Charting the Spartan Mirage
March 17, 2015
Dr Philip Davies discusses the intellectual background to a conference on Plutarch and Sparta, to be held in Nottingham on 31 March. At the core of any research on Sparta lies a peculiar methodological dilemma. Sparta is one of the most renowned of the ancient Greek city-states, and after its defeat of Athens in …
Sappho’s Beloved
March 5, 2015
Doctoral student Harriet Lander introduces a case-study from her work on the history of translations of Sappho. Solon, according to Aelian, asked his nephew to teach him one of Sappho’s poems, ‘So that I may learn it and then die’. This desire to know and understand Sappho’s lyrics has been a pervasive attitude from antiquity …
Singing the blues
March 1, 2015
Mark Bradley hunts for the ‘missing’ colours in the ancient world The ancient Greeks and Romans probably would have wondered what the fuss is about. They would have seen a dress that looked slightly different depending on the viewer’s angle. They might have thought it peculiar as fashion – more like a costume for comedy …
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Censorship, gender and power: Fordyce and Catullus 58
March 12, 2015
Helen Lovatt considers the relationship between bowdlerising a classical text and broader questions of censorship. Issues of free speech are still very much debated: recently the classicist Mary Beard was caught up in a twitter storm about no-platforming speakers at universities, in particular certain radical feminists whose views offend some in the transgender community. It …
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