classics 
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6/4/2023
Recovering the Story of the Empress Messalina After a Roman Cancellation
by Honor Cargill-Martin
After the empress Valeria Messalina's fatal fall from favor with her husband Claudius, her name and image were stricken from public and private spheres, an episode that reveals the tightly-regulated dissemination of imperial women's images (and puts current "cancel culture" panic and whisper networks into perspective).
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SOURCE: The Atlantic
5/12/2023
Cleopatra's Daughter and Other Key Figures of the Multicultural Roman Empire
by Mary Beard
Jane Draycott relates the stories of figures like King Juba II of Mauretania in north Africa, who was reared in Rome as a captive and installed by Augustus to lead a puppet buffer state, which shed important light on the diversity within the empire and the multiple ways that Rome exercised power over its vast dominions.
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11/13/2022
Are the Modern Stoics Really Epicureans?
by Emily A. Austin
The Modern Stoicism movement has embraced the classical philosophy, often as part of project of disciplining emotion with rationality. Perhaps adherents should consider the rival philosophy of Epicureanism, which is even more in line with the modern embrace of science.
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SOURCE: Antigone Journal
10/15/2022
Adventures in Decoding Cicero's "Consolation"
by Mike Fontaine
After scholars argued inconclusively for centuries about whether a treatise on grief attributed to Cicero was a forgery, a computer program suggested it was. The author says the computer got it right, and expands on his own investigation.
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SOURCE: Jewish Journal
8/8/2022
What Does Dante Tell Us About the End of the Ukraine War?
by Tad Daley
In "On Monarchy" Dante offered the first proposed solution in literature to the problem of war – a world government.
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SOURCE: The Guardian
9/29/2022
Joyce Reynolds Transformed History of Imperial Rome
Using painstaking archaeological methods, Reynolds laid a new foundation for understanding how Rome related to its eastern provinces.
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SOURCE: Humanities
9/5/2022
All History is Revisionist
by James M. Banner Jr.
"The collective noun for a group of historians is an “argumentation,” and for good reason. At the very dawn of historical inquiry in the West, historians were already wrestling over the past, attacking each other."
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7/3/2022
What Americans Might Learn About Political Collapse from the Classical Greeks and Romans
by Daniel Noah Moses
The right traces political turmoil in the US to the supposed abandonment of the classical canon. But reading those works might not teach the lessons they want about hierarchy, authority, and political collapse.
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6/12/2022
As an Island, Britain Became a Stage for Roman Politicians
by Richard Hingley
The conquest of Britain mattered to Roman emperors not for the island's strategic significance, but because it signaled a ruler's mastery of the ancient deity Oceanus and thus his worthiness in domestic politics.
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4/3/2022
More War Crimes Will Follow in Ukraine
by Fred Zilian
To those who believed that war and war crimes in Europe in the 21st century had become unthinkable, Thucydides offers us a simple yet powerful statement: “War is a violent teacher.”
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SOURCE: Society for Classical Studies
3/14/2022
Sampling the Epic in Kendrick Lamar's "Mortal Man"
by Justine McConnell
Remembering the essential orality of classical epics can help to understand them as works that have been sampled and remixed, and to place contemporary popular culture in dialogue with that tradition.
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3/13/2022
Deadly Cucumbers and Roof Tiles: The Lines Separating Civilians from Combat Have Always Been Blurred
by Nadya Williams
Stories of ordinary Ukrainians resisting invasion are framed as heroic, but this can conceal the trauma and violence inflicted on civilians in warfare, both modern and ancient.
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SOURCE: Public Books
2/7/2022
Finding Nowhere: Mapping the Future Study of Antiquity
by Stephanie Wong and Sarah E. Bond
This is a conversation inaugurating a broader discussion about considering the ancient world beyond the fragmented histories of Greece, Rome, or "the west."
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SOURCE: WGBH
1/4/2022
New Boston MFA Exhibit Shows Museum's Complex History of Censoring Queer Desire
by Erin L. Thompson
"When I first visited Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, as a young and deeply closeted queer college student, I found myself wondering if the museum possessed ancient Greek vases decorated with anything other than sex scenes."
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SOURCE: Chronicle of Higher Education
12/3/2021
A Descent into Textual Paranoia
by Christopher S. Celenza
"Doing one's own research" in an environment of proliferating information and few gatekeepers isn't new to the internet age.
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12/5/2021
What if Hannibal Had Won?
by Philip Freeman
Historians' dependence on the accounts of Roman historians has distorted modern understanding of Hannibal, the Carthaginians, and the different possibilities for the world if he had succeeded in defeating Rome.
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SOURCE: Black Perspectives
11/11/2021
Mapping Black Antiquity
by Sarah Derbew
Ancient Greek literature is full of depictions of African people that affirm their participation in classical antiquity. Why have these been submerged?
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SOURCE: Foreign Policy
11/1/2021
Boris Johnson’s Roman Fantasies
by Mateusz Fafinsky
Boris Johnson's recent statements that the collapse of Rome was caused by open borders are well out of step with historical understanding of the fragmenting of the Roman empire, but in line with a long legacy of political misappropriation of Rome as an allegory for the danger of immigrants.
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SOURCE: Inside Higher Ed
9/20/2021
Why a Liberal Education is Worth Defending
by Steve Mintz
Roosevelt Montas’s forthcoming "Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation" makes a powerful case for engagment with the Great Books as a way to subvert hierarchies and promote equity.
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SOURCE: National History Center and Woodrow Wilson Center
9/17/2021
Stoic Wisdom: Ancient Lessons for Modern Resilience (Thursday, 9/23)
Nancy Sherman addresses the Washington History Seminar to discuss the maladaptation of Stoicism to the modern self-help industry and a fuller understanding of the lessons of the school. Zoom, September 23, 4:00 EDT.
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