A Midsummer Night Reverie (2): more lost tragedies
August 15, 2014
In this post I (belatedly) publish the second part of Alan Sommerstein’s thoughts on Nick Lowe’s paper on tragic fragments, delivered to the Nottingham Branch of the Classical Association. In the first part of this post, I reported Nick Lowe’s top ten lost tragedies from his excellent paper at the AGM of the Nottingham …
Classical festivities in Edinburgh: A handy list
August 6, 2014
Lynn Fotheringham asks what’s on at the Edinburgh Festival this year and finds many interesting classical productions. For many years now my theatre-going has tended to focus on the Classics-related – not just performances of Greek drama; over my fifteen years in Nottingham, I remember Heaney’s Burial at Thebes and Berkoff’s Oedipus at the Playhouse, …
A Midsummer Night Reverie: ten top “lost” tragedies (and more) (1)
August 3, 2014
This post is by Professor Alan Sommerstein. A few weeks ago – on 24 June, Midsummer Day, to be precise (whence my title) – the Nottingham branch of the Classical Association held its Annual General Meeting (at Loughborough, whose admirable schools and teachers have long been one of the branch’s mainstays). Between the business meeting …
Classics and the First World War: ‘Stand in the trench, Achilles’
July 13, 2014
A hundred years since the summer of 1914: people’s minds are turning to the First World War. I thought it might be of interest to spend a little time here drawing attention to some of the various ways in which this war was experienced, described and commemorated in connection with Classics. This poem was composed …
Simaetha revisited (1)
July 4, 2014
How silly is it to use a parody or joke to flag up features on an ancient text? In my post Simaetha’s letter, I provided a letter to an agony aunt, as if written by Simaetha, the speaker of Theocritus 2. This poem (a favourite of mine, which I teach as part of the first …
CA report: Classics in Nottingham (2)
July 1, 2014
Nottingham Teaching Associate Philip Davies and PhD student Peter Davies (no relation) report on the second of two Sparta panels at the recent CA conference. See here for their first report. The second of the two panels on Sparta at the recent Nottingham CA conference expanded our focus beyond the citizen body of Sparta, considering …
CA report: Sparta in Nottingham (1)
June 18, 2014
Nottingham Teaching Associate Philip Davies and PhD student Peter Davies (no relation) report on the first of two Sparta panels at the recent CA conference. You can now read their second report here. Nottingham recently hosted the Annual Conference of the Classical Association, the biggest Classics and Ancient History gathering in the UK. The conference …
Beginnings and Endings (77)
June 12, 2014
And another thing… A few weeks ago I posted about beginnings and endings in ancient literature, and called the post ‘Beginnings and endings (1)’. So I must go on… Sometimes the question ‘how can an ancient poem end?’ matters. One striking ending in a modern poem is Keats’ sonnet ‘On first looking into Chapman’s Homer’; …
Simaetha’s letter
June 7, 2014
Strange things happen during the marking period… In between thinking about the first year literature course and whether I should have included more Hellenistic poetry, and looking at m’learned colleague Esther Eidinow’s ancient solutions to modern problems on this blog, I somehow came up with this: an appeal for a modern solution to an ancient …
Pompeii: The Curious Case of the Body Casts
May 29, 2014
Katharina Lorenz asks why the casts made of bodies in Pompeii are so compelling (and so widespread in popular culture). I am not a great fan of sword-and-sandal films, I am afraid. The Life of Brian is about what I am comfortable encountering on the screen antiquity-wise; and when it comes to Ben Hur, admittedly …
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