Classics Commons^™

Rethinking Greece: Despina Lalaki On Hellenism, State-Building, Archaeology And The "Democratic West", Despina Lalaki

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Western Classics In Modern Japan (German), Frank Jacob

Publications and Research

A presentation paper (invited guest lecture) delivered at the Institute of Ancient History at Marburg University, Germany, July 12, 2016.

The Cradle Of Democracy And The Longue Durée Of A Crisis: Some Thoughts From The Perspective Of Historical Sociology, Despina Lalaki

Publications and Research

The relationship between Modern Greece and the West has always been a complex and tortuous one. Greece as “the cradle of democracy” – a construct at the intersection of western modernity’s political imaginary and Greek national identity – a terribly familiar and powerful cliché which to a great extent, still today, informs our imagination and politics has been at the heart of this relationship. It is rather a truism to suggest that democracy lies at the political core of the civilization that the West insists offering to the rest of the world, yet we tend to forget that this is …

Classics And Rockefeller Center: John D. Rockefeller Jr. And The Use Of Classicism In Public Space, Jared A. Simard

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation situates the mythologically-inspired artwork of Rockefeller Center in the classical education of its sole proprietor, John D. Rockefeller Jr. I argue that his extensive classical education at the Browning School and Brown University led to an adult interest in the Classics. Through extensive, original archival research at the Rockefeller Archive Center and the Rockefeller Center Archive Center, I demonstrate that this interest was expressed through his philanthropy of prestigious institutions such as the American Academy in Rome, the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, and the excavations of the Athenian Agora. Colonial Williamsburg and Versailles are also …

Feral And Isolated Children From Herodotus To Akbar To Hesse: Heroes, Thinkers, And Friends Of Wolves, Karl Steel

Publications and Research

"In 1304, a small child of Hesse was taken by wolves, and lived with them for a while, eating well, learning to run on all fours, perhaps joining them in their raids on sheep and humans, until he was taken by hunters and forced to live, unhappily, in human society, compelled to learn to walk upright, and exhibited as a spectacle. This account, almost certainly legendary, belongs to a small set of similar stories of feral children from roughly the same time, which, unlike so many modern accounts of wild children, are not about isolation, deprivation, or a catastrophic separation …

An Exploration Of Early Romanization: A Comparative And Semiotic Approach, Mikel Wein

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Romanization became a popular academic topic after its initial proposal in 1915 by Francis Haverfield. Even today, it is maintained as a popular theory to explain how Rome came to dominate everything from the Italian peninsula to Roman Britain. Traditionally, Romanization has been framed using a theoretical framework of dominance through cultural diffusion. Several authors have challenged this dynamic, but have not framed this discussion within contexts of pre-Republican Roman expansion. This paper challenges the traditional framework and suggests utilizing a comparative and semiotic approach to evaluate early Roman expansion and Romanization. The paper also challenges the traditional definition of …

A Passage From Brooklyn To Ithaca: The Sea, The City And The Body In The Poetics Of Walt Whitman And C. P. Cavafy, Michael P. Skafidas

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This treatise is the first extensive comparative study of Walt Whitman and C. P. Cavafy. Despite the abundant scholarship dealing with the work and life of each, until now no critic has put the two poets together. Whitman’s poetry celebrates birth, youth, the self and the world as seen for the first time, while Cavafy’s diverts from the active present to resurrect a world whose key, in Eliot’s terms, is memory. Yet, I see the two poets conversing in the crossroads of the fin de siècle; the American Whitman and the Greek Cavafy embody the antithesis of hope and dislocation …

Creating With Anger: Contemplating Vendetta. An Analysis Of Anger In Italian And Spanish Women Writers Of The Early Modern Era, Luisanna Sardu Castangia

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the vast gamut of human emotions, anger is one of the most complex, provocative, and enduring. From Greek philosophers working in antiquity to today’s most recent theories on emotions, most scholars agree that anger has a multifaceted nature. This near universal agreement across the barriers of time and geography stems from the following facts: in order to exist, anger involves the participation of other emotions; anger does not have an opposite; anger leads an individual to engage in an act of self-analysis and in an evaluation of other individuals; and, finally, anger inspires action to right a wrong that …

Records Of The Latin Greek Institute, Brooklyn College

Finding Aids

This collection is comprised mostly of brochures, posters, and programs. Included within the 4 series of this collection are also photographs, correspondence, articles, newsletters, translated literature, and information on a major contributor of the Latin Greek Institute, Phyllis Goodhard Gordon. Newspaper Articles, programs, and posters that were too large to fit in standard boxes, were separated and condensed into one oversized box in this collection.

The Papers Of Procope Costas, Brooklyn College

Finding Aids

The Papers of Procope S. Costas consists primarily of Dr. Costas’s writings, mainly the dictionary that he had prepared (although never fully finished) entitled English Words Derived from the Greek. In addition to the six boxes that contain bound and unbound drafts of the dictionary Dr. Costas was working on, this collection is comprised of correspondence, personal information, miscellaneous items such as invoices and brochures, several citations, photographs of family and friends, as well as oversized materials including two LP’s (with manuals that Dr. Costas wrote).

Ancient Medicine: The Classical Roots Of The Medical Humanities, Michael Goyette, Emily Fairey, Brooklyn College Library And Academic It

Open Educational Resources

This site is for those interested in ancient medicine and the medical humanities, both at Brooklyn College and around the world.

The medical humanities is a multidisciplinary field that embraces the study of medicine through the lenses of literature, history, philosophy, the social sciences, and the arts in the context of applied medicine and medical ethics. It draws upon these diverse disciplines in pursuit of medical educational goals, and in its continued valuation of liberal education supports classical ideals of critical analysis and the importance of cultural awareness in the sickness and health of society and the individual.

The guide …

The Life Aquatic: Liquid Poetics And The Discourse Of Friendship In The Faerie Queene, Steven Swarbrick

Publications and Research

From Michel de Montainge’s essay “Of Friendship” to Jacques Derrida’s rearticulation of the former in The Politics of Friendship, scholars both early modern and modern have sought ways to address the fluid co-mixture of bodies from which the discourse of friendship can and does emerge. More recently still, new materialist thinkers of ontology have begun to shift our attention to the ways both human and nonhuman bodies inter-animate in the making of political, interpersonal, and artistic life worlds. Together with these investigations, I argue that an aquacentric account of relation is necessary to think the subject of friendship …

Why Are Grimms' Fairy Tales So Mysteriously Enchanting?, Ana Neophytou

Dissertations and Theses

No abstract provided.

Variations On A Theme: Contemporary Memorials To Harriet Tubman, Elise Anne Geltzer

Dissertations and Theses

No abstract provided.

Senecan Tragedy And Virgil's Aeneid: Repetition And Reversal, Timothy Hanford

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores the relationship between Senecan tragedy and Virgil's Aeneid, both on close linguistic as well as larger thematic levels. Senecan tragic characters and choruses often echo the language of Virgil's epic in provocative ways; these constitute a contrastive reworking of the original Virgilian contents and context, one that has not to date been fully considered by scholars. This study is organized according to three main themes that are argued to have strong intertextual aspects: repetition of the past, victor and vanquished, and maius nefas, or greater crime. In each case Seneca tragicus is seen to take a theme …

Ovid's Pentheus: An In-Depth Guide For Students And Teachers To A King's Anger And Fiery Oration, Benjamin Joffe

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Born out of my years of using traditional commentaries for Latin and Greek texts, both for myself as a student learning the language anew and then as a teacher sharing my experience with others &mdash and still learning the language years later &mdash this in&ndashdepth guide to Ovid's version of the story of Pentheus I have conceived as a reimagining of the genre, at once a vehicle designed to allow students to navigate their own ways through the literature and also a tool for building their analytical skills to apply liberally, earnestly, and enthusiastically to other Latin and Greek texts, …

The Interchange Of Plain Velar And Aspirate In Kronos/Chronos: A Case For Etymological Equivalence, Roberto Peter Bongiovanni

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Despite the current state of uncertainty regarding the etymology of Kronos, the equivalence long familiar to the ancients between Kronos and Chronos is still a moot point. Arguments denying their etymological equivalence can no longer firmly rely on linguistic arguments. It is therefore necessary to examine the validity of the time-honored interpretation of Kronos as the personification of Time. The solution to this problem is of considerable importance to Classical studies, since it will not so much as contribute to a better understanding of the myth of Kronos, as the interpretation of Kronos as Time is already familiar from ancient …

Unhinged: Kairos And The Invention Of The Untimely, Robert Leston

Publications and Research

Traditionally, kairos has been seen as a “timely” concept, and so invention is said to emerge from the timeliness of a cultural and historical situation. But what if invention was thought of as the potential to shift historical courses through the injection of something new or alien into a situation? This essay argues that kairos has not been able to free itself from its historical constraints because it has been bound to a human sense of temporality. By evolving along patterns different from print, the apparatus of the cinema developed in a way where it was not bound to illustrating …

Soldiers Of Science--Agents Of Culture: American Archaeologists In The Office Of Strategic Services (Oss), Despina Lalaki

Publications and Research

"Scientificity" and appeals to political independence are invaluable tools when institutions such as the American School of Classical Studies at Athens attempt to maintain professional autonomy. Nonetheless, the cooperation of scientists and scholars with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), among them archaeologists affiliated with the American School, suggests a constitutive affinity between political and cultural leadership. This relationship is here mapped in historical terms, while, at the same time, sociological categorizations of knowledge and its employment are used in order to situate archaeologists in their broader social and political context and to evaluate their work not merely as agents …

Inscriptional Evidence Of Pre-Islamic Classical Arabic: Selected Readings In The Nabataean, Musnad, And Akkadian Inscriptions, Saad D. Abulhab

Publications and Research

This book investigates the ancient roots of Classical Arabic through detailed tracings and readings of selected, Pre-Islamic, ancient inscriptions from the Northern and Southern Arabian Peninsula. It provides detailed readings of important Akkadian, Nabataean, and old Arabic Musnad inscriptions, including Namarah and the Epic of Gilgamesh inscriptions. The book provides clear inscriptional evidence indicating that Classical Arabic was predominantly utilized in the major population centers of the greater Arabian Peninsula, including Mesopotamia and the Levant regions, many, many centuries before Islam. In his book, the author presents several important new readings. Among them, a new reading of two important Classical …

On The Social Construction Of Hellenism Cold War Narratives Of Modernity, Development And Democracy For Greece, Despina Lalaki

Publications and Research

Hellenism is one of those overarching, ever-changing narratives always subject to historical circumstances, intellectual fashions and political needs. Conversely, it is fraught with meaning and conditioning powers, enabling and constraining imagination and practical life. In this essay I tease out the hold that the idea of Hellas has had on post-war Greece and I explore the ways in which the American anti-communist rhetoric and discussions about political and economic stabilization appropriated and rearticulated Hellenism. Central to this history of transformations are the archaeologists; the archaeologists as intellectuals, as producers of culture who, while stepping in and out of their disciplinary …

Mensura Incognita: Queer Kinship, Camp Aesthetics, And Juvenal's Ninth Satire, Michael Broder

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The dissertation addresses four problematic aspects of scholarship on Juvenal 9. The first two are matters of reception history: first, the poem has been understudied; and second, most major extant studies of the poem have been grossly or subtly homophobic. The other two problems are matters of literary criticism: Juvenal's ninth satire has traditionally been read as an attack on homosexuality, when in fact it is neither an attack, nor is it about homosexuality. The current study addresses each of these problems, reassessing the ninth satire in the context of queer theory and camp aesthetics. Chapter One traces the homophobic …

La Música En Los Cultos Dionisiacos, Adriana Renero

Publications and Research

Para penetrar en el mundo musical griego es preciso alejarnos de nuestras categorías estéticas habituales y pensar en modos, ritmos y armonías diferentes. Al mismo tiempo, es indispensable advertir que en la sociedad griega arcaica la música ocupaba un lugar fundamental, pues mantenía estrechos vínculos con la medicina, la astronomía, la religión, la filosofía, la poesía y la pedagogía, entre otras disciplinas. Lo anterior responde a que la música era considerada un arte peculiar y ambiguo dotado de “poderes especiales” porque actuaba como fuerza capaz de precipitar al hombre a la locura, al mismo tiempo que la curaba, o bien, …

Contracts In Athenian Law, Ellen Knopf

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation investigates contracts and the contractual language of 4^th century B. C. Athens. Its main source is Attic oratory although there is some discussion of inscriptions. Since no ancient Greek word has the same range of meanings as the English word 'contract', the first task is to consider the characteristics of transactions that will count as contracts in the study and to define the term. After giving criteria for identifying contracts, the study examines Greek words whose dictionary definitions include the word 'contract'. Part I surveys the terms, όμολογία, συγγραϕή, συμβόλαιον and συνθήκη, discussing their senses in oratory …