Our first speaker on September 9 will be Stephen Harrison and will talk on the following topic:

George Buchanan, Silvae 3: Desiderium Lutetiae

This paper presents an account of this poem by the Scot George Buchanan (1506-82), international scholar and teacher, tutor to Mary Queen of Scots and her son James VI, a leader of the Calvinist Scottish Reformation, royal minister, and perhaps the greatest Latin poet born in the British Isles. Silvae 3 (part of a book broadly based on Statius’ homonymous collection) is a work in which Buchanan represents through pastoral allegory his longing to return to Paris, the city where he had spent half his life, and which was written during his detention in Lisbon by the Inquisition (1551-2) on the grounds of unorthodox belief. The paper suggests that Silvae 3 is an intensely composed and highly allusive musical poem, which shows an interesting mixture of classical generic models (e.g., pastoral and elegy) as well as neo-Latin intertexts.

You will need a Columbia ID or a guest access QR to enter the Columbia campus. If you require guest access, please email Paraskevi Martzavou [pm2839@columbia.edu] at least 48 hours before the lecture.

** Please Bring a dictionary and laptop **

For more information, please contact Shante Tucker, Administrative Assistant, at st3516@columbia.edu.

Ancient Greek & Latin Placement Exam, August 27, 2025, 11:30 a.m.–1:30 p.m. in 616 Hamilton Hall

This is a sight exam; no dictionaries or grammatical aids may be used. 

The exam is open to CC, GS, and Barnard students, and no prior registration is needed.

Please contact Professor Kakkoufa with any questions at nikolas.kakkoufa@columbia.edu, and Barnard students should contact Professor Ellen Morris at emorris@barnard.edu

Placement tests are offered each year (in late August) to assist Columbia students (CC, GS, SEAS) who enter with prior knowledge of Greek or Latin in finding an appropriate course.

Hello everyone,

We are excited to invite you to the fourth and last talk of the Spring 2025 Semester!

Jake Haagenson (Columbia University) will give his talk entitled:

Socratic Ignorance in the First Alcibiades 

and Implications for Authenticity

The talk will occur on Friday, May 9th, at 4:10 p.m. EDT in Hamilton 603, in person and on Zoom. A reception will follow. 

If you would like to receive a Zoom link, please email Holly Axford (ha2694@columbia.edu). The Zoom link will be circulated the day before the talk.

Socratic Ignorance in the First Alcibiades 

and Implications for Authenticity

Abstract:

There is academic controversy over whether the First Alcibiades is a genuine work of Plato. Yuji Kurihara (2012) argues that one piece of evidence against authenticity is that, in the dialogue in question, Socrates expresses so-called “Socratic ignorance” as knowing (eidenai) that one does not know; whereas in works less doubtfully by Plato, such as the Apology, Socrates only avows that he thinks (oiesthai) he does not know. I agree with Kurihara that this is a difference that deserves readers’ attention. However, I offer that there are substantive reasons for Socrates’ use of eidenai to describe the cognitive attitude of one who is aware of her own ignorance. In order to make better sense of Socrates suggestive use of eidenai, I propose to turn from what commentators widely agree is a central concern of the First Alcibiades, self-knowledge, to the related conceptions of first-order knowledge that the dialogue evokes and, perhaps, explores. I argue that the First Alcibiades develops two criteria, one formal and the other substantive, for the sort of first-order knowledge that is the target of Socratic inquiry, especially in Platonic dialogues that ask so-called “ti esti” questions. I propose that the formal criterion holds that someone who knows (x) will not contradict herself concerning (x) and that the substantive criterion requires that someone who knows (x) will have an expert conception of (x). Based on these criteria, which allow one to diagnose knowledge or ignorance, Socrates is positioned to describe Socratic ignorance as knowing that one does not know. In that case, Socrates’ distinctive use of eidenai is motivated by the substance of the dialogue and denotes a philosophical innovation. I suggest, then, that if Socrates use of eidenai lends any indication concerning authenticity, the philosophical innovation backgrounding this use is of the sort very much at home in Plato’s corpus.

** Please Bring a dictionary and laptop **

For more information, please contact Shante Tucker, Administrative Assistant, at st3516@columbia.edu.

We invite you to attend and participate in a small gathering within the Classics Department that will focus on the character and importance of the Second Century BCE in work being done by department members. Discussion will include considerations of the possible distinctiveness of a "late Hellenistic" period, overlaps and divergences between Greek and Roman cultural fields during the second century, and many others. Especially at this late point of notice, this will be an informal event; participants will present works-in-progress of their ongoing research into all matters second-century. All are welcome and encouraged to present their ongoing work, in whatever stage of completion. We hope that you will join us!

The event will take place on Friday, May 9th from 11a-1p in Hamilton 618 and we hope to see you there.

The New Euripides Papyrus (P. Phil.. Nec. 23 v ):
Fresh Perspectives on Tragic Rhetoric

Abstract:

In November 2022, a team of archaeologists from the Egyptian mission at the necropolis of Philadelphia in Egypt unearthed from a tomb a papyrus that contained 97 (to a considerable extent otherwise unattested) lines of Euripides’ fragmentarily preserved tragedies Ino and Polyidos.  The papyrus was edited (in ZPE 230 [2024] 1-40) by Prof. John Gibert and Assistant Prof. Yvona Trnka Amrhein (University of Colorado Boulder), who launched a project towards interpreting this amazing new finding.

The present lecture, which derives from this project, will seek to explore the
debate (agon) in Euripides’ Polyidos preserved in 60 lines of this new papyrus text. It will investigate the structure of this debate, which takes place between King Minos and the seer Polyidos, representing political and intellectual authority, respectively; the agon’s rhetorical sophistication and underlying ideology; and raise questions about the impact of sophia (wisdom) on late fifth-century Athenian thought.

Hello everyone,

We are excited to invite you to the second talk of the Spring 2025 semester!

Thomas Biggs (University of St Andrews) will give his talk entitled

One is the Loneliest Number: Gnaeus Naevius and Livius Andronicus

The talk will occur on Tuesday, April 8th, at 4:10 p.m. EDT in Hamilton 702, in person and on Zoom. The reception will follow. 

If you would like to receive a Zoom link, please email Holly Axford (ha2694@columbia.edu). The Zoom link will be circulated the day before the talk.

One is the Loneliest Number

Gnaeus Naevius and Livius Andronicus

Abstract:

This lecture explores intertextuality at the beginnings of Latin literature. Its broader interests are in simultaneity and sequence: the circulation of literary works without clear priority relations, the scholarly desire to order texts, and the ways in which style, trends, and vibe relate to temporal and often spatial coexistence. Following the conventional chronology, it is Naevius who reacted against and availed himself of Livius Andronicus’ development of a poetics in Latin inflected by Greek epic and dramatic forms. There are, however, alternative ways of conceptualising the interaction between these poets, which include notions of authorship that privilege the collaborative, collective, and distributed. The Middle Republic was a fluid period of mobility, contact, and convergence. Andronicus’ dates were even contested in antiquity, and the details of all authorial biographies from the era are unreliable on such matters. If compositional timelines are more entangled than is typically allowed in histories of Roman literature, opening the modes of interpretation can only offer greater understanding of the ways these texts generate meaning. Accordingly, the second half of this paper untethers the fragments from chronology and embraces the fact that they were composed and first received within the same moment. The paper concludes with the productive power of indeterminacy. It suggests that scholars of early Latin poetics should adopt concepts like interaction and interdiscursivity alongside more entrenched notions of literary reference and allusion that depend on sequence.

New York Classical Club Greek and Latin Reading Contest

Saturday, 5 April 2025, 2 pm

***Back in person!***

Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, 15 E. 84th St.

Can you rhapsodize like Homer or orate like Cicero? Come and compete against other Greek and Latin enthusiasts and win these prizes:

Prizes for the Oral Reading of Greek: 1st: $300; 2nd: $200; 3rd: $100.

Prizes for the Oral Reading of Latin: 1st: $300; 2nd: $200; 3rd: $100.

Any college or university student is eligible to compete. Contestants may compete for both the Greek and Latin prizes or for either one. Memorization is not required; feel free to read from a script.

Choose one of the following passages:

Greek: Plato, Apology 41c7 (Ἀλλὰ καὶ ...) to d9 (... μέμφεσθαι) OR Homer, Iliad 9.406-420

Latin: Cicero, First Catilinarian 32-33 OR Catullus 3

To register, please e-mail Katharina Volk (kv2018@columbia.edu) by March 29th.

“An ancient commentary on Thucydides in the Bodleian Library”
4:10 PM, Friday 4 April, 603 Hamilton
Dr Ivan Matijašić, Assistant Professor of Ancient Greek History at Ca’ Foscari University Venice (Italy),

Dr Ivan Matijašić is Assistant Professor of Ancient Greek History at Ca’ Foscari University Venice (Italy). He received his PhD from the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa in 2015 and held research and teaching positions in Münster, Newcastle, Siena, Venice (Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow in 2022), and the Harvard Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington DC. His research interests span Greek historiography, ancient geography, epigraphy, and the history of classical scholarship. He has published two books (Shaping the Canons of Ancient Greek Historiography, De Gruyter 2018; Timachidas Rhodius, Brill 2020), more than thirty articles, and has edited Herodotus – The Most Homeric Historian? (Histos Supplement 2022), (with Luca Iori) Thucydides in the ‘Age of Extremes’: Academia and Politics (History of Classical Scholarship Supplement 2022), and (with Sergio Brillante) Nuovi approcci alla critica letteraria antica: tra storia e storiografia (Special Issue, Maia:Rivista di letterature classiche 75 (2023), 5-140).

He is finalising, together with Tim Rood (Oxford) and Daniel Sutton (Cambridge), a book on British classicist and politician J. Enoch Powell and Thucydides and he is working broadly on Thucydides as well as the relationship between classical scholarship and politics in the 20th century. He has a short-term Fellowship from the New York Public Library and is staying in New York from March 31 to April 18, 2025 to carry out research on the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars.

Paul Kosmin (Harvard University) will discuss The Ancient Shore (Harvard UP, 2024)

Please join us for our Undergraduate Open House on February 26, 2025 from 11:30a-1pm in 618 Hamilton Hall. We look forward to seeing you !

Ellen McLaughlin (Barnard College) will discuss The Greek Plays 2: Ajax in Iraq, Kissing the Floor, Penelope, Mercury’s Footpath, The Oresteia (Theater Communications Group, 2024)

** Please Bring a dictionary and laptop **

For more information, please contact Shante Tucker, Administrative Assistant, at st3516@columbia.edu.

Good morning, All. 

We encourage everyone to attend this dissertation workshop, scheduled for Friday, January 24th, from 10:30 a.m. to 1 p.m.

Further details are below.

Hello everyone,

We are excited to invite you to the fourth and last talk of the Fall 2024 Semester!

Luke Lea (Columbia University) will give his talk entitled Good “Because of Itself” in Republic II. The talk will occur on Friday, December 6th, at 4:10 p.m. EDT in Hamilton 603 and on Zoom. A reception will follow. 

If you would like to receive a Zoom link, please email Holly Axford (ha2694@columbia.edu). The Zoom link will be circulated the day before the talk. 

Our speaker has kindly agreed to precirculate an abstract, pasted below. A poster for the event is also attached to the bottom of this email.

We hope to see you all there!

All the best,

Holly Axford, Gia Chen, Paraskevi Martzavou, Umberto Verdura, and Gareth Williams

Columbia Classics Lectures Series Co-Organizers

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Title: Good “Because of Itself” in Republic II.

Abstract: Early in Republic II, Socrates accepts a challenge from Glaucon. The Challenge is to show that the just life is better than the unjust life, but Glaucon will not accept any old argument that this is so. Socrates must praise justice as something valuable “because of itself” and without any reference to the value it has “because of what comes to be from it”. In agreeing to praise justice in this way, Socrates may seem to pledge that his defense of the just life will bracket any valuable consequences being just may bring the just person. Yet later formulations of what appears to be the same Challenge expect that Socrates will rest his case for the value of justice on some things that most modern readers would consider among its consequences. And indeed the argument he develops in Books II-IX relies on things that should seem to count for modern readers among justice’s consequences: the happiness and pleasure justice brings about for its possessor, the work justice does in the just person’s soul, the outcome resulting from this work, etc. In resting his defense of the value of the just life on these consequences of justice, does Socrates violate the terms of The Challenge? I argue that he does not. The Challenge, rightly understood, tasks Socrates not with praising justice as intrinsically good (which would require bracketing all its consequences) but as good by nature. Something can be good by nature in virtue of certain consequences it produces.

** Please Bring a dictionary and laptop **

For more information, please contact Shante Tucker, Administrative Assistant, at st3516@columbia.edu.

Event link: https://sofheyman.org/events/celebrating-recent-work-by-john-ma

Join us for our New Books Series event honoring Polis: A New History of the Ancient Greek City-State from the Early Iron Age to the End of Antiquity by John Ma. In this landmark book, John Ma provides a new history of the polis, charting its spread and development into a common denominator for hundreds of communities from the Black Sea to North Africa and from the Near East to Italy.

Professor Ma will be joined by panelists Richard Billows, Ellen Morris, Dan-el Padilla Peralta, and Seth Schwartz.

Tuesday, December 3, 2024, 6:15 pm EST | In person at the Heyman Center and online via Zoom

Registration required 

CU/BC ID holders must also register in advance

On Friday, November 22nd. Professor Jeffrey Ulrich (Rutgers University) will be presenting in person his new book The Shadow of an Ass. Philosophical Choice and Aesthetic Experience in Apuleius' Metamorphoses (University of Michigan Press), and he will also talk about the process of transforming a Ph.D. dissertation into a book

Shane Butler (Johns Hopkins University) will give his talk entitled Cicero’s Regret: Classics and the Atmospheric Turn. The talk will occur on Friday, November  15th, at 4:10 p.m. EDT in Hamilton 603 and on Zoom. A reception will follow. 

If you would like to receive a Zoom link, please email Holly Axford (ha2694@columbia.edu). The Zoom link will be circulated the day before the talk.

Title: Cicero’s Regret: Classics and the Atmospheric Turn

Abstract: The Late Antique poet Ausonius tells us, in passing, that the noun paenitentia (regret) is found nowhere in Cicero. The claim is true, and this paper uses it as the starting point for an exploration of the Latin language of affect, with particular attention to impersonal verbs, both of affect and of weather. This will lead us to interlocutors in a wide range of fields: philosophy of mind, affect theory, phenomenology, “atmospherology,” and historical linguistics, among others. It will also shed light on some of Cicero’s most intimate and anguished letters. This paper thereby offers an initial attempt to consider what the “atmospheric turn” can do for Classics, and vice versa.