Classics or classical studies is the study of classical antiquity. In the Western world, classics traditionally refers to the study of Classical Greek and Roman literature and their related original languages, Ancient Greek and Latin. Classics also includes Greco-Roman philosophy, history, archaeology, anthropology, art, mythology and society as secondary subjects.
Latin literature includes the essays, histories, poems, plays, and other writings written in the Latin language. The beginning of formal Latin literature dates to 240 BC, when the first stage play in Latin was performed in Rome. Latin literature flourished for the next six centuries. The classical era of Latin literature can be roughly divided into several periods: Early Latin literature, The Golden Age, The Imperial Period and Late Antiquity.
Publius Ovidius Naso, known in English as Ovid, was a Roman poet who lived during the reign of Augustus. He was a younger contemporary of Virgil and Horace, with whom he is often ranked as one of the three canonical poets of Latin literature. The Imperial scholar Quintilian considered him the last of the Latin love elegists. Although Ovid enjoyed enormous popularity during his lifetime, the emperor Augustus exiled him to Tomis, the capital of the newly-organised province of Moesia, on the Black Sea, where he remained for the last nine or ten years of his life. Ovid himself attributed his banishment to a "poem and a mistake", but his reluctance to disclose specifics has resulted in much speculation among scholars.
Classical Latin is the form of Literary Latin recognized as a literary standard by writers of the late Roman Republic and early Roman Empire. It formed parallel to Vulgar Latin around 75 BC out of Old Latin, and developed by the 3rd century AD into Late Latin. In some later periods, the former was regarded as good or proper Latin; the latter as debased, degenerate, or corrupted. The word Latin is now understood by default to mean "Classical Latin"; for example, modern Latin textbooks almost exclusively teach Classical Latin.
Classical mythology, also known as Greco-Roman mythology or Greek and Roman mythology, is the collective body and study of myths from the ancient Greeks and ancient Romans. Mythology, along with philosophy and political thought, is one of the major survivals of classical antiquity throughout later Western culture. The Greek word mythos refers to the spoken word or speech, but it also denotes a tale, story or narrative.
Sextus Propertius was a Latin elegiac poet of the Augustan age. He was born around 50–45 BC in Assisium and died shortly after 15 BC.
Elaine Fantham was a British-Canadian classicist whose expertise lay particularly in Latin literature, especially comedy, epic poetry and rhetoric, and in the social history of Roman women. Much of her work was concerned with the intersection of literature and Greek and Roman history. She spoke fluent Italian, German and French and presented lectures and conference papers around the world—including in Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Argentina, and Australia.
In classical mythology, Cupid is the god of desire, erotic love, attraction and affection. He is often portrayed as the son of the love goddess Venus and the god of war Mars. He is also known as Amor. His Greek counterpart is Eros. Although Eros is generally portrayed as a slender winged youth in Classical Greek art, during the Hellenistic period, he was increasingly portrayed as a chubby boy. During this time, his iconography acquired the bow and arrow that represent his source of power: a person, or even a deity, who is shot by Cupid's arrow is filled with uncontrollable desire. In myths, Cupid is a minor character who serves mostly to set the plot in motion. He is a main character only in the tale of Cupid and Psyche, when wounded by his own weapons, he experiences the ordeal of love. Although other extended stories are not told about him, his tradition is rich in poetic themes and visual scenarios, such as "Love conquers all" and the retaliatory punishment or torture of Cupid.
Don Paul Fowler was an English classicist.
Ovid, the Latin poet of the Roman Empire, was banished in 8 AD from Rome to Tomis by decree of the emperor Augustus. The reasons for his banishment are uncertain. Ovid's exile is related by the poet himself, and also in brief references to the event by Pliny the Elder and Statius. At the time, Tomis was a remote town on the edge of the civilized world; it was loosely under the authority of the Kingdom of Thrace, and was superficially Hellenized. According to Ovid, none of its citizens spoke Latin, which as an educated Roman, he found trying. Ovid wrote that the cause of his exile was carmen et error, probably the Ars Amatoria and a personal indiscretion or mistake. The council of the city of Rome revoked his exile in December 2017, some 2000 years after his banishment.
The Asiatic style or Asianism refers to an Ancient Greek rhetorical tendency that arose in the third century BC, which, although of minimal relevance at the time, briefly became an important point of reference in later debates about Roman oratory.
Catharine Harmon Edwards is a British ancient historian and academic. She is Professor of Classics and Ancient History at Birkbeck College, University of London. She is a specialist in Roman cultural history and Latin prose literature, particularly Seneca the Younger.
Philip Russell Hardie, FBA is a specialist in Latin literature at the University of Cambridge. He has written especially on Virgil, Ovid, and Lucretius, and on the influence of these writers on the literature, art, and ideology of later centuries.
Judith P. Hallett is Professor and Distinguished Scholar-Teacher Emerita of Classics, having formerly been the Graduate Director at the Department of Classics, University of Maryland. Her research focuses on women, the family, and sexuality in ancient Greece and Rome, particularly in Latin literature. She is also an expert on classical education and reception in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Alison Ruth Sharrock is an English Classics scholar. She has been Professor of Classics at the University of Manchester since August 2000. In 2009, she gave the Stanford Memorial Lectures. Together with David Konstan of Brown University, she edits the series Oxford Studies in Classical Literature and Gender Theory published by Oxford University Press.
Eleanor Winsor Leach was the Ruth N. Halls Professor with the Department of Classical Studies at Indiana University. She was a trustee of the Vergilian Society in 1978–83 and was second and then first vice-president in 1989–92. Leach was the president of the Society of Classical Studies in 2005/6, and the chair of her department (1978–1985). She was very involved with academics and younger scholars – directing 26 dissertations, wrote letters for 200 tenure and promotion cases, and refereed more than 100 books and 200 articles. Leach's research interests included Roman painting, Roman sculpture, and Cicero and Pliny's Letters. She published three books and more than 50 articles. Leach's work had an interdisciplinary focus, reading Latin texts against their social, political, and cultural context. From the 1980s onwards, she combined her work on ancient literature with the study of Roman painting, monuments, and topography.
Emily Joanna Gowers, is a British classical scholar. She is Professor of Latin Literature at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of St John's College, Cambridge. She is an expert on Horace, Augustan literature, and the history of food in the Roman world.
Ann Bergren was Professor of Greek literature, Literary Theory, and Contemporary Architecture at University of California, Los Angeles. She is known for her scholarship on Ancient Greek language, gender, and contemporary architecture.
Helen V. Lovatt is Professor of Classics at the University of Nottingham. She is known in particular for her work on Latin epic literature especially from the Flavian period.
Nandini Pandey is Associate Professor of Classics at the Johns Hopkins University, after teaching from 2014-2021 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is an expert on the literature, culture, history, and reception of early imperial Rome.
