Aeschylus was an ancient Greek tragedian often described as the father of tragedy. Academic knowledge of the genre begins with his work,and understanding of earlier Greek tragedy is largely based on inferences made from reading his surviving plays. According to Aristotle,he expanded the number of characters in the theatre and allowed conflict among them. Formerly,characters interacted only with the chorus.
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.
In Greek mythology,Prometheus is one of the Titans and a god of fire. Prometheus is best known for defying the Olympian gods by stealing fire from them and giving it to humanity in the form of technology,knowledge,and more generally,civilization.
In ancient Greece,a metic was a resident of Athens and some other cities who was a citizen of another polis. They held a status broadly analogous to modern permanent residency,being permitted indefinite residence without political rights.
A hetaira,,also hetaera,,was a type of courtesan or prostitute in ancient Greece,who served as an artist,entertainer and conversationalist in addition to providing sexual service. Custom excluded the wives and daughters of Athenian citizens from the symposium,but this prohibition did not extend to hetairai,who were often foreign born and could be highly educated. Other female entertainers made appearances in the otherwise male domain,but hetairai joined the male guests in their sexual joking,sometimes evidencing a wide knowledge of literature in their contributions.
Black Athena:The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization,its three volumes first published in 1987,1991,and 2006 respectively,is a controversial book by Martin Bernal proposing an alternative hypothesis on the origins of ancient Greece and classical civilisation. Bernal's thesis discusses the perception of ancient Greece in relation to Greece's North African and West Asian neighbours,especially the ancient Egyptians and Phoenicians who,he believes,colonized ancient Greece. Bernal proposes that a change in the Western perception of Greece took place from the 18th century onward and that this change fostered a subsequent denial by Western academia of any significant Egyptian and Phoenician influence on ancient Greek civilization.
Richard Seaford was a British classicist. He was professor emeritus of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Exeter. His work focused on ancient Greek culture,especially that of ancient Athens. He died in December 2023.
Rush Rehm is professor of drama and classics at Stanford University in California,in the United States. He also works professionally as an actor and director. He has published many works on classical theatre. Rehm is the artistic director of Stanford Repertory Theater (SRT),a professional theater company that presents a dramatic festival based on a major playwright each summer. SRT's 2016 summer festival,Theater Takes a Stand,celebrates the struggle for workers' rights. A political activist,Rehm has been involved in Central American and Cuban solidarity,supporting East Timorese resistance to the Indonesian invasion and occupation,the ongoing struggle for Palestinian rights,and the fight against US militarism. In 2014,he was awarded Stanford's Lloyd W. Dinkelspiel Award for Outstanding Service to Undergraduate Education.
Edith Hall,is a British scholar of classics,specialising in ancient Greek literature and cultural history,and professor in the Department of Classics and Ancient History at Durham University. She is a Fellow of the British Academy. From 2006 until 2011 she held a Chair at Royal Holloway,University of London,where she founded and directed the Centre for the Reception of Greece and Rome until November 2011. She resigned over a dispute regarding funding for classics after leading a public campaign,which was successful,to prevent cuts to or the closure of the Royal Holloway Classics department. Until 2022,she was a professor at the Department of Classics at King's College London. She also co-founded and is Consultant Director of the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama at Oxford University,Chair of the Gilbert Murray Trust,and Judge on the Stephen Spender Prize for poetry translation. Her prizewinning doctoral thesis was awarded at Oxford. In 2012 she was awarded a Humboldt Research Prize to study ancient Greek theatre in the Black Sea,and in 2014 she was elected to the Academy of Europe. She lives in Cambridgeshire.
Peter Meineck is Professor of Classics in the Modern World at New York University. He is also the founder and humanities program director of Aquila Theatre and has held appointments at Princeton University and University of South Carolina.
Hellenic studies is an interdisciplinary scholarly field that focuses on the language,literature,history and politics of post-classical Greece. In university,a wide range of courses expose students to viewpoints that help them understand the historical and political experiences of Byzantine,Ottoman and modern Greece;the ways in which Greece has borne its several pasts and translated them into the modern era;and the era's distinguished literary and artistic traditions.
Zakoros was an ancient Greek religious office,denoting an attendant in a temple,similar to a neokoros.
Johanna Hanink is Associate Professor of Classics at Brown University. She specialises in ancient Greek theater and performance and the cultural life and afterlife of ancient Athens. Hanink also serves as a contributor to Aeon Magazine,the Chronicle for Higher Education,and Eidolon.
Susan Jane Deacy is a classical scholar who has been Professor of Classics at the University of Roehampton since January 2018. She researches the history and literature of the ancient Greek world,with a particular focus on gender and sexuality,ancient Greek mythology and religion,and disability studies. She is also an expert on the teaching of subjects which are potentially sensitive,including sexual violence,domestic violence,and infanticide;she was project leader on the initiative 'Teaching Sensitive Subjects in the Classics Classroom'. She is also series editor of Routledge's Gods and Heroes of the Ancient World, and has been editor of the Bulletin of the Council of University Classical Departments since 2011.
Fiona McHardy is a Professor of Classics and also the Head of History and Classics in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Roehampton. In 2003 she started work at Roehampton where she was responsible for building up the BA Classical Civilisation. Her research interests include ancient and modern Greek literature,folk poetry,anthropology and culture. She teaches modules on ancient Greek language,literature and culture.
Donna Zuckerberg is an American classicist,feminist,and writer. She is author of the book Not All Dead White Men (2018),about the appropriation of classics by misogynist groups on the Internet. She was editor-in-chief of Eidolon,a classics journal,until its closure in 2020. She is the sister of Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Shelley P. Haley is the Edward North Chair of Classics and Professor of Africana Studies at Hamilton College,New York,and President of the Society for Classical Studies. She is an expert in applying Black feminist and critical race approaches to the study and teaching of Classics.
Sarah Emily Bond is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Iowa. Her research focuses on late Roman history,epigraphy,law,topography,GIS,and digital humanities.
Matthew Freeman Trundle was a British-born New Zealand academic. From 1999 until 2012 he was a member of the Classics Programme at Victoria University of Wellington. From 2012 until his death in 2019 he was a professor of classics and ancient history at the University of Auckland.
Akiko Kiso is a Japanese classical scholar who specialises in Greek literature. She is a professor emeritus at Osaka University. She is the first Japanese scholar to publish on Sophocles. Her work included reconstructions of the lost plays of Epigoni and Tereus. She also worked on comparative approaches to Greek tragedy with emphasis on Japanese classical drama.
