Research

Abstract: The contents of 118 inhumation burials (seventh to twelfth centuries CE) excavated at Hacımusalar Höyük (ancient Choma) were studied in order to reconstruct the Byzantine population. Overall, the sample was similar to other Byzantine populations:...

This project looks into representations of the underworld in Greco-Roman antiquity from myth, tragedy, philosophy, and art. It aims to create a comprehensive map of the geography of the underworld, how this picture may have changed overtime, and the...

A New Text of Apuleius: The Lost Third Book of the “De Platone.” By Justin A. Stover. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Pp. [xviii] + 216.
Christina Hoenig (University of Pittsburgh)
Injecting new excitement into...

The legend of the wife and mother who avenges herself on an unfaithful or abusive husband by murdering their children is one that crosses oceans, boundaries and centuries. Even in antiquity, though Euripides’ Athenian treatment of the myth is the most...

Socrates and the Socratic Dialogue assembles the most complete range of studies on Socrates and the Socratic dialogue. It focuses on portrayals of Socrates, whether as historical figure or protagonist of ‘Socratic dialogues’, in extant and fragmentary texts from...

Museum displays can serve to educate and inform the public about various concepts and classes of objects. However, the ways in which these displays present information is typically filtered through selective interpretive lenses that reflect a variety of biases,...

The influence the Harvard School has had on my scholarship? Among the questions you ask, this is a challenging one indeed, Professor Hejduk, and it comes at an (in)opportune time: I have recently published a monograph on the Aeneid (Stahl 2016, subtitled a Recovery...
The scientific study of ancient human remains reveals important information about life in past societies. Based on careful visual inspection, it is possible to determine the age, sex, stature, and state of health of skeletons, while biomolecular analysis of bone can...

Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Plato in Antiquity offers a comprehensive account of the ways in which ancient readers responded to Plato, as philosopher, as author, and more generally as a central figure in the intellectual heritage of Classical...

This chapter offers a broad survey of nearly fifty Spanish American receptions (in translation, adaptation, and re-performance) of the seven extant plays of Aeschylus since the nineteenth century. The approach is expository and panoptic, rather than interpretive,...

My paper examined the history and rhetoric of the ancient “Olympic truce” (ekecheiria), which aimed at ensuring safe passage for athletes and spectators to and from the festival of Zeus at Olympia. Conceived on the bloody battlefields of the Peloponnesian War, the...

As part of their presentations in Classics 1610 ("Greek Archaeology"), this year's Pitt in Sicily students created 360° videos at sites around the island. You can view the videos on YouTube by searching "Pitt in Sicily", or simply clicking ...

A great distance―spatial, temporal, and cultural―stretches between fifth - century BCE Greece and the fourteenth/fifteenth-century CE Japan, when the best-known writers of tragedy(Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides)and of noh(Kan’ami, Zeami, and Zenchiku)created...

Prof. Smethurst spoke about the history of performances of Greek tragedy in Japan with a focus on the productions of “Trojan Women” and “Medea” by Suzuki Tadashi, Ninagawa Yukio, and Miyagi Satoshi.

Proclus (412-485 A.D.) was one of the last official "successors" of Plato at the head of the Academy in Athens at the end of Antiquity, before the school was finally closed down in 529. As a prolific author of systematic works on a wide range of topics and one of...

Dr. Korzeniewski's talk discussed the maturation of Venus in the Aeneid and her coming to accept Aeneas’ fated destiny. The full conference program may be found here.


In recent decades, international research on Virgil has been marked, if not dominated, by the ideas of the 'Harvard school' and similar trends, according to which the poet was engaged in an elaborate work of subtle subversion, directed against the new ruler of the...

‘Dark tourism’ is generally defined as travel to sites associated with suffering, death, or the macabre. In the modern world, popular dark tourism destinations include bloody battlefields such as Gallipoli and Waterloo, sites of disaster like Chernobyl and the World...

Virginia Magazine turned to U.Va. academics from six disciplines and asked them how each of their respective fields interprets the supernatural—spirits, visions, the undead and more: Archaeologists generally agree that the ancient Greeks believed in things that we...

Sicily was among one of the first areas settled during the Greek colonization movement, making its cemeteries a popular area of study for scholars of the classical world. Yet these studies have often considered human remains and burial customs separately. In this...

For the ancient Greeks, the dead were subjects of both fear and supplication. Necrophobia, or the fear of the dead, is a concept that has been present in Greek culture since the Neolithic period. At the heart of this phobia is the belief that corpses are able to...

With the exception of extispicy scenes catalogued by Francois Lissarrague and snake-eagle omens discussed by Diana Rodríguez Pérez, divination has been ignored by vase-painting scholars and of ancient religion scholars, only Michael Flower has touched on visual...


The problem of responsibility in moral philosophy has been lively debated in the last decades, especially since the publication of Harry Frankfurt's seminal paper, "Alternate possibilities and moral responsibility" (1969). Compatibilists - also known as "soft"...