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Posts by Ellen Bauerle
The Metal Age: The Use of Classics in Heavy Metal Music
It is a great time to be a fan of both the Classical world and heavy metal music: the two have never overlapped to the extent that they do right now. Consider, for example, the fact that in 2013 not one but two Italian metal bands, Heimdall and Stormlord, released concept albums based on Vergil’s Aeneid. But this overlap is not a new phenomenon—in fact, far from it. Heavy metal music has drawn on the Classical world almost from its very beginnings, and this interest in the Classical world is part of a larger obsession with other times and places—both real and imagined— that is a defining characteristic of the genre. And since metal is a conservative genre (there are clear forefathers to whom almost all subsequent bands owe and acknowledge their allegiance), the interest in these kinds of subjects by earlier bands sanctioned continuous use of them by all subsequent bands. To simplify radically, metal begins in 1969-70, with the debut of the two main Read more … |
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Tartarus and the Curses of Percy Jackson (or Annabeth’s Adventures in the Underworld)
by Thomas D Kohn A few years ago, I adopted the Anthology of Classical Myth, edited by SM Trzaskoma, RS Smith, and S Brunet (Hackett, 2004), for my Greek and Roman mythology course. And so, some months before the start of the semester, I read through the text, in order to familiarize myself with the selections. At the same time, I began to read the “Percy Jackson and the Olympians” series by Rick Riordan. I was amazed by the degree to which the two complemented each other. I like to drive home to my students the point that writers in antiquity did not feel obligated to adhere to one particular version of a myth (for example, the various depictions of Prometheus by Aeschylus, Hesiod, and Plato), and in fact both retained certain details and also made certain changes based on their literary agenda. Part of the delight, therefore, in reading renditions of Greek myth, both ancient and modern, lies not in labeling departures as “wrong,” but in comparing them Read more … |
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For the Girls: An Elegy
In 1954, the girls went out to play “She’s always got her nose in a book,” their mothers said, Serious girls, or rowdy, they got straight A’s, Once they wore red Keds, and collected barrettes; Now it is summer again, and the trees cast Read more … |
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Our Paths to Classics
Your Amphora staff members are pleased to bring you this new issue, in print and digital formats. At the initiative of Executive Director Adam Blistein, we have been developing ways to bring materials to you in both formats, much as we did in our most recent issue, as a way of leveraging the benefits of print and digital presentation. In this issue, KFB Fletcher (Louisiana State University) examines the considerable crossover that classical studies makes into the world of metal, or heavy metal, music. He surveys their use of Latin, and the reuse of mythical themes and plot elements from authors and works we know well, as well as people and events from ancient history. His piece includes hyperlinks to samples of “classical” metal music, so readers may care to visit the version of his article on the SCS’s blog, where the links are of course live and clickable, although those reading Amphora in PDF format will also find these links (and others Read more … |
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Eurydice by Sarah Ruhl: The Power of Pretense
The story is familiar. Musician marries the love of his life; on their wedding day, she dies. He grieves until he wills his way into the Underworld and is allowed to retrieve her on one condition, which he violates. Thus, even the theme is the same: the fallibility of the human condition and the inability of art to triumph over the persistence of suffering and the finality of death. Nor is Eurydice a strident feminist with a point to prove, after centuries of silent existence as nothing more than a catalyst for the erotic narrative that is the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. For contemporary American playwright Sarah Ruhl, Eurydice is foremost a daughter who learns the hard way that all relationships are constructed of words that cannot always withstand the insistent tensions and demands of parents and spouses. Since language is so deficient, Ruhl deploys light, space, distance, and depth to hone the banal into razor-sharp instruments capable of exposing emotional Read more … |
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Troilus and Cressida and Tacitus
by Herbert W. Benario This play is one of Shakespeare’s oddest. The theme focuses upon the Trojan War, with constant interplay among the great figures of the Greeks and Trojans, in the seventh year of the war. The cause of the war, the Trojan prince Paris stealing the beauteous wife of Shakespeare will pronounce harsh judgments upon the heroine of the play. Her behavior and character will be sharply contrasted with one of Tacitus’ prime female figures in the struggle between Romans and Germans. Both suffer the indignity of being handed over to the enemy by their fathers. But their response and behavior are vastly different. The focus of the play is likewise upon a young man and woman, Troilus, a son of King Priam of Troy, and Cressida, hitherto unknown in the ancient legend of Troy. She plays a relatively small role in the drama; indeed, almost everything about her is quizzical. She is traded by her father, Calchas, a seer who went over to the Greeks Read more … |
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A New Incarnation of Latin in China, by Yongyi Li
On a wintry day in 1996, I was thumbing through catalogues in a deserted corner of the library of Beijing Normal University when my attention was suddenly seized by some titles in a language strangely familiar. I could easily decipher them because of their resemblance to English words, and I knew the names of the authors as I had read them in translations. Latin! My instinct told me. I relayed this discovery to my teacher of Shakespearean plays, a BA in Classics who had just graduated from Oxford. The next morning saw us standing in front of a counter in the most secluded part of the library, after spiraling flights of gloomy stairs. A long silence ensued before the books were fetched from a bank ten stories above and presented before us. In a thrilled voice, my teacher began to read a Latin passage aloud to me. We had been the first in decades, the librarian told us, to borrow these books, and there were many more such books simply locked in some rooms, as no one had the expertise Read more … |
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The Kids Are Alright, or, Nobody Killed the Liberal Arts: Michael Broder and Daniel Tompkins Discuss Joseph Epstein
In September 2012, Joseph Epstein published an essay in the Weekly Standard called Who Killed the Liberal Arts? The piece provoked lively response on the Classics List and at least one rapid, articulate response, by Katie Billotte in Salon. Epstein’s argument is of more than passing concern to academics, scholars, students, and members of the general public interested in current debates about the value and vitality of the humanities and humanistic education, not only because he claims that the so-called liberal arts are dead, but also because he accuses humanists themselves of the murder. Moreover, it is important not to let his ideas go unchallenged, both because they are so often flawed, and also because they are part of a broader pattern of similar laments that collectively seek to Read more … |
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Labors and Lesson Plans: Educating Young Hercules in Two 1990s Children’s Television Programs, by Angeline Chiu
“Zero to Hero, in no time flat … Zero to Hero, just like that!” The Muses’ song from the Disney film Hercules could apply equally well to the sudden, spectacular rise of Hercules in pop entertainment of the late 1990s. Those proved lively years for the hero in American film and TV, spearheaded by the 1997 Disney animated movie and by television’s Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, starring Kevin Sorbo (1995-99). The two quickly spun off more TV series: Disney’s Hercules: The Animated Series (1998-99, 65 episodes of 30 minutes each) and Young Hercules (1998-99, 50 episodes also of 30 minutes each) starring Ryan Gosling.* Both spinoffs reimagined the mythological hero specifically for younger viewers and gave him unprecedented exposure in children’s weekday TV.† In terms of the target audience, grade school and middle school years are very impressionable times for encounters with cultural influences. Every spring I teach a large myth course, Read more … |
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Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? by Ellen Bauerle
In this issue of Amphora we are fortunate to have our Executive Director Adam Blistein’s account of his introduction to classics through a particularly gifted high school teacher and coach, Alfred Morro, and Adam’s comments on what that experience has meant to him. It was serendipity that Adam proposed his article to your Amphora staff for this issue, but his essay also fits nicely with another topic that has been under discussion among the APA’s Outreach division: thinking about our origins, about our path to classical studies, and what that tells us. As I was getting to know social media a while back, and mindful of the colorful situations that people sometimes get themselves into with unfamiliar technology, I was looking for some safe, mild topics of discussion and posting. I got to talking with the smallish group of social media friends I had at the time about how they happened to reach the positions they held as adults—most but not all were college or Read more … |