classical studies

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What Makes a Good Book Review?

Classical Review publishes hundreds of reviews every year. The books reviewed in our journal run the full range of topics related to antiquity and its reception; and the reviewers who write them are similarly diverse in their approaches.…

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Why Objects Speak

This text is identified as my own by the name placed above it, which seems sensible enough. Marking ownership was one of the earliest uses to which the ancient Greeks put their alphabet—which was to spawn among others the alphabet in which this text is written—but they had a strikingly different way of doing so. ‘I am the kylix of Korax’, declares an eighth-century BCE wine-drinking cup from Rhodes; ‘I am the lekythos of Tataie—whosoever steals me will go blind’, threatens a seventh-century oil flask from Cumae; ‘I am the remembrance of Ergotimos’, announces a shelf of Attic rock from the sixth century.

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Circe’s Etruscan Drugs

When only four words of a poet’s entire output in a specific genre survive to the present day, is there really anything of substance that we can say about this poetry on the basis of such slender remains?…

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Reviewing a new Greek Lexicon

Lexica are the workhorses of Classical Studies. They’re the tomes that come most easily to mind when we joke that we spend our days ‘looking things up’. And so, the launch of a new lexicon for Ancient Greek is an event to be noticed.

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Socrates and the Beautiful Girl

What is the Beautiful? In Plato’s Hippias Major, Socrates and the sophist Hippias set out to answer this question. Along the way, they evaluate such answers as ‘the appropriate’, ‘the beneficial’, ‘gold’, and even ‘burying your parents’.…

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Sculpted stone from Stanwick Roman villa

It was an amazing moment in 1990 in the course of the Historic England (HE) excavations at Stanwick Roman villa, when David Neal uncovered the first piece of sculpted stone, reused as a quoin in the north-eastern corner of the fourth-century villa building.…

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Not so bad, actually: Nero in the Journal of Roman Studies

A fair-haired, bull-necked, poetry-loving ruler, with an eye for interior design, pathetically desperate for his subjects’ affection, sexually incontinent, lazy and slapdash in his handling of public affairs, prone to showing off his knowledge of Greek in public, and later to be remembered as the most disastrous political leader his country had ever produced – why have the Roman Society and the British Museum chosen this year of all years to commemorate the emperor Nero?…

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Pots and cultural diversity in the Roman north – the case of Severan York

Questions on the extent of multiculturalism in Britain’s (Roman) past have never been more relevant. Thanks to the evidence of inscriptions and the recent scientific analysis of human skeletal remains we know that Romano-British cities were home to significant minorities of people with foreign origins from across the Roman empire and beyond, but what can the more everyday evidence of pottery tell us?…

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Art and character: My Ancient Greek dinner guest

In discussing the interconnections of action and character (ethos) in tragedy, Aristotle praises the Greek painter Polygnotos for his “fine depiction of character” (Poetics 1450a27), contrasting his work with that of Zeuxis, who, famous for his realism, does not depict character.…

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The Türkmen-Karahöyük Intensive Survey Project (TISP): documenting the discovery of a lost kingdom in Anatolia from the Late Bronze and Iron Ages

“The Türkmen-Karahöyük Intensive Survey Project (TISP), led by James Osborne (University of Chicago), was begun in 2019 and determined that the site might not just be big, but among the very largest sites in Anatolia during the Late Bronze and Iron Ages…” One of the paradoxes of archaeology is that, although understanding of the past is usually achieved only after years of painstaking work, once in a blue moon something may be found that instantly changes one’s theories or suddenly leads to completely new research avenues.…

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Always something new from Anatolian Studies!

As a subscriber to Anatolian Studies for forty years, I am a loyal reader and very familiar with the academic literature and specialist studies about the antiquities of Turkey, but by any standards the 2016 volume of the journal must count as one of the best ever.

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Glass encounters from Pompeii

Hilary Cool, Barbican Research Associates, reflects on how she tackled the topic of her forthcoming article in Papers of the British School at Rome which is due to be published later this year.…

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