedents. To take one example, in A History of Ancient Western Philosophy, published in 1959 by the respected scholar Joseph Owens, only fifty-one of 419 pages were devoted to post-Aristotelian philosophy, and only two pages to philosophy after the third century of our era. All of this has radically changed. For some time there has been a flourishing industry engaged in research on Hellenistic and early Imperial philosophy. Now the last frontier, the philosophy of late antiquity, is also yielding its secrets.

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We know exactly when the first image of a Roman emperor arrived in Australia. It came as part of the goods on board the ill-fated Batavia, which ran aground off the west coast of Australia on 4 June 1629. This shipwreck went down in infamy following the mutiny of a group of the survivors and the subsequent murder of, at least, 110 men, women, and children. Eventually, the survivors were rescued and the horror of the actions of the mutineers was revealed.

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Lost in Thought by Zena Hitz & The Battle of the Classics by Eric Adler

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June 2021, no. 432

The higher education sector currently faces a confluence of challenges that are imperilling the future of universities as they have traditionally been understood and the sort of intellectual life they have long sustained. The most immediately pressing concern is the impact of the pandemic that has eroded the financial stability of Australian universities, resulting in widespread job losses and the closure of entire departments. Overall state funding for higher education has in fact grown slightly over the past decade, but this increase has coincided with ever more complex and invasive attempts by governments to ensure that tax dollars are ‘well spent’, such as the Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) exercise that began in 2010, the Engagement and Impact Assessment (EI) implemented in 2018, and the National Interest Test (NIT) introduced in 2019 for all applications for funding to the Australian Research Council. The impact of these efforts is felt across all academic disciplines, but some are hit harder than others, often by design, such as last year’s Job-ready Graduates Package, which has made most humanities degrees vastly more expensive than other subjects thought to lead to better employment outcomes.

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Greek myths are entirely predictable: Actaeon offends Artemis and is hunted down by his own hounds; Pentheus refuses to worship Dionysus and is ripped apart by his mother; Antigone disobeys the king, and dies for her crime. Beginning, middle, and end: so familiar, so inevitable. The trick was never really in the plot, but in what you did with it. And what Helen Morales does with Greek myth deserves our fullest attention.

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When the Abbé Michel Fourmont travelled to Sparta in the 1730s, he thought he was going to make his fortune and academic reputation. The depths of Ottoman Greece were largely unknown territory to European travellers at this time. What fabulous discoveries lay in store for him, wondered the Abbé. What treasures had been left behind by this one of the greatest powers that the Greek world had ever known? One can imagine his anguish when, after braving numerous perils to reach Sparta, he discovered that barely anything remained of this great city-state. Indeed, the paucity of material was such that it seems to have driven Fourmont slightly mad. Rather than admit that nothing existed, he invented in his account of Sparta a series of fabulous, non-existent monuments – altars for human sacrifice, elaborate records of treaties between Sparta and Jerusalem, lists of priestesses and kings that stretched back to antiquity. To disguise his act of forgery, lest any later traveller try to find these monuments, he even pretended to have destroyed them, protesting that as a decent Christian he couldn’t allow such pagan works to survive. It would take scholars decades before they could unravel the extent of Fourmont’s deceit.

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Long Live Latin by Nicola Gardini & Vox Populi by Peter Jones

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May 2020, no. 421

What is the value of useless knowledge? One of the by-products of the rise of artificial intelligence is that the realm of what one really needs to know to function in society is ever shrinking. Wikipedia makes learning facts completely redundant. Pub trivia competitions now seem a fundamentally anachronistic form of entertainment, like watching a jousting tournament in the age of artillery. One can appreciate the skill, but one also knows that its time has come and gone.

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How to Die: An Ancient guide to the end of life by Seneca, edited and translated by James S. Romm

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September 2018, no. 404

Studies of the ancient Mediterranean are increasingly popular. Once a privilege of the élite, whose schools prepared predominantly male students for tertiary study of Greek and Latin, Classics now has a much wider audience. This is partly the result of scholars such as Mary Beard (recently the recipient of a damehood) who ...

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