Research

In three years, Cicero fell from grace and found himself ridiculed and rejected by the Roman aristocracy he had toiled strenuously to become part of. When Clodius burned down his house on the Palatine Hill in 58 BC, the destruction of the symbolic marker of his political reputation dealt a great blow to Cicero’s ego. The following year, he returned from exile and fought to get his house back at public expense, detailed in De Domo Sua . He managed to regain favor in his speech

Once again, the style of this post is a bit different from my previous ones. Instead of doing short, blurb-ish myth retelling like the ones I did over the summer, I'm going to try to shift the content of my blog into research. The following is a slightly modified version of a research paper I completed over the past two months, complete with Thesis and Bibliography. The following is my original research. Enjoy! Introduction  Since its conception, race has always been in conve

Though theater is often reduced into a pure form of entertainment, it played the important role of social and political commentary in both contemporary society and the ancient Roman world. The inherent quality of theater, first and foremost, as a visual spectacle characterized by the use of scenery, props, and costumes in addition to acting as an appeal to its audience’s emotions made it a very enticing strategy for aspiring orators. Cicero was one such person. Known for his

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

Image of a Roman wedding carved onto the side of a tomb. The question of love is one that remains constant throughout the ages. Love’s definition is so difficult to pin down because of its fluidity and variability from person to person, circumstance to circumstance. Nowadays, we look at love as a mental phenomenon that simply happens because our brain wills it to. We naturally respond to our cravings of love by seeking out companionship. The psychological miracle that is love

On the Walpurgis night of 1977, mobs of women stormed Rome in witch disguises, passing the night in rowdy drinking and dancing.  Trailing off American revivals of witchcraft in feminist organizations such as W.I.T.C.H (Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell), these popular performative transgressions coalesced historical traditions of witchcraft circulating in the late 1950s and the political programs designed to mobilize non-hegemonic knowledge of the 1970s, pr

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