Cambridge Classical Reception Seminar Series (CCRSS): ‘Magnesia and Brasília: planning cities and fostering values’

Classics Faculty, Cambridge Sidgwick Avenue, Cambridge, United Kingdom

Prof. Gábor Betegh (Laurence Professor of Ancient Philosophy, Cambridge) In this paper I propose to compare two planned cities, Plato’s Magnesia, as set out in his late dialogue the Laws, and Lúcio Costa’s Brasília, a landmark of modernist city planning. It is rarely remarked that Plato in the Laws does not only outline the legal, institutional and educational […]

Cambridge Classical Reception Seminar Series (CCRSS): ‘Archaeo-politics and the Greek crisis’

Classics Faculty, Cambridge Sidgwick Avenue, Cambridge, United Kingdom

(in collaboration with the Cambridge Modern Greek Seminar) Prof. Dimitris Tziovas (Professor of Modern Greek Studies, Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies, University of Birmingham) The crisis has induced Greek society to rethink its values, to revisit its founding myths and to re-examine its earlier certainties. This involves to a certain extent a narrativisation […]

Cambridge Classical Reception Seminar Series (CCRSS): ‘Aztec Latinists: Classical learning and native legacies in post-conquest Mexico’

Classics Faculty, Cambridge Sidgwick Avenue, Cambridge, United Kingdom

Prof. Andrew Laird (John Rowe Workman Distinguished Professor of Classics and Humanities, Brown University, USA) Soon after the Spanish conquest of Mexico in 1521, missionaries began teaching Latin, classical rhetoric and Aristotelian philosophy to youths from the native Nahua or Aztec nobility. In his talk, Andrew Laird will explain the nature and purpose of that […]

Audio / Visual Romans

British School at Rome via Antonio Gramsci 61, Rome, Italy

Audio / Visual Romans seeks to explore the complex relationship between sound and image in films about ancient Romans: musical accompaniment as the aural encoding of history; film dialogue as the mechanism by which the past speaks in the present.Afternoon Roundtable Discussion 15.30 - 17.00 and Evening Film Screening 18.00 - 20.00FREE. ALL WELCOME. NO REGISTRATION REQUIRED.You are […]

CAMBRIDGE CLASSICAL RECEPTION SEMINAR SERIES: Charles Stocking, ‘Kratos before democracy: force, politics, and signification in Derrida and Homer’

Classics Faculty, Cambridge Sidgwick Avenue, Cambridge, United Kingdom

In Iliad Book 2, Odysseus delivers a speech to the dēmos, which has been quoted extensively throughout antiquity and modernity as a distinctly anti-democratic claim for monarchic sovereignty. He exclaims, “Rule by many lords is not good. Let there be one lord, one king, to whom the son of crooked counseling Kronos has given the […]

Elizabeth Vandiver, ‘“The best Greek poets used a kind of free verse”: the Imagists, vers libre, and ancient metrics’

Classics Faculty, Cambridge Sidgwick Avenue, Cambridge, United Kingdom

Professor Elizabeth Vandiver (Clement Biddle Penrose Professor of Latin and Classics, Whitman College, USA) Abstract: The use of vers libre was one of the hallmarks of Imagist poetry; one of the six principles of Imagism printed in the Preface to the 1915 anthology Some Imagist Poets (edited by Amy Lowell) said, ‘We believe that the individuality of a poet may […]

Centre for Myth Studies seminar: ‘Return to Oedipus’

University of Essex Colchester, United Kingdom

Open Seminar Centre for Myth Studies University of Essex Room EBS.1.1   Return to Oedipus   Professor Marinos Pourgouris (University of Cyprus)   If there is one story, one narrative, at the very centre of Freudian theory, it is undoubtedly structured around the myth of Oedipus. The story of Oedipus has become, as Shoshana Felman […]