Literature

Sigmund Freud For all my craze about Freud and classics, I do have to admit that there are several valid critiques of Freudian theory out there. For one, Freud’s psychoanalysis is not backed in science. His theories on the “Oedipal” or the “phallic” are mere metaphors with no valid substance backing them outside of the fictional stories from which they are culled. What, then, makes psychoanalysis a worthy method of studying classics? According to the classicist Ellen Oliensis

Book 4 of the Aeneid  is one of my all-time favorite selections of Latin poetry. For those who don’t know what the Aeneid  is, it’s essentially a fanfiction/sequel written by the Latin poet Vergil to Homer’s Iliad , commissioned by Caesar Augutus, the first emperor of Rome. The Aeneid follows the story of Aeneas , a displaced Trojan prince and a son of the goddess Venus (and, for the most part, a self-insert of Augustus himself). He receives a prophecy from the Fates that he

A painting depicting a stereotypical Roman witch: an old hag with supernatural abilities ***The following is a revised excerpt from a larger research project on the evolution of the identity of the witch that I did in the past spring. The first part of this project focuses on Roman witches. In the past, a learned Roman woman would find herself a social pariah for her intelligence. Most likely, she would also be a skilled herbalist and healer. Men fear that her superior knowle

Catullus 29 is neither my favorite nor the most interesting Catullian poem I've translated, but I do believe that it is the epitome of...

When I say that my favorite writer is a dead Roman whose thousand-year-old verses could contend with the likes of Eminem, people give me weird looks. Though his poems were explicit even by today’s standard, Catullus nonetheless pioneered the style of lyric poetry in celebrating the sensual joys of life—drinking, dancing, queerness, loving—topics ostracized in Roman society. Reducing his achievements to pages of sacrilege, flabbergasted critics slandered Catullus for not confo