Egypt’s most direct connections were and are within the Africa where it is sited. Ancient Egypt is often seen as a civilization on the edge of the ancient Near East rather than through the more immediate lens of the regions closest to it. Recent scholarship has enhanced understanding of the African context, and it uses a more holistic…

In a special collaboration through the Humanities Initiative's new Media & Meaning series, we are proud to offer a breakfast conversation with filmmaker Uberto Pasolini (The Full Monty, The Return) and Profs. Rachael DeLue, Barbara…

On February 15th, Uberto Pasolini, the director of THE RETURN, will be present at the Princeton Garden Theatre for a post-film discussion moderated by Barbara Graziosi, the Ewing Professor of Greek at Princeton University and chair of the Classics Department.

In this retelling of Homer’s Odyssey, Ralph Fiennes…

Empowered by a love for the Classical world and the JCL, a group of Princeton students — from states ranging from Florida, Georgia, New Jersey, New Hampshire, Virginia, to Wisconsin — founded the first annual Princeton Certamen held on March 24, 2018. As the tournament enters its 6th year, we are excited to continue to promote love for Classics…

This talk offers a study of an epic topos – the storm at sea – in two of the earliest Latin epics written in Spanish and Portuguese America: José de Anchieta’s De Gestis Mendi de Saa (Coimbra 1563) and Francisco de Pedrosa’s Austriaca sive Naumachia (c. 1580). Anchieta and Pedrosa stand in a long tradition of early…

A panel discussion on poetry, pedagogy, classics, and the creative process, celebrating the Special Poetry Issue of The Classical Outlook. 

featuring
A.E. Stallings
Charles Martin
Chris Childers
Emma Hunter
Meredith Bergmann…

Please join us for a symposium honoring the life, work, and legacy of Boethius on the occasion of the (supposed) 1500th anniversary of his death!

Short talks and discussions will be led by                  

Claire Apostoli …

The idea that medieval Islamicate science is part of a linear, unified ‘tradition’ linking Greco-Roman antiquity and European modernity owes its popularization to the Jewish orientalist Max Meyerhof’s essay “From Alexandria to Baghdad”, originally delivered in German to the Prussian Academy of Sciences in 1930. Although under-theorized by…

There is a strange, structural parallel between the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh and On Nature, a long philosophical poem by the ancient Greek thinker Parmenides. Both poems depict the main character passing through the gate by which time flow into our mortal world. On the other side of this gate, the character…

A conversation with award-winning Anon(ymous) playwright Naomi Iizuka and Barbara Graziosi, Princeton’s Ewing Professor of Greek Language and Literature and Chair of  the Classics Department, will be presented on November 7 at 5:30 p.m. in the Berlind Rehearsal Room at McCarter…

Critique queries the political subtexts and didactic intentions of Euripides’s Orestes. Can we tolerate looking beyond the political and the didactic and asking different sorts of questions? One might consider other kinds of work that Orestes does: how does the play transport its recipients into its storyworld? how does…

Ekphrasis when applied to contemporary literature is typically used to refer to the description of an artistic object or artefact within a poem or other piece of writing. Ekphrasis in ancient Greek and Latin literature attracts a much broader field of reference. Where it is defined by the rhetoricians, it is referred to as the ability for a…

The refoundation of Sikyon in 303 BCE by the Macedonian general and future king of Macedon Demetrios Poliorketes at a new location may have been primarily dictated by geopolitical concerns, but it also gave its founder the opportunity to materialize his ambitious urbanistic and architectural plans. The results of the past and current…

In Classics, Love, Revolution: The Legacies of Luigi Settembrini, Barbara Graziosi and Andrea Capra intervene in current debates about classics and its relation to revolutionary ruptures, nationalist movements, and identity politics today. They begin with The Neoplatonists, an explicit love story posing as the work of an…

In this lecture, author, critic, classicist, and translator Daniel Mendelsohn (*89, *94), whose new translation of Homer's Odyssey will be published next April, takes his audience into the heart of the process of translating. Beginning with the dauntingly enigmatic adjective that Homer uses to describe his hero in the first line…

No word is more associated with late antiquity than ‘transformation,’ a term signaling a departure from Gibbon’s melodramatic narrative of decline and collapse of the Roman empire, for which Christianity was partially to blame. But transformation has its own romances, not to mention its own exceptionalism, and so this lecture will offer an…

The Classics Department is co-sponsoring this first of its kind, three-day conference organized by Marc Domingo Gygax (Princeton) and Manuel…

or on Zoom at https://princeton.zoom.us/j/92435122246

Racial reckoning was a recurrent theme throughout the summer of 2020, a response to George Floyd’s murder and the unprecedented impact of COVID on marginalized groups.

In this talk I look at the Chinese interest in the Western Classical World in a long-term perspective, from antiquity to present. I shall reveal the main frameworks into which Graeco-Roman concepts were and are anchored and discuss the degree to which Western Classics had and have an impact on Chinese discourses, and vice-versa.

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Comparative studies of Ancient Greece and the Near East have become a well-established subfield of classics, with a growing number of scholars specializing in various geographies and cultural fields in which the Greeks interacted with others. At the same time, discontent with the distinction between Greece and the Near East has grown as it…