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.

The Classical Studies Graduate Program is pleased to announce that Professor Simcha Gross (University of Pennsylvania), author of Babylonian Jews and Sasanian Imperialism in Late Antiquity (Cambridge UP, 2024), will be on campus to discuss his book on Friday, November 8, at 11am in Room 607 Hamilton Hall.

This in-person event has an author-meets-readers format. We are circulating in advance the Introduction and Chapter 5 (pages 1-32 and 197-238). Also included is Chapter 1, for those interested in learning more about the interventions discussed in the Introduction. Please see the selections attached.

After an introduction by Professor Seth Schwartz (CU Departments of Classics and History), Professor Gross will discuss the book, engage in dialogue with Ayelet Wenger (CLST), and answer questions from attendees in a seminar-style format.

A short reception will follow the event. We hope that you can join us!

**Please note that if you are not a CUID cardholder, you must register for access to campus using this form by 4pm on Thursday, November 7**

Title: Vulnerable Bodies: Roman Medical Research and the Enslaved.

Abstract: Roman doctors periodically required bodies, both living and dead, for medical demonstration and research. There were many vulnerable bodies in Roman society--animals, the enslaved, the impoverished, the outcast, and the conquered--and this talk will explore which bodies doctors seem to have favored for which purposes. As it turns out, their use of the enslaved appears to have been surprisingly curtailed. The talk will therefore also address Galen's perspectives on slavery and the enslaved and explore the potential boundaries to the exploitation of this particularly vulnerable population.

Are you interested in Religious Studies at Columbia?

Drop in for an informal information session! Food and Drink will be provided.

Attention undergraduates in Classics, Ancient Studies, and Hellenic Studies!

Attend our Open House on Friday, October 18th, from 11:45 to 1:45, and meet fellow students, the Director of Undergraduate Studies, and other department faculty and staff. Learn about the majors, minors, and Spring courses. 

Coffee and a light brunch will be served. 

On Friday, October 11th, from 4:10–5 pm in 716 Philosophy Hall, the Classical Studies Graduate Program is hosting an information session for undergraduates interested in learning more about the BA/MA option through the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

The Classical Studies program offers a unique interdepartmental and interdisciplinary training in the study of the ancient world, drawing on faculty from the departments of Art History & Archaeology, Classics, History, and Philosophy. If you are a prospective applicant in your junior year or in the first semester of your senior year, we invite you to learn more about the requirements ahead of the application deadline on November 13th. We also welcome students who are considering applying in upcoming semesters.

Title: Social Networks of Debt, 51-50 BCE

Abstract:

Focusing on the 50s BCE, and especially the Ciceronian corpus of letters from his Cilician governorship, this paper tries to strike a balance between economic and socio-political interpretations of debt on the eve of Civil War. The first half of the paper gives a state of the conversation over the last 50 years with a special eye to improvements in models for both thinking about debt on a global scale and how new data has changed our understanding of the Roman monetary supply. The second half of the paper addresses the reading of anecdotal literary sources and the difficulties of interpretation, trying to answer the question: are socio-political factors driving the economic factor or vice versa?

** 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 28, 2024, 11 a.m.–2 p.m. in 616 Hamilton Hall

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

Please contact Professor Kakkoufa with any questions nikolas.kakkoufa@columbia.edu

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

Title: Surface Tensions: Mutable Materials, Sympotic Sociability, and Bodily Surfaces in the Theognidea

Abstract: In this paper, I will explore the relationship between bodily surfaces and sympotic sociability focused on the corpus of the Theognidea. In particular, I explore the recurring issues of social mutability and adaptability in sympotic and polis communities staged as they are presented in the Theognidea. I argue that the body’s surface, especially the skin (χρώς, χροιή), brings together ethical problems of surfaces/presentation, concealing/deception, and mutability, most clearly articulated through surface-material associations with counterfeit metals (Thgn. 118-28, 447-52) and the adaptable body of the octopus (213-18, 1071-74; Plut. de amic. Multit. 96f). What I suggest this reading of surfaces provides is a way to conceive of a material alignment between the poetic program of the Theognideaand the sympotic world the collection constructs, pegged to the ethical dilemmas of trust and deceit, as well as praise and blame. This nexus of bodily and material surfaces demonstrates how archaic poetry can materially enmesh the body of the symposiast in the occasion the poetry creates as a way to both conceal and reveal these ethical challenges and realities simultaneously at the levels of poet, audience, and poetry.

The Earle Prize exam will be given Wednesday, April 17th, from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. in 618 Hamilton Hall!

Columbia University’s Department of Political Science, Department of Classics, Department of Italian, and Columbia University Press present:

Book Talk “On Niccolò Machiavelli: The Bonds of Politics” with Gabriele Pedullà in conversation with Nadia Urbinati and Gareth Williams.

Link to the Event

Five hundred years after his death, Niccolò Machiavelli still draws an astonishing range of contradictory characterizations. Was he a friend of tyrants? An ardent republican loyal to Florence’s free institutions? The father of political realism? A revolutionary populist? A calculating rationalist? A Renaissance humanist? A prophet of Italian unification? A theorist of mixed government? A forerunner to authoritarianism? The master of the dark arts of intrigue?

This book provides a vivid and engaging introduction to Machiavelli’s life and works that sheds new light on his originality and relevance. Gabriele Pedullà—a leading Italian expert and acclaimed writer—offers fresh readings of the Florentine thinker’s most famous writings, The Prince and the Discourses on Livy, as well as lesser-known texts. A new and often surprising Machiavelli emerges—one closer to his time but also better suited to inform our own. Pedullà’s portrait of Machiavelli highlights his close attention to social and emotional bonds, staunch opposition to oligarchy, keen awareness of the economic side of power dynamics, and strong preference for history over philosophy as a guide for leaders.

This book recovers the excitement Machiavelli roused in his first readers for a twenty-first-century audience, capturing his capacity to provoke, both then and now, with unconventional ideas and startling insights.

This book is part of the Core Knowledge series, which takes its motivation from the goals, ideals, challenges, and pleasures of Columbia College's Core Curriculum.

Gabriele Pedullà is professor of Italian literature at the University of Roma Tre University. His English-language books include In Broad Daylight: Movies and Spectators After the Cinema (2012) and Machiavelli in Tumult: The Discourses on Livy and the Origins of Political Conflictualism (2018). His publications in Italian include award-winning fiction as well as an annotated edition of The Prince.

Nadia Urbinati is Kyriakos Tsakopoulos Professor of Political Theory at Columbia University. Her books include Democracy Disfigured (2014) and A Cosmopolitanism of Nations (2009).

Gareth Williams is an Anthon Professor of Latin Language and Literature at Columbia University. He has published extensively on Ovid, Roman philosophy, and classical reception.

Event contact information:
Meredith Howard
212-853-5329
mh2306@columbia.edu

Greetings Everyone 

Dr. Kostas Vlassopoulos will be visiting Columbia University to give a talk entitled 'What is slave agency and how did it affect the history of antiquity? at 4:10 pm in 618 Hamilton hall

Please share with your department, and we look forward to seeing you there!