Found in Antiquity

  • Top ten Fayum Portraits

    At the moment, I’m in full flurry of editing my Classics Honours thesis which is due on Monday. Enjoy these Fayum mummy portraits while I prep my thesis! What strikes me about these is the incredible individuality of each of these faces. It’s like the coloured, painted equivalent of looking at Roman statue busts where Read more

  • Rape Culture in Classical Mythology

    I’m a little ambivalent about putting this take-home exam essay I wrote in second year up on the blog. On the one hand, it’s something I’ve thought about posting up for a while. On the other, I feel that even though I’ve learned more about Classics and grown as a person since second year, I Read more

  • When Classics and Theology were the same subject

    Classicists are usually vaguely aware that the study of ancient literature is a very, very old field of research, and that it used to be merged with the study and exposition of Christian theology. It is rare, however, for a Classicist to actually come up against past scholarship and see firsthand what kind of work Read more

  • The five strangest deaths of the philosophers

    The greatest philosophers of the ancient world were celebrated not just for their voluminous writings on arcane topics, but also for their eccentric lives and witty sayings. They were geniuses, and yet were also remembered as charismatic oddballs. Perhaps, then, it’s not surprising that there were so many bizarre tales about the means of their Read more

  • Ciceronian Disputations

    What’s this? A creative piece, you say? You’re spot on. This is a dialogue between Cicero and my supervisor at uni, Assoc. Prof. Parshia Lee-Stecum. I originally wrote it for Orpheus, the publication of MUCLASS (Melbourne University Classics and Archaeology Students Society). I was a little worried that my supervisor might not like it… Cicero Read more

  • When Classics students talk with Theology students

    Theology students have it harder in other areas, but not in learning Greek. While I’m struggling through Plato and Herodotus, they’re generally translating shorter, more straightforward sentences. The nerve of them! Don’t they have to deal with bizarre verb forms, multiple dependent clauses, and the general uppitiness of the writers? Instead, they’re translating the stuff Read more