As part of my research project on Gaza in late antiquity, I am organising, together with my colleagues Maijastina Kahlos and Katja Ritari, a one-day workshop on the construction and representation of identities from antiquity to the Middle Ages. Venue: Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, Fabianinkatu 24, room 136 Time: Wednesday, 2 March 2016, 9am… Continue reading →
Galen of Pergamum (AD 129–c. 216), a central figure in the history of medicine and the intellectual culture of the Imperial period, has been the focus of much scholarly activity in the last few decades. This lively interest in him can be ascribed to his contributions to various specialised fields in the art of medicine… Continue reading →
One of the research projects currently underway in Classics at Glasgow is looking at the fragments of Roman oratory from the Republican period. This project (‘The Fragments of the Republican Roman Orators, www.frro.gla.ac.uk), funded by the European Research Council, aims to gather and make sense of all the evidence for public speech in the Republican… Continue reading →
Who says that working on Latin manuscripts and moral sayings is a dull pursuit? For about six years now I have been travelling to Italy, Germany, and France to gather information from several manuscripts so as to edit afresh an important collection of Latin one-line “sayings” or “proverbs” (sententiae or proverbia), which, despite its massive impact… Continue reading →
We classicists tend to study ancient oratory in isolation and, at most, branch out to other ancient oratorical cultures, comparing Roman with Greek and vice versa. But after some years of being asked about my opinion on Tony Blair’s and Barack Obama’s oratory and finding that as a Ciceronian scholar I had surprisingly little to… Continue reading →
The Greek polis of Gaza in Palestine underwent, in common with other cities, a profound transformation during the fifth and sixth centuries CE in society, economy and religion. What is unique about Gaza in these decades is its thriving and wide-ranging culture, as documented by ample literary and also material evidence. Speeches, letters and philosophical… Continue reading →
Since October 2014, I’ve been working with a team to investigate Hero (Heron) of Alexandria’s treatise On Making Automata (peri automatopoiētikēs). It’s not a very well known or well studied text, but it’s our best detailed evidence for a recognisable sub-field within ancient mechanics and engineering. The devices that Hero describes are powered mainly by… Continue reading →
Sadly enough, the city of Gaza is nowadays mostly associated with the eruption of fierce violence, even with outright war, and reminds us that a convoluted relationship between ethnic, religious and political groups can easily set a whole region on fire. What a world of difference seems to lie between contemporary Gaza and the very… Continue reading →
Welcome to the blog of Classics at Glasgow. We’ll be posting regularly here on the research being conducted in the subject area, both by staff and postgraduate students. We have major ongoing multi-person research projects in the fields of politics (rhetoric) and ancient technology, and other research concentrations in the fields of drama, reception studies… Continue reading →
