Seen from a distance Thucydides and Tacitus have much in common: they are both uncomfortable authors whose unsparing commitment to revealing the truth results in grim depictions of the amoral deployment of… Read More
I will discuss my work in producing a new verse translation with introduction of the Odyssey, forthcoming from Norton (November 2017). The obvious question about any new translation of an already-much-… Read More
Magic – the word evokes the mysterious and the marvelous, the forbidden and the hidden, the ancient and the arcane. But what did magic mean to the people who coined the term, the people of ancient Greece… Read More
Drawing on Homer, Herodotus, Plato, and Epicurus, among others, this paper recovers an ancient, though largely forgotten, democratic tradition which associates the egalitarian mindset with the tendency… Read More
This talk will examine the burning of written material at Rome from the Republican period until the rise of Christianity, using the lens of book history. We will consider why and how Romans burned written… Read More
This lecture reviews the startling new archaeological discoveries that have been made in Turkey during the last 25 years, including the Roman Sebasteion at Aphrodisias, the early Neolithic cult circles at… Read More
"Conference on Divination in the Ancient World" - a three-day event beginning on Thursday night, running all day Friday & most of Saturday, with lunch to be served in the Nevil Room of the Penn Museum.… Read More
