Framing the Gods

Stone Altars and Visual Boundaries in Roman Britain and Syria Blair Betik(Yale)5:00 pm Wednesday, 6 MarchRoom 109 Gordon House Despite its instrumental and ubiquitous place in sacred ritual practice in the ancient Mediterranean world, the altar has been overlooked and under-theorized by modern scholars of the ancient Roman Empire. While existing scholarship evaluates Roman altars …

In the Search of Middle Persian Alexander

Ankur Desval(SOAS) 5:00 pm Wednesday, 21 FebruaryRoom 109 Gordon House It is perhaps one of the most contested and tantalising questions in Middle Persian studies as to whether an Alexander Romance existed in the Middle Persian language or not. I will aim to give an overview of the factors that play chief roles in this …

Notes on Seres, the Traders before Silk Road

Zeyu Jiang(UCL) 5:00 pm Wednesday, 20 MarchRoom 109 Gordon House This talk will mention the trading networks that existed before the establishment of the Silk Road in the 2nd Century BCE, mainly focusing on the role played by traders, highlighting their contribution to the exchange of goods, cultural ideas, and scientific knowledge across vast empires.  Notes …

The Parodos of Euripides’ IT

A Note on the Metre of 126-27 Nathaniel Agnew (UCL) 5:00 pm Wednesday, 10 JanuaryRoom 109 Gordon House This short talk will take a closer look at the sequences of five long syllables in lines 126 and 127 of Euripides' tragedy Iphigenia in Tauris. Modern scholars take these lines to be so-called double drag dochmiacs. …

Reading Livy through a Local Lens

A Study of Colony Notices in the Ab Urbe Condita Talia Boylan(Yale University) 5:00 pm Wednesday, 7 FebruaryRoom 109 Gordon House The Augustan historian Livy provides us with many and various accounts of Roman colonization, most of which he relates in colony notices— short, annalistic passages which chronicle the Romans’ colonizing activities in a relatively …

Classics and Austerity

Tempest and Armitage Thomas Munro(Yale) 5:00 pm Wednesday, 24 JanuaryRoom 109 Gordon House In this paper I analyse Kae Tempest’s Brand New Ancients (2013) and selected poems from Simon Armitage’s poetry collection The Unaccompanied (2017), along with his stage play Missing Presumed Dead (2015). I consider their use of classical imagery and mythology to engage …

Lyceum Community Classics Seminar 2023-2024

Call for Papers Term 2  The Lyceum Classics Community Seminar is looking for three speakers for Spring Term 2024 (Monday, 8 January 2024 – Friday, 22 March 2024). PhD students enrolled at London universities and visiting students hosted at London institutions who wish to speak are encouraged to submit a brief summary (up to 200 words) of …

Lyceum Seminars 2023–2024 Term 1

We are pleased to announce the dates of the Lyceum Seminars for the First Term. The seminars will take place in Room 106, Gordon House, 29 Gordon Square, WC1H 0PP Time: 5:00pm – 6:00pm Please find below the dates of the seminars: 04/10/2023 18/10/2023 01/11/2023 15/11/2023 29/11/2023 13/12/2023

Call for Papers Lyceum Community Classics Seminar 2023-2024

The UCL Department of Greek and Latin is pleased to announce that the Lyceum Classics Community Seminar will continue to run in the 2023-2024 academic year. As a forum of peers where postgraduate students can present their work in a relaxed setting, the Lyceum aims at giving doctorands practice in speaking before an audience, while …

Smouldering Similes: Understanding Desire in the Metamorphoses

“… the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile.” Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol Ovidian similes are essentially liminal spaces. Existing work, while trying to neatly categorise them, has also noted their resistance to a narrow understanding.[1] The paradox of similarity and distance, intrinsic to a simile makes it a complex and layered literary …

HELLENOAEGYPTIACATHE CASE OF SAPPHO’S AND HIPPONAX’S EGYPTIAN WINE

In the following paper, it will be argued that the words ὄλπις (cf. Sapph. Fr. 141 LP) and ἔρπις (cf.Hippon. Fr. 79 Degani), both being Greek renderings of the Egyptian word irp (“wine”), reflect anold pre-Faiyumic (cf. Hlp) and a pre-Boḥairic (cf. Hrp) pronunciation of irp respectively. Thisdiscrepancy reveals a paradigm shift in Graeco-Egyptian trade …

Money, money, money? Architectural innovation, economic advantage, and social responsibility in building projects

As the old adagio goes, architectural innovation is informed by economic considerations: namely, the transition from one building technology to another is determined by issues of speed and of costs, whether financial or human. This is also how the “concrete revolution” has been explained. Both P. Davies (2017) and M. Mogetta (2021), for instance, argue …