2019

AUTUMN NEWSLETTER
Letter from the
Chair
Stanford
Classics
clearly had a
thriving year
in my absence!
Rather than
drawing any
conclusions from that fact, it is more
important to thank Walter Scheidel for
his sterling service to the department
once again, this time as interim chair
while I had a year’s research leave to
further some research projects.
The department was delighted to
welcome Richard Saller to our ranks
as a full-time faculty member after
ten years as Dean of the School of
Humanities and Sciences. When I first
studied Classics as an undergraduate, it
was Richard’s name that was one of the
first to imprint itself on my awareness
as a scholar whose writings were
especially worth reading. That was far
away in place and time (ahem), but
my admiration for Richard’s work has
only grown in the meantime. Plunging
straight into his teaching role, Richard
taught the Majors Seminar – a core
course for our undergraduates, with an
enhanced writing requirement. Ably
aided by Kevin Ennis, graduate student
in classical archaeology, Richard led
twelve students on a study trip to
Rome in Spring Break at the end of
the course. This is the second such
study trip the department has offered
in recent years, and we are pleased to
have such opportunities of experiential
learning that bring together the many
different facets of studying classical
antiquity.
Our marquee event of the year was
the Lorenz Eitner Lecture on Classical
Art and Culture, given in November
2018 by Professor Emily Greenwood of
Yale University. In her talk, ‘Troubling
the Classical Commonplace: Reading
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2 STANFORD UNIVERSITY
Ancient Athenian Legal Speeches after
Frederick Douglass’, Emily opened
up fascinating connections between
Douglass and later African-American
thought and posed searching questions
about the making and remaking of the
Classics in our own time.
Ben Russell (University of Edinburgh),
as our early career visitor, led a series
of events on the Roman marble
trade. During his three weeks with
us, Ben not only gave talks, he spent
considerable time in conversation with
our graduate students. Among many
visitors to campus, Sabine Ladstätter
(Austrian Academy of Sciences), Troels
Myrup Kristensen (Aarhus University)
and Wilfred E. Major (Louisiana State
University) all had extended stays
among us, generously sharing their
own research in talks, seminars, and
workshops. Willie helped us launch our
full-year pedagogy program, overseen
by Hans Bork and John Klopacz.
Josh Ober and Chris Bobonich
(Philosophy) together hosted a
conference, Plato and Rationality, funded
by the Towards Citizenship Fund, and
have further plans afoot. Christopher
Krebs hosted the third Historiography
Jam, bringing together scholars from
the surrounding areas to discuss Latin
(and sometimes Greek) historical texts.
Several Classicists joined me in monthly
meetings of an interdisciplinary
research group, Aftermaths of Slavery,
which I have run together with Jim
Campbell (History). But it is our own
Adrienne Mayor who may have set a
new record for attracting audiences.
When she spoke on ‘Gods and Robots:
Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams
of Technology’ in our regular series
of Friday lunchtime talks, not one but
two overflow rooms were needed to
seat those who could find no space in
our usual (spacious) seminar room.
Her book by the same title appeared
in November 2018 and promises to be
another huge hit.
We welcomed Pamela Jara-Arancibia
as our new administrative coordinator;
she is both the welcoming face of the
department and the person to keep tabs
on financial transactions, balancing
several other kinds of responsibility at
the same time. Claudia Ortega, Student
Services Officer, was on maternity leave
at the time of writing, having welcomed
her first child, Maximo, in October
2019. Jill Westbrook has been standing
in for her in her absence. Classics is
indeed lucky to have such a smoothly
functioning administrative office,
thoughtfully and calmly supervised by
Valerie Kiszka.
And sabbatical, you ask? I had fun
thinking about obelisks and other
monuments, as well as my other usual
topics. I presented papers on the
inscriptions placed on or underneath
obelisks, at conferences in Stellenbosch
(The Manipulation of Discourse) and
NYU (MATERIA III: New Approaches to
the Material Text in the Ancient World).
These inscriptions, varied as they
are, give all kinds of clues about the
intended meanings of the monuments
to which they were attached. I also
presented a paper on classical reception
in 21st-century South Africa at a
conference of the London-based
research group Claiming the Classical.
In that very international gathering
it was exciting to contemplate the
ever-changing role of Classics in a
framework of global humanities. It was
a great treat to be able to visit Egypt
and see some of its monuments close-
up. The ruins at San El-Hagar (ancient
Tanis) in the northeastern part of the
delta were quite a revelation, even
though some of its obelisks have been
moved to the ambitiously conceived
Grand Egyptian Museum near the
Pyramids of Giza. That visit to San El-
Hagar continues to remind me vividly
of the presence of the past in our own
times, its variety, and its ever-changing
significance.
Grant Parker
PhD Placements 2019
Scott Arcenas (PhD, 2018) - Assistant Professor Faculty and Staff
in the Department of History at George Mason
Emeriti
University
Marsh McCall, Jr.
Susan Treggiari
Nolan Epstein (PhD, 2019) - Visiting Classics
Lecturer in the Summer Language Institute at Chair
the University of Chicago Grant Parker

Director of Graduate Studies

Edward "Ted" Kelting (PhD, 2019) - Visiting Susan Stephens
Assistant Professor in the Department of
Classics at Colorado College Director of Undergraduate Studies
John Klopacz
Kate Kreindler (PhD, 2015) - Visiting Assistant
Professor in the Department of Classics at the Professors Josiah Ober
David Cohen Anastasia-Erasmia Peponi
University of Massachusetts, Amherst Rush Rehm
Andrew Devine
Richard P. Martin Richard Saller
Matthew Loar (PhD, 2015) - Director of Ian Morris Walter Scheidel
Fellowships at Washington and Lee University Reviel Netz Michael Shanks
Andrea Nightingale Susan Stephens
Kilian Mallon (PhD, 2019) - Lecturer in the
Department of Classics at Stanford University
Associate Professors Courtesy Professors
Giovanna Ceserani Fabio Barry
Jon Weiland (PhD, 2018) - Archaeologist at Christopher B. Krebs Chris Bobonich
Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency in Jody Maxmin Alan Code
Hawaii Grant Parker Charlotte Fonrobert
Jennifer Trimble Ian Hodder
Michael Penn
Scott Weiss (PhD, 2019) - Visiting Assistant Assistant Professors Bissera Pentcheva
Professor in the Department of Classics at Knox Hans Bork Caroline Winterer
College Justin Leidwanger Yiqun Zhou

Lecturers Administrative Staff

Hans Wietzke (PhD, 2014) - Lecturer in the
Maud Gleason Pamela Jara-Arancibia
Department of Classics at the University of John Klopacz Valerie Kiszka
Massachusetts, Amherst Kilian Mallon Claudia Ortega
John Tennant Jill Westbrook
Contents
Letter from the Chair ............................................ 2 Research Scholar
Faculty News .......................................................... 4 Adrienne Mayor
Mellon Fellow ...................................................... 11 ..................................................................................................
Commencement .................................................. 12
Spring Break in Rome ......................................... 14 Cover Image: Marzamemi Maritime Heritage Project
Graduate Student News .................................... 16
Undergraduate Stories ....................................... 22 Justin Leidwanger excavating fragmentary panels from
Alumni Updates .................................................. 25 the marble chancel screen as undergraduate Fahdah
Marble Carving Workshop ............................... 26 AlSubaihin and former undergrad (now UPenn PhD
Eitner/SCIT ........................................................ 27 student) James Gross excavate farther along the reef.

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DEPARTMENT OF CLASSICS 3
Faculty News
Hans Bork
My first year as a faculty member in
the Classics Department was wonderful
and jam-packed. I taught an exciting
range of undergraduate and graduate
courses (Elementary Greek; Pliny and
Martial; the Imperial Latin survey),
and helped run the department’s new
Pedagogy Workshop for graduate
students. I had the chance to meet
many of our wonderful students, and
I quickly became comfortable with
academic life at Stanford. My research
work was also productive: I gave papers
at two stimulating conferences (one
on expressive language in Roman
comedy, and the other on “imaginary
inscriptions” in the plays of Plautus),
wrote several articles for publication
(two now currently under review),
attended a training program on Latin
lexicography in Munich, and made
satisfying progress on the manuscript
for my book.
Andrew Devine
My new book, Pragmatics for Latin,
was published by Oxford University
Press in February. Stanford Classics
PhD Larry Stephens co-authored the
book, which shows how the pragmatic
meanings associated with different
Latin word orders arise naturally from
the compositional process and how the
semantic meaning of Latin sentences
can be derived compositionally without
first rearranging the words back into
an English-like underlying order.
Such questions seem to be basic, even
elementary. Anyone reading a Latin
text might wonder how meaning is
derived from free word order. But it
turned out to be quite a challenge, both
technical and theoretical, to develop a
workable syntax-semantics/pragmatics
interface for the Latin language.
John Klopacz
At the end of my report for the 2018
newsletter I mentioned that several
colleagues and I were meeting to plan a
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4 STANFORD UNIVERSITY
year-long series of pedagogy workshops
for our graduate students. While I was
the faculty coordinator for series, this
was very much a collaborative project
of both faculty and students. I enjoyed
this opportunity to work closely with
master teacher Susan Stephens and
to get to know our newest colleague
Hans Bork. Visiting scholar Wilfred
Major generously shared his time and
expertise in, among other topics, online
Greek teaching. This dedicated Latinist
was amazed to learn from Willie that
it’s no longer your grandparents’ Chase
and Phillips for the Hellenists. Graduate
representative Kevin Ennis kept us
informed about when to schedule
meetings and took care of the all -
important lunch arrangements. Along
with best practices in the classroom
we discussed textbook selection,
leading discussions of controversial
issues in classical literature, and
how to approach questions about
language instruction during a job
interview. Faculty members made our
languages classes open to visits from
the graduate students and offered
them opportunities to teach a lesson.
Professor Major has returned to LSU,
but we are delighted that Mellon Fellow
John Tennant will join our team for the
current academic year.
I have continued to draw upon my
background as a graduate student
of medieval comparative literature.
During Winter Quarter I took on
Later Latin 400 – 1700 and taught
a group of Classics undergraduates
who were a mix of either old hands
at Late Antiquity or the “medieval
curious.” They more than rose to the
challenge of a wide range of authors
including Isidore, Prudentius, Boethius,
Hrotsvitha, and Heloise. With generous
support from the department I was
able to join Stanford English colleagues
Elaine Treharne and Jonathan Quick in
London for a conference organized in
conjunction with the British Library’s
special exhibition of Anglo-Saxon
manuscripts. The highlight of this
event for me came when, just after the
Library’s opening hour, I stood alone in
front of the Codex Amiatinus and other
manuscripts upon which I had only
dreamed I would ever set my gaze.
At the beginning of the summer I
joined my one-time Castilleja School
colleague Constance Richardson in
Rome to meet and lead a group of
fourteen participants in the Vergilian
Society’s “Grand Tour of the Bay of
Naples.” Our group included a rising
college senior, an indefatigable eighty-
five year old, and Professor of Classics
by courtesy Yiqun Zhou. Constance and
I designed a tour that followed as nearly
as possible the path of the eighteenth-
century Grand Tourists, concentrating
on the archaeological sites available
to them with a nod to the splendors
John Klopacz (tour co-director),
Professor Yiqun Zhou (East Asian
Languages and Classics by courtesy),
and graduate archaeologist Serena
Crosson met at Pompeii's Villa of the
Mosaic Columns in July 2019 during
the Vergilian Society's Bay of Naples
"Grand Tour."
of Baroque and Bourbon Naples. I
must thank both Giovanna Ceserani
and Tiziana Vanorio for sharing their
knowledge of the Grand Tour and the
geology of the Campi Flegrei. In 2020
I shall lead a tour in Campania for
undergraduate Latin students enrolled
in “Greeks, Trojans, and Romans in the
Bay of Naples.”
Valerie Kiszka, Claudia Ortega and
I continue to receive and answer
inquiries concerning our undergraduate
program from American and
international high school students.
Their interest speaks well for the
continuing relevance of Classics and
for the excellence of secondary Latin
and Greek programs. In February a
group of Berkeley High School Latin
students and teachers visited campus
to attend our classes and have lunch
with our students and faculty. Our
undergraduate majors and minors are
always generous with the time they
spend with campus visitors and several
assisted at California Junior Classical
League events. Students held (October
11 – 12) Stanford Classics' first annual
Latin certamen.
This year’s commencement ceremony
was especially poignant for me because
two of the graduates, Alexandra Myers
and Clare Tandy, were my Castilleja
Latin students as sixth- and seventh-
graders. It was a rare privilege to see
young Classicists move from their first
steps in a language to the completion
of their undergraduate degrees. Clare
and Alexandra were part of the 2019
undergraduate cohort, which for me
exemplified the words of Terence “homo
sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto,
I am a human being, I judge nothing
pertaining to humanity foreign to me.”
As I said of them at the ceremony,
“In addition to Greek and Latin they
have acquired here at Stanford and in
overseas programs Russian, German,
Arabic, Italian, and, I suspect, other
languages of which I am not aware.
They have studied physics, biology and
engineering to discover as Lucretius
would say ‘the nature of things’, and
they turned to the classical tradition
to learn dare I say the meaning of
things and how to live a good life and
to create a humane social order. They
have flourished in the creative arts
of acting, music making and telling
stories, but have not spurned the
practical arts of cooking, household
management, and, for one of these
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DEPARTMENT OF CLASSICS
graduates, farming on The Farm. Most
of all they have pursued - and I trust
will continue to pursue - the truly
fine arts of compassionate listening,
reaching across divisions, and building
community.”
Christopher Krebs
This past academic year was, once again
and for the fifth time, concluded by two
weeks in France spent studying Caesar
with twenty-some high-school teachers
of Latin. Along with the Paideia
Institute for Humanistic Study, which
runs “Caesar in Gaul,” and Luca Grillo,
my co-instructor from Notre Dame,
we have by now worked with over 100
teachers to make Caesar’s Latin come
alive in classrooms all over the US; the
experiences have been rewarding, and
we’re hoping to resume the program
next year.
Prior to “Caesar in Gaul,” I taught
my class on Rome for Stanford’s
Humanities Institute, where, once
again, I much enjoyed co-lecturing with
Caroline Winterer and Dan Edelstein
on “Revolutions” (any day now ...).
This followed an academic year during
which I taught my typical mix of
classes: the first part of the graduate
survey of Latin literature, my HumCore
class on “Great Books, Big Ideas from
Antiquity,” my freshman seminar on
“Eloquence Personified: How to Speak
Like Cicero,” and an advanced Latin
course on Roman love poetry.
In written matters, a long discussion of
Caesar’s geographies in their respective
intellectual contexts finally appeared in
the American Journal of Philology (“The
World’s Measure: Caesar’s Geographies
of Gallia and Britannia in their Contexts
and as Evidence of his World Map”),
in which I may suggest that the famous
map of Agrippa is actually Caesar’s.
Then there is a fun note in Classical
Quarterly on Plato’s Phaedrus in Caesar’s
ethnographic digression in BG 6
(“‘Greetings, Cicero!’ Caesar and Plato
on Writing and Memory”), parts of
which I enjoyed discussing with Andrea
Nightingale and Richard Martin, and
a review of a French flight of fancy
on Vercingétorix (which must not be
named). I am sorry to say that I am
still working on my commentary on
the seventh book of the Gallic Wars,
but I am also happy to report that I
am emerging from the trenches before
Alesia; then again, connoisseurs of the
late Roman Republic know that the
Gallic war did not end in 52 BCE. And
if I were to say that I’d be done with
Caesar very soon, I would have to be
untruthful. An “Enhanced Sabbatical
Fellowship in the Humanities and
Arts” will allow me to work “flat out”
(as Simon Hornblower once said
with regards to his Thucydides) on my
research projects.
For talks and seminars I travelled to:
Princeton, where I had the honor of
delivering the annual Prentice Lecture
(on “Classics as Crime Fiction”); Zurich,
where Anne Kolb hosted me graciously,
and half the humanities faculty (it
seemed to me) came to a talk on Caesar;
San Diego for the SCS; Nueva School,
where I contributed a series of lectures
and classes to their ambitious and
well-run intersession program; and
last but not least the Junior Classical
League convention at Miramonte High
School in Orinda to talk about “reading
responsibly.” Then in April I was
happy to host the third Historiography
Jam, a two-day workshop on ancient
historiography that brought together a
dozen philologists and historians from
near and far (many thanks to Valerie,
Claudia, and Lydia for making it, once
more, such an enjoyable and smooth
operation).
Justin Leidwanger
In the past academic year, I finalized
my book on the Roman maritime
economy in the eastern Mediterranean
(Roman Seas), which will be published
by Oxford University Press around the
end of 2019. A collection of papers on
Mediterranean maritime networks,
co-edited with Carl Knappett, appeared
in the fall with Cambridge University
5
Press, and a series of major interim
reports disseminated fieldwork results
from the Marzamemi shipwreck as well
as our 2011-2015 excavations at Burgaz
in Turkey.
Justin Leidwanger and Kilian Mallon
(PhD 2019) celebrating a successful
defense.
Moving labs at the Archaeology Center
gave me the chance to reorganize
and design a new space to better
accommodate our growing 3D work.
No sooner was this in order than
visitors Ben Russell (Edinburgh) and
Leopoldo Repola (Naples) arrived and
used the space throughout the spring
quarter. To take advantage of Ben’s
visit, we organized a workshop on
stone carving, allowing members of the
Classics and Archaeology communities
to learn about tools and processes and
to try their hands at creating a Roman
Corinthian capital under the guidance
of two professionals. Leopoldo and
I busied ourselves with museum
development and exhibition designs
related to our work at Marzamemi.
We spoke about this and other
aspects of the Marzamemi project at a
conference (co-organized with Krish
Seetah in Anthropology) examining
the intersection of environment,
development, and archaeology in
dynamic coastal communities. This
new lab space will also play a key role
in an upcoming freshman seminar that
explores the ancient world through 3D
modeling, digital analysis, and virtual
environments.
Spring brought the usual rush of field
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6 STANFORD UNIVERSITY
preparations, as well as two conferences
in which I felt particularly honored
to have a role: events at the British
School in Rome and the Norman Palace
in Palermo celebrated the work of
Sebastiano Tusa, our colleague who,
before his tragic death in the Ethiopian
Airlines crash in March, helped initiate
and support the Marzamemi project
as superintendent and then regional
councilor for cultural heritage.
This summer we completed the major
excavation on the shipwreck while
continuing our efforts to bring pop-
up multimedia exhibits on maritime
history into the community and
initiating documentation of historic
fishing and contemporary refugee
vessels. This work segues into our next
multi-year phase of the project, which
will explore the long-term history of
the local tuna fishing economy in the
context of Mediterranean connectivity.
Richard Martin
A quiet year, relatively speaking. I
designed and taught two new courses:
Epic!—a high-concept seminar in which
we read, in loving detail, the entire Iliad
and Odyssey in translation—and Ancient
Myth in Modern Poetry (another what-
you-see-is-what-you-get title), in which
ten keen students explored the lyrics
of Yeats, Auden, Tsvetaeva, Cavafy,
and Margaret Atwood, among many
others. Accompanied by an intense
cadre of graduate students, I revisited
the Peace and Thesmophoriazusae of
Aristophanes. I filled whatever odd
niches of time remained by advising on
dissertations (a half-dozen, inside and
outside the Department) and directing a
superb senior thesis (Carolyn Manion’s
work on the history of the Visigoths
by Isidore, the 7th-century Bishop of
Seville), as well as involvement in the
work of Harvard’s Center for Hellenic
Studies (Washington, DC and Nafplio,
Greece) and the American School of
Classical Studies in Athens.
Lecture and conference travels led to
pleasant venues: San Diego in early
January (SCS/AIA); Santa Clara a
few weeks later (hosted by my former
Stanford IHUM colleague and former
Princeton student, Daniel Turkeltaub);
London in February (Runciman
Lecture at King's College) followed
by a quick run up to Durham, where
Phil Horky, another IHUM veteran,
is making his mark; Bryn Mawr in
April (Agnes Michels Lecture); and
UCLA in May (“Wars of Words,” a
terrific folklore and mythology event).
Among my more unusual outreach
commitments: the ongoing production
of a Greek television series on the
alphabet saw me muffing multiple takes
on the meanings of innumerable words
(we are up to Nu by now…) while
being filmed by a patient and energetic
production crew. Additional footage of
the Raubitschek Professor striding up
the hills of San Francisco is calculated
to give viewers the impression that I
sometimes go outdoors.
Richard Martin delivering the 28th
annual Runciman Lecture at King's
College London. Photograph by
Katerina Kalogeraki.
Adrienne Mayor
My year as a 2018-19 Berggruen
Fellow at the Center for Advanced
Studies in the Behavioral Sciences was
a wonderful opportunity to meet social
scientists and scholars working on the
future of AI and robotics.
During the year I gave a seminar on
the ancient links between tyranny
and technology in myth and historical
antiquity. I spoke about ancient
versions of AI and automatons at
Berggruen headquarters in Los Angeles,
located in the fabulous Victorian
steampunk Bradbury Building (a
location for the film Blade Runner
and the TV series Bosch). I also gave
talks about my book Gods and Robots:
Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of
Technology at NASA Moffet Field in
Mountain View; the Stanford Classics
Department; LASER (Leonardo Art/
Science Evening Rendezvous at
Stanford); Town Hall, Seattle; Science
on Tap, Portland; Bloomberg Beta
Venture Capital, California Institute
of Integral Studies; and the Mechanics
Institute in San Francisco.
Translations of Gods and Robots are
coming out in Germany, Taiwan,
Beijing, and Spain. I wrote articles
for Time, Foreign Policy, Gizmodo, The
Conversation, and Proceedings of the
Geologists’ Association, as well as Technica
Curiosa. I wrote the script for another
TED-Ed lesson, this one on Talos,
the bronze robot of Greek myth. Two
chapters are forthcoming, in After Shock:
Future Shock at 50 and the Brill volume
Imagination and Art.
This year I discussed ancient ideas
about artificial life in ten podcasts
and about 30 international media
interviews, including the Guardian’s
digital culture series and Sean Carroll’s
Mindscape.
Ian Morris
I had a busy year, and I spent more of it
administering things than I’d planned.
The president and provost asked me to
join their long-range planning group
for Stanford. I co-chaired a committee
on “The Changing Human Experience”
with Lisa Blaydes from the Political
Science department. Our job was to
identify major areas of intellectual
excitement across the humanities and
the non-policy-oriented parts of the
social sciences, and to make a plan that
will help the university raise funds
and facilitate research. This turned
out to be more fun than it sounds, but
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DEPARTMENT OF CLASSICS
it also involved more meetings and
memos than I’d really thought possible.
Research funds should start flowing
before the end of 2019, though, and—
the important thing—someone else will
be chairing it.
Other activities this year were more
welcome. In November I found
myself on the Central Asian steppes
at a conference organized on behalf of
Kazakhstan’s long-serving president,
Nursultan Nazarbayev. He resigned
shortly after, though I don’t think it
was anything I said. I was asked to open
the event with a twelve-minute speech
summarizing the important changes
in global geopolitics in the century
since the guns fell silent at the end of
World War I. I hope I didn’t leave any
of them out. I half froze to death, but I
got to know some extraordinary people
there—including one of my heroes,
the UN’s former nuclear negotiator
Mohammed ElBaradei.
I also took part in a couple interesting
events in London. One had me giving
a public lecture at the British Museum
about Britain’s long-term relationships
with Europe and the wider world since
the British Isles physically split off from
the Continent, around 6000 BC. It was
held on March 29, which was supposed
to be Brexit Day, so the atmosphere was
a little charged. As part of the process
I met with Princess Anne, which was
a new experience (I grew up in Britain
but didn’t socialize much with royalty).
My book on Britain and Europe still
isn’t finished, but fortunately British
politics move even more slowly than
my writing schedule.
The other London event was a
conference on war and religion in
antiquity, organized by Stanford’s
former PhD student Irene Polinskaya,
now a professor at King’s College
London. It was a great event, even
though the temperature got up into the
nineties (London isn’t built for that).
I made another slightly unusual trip in
August, to be the Australian Army’s
2019 professor of future land warfare.
I gave fifteen talks. Some were very
wonkish, like ones to the Office of
National Intelligence and the Lowy
Institute in Sydney, while others were
much more down-to-earth, like one to
the Special Forces (where I talked a lot
about pirates). There was some beach
time, though, and the Seventh Brigade
in Brisbane let me drive in one of their
M1A1 Abrams tanks. Another first.
Ian Morris in an M1A1 Abrams tank,
courtesy of 6 Brigade of the Australian
Army. Morris was in Australia in August
2019 as the Australian Army's E.G.
Keogh Visiting Chair.
The rest of the time, I kept busy
teaching my ancient history classes
and meeting with graduate students
on campus. A couple of the year’s
highlights were attending an award
ceremony for Grace Erny, who won
one of the highly competitive Stanford
Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellowships
in 2018, and getting the news that
Amanda Gaggioli will be receiving one
of the 2019 awards.
Reviel Netz
I spent last year on sabbatical at
the Center for Advanced Studies
in Behavioral Sciences at Stanford.
This comes just in time, since T.L.
Heath published his History of Greek
Mathematics in 1921, and it was never
replaced by a more up-to-date history.
Such a history is required at least once a
century, and I hope to publish my new
history of Greek mathematics in 2021.
I am relieved to say I completed the
manuscript, but now comes the hard
7
work of editing. 2021 remains a tough
target!
The center is very near the campus
but rather higher, just off the Dish
walking path. During the winter break
most everyone stayed home, and I was
the only human up on the hill—which
reverted, so to speak, to nature. There
I was, frantically typing my section of
the book on the reception of Greek
astronomy within Medieval Islam,
while a pack of deer were out there,
beneath my window, munching the
flowers. The life!
Meanwhile, my monograph on the
practices of high culture in antiquity:
Scale, Space and Canon in Ancient Literary
Culture is making its way to publication
by Cambridge University Press. We
have produced an index and corrected
a round of proofs, and we even have
our cover art. The cover will show an
idealized eighteenth-century image
of the city of Alexandria, which is
appropriate since the book spends
most of its pages between Athens and
Alexandria. Everyone knows Athens,
so it really is incumbent upon us to
lift its ancient rival. This is also an
image about size—the centerpiece is
the Pharos of Alexandria—which once
again is appropriate, since one of the
main themes of my book is the sheer
scale of ancient culture (I argue that
there were about 30,000 authors active
before 200 CE). Also, the book is big—
905 pages—and it is a good bargain,
available for pre-order from CUP for a
mere $60. The press marks this at such
an attractive price because it wishes to
sell many copies. I heartily concur.
Andrea Nightingale
This year had its ups and downs. On
the down side, my partner Mark was
diagnosed with a brain tumor in late
June. And, to add insult to injury, our
beloved cat Jamalia Sweets was also
diagnosed with a brain tumor that
very same week! After putting Mark
through a number of medical tests, the
doctors told us at the end of August that
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8 STANFORD UNIVERSITY
Mark will not need surgery, at least for
now. The tumor is located in a good
place and is doing no damage, and it
has not grown since June. We were
thrilled to get this news. After Mark got
diagnosed, we decided to get married
(we had been together for 13 years). We
got married on August 7th!
Among the wedding events, we did a
short hike to the top of Windy Hill (in
the Santa Cruz Mountains, which are
west of Stanford), which is one of our
favorite places in this area. We will go
to Kenya in 2020 for our honeymoon.
You may be wondering about how our
cat is faring. I am happy to report that
Jamalia has not gotten any worse. She
twitches a bit but remains her happy,
cuddly self. She is quite old, and we do
not know how many months she will
have on this earth. But she is doing well
thus far!
Andrea and Mark out on a hike on their
wedding day.
On the academic front, I finished
my book, Eros and Epiphany: Plato’s
Theological Philosophy, and submitted it
to Cambridge University Press. Two of
my Plato students did fantastic work on
the book. First, my research assistant
Thomas Slabon (a PhD candidate in
Philosophy at Stanford) read the entire
manuscript and found many errors. I
am incredibly grateful to him for doing
all this hard work for me. My other
dissertation student, Dr. John Tennant
(who just finished his PhD in Classics
at UCLA in June) read a number
of chapters and sent me excellent
comments. I want to add that John
won a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship
at Stanford, and will start teaching for
us in the fall! I am so very proud of
him, and I know that he will do great
work for Classics. Congratulations,
John! Two of my other students
who completed their dissertations
last year also got postdoctoral
fellowships—Vanessa Glauser and
Boris Shoshitaishvili. Among my
other dissertation students (these
include students whose dissertations
I am directing and those for whom I
serve as a member of the dissertation
committee), I want to congratulate
Alyson Melzer for winning the
Mabelle MacLeod Lewis Dissertation
Fellowship! I feel incredibly lucky to
have had such great students here at
Stanford.
Josh Ober
I spent most of the year teaching,
developing a new Stanford initiative
on civic education, and working on the
book project that will be presented in
my Sather Classical Lectures at UC-
Berkeley in autumn 2019. Meanwhile,
I spent several weeks of autumn in
Canberra, Australia as a guest of
the Australian National University
Department of Philosophy and the
University of Canberra Center for
Deliberative Democracy. I gave a few
guest lectures at the University of
Chicago, University of Tennessee, and
Texas Tech. Highlights of the year
include a two-week trip to Egypt (the
first time I have ever seen the sights so
memorably recorded by Herodotus),
and a week in the backwoods of
western Alaska (a place that even the
intrepid Herodotus never made it to)
fly-fishing with my brother, Richard.
My co-edited book, Ancient Greek
History and Contemporary Social Science,
the result of a term as a Visiting
Leventis Professor at the University of
Edinburgh, was published by U of E
Press. I also co-authored a few articles:
one with my old friend and co-author
Brook Manville on why it is hard to
predict the future of democracy; one
with my former Classics PhD student
Federica Carugati and my Political
Science colleague Barry Weingast
on the question of whether political
development is uniquely modern
(answer: no); and one with the
London-based computer scientists
Jeremy Pitt and Ada Dioconescu
titled “Knowledge Management for
Democratic Governance of Socio-
Technical Systems.” Not surprisingly,
my background in Greek history and
classical literature was the basis for my
contribution to each of these seemingly
far-flung topics.
Anastasia-Erasmia Peponi
Two new seminars I taught in the
winter and spring were the highlights
of this academic year.
The first one was dedicated to the
way classical aesthetics was adopted
and reinterpreted by eighteenth and
early nineteenth-century philosophers,
critics, and poets who contributed
to the shaping of modern aesthetic
thought. Works by Hutcheson,
Addison, Batteux, D’Alembert,
Baumgarten, Lessing, Kant, Schiller,
Schelling, Hume, Wordsworth,
Coleridge, Goethe, Hegel, and
Nietzsche were juxtaposed mainly
with Plato, Aristotle, and Horace
but also with occasional references
to Philostratus, Plotinus and other
ancient authors. The discussions were
stimulating and at times pleasantly
intense, with all participants arguing
and counterarguing both orally, in
class, and in written exchanges. We
repeatedly debated such issues as the
concept of taste and its ambiguous
relationship to Greek and Greco-
Roman thought; the role of Greek
philosophy in modern taxonomies of
the mind and in the systematization
of the Fine Arts; the centrality of
the concept of mimesis in part of
eighteenth-century thought; the
concept of belle nature and its possible
Aristotelian roots; and aesthetics as
relevant to the ancient opposition
between things perceptible through the
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DEPARTMENT OF CLASSICS
senses (aisthêta) and things perceptible
through the mind (noêta). One of the
recurrent points of contention was
how to assess the usually explicit and
at times implicit presence of Greek and
Roman aesthetic thought throughout
the eighteenth century. The mix of
Classics graduate students and students
from Philosophy and Comparative
Literature (both graduate and advanced
undergraduate, enrolled and auditors)
made this seminar particularly rich and
dynamic.
The second seminar was dedicated
to Philodemus, an important but
still under-examined philosopher,
poet, and critic of the first part of the
first century BCE. His critical works
are of paramount importance not
only because they shed light on the
intersection of art and literary criticism
and philosophy, but also because of
their specific Epicurean connections.
Despite the fragmentary condition of
Philodemus’ works, we were able to
discuss a number of specific questions
stemming from his critical works,
and we owe much to the generosity
of Professor Richard Janko (from
the University of Michigan), who
shared with us the manuscript of his
forthcoming edition of the second
book of Philodemus’ On Poems. Overall,
this challenging seminar benefitted
immensely from the published work of
Professor Elizabeth Asmis (University
of Chicago) as well as from her visit and
very illuminating talk at the seminar.
In the spring, I was once again
reminded that one of the reasons why
Classics is so attractive is its important
role in the most pioneering discourses
in modern times. Invited to speak at the
Institute for the Study of the Ancient
World in NYC, I visited a small but
remarkably illuminating exhibition,
organized by the Institute, on the
Ancient World and the Ballets Russes, the
latter being “the Paris-based company
led by Sergei Diaghilev (1872–1929)
that revolutionized ballet and kindled
an unprecedented interest in this art,” as
the organizers of the exhibition put it.
Vanguards have always been enamored
of the Classics.
Rush Rehm
I taught several courses in 2018-19,
including the Freshman Seminar
"To Die For: Antigone and Political
Dissent." As Artistic Director of
Stanford Repertory Theater (SRT), I
directed my adaptation of Turgenev's A
Month in the Country (entitled Four-Sided
Triangle) for the Turgenev Bicentennial
Festival in St. Petersburg, Russia; a
revival of Democratically Speaking at
the Marines' Memorial Theater in San
Francisco; and two new productions
for SRT's twenty-first annual summer
theater festival on the Environment
and Social Justice—Voices from the Earth:
From Sophocles to Rachel Carson and
Beyond and Polar Bears, Black Boys, and
Prairie-Fringed Orchids. Voices from the
Earth will be remounted at Stanford in
November 2019. I continued to work
on my book on Euripides' Electra for the
Bloomsbury Companions to Greek and
Roman Tragedy, and I reviewed Greek
Tragedy on the Move by E. Stewart for
the Journal of Hellenic Studies.
Richard Saller
My return to full-time teaching and
research after twenty-four years as
dean or provost has been an enormous
pleasure (and relief). Teaching over
the past year included a Writing
in the Major course on Augustan
politics and culture, culminating in
a trip to Rome with our majors and
minors. In addition, David Cohen and
I experimented with a new course
called “Slavery, Human Trafficking
and the Moral Order: Ancient and
Modern.” Unfortunately, news reports
of contemporary trafficking made the
material all too familiar. Reentry into
research has been daunting, owing
to the flood of recent publications
on Roman economic history, in part
stimulated by the Cambridge Economic
History of the Greco-Roman World, which
I edited along with Walter Scheidel and
Ian Morris.
9
Walter Scheidel
During the past—and as it turned out,
mercifully uneventful—academic year I
filled in for Grant Parker as department
chair while he took a much-deserved
sabbatical. Much of the year was taken
up by the production of my latest
book, Escape from Rome: The Failure of
Empire and the Road to Prosperity, which
Princeton University Press published
in October. What I had originally
intended to be a slim volume somehow
ballooned to 700 pages. My only excuse
is that it covers some 2,500 years of
world history.
I also managed to finish several articles
on the comparative history of inequality
and slavery. I am now finally resuming
work on the violent succession
practices of Roman emperors in a
global cross-cultural context—a project
that dates back to 2005 but kept getting
shunted aside by competing interests.
Over the course of the academic year
I led the annual Newell Classics Event
at St. John’s College in Cambridge
and gave lectures at NYU, Princeton,
Buenos Aires, and Vienna. I also
visited Moscow and St. Petersburg
and continued my series of seminars
for the CIA. On the home front, I
taught an introductory seminar on the
long history of economic inequality
and a graduate seminar on ancient
inequalities together with Ian Morris,
as well as my usual survey of Roman
history and my segments for the
Human Biology core sequence. I was
particularly pleased that my stellar
erstwhile PhD advisee Dan-el Padilla
Peralta was awarded early tenure at
Princeton. As interim chair, I made a
sustained effort to prioritize diversity
in inviting speakers for our various
departmental events. But that was
surely not enough, and much more
needs to be done to make Classics more
inclusive and viable.
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10
Jennifer Trimble
In 2018-19 I was on sabbatical,
supported by a Stanford University
Humanities and Arts Enhanced
Sabbatical Fellowship. I spent most of
the year continuing to research and
write my book on the intersections of
Roman slavery and visual culture. This
book project is pushing me in directions
far from my early training and the
work I’ve previously done. Happily,
one of the benefits of sabbatical is
having time to read up on new areas.
Even better, expert colleagues help
guide us through those new areas—like
Hans Bork, a generous and helpful
interlocutor on the literary dimensions
of this project. Sabbatical provides
time for research travel as well. In a
visit to the Vatican Museums, I was
able to examine religious dedications
made by Roman slaves. Thanks to the
help of the curators there, I gained
access to the Galleria Lapidaria, a
collection of ancient inscriptions that
is usually closed. These are housed in
a sixteenth-century corridor in a very
eighteenth-century arrangement: the
inscriptions are immured in the walls,
thickly covering the surfaces from floor
to ceiling.
On that same research trip to Rome,
I revisited one of my favorite ancient
works of art in the Capitoline
Museums, a marble sculpture depicting
a wounded warrior. The nude figure
falls onto his knees and left arm,
fending off an attack from above with
the sword in his right hand. But, if you
look more closely, that is not at all what
the sculpture depicts. Think away all
the eighteenth-century restorations:
the head, the neck, both arms, both
legs, the plinth, the shield. The only
ancient bit is the torso, and that torso
is a Roman reproduction of Myron’s
Discobolos, or Discus Thrower. This
was the first Discobolos found in the
modern period, and at that time no one
yet knew what the ancient statue was
supposed to look like. But the aesthetics
of the time demanded complete
STANFORD UNIVERSITY
restorations of ancient fragments,
and so a plausible restoration had to
be made—the wounded warrior. This
restored sculpture is a vivid reminder
of just how long people have been
looking at and doing things with
ancient Roman objects, and how
different those objects look as modern
interests and knowledge change. This
theme is directly relevant to writing a
book on slavery as well. How modern
scholars study ancient Roman slavery
changes in different time periods and
different countries; it is shaped not
only by methodological advances but by
more recent histories and aftermaths of
slavery.
Taking a break from the grim topic of
slavery, I also spent some time this year
working on other aspects of Roman
art. I attended a terrific conference on
Roman Women on the Bay of Naples,
organized by Brenda Longfellow at
the Villa Vergiliana, near Naples. For
that conference paper, and then in an
article now submitted to the volume
Brenda and Molly Swetnam-Burland
are co-editing, I thought about how
we can reconstruct female viewers
of Roman paintings in the absence
of any direct evidence. A productive
and untapped way forward is to take
seriously the labor and embodied
experiences of the space in which a
painting was seen. That labor and those
embodied experiences were a primary
filter for viewing and reception.
Another highlight was a conference on
relief organized by Milette Gaifman at
Yale, for which I was the discussant.
This conference plunged us into the
materiality of sculpted forms, from
Roman imperial reliefs to Greek
funerary stelae, from ancient writings
to the role of modern photography.
And that emphasis on materiality
intersected in stimulating ways with
an event back at Stanford. Justin
Leidwanger, together with our visiting
Early Career Fellow Ben Russell,
co-organized a workshop on marble
carving, complete with hands-on
demonstrations given by two practicing
sculptors. There is no substitute for
knowing how something is made—and STANFORD
for trying your hand at it yourself! HUMANITIES CENTER
In short, community is an essential
Mellon Fellow
part of academic research and and Lecturer OF
writing. Our students are a vital
part of this community, and it is an
CLASSICS
ongoing privilege to advise emerging
John Tennant received his PhD
young scholars. Dillon Gisch, in his
dissertation, is tackling the afterlives
in Classics from the University of
of the Knidian Aphrodite in a very California, Los Angeles (2019) and
new way, exploring marginal cases his MA in Classics from Stanford
that resist traditional classifications University (2013).
and thus make us rethink what the
material meant to ancient viewers. His research concerns the
Gabrielle Thiboutot, in her dissertation transmission of cultural wisdom
work, continues to discover new in Greek prose and poetry and
things about how mummy portraits in how this transmission was called
Roman Egypt were made and what they into question in the late fifth century BCE—coming to a head in works
tell us about commercial and artistic by authors such as Euripides, Thucydides, and especially Plato. John
networks more broadly. But Stanford’s explores how proverbs, aphorisms, and other rhetorical commonplaces
Classics department is not only about become particularly important at times when shared discourse breaks
producing new professors. I am equally down, when language itself becomes an object of mistrust.
proud of our students who find ways
to transfer their skills and contribute The transformative potential of figurative speech employed in proverbs
meaningfully in other walks of life. Dr. became apparent to John while he was practicing as a union labor
Jonathan Weiland, for instance, wrote lawyer, his previous profession. The law itself is arguably composed
his PhD dissertation about Roman largely of just such phrases, with similar normative aspirations. John
burials and poverty in the Roman
received his Juris Doctor from Harvard Law School, where he first
world; I was his advisor. Jon has expert
became interested in the seeming connections between modes of
skills in excavating graves and human
discourse and speakers’ ethics and moral values. In 2002-03, John
bones and in drawing meaning from
very meager remains. This year, Jon
received a Fulbright Post-Doc Research Fellowship to work with police
accepted a position that uses those skills unions and immigrants' rights advocates in Paris, France, studying
in a different way. He has been hired by the ways in which tensions might be reduced in the Parisian suburbs
a company that specializes in forensic between rank-and-file police officers and the communities they serve,
work, including human identification composed primarily of Muslim immigrants from the Maghreb.
and mass fatalities, to work with the
Department of Defense on recovering John’s current project (a continuation of the subject of his dissertation)
the remains of American soldiers is to frame Plato’s Republic as an attempt to reform the state of discourse
missing in action. in a politico-discursive crisis that occurred toward the end of the
fifth and beginning of the fourth century in Athens, focusing on the
To end on previously unexplored role that proverbs and gnômai play in Plato’s
a lighter creation of the ideal polis. Plato uses such commonplaces not solely for
note, cats the purpose of lending his dialogue a more authentic character. Rather,
are excellent they elucidate the dynamics of power that inhere in the prevailing
company for modes of Athenian discourse and provide a locus for Plato’s critique
a classicist of the improper use of language. Plato reveals how discursive reform
working is inseparable from social and political reform. Proverbs, gnômai, and
long hours at other rhetorical topoi serve collectively as one of the building blocks of a
her desk. just society. Put simply, wordcraft is statecraft.

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DEPARTMENT OF CLASSICS 11
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12 STANFORD UNIVERSITY
 Stanford Classics Commencement
Distinguished Speaker

Dr. Yan P. Lin, President of FITI in Montreal, Quebec

When I see before me the students who have studied Classics, I regain
hope. So, speaking first for myself and for your teachers, it has been our
duty to carry the torch and to relay it to the next generation. Speaking to
you who are graduating today, that duty is now also yours. You must not
let the light go out. You will all start new lives, beginning your careers or
continuing further study. You may be on the way to becoming professors,
teachers, educators, scholars, or entrepreneurs. With the spirit of Classics,
you should be able to do very well, regardless of what you choose to do.
With preparation in the spirit of criticism, competitiveness, rationality, and
humanity, there is no reason to not do well.

2019 Graduates and Awards

Doctor of Philosophy Minor Departmental Awards
Matthieu Abgrall Madeleine Duboc
Nolan S. Epstein Alfonso Gamboa Senior Prize
Edward Kelting John Hamby Raleigh Ethan Browne
Kilian Mallon Madeline Lee Anna Widder
Scott Weiss Martin Litonjua
Robert Pragada Junior Prize
Bachelor of Arts Samuel Reamer Justin Muchnick
Raleigh Ethan Browne*Φ Aaron Rios
Seth Chambers* Joshua Singer Archimedes Prize for
Aulden Foltz Clare Patrice Tandy Classics and Science
Jacob Kaplan-Lipkin Bradley Zdroik Aulden Foltz
Alexandra Myers
PhD Minor School of Humanities
Bachelor of Arts with Vanessa Severine Glauser and Sciences Award
Honors Jeffrey Alan Knott
Mary Carolyn Manion Boris Shoshitaishvili J.E. Wallace Sterling Award
Anna Widder*Φ for Academic Achievement
Raleigh Ethan Browne
* Distinction
Φ Phi Beta Kappa Society

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DEPARTMENT OF CLASSICS 13
THE AUGUSTAN AGE: POLITICS AND CULTURE
Classics students study in Rome WINTER/SPRING 2019

This year, students enrolled in the Classics Majors Seminar “The Augustan Age” capped off their
quarter with a trip to Rome.

Lodging in the Trastevere neighborhood—famed for its piazze, fountains, and other trappings of
la dolce vita—the class ventured across the city to study the monumental achievements of the
Roman Empire. Led by course instructor Richard Saller and TA Kevin Ennis, they visited famed
architectural marvels like the Pantheon and Colosseum. In the Vatican and Capitoline Museums,
they appreciated firsthand the artistic achievements of the Augustan Age.

Special thanks to local expert Francesca Caruso for her outstanding guidance and knowledge.

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14 STANFORD UNIVERSITY
 I’ve always been fascinated with La Città Eterna.
It was the experience of a lifetime to walk down
centuries-old cobblestone streets, turn the corner,
and see over two millennia of history in a single
view.

Our focus was on the Augustan Age, and you can’t

even begin to grasp the influence Augustus had
on the very landscape of Rome without being
consumed by the city itself. What astounded me
most was how Rome embraced all parts of its
history, its urban developments layered one on top
of the other, connecting the past to today in striking
ways that made Ancient Rome feel closer to our
time. Francesca Caruso, our tour guide during the
trip, said it best: “These are your streets. These are
your stones. These are your stories."
Vincent Nicandro, Class of 2020

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DEPARTMENT OF CLASSICS 15
Graduate Student News
Brandon Bark
I mostly spent the year writing and
researching for my dissertation. I also
had the opportunity to teach a few
online courses for the Paideia Institute,
including one of my own design, a
survey of Christian Latin authors from
the Vetus Latina to Augustine, which
I hope to teach again. This summer I
co-TA'ed for the third time Professor
Krebs' high school course about
Rome and its legacies for the Stanford
Summer Humanities Institute alongside
fellow PhD student and Latinist Rachel
Dubit. My wife and I attended not one,
but two Stanford Classics weddings
this summer! We first attended the
beautiful marriage of Nick Gardner
and Mary Kelly in Pescadero. We then
had the chance to travel to France to
witness (literally: I served as a "témoin
de mariage") the marriage of fellow
grad student Peter Shi and his lovely
bride Béline at the lovely Château de
Montmirail near the Loire Valley. It
was great to see fellow grad Amanda
Gaggioli and recent alum Brittney
Szempruch there as well!
Brittney, Peter, Martin, and Brandon in
Paris at Peter Shi and Beline Pasquini's
(recent visiting student researcher)
wedding.
Nicholas Bartos
My second year in the doctoral
program began with a major highlight.
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16
Welcome, New PhD Students!
Sinead Brennan-McMahon
Language & Literature
Annie Lamar
Language & Literature
Guoshi Li
Classical Archaeology
Matt Previto
Classical Archaeology
Nick Bartos near the Duomo of San
Giorgio in Ragusa, Sicily.
In the fall, I was fortunate to have the
opportunity to design and teach my
own course for the first time. “Egypt in
the Age of Heresy” introduced students
to one of the most controversial eras in
ancient Egyptian history: the Amarna
Period (c. 1350-1334 BCE). During this
period, Akhenaten, the “Heretic King,”
ruptured centuries of tradition by
establishing a new “religion of the sun”
(often considered the world’s first form
of monotheism), founding a new capital
city (Amarna), and overseeing radical
departures in artistic and architectural
forms, only to be systematically erased
by his successors and largely forgotten
until his rediscovery in the nineteenth
STANFORD UNIVERSITY
century. It was a pleasure to delve
into much-debated archaeological and
textual sources with such a capable
group of students.
In the winter, I had an excellent
experience assisting Prof. Susan
Stephens with a much larger course:
“Ancient Athletics.” Thanks to the
generous support of the Stanford
Classics Department and the
Stanford Archaeology Center, I
returned for summer fieldwork to
the Marzamemi Maritime Heritage
Project in southeastern Sicily (directed
by Professor Justin Leidwanger).
I continued my role of excavating
the Marzamemi II shipwreck and
organizing underwater archaeological
survey to the north at the fishing and
commercial port of Vendicari. I will
present a collaborative paper on the
results of the ongoing Vendicari survey
in a colloquium session, “The ‘Church
Wreck’ and Beyond: Marzamemi
Maritime Heritage Project, 2013-2019,”
at the 2020 AIA/SCS Annual Meeting
in Washington, D.C.
Leonardo Cazzadori
In the 2018-19 academic year, I
continued to develop my dissertation
project on Hellenistic didactic poetry.
I explored how the term 'didactic'
emerged in early modern criticism
and what gaps exist between this
conceptualization and antiquity. I
assessed the ancient evidence on this
type of poetry in the Hellenistic age
and tackled some reductionist scholarly
approaches to this group of poems.
I then moved toward the core of the
project, which aims to understand what
is the culture of Hellenistic 'didactic'
poetry. I first explored how the poets
presented their chosen themes in the
texts in terms of rhetorical efficacy (or
lack thereof) and style. I also began
to study how the poems could have
engaged with the variegated world of
prose.
I plan to complete my research on
this latter aspect in the next academic
year, investigating what kinds of
aesthetic experience this poetry could
have allowed and what interpretative
challenges it has posed to moderns.
Grace Erny
My fourth year at Stanford passed
in a whirlwind. After defending my
dissertation proposal in December, I
began the process of compiling data
and outlining my dissertation chapters.
I was supported in this process
by a Digital Humanities Graduate
Fellowship at CESTA, which provided
training in various digital humanities
tools, the support of a cohort of
other graduate student fellows, and a
research assistant to help me digitize
archaeological survey maps in GIS.
Another highlight of the 2018-19
school year was teaching Intermediate
Greek this spring.
Grace Erny collects lithics on the site
of Pounta during the Bays of Eastern
Attica Regional Survey.
Fieldwork in Greece kept me busy
for nearly three months this summer.
I was excited to join the staff of a
new archaeological project in Attica,
BEARS (the Bays of Eastern Attica
Regional Survey), co-directed by
Stanford Classics alum Sarah Murray.
Our team conducted gridded collection
and intensive survey around the bay
of Porto Raphti in Attica, including on
Raphtis Island (the first time I have ever
taken a boat to work!). We recovered
artifacts dating from the Final Neolithic
through the Late Roman period. I also
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DEPARTMENT OF CLASSICS
returned to the Western Argolid, where
I have been working since 2014, for
a brief study season. Finally, I ended
my summer with a third campaign at
the Anavlochos Excavations in East
Crete. I supervised a team excavating a
previously unexplored neighborhood
in the Geometric settlement, then
began to study the pottery from a
mountaintop votive deposit that we
excavated in 2017. I am grateful to the
Stanford Classics Department and the
Stanford Archaeology Center for their
support as I pursue this research.
Amanda Gaggioli
This past summer I participated in
the Wiener Laboratory Field School
with the American School of Classical
Studies at Athens, where I learned
about and contributed to research
on site formation, stratigraphy, and
geoarchaeology in the Athenian
Agora. In addition, I participated in
fieldwork and carried out my own
geoarchaeological research at the
Late Bronze Age sites of Maroni and
Kalavasos in Cyprus, the Roman and
Hellenistic sites of Antiochia ad Cragum
and Blaudos in Turkey, and Geometric
and Hellenistic sites in Helike, Greece.
On the whole, my summer fieldwork
contributed to my dissertation research,
in which I will use the methods and
techniques of soil micromorphology to
better understand human-environment
relationships in early Greece. I am
taking soil cores below, through, and
above earthquake destruction levels
of architectural remains in order to
Amanda Gaggioli prepares an area
for taking soil cores outside a Roman
temple at the site of Antiochia ad
Cragum in Gazipaşa, Turkey.
investigate particular earthquake
micro-features in soils. This evidence
will aid in determining and interpreting
correlations between environmental
events and changes in technology and
society as observed from materials
in the archaeological record. I am
looking forward to demonstrating the
potential applications of soil sciences to
new research questions in the field of
classical archaeology.
Nick Gardner
This was an eventful summer for me,
and the first half was very busy. During
the summer quarter I taught a course
on Greek and Latin roots and took a
computer science class. While all that
was going on my partner Mary and
I got married! Our wedding was in
Pescadero, California, and it was a blast.
The reception was at a goat farm. The
second half of the summer was less
exciting but more relaxing, with time
to go on hikes, lie around, see movies
at the Stanford Theater—and (at last!)
no general exams to study for. Now
I'm starting to work on my dissertation
prospectus, and I am looking forward to
year four of the program.
Nick Gardner and Mary Kelly at their
wedding in Pescadero, California.
Dillon Gisch
In 2018-19 I continued work on
my dissertation, “Replication and
Difference in Images of ‘Modest
Venus,' 200 BCE–600 CE,” which
considers how viewers in the ancient
17
Roman world would have understood
replicated images of Venus naked
and covering her vulva. During the
academic year, I had the good fortune
to present three components of this
research.
The first of these took place at the
Stanford Interdisciplinary Working
Group in Literary and Visual Culture.
There I argued that the ancient
literary and visual lines of evidence
for Praxiteles’ Knidian Aphrodite,
the archetypal “modest Venus,” are
fundamentally incommensurate and
offer little in the way of evidence
about how ancient viewers would
have understood this long-lost statue,
contrary to longstanding art-historical
contentions.
Second, at the Society for American
Archaeology, I extended the above line
of inquiry to investigate how modern
historians of art have interpreted
surviving images of “modest Venus” in
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
I found that historians of art have
discursively constructed these images
of Venus—the mythological paragon
of womanly sexuality in the ancient
Roman world—as sexually undesirable.
These judgments tell us more about the
judges' aesthetics and erotics than the
significance of these images for ancient
viewers. What’s more, strides toward
greater diversity among researchers
over the past thirty years have proven
insufficient to ameliorate the misogyny
and misethnicity that subtend this
entire conversation.
Third, at the Stanford Archaeology
Center, I presented a group of
Egyptian(izing) images of “modest
Venus” from Roman Syria. I contended
that these images have thwarted
modern typologies since their initial
publication at the turn of the twentieth
century. However, based on new
provenance research, I offered a novel
interpretation of these signifier-rich
images in their ancient contexts for the
first time.
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18
Throughout these three presentations,
I had the good fortune to interact
with many talented Stanford graduate
students and alumnae, including Rachel
Bolten, Kim Connor, Caroline Culp,
Dr. Thea de Armond, Dr. Lindsay Der,
Anne Duray, Amber Harper, and Sarah
Wilker. I am tremendously grateful for
both their invitations to present my
research and the astute feedback that
their audiences offered.
During summer 2019 I undertook
library, museum, and site-based Brian Le at the Legion of Honor museum
research at the Musei Vaticani in the Early Rubens exhibit, which
(Vatican City), Parco Archeologico included the “Head of Medusa” painting
dell’Appia Antica (Rome, Italy), Museo which inspired him to blog about how
Archeologico Nazionale di Firenze Rubens reworks the Classical myth of
(Florence, Italy), Museo Etrusco Medusa.
“Guarnacci” (Volterra, Italy), Musée du
at the structures of Ancient Greek and
Louvre (Paris, France), Institut national
an immensely useful challenge that
d’histoire de l’art (Paris, France),
deepened my grasp of the language.
and Rijksmuseum van Oudheden
(Leiden, Netherlands). At each of these
Overall, my first year in the program
venues a variety of knowledgeable
has broadened my horizons by exposing
curators, librarians, and archaeologists
me to new authors and perspectives. It
generously facilitated my work with
has also given me the chance to return
primary sources, which will support
to one of my old favorites, Homer,
my dissertation research as I continue
and explore possible ideas for a thesis.
writing in 2019-20.
Over the summer, I have been writing
about modern culture and the reception
Brian Le
of Classical mythology for my blog
During my first year as an MA student,
(windswaves.wordpress.com), with
I had a wonderful time becoming
topics ranging from Game of Thrones
part of the very welcoming Stanford
to Peter Paul Rubens' reworking of
Classics community. After a couple
Classical influences in his painting
years away from the academic world,
"Head of Medusa." I've also been
it was exciting to finally dive back into
practicing my language skills to prepare
some Ancient Greek. In Fall Quarter,
for the various translation exams in my
I took Anastasia-Erasmia Peponi's
future.
"Erotic Prose and Poetry.” I especially
enjoyed the lyric poetry portion, with
This upcoming year, I look forward
Sappho and her intimate expressions
to delving further into Ancient
of personal experiences emerging as
Greek literature with the Greek
a highlight. In winter, I was given
survey sequence and thinking more
the privilege to undertake a directed
about potential topics for my MA
reading on Odyssey 19 with Richard
thesis project. I'm excited for new
Martin, for which I wrote a paper on
opportunities to continue enriching
the revelation and concealment of
myself with the passion and intellectual
Odysseus' identity in his exchanges
curiosity of my fellow Classics scholars
with Penelope that might be a useful
here at Stanford.
foundation for an eventual MA thesis.
"Greek Prose Composition" with Tom
Recht proved to be a fascinating look
STANFORD UNIVERSITY
Thomas Leibundgut
My second year of graduate school
brought both new challenges and
familiar experiences. To my great
delight, I taught at the university level
for the first time alongside Ian Morris
and Walter Scheidel in their survey
classes about Greek and Roman history.
It was a pleasure to guide students from
many disciplines and walks of life from
their various points of departure to
a deeper understanding of the social,
economic, and cultural structures of
these deeply strange but deceptively
familiar societies.
At the same time, I continued my
coursework with three quarters of Latin
survey, seminars in ancient inequalities,
slavery, papyrology, and masculinities,
as well as Italian language studies. In
a pleasant turn of events, I also played
an active part in this year’s production
of SCIT as the hippest Heracles
ever to feature in an adaptation of
Aristophanes’ Frogs.
I have spent the summer of my second
year preparing for general exams, tying
up some loose ends from past classes,
and beginning to explore possible topics
for my dissertation.
David Pickel
This year I completed my fourth year
in the Classics Department. I am now
writing my dissertation, which is
about interactions between humans,
malaria, and the environment in
Roman central Italy. Drawing from
epidemiology and disease ecology, I am
using spatial analysis to model ancient
malaria transmission risk in Roman
Italy based on essential ecological
criteria: temperature and hydrology.
This modeling provides me with maps
that indicate where and when in the
landscape malaria was likely to persist.
I am then juxtaposing these maps with
the archaeological and textual data,
which provide evidence for Roman
approaches to water management
and daily life within at-risk areas.
Through this process it becomes clear
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DEPARTMENT OF CLASSICS
that the Romans, although unaware
of malaria’s specific etiology, were
likely able to reduce the risk of the
disease’s transmission. It also suggests
that malaria’s eventual entrenchment
within the peninsula, lasting until
its elimination in the mid-twentieth
century, may have been a consequence
of those very same Roman practices
which for a time curtailed the disease’s
transmission.
Much of this dissertation work was
done in Belgium. For part of the
winter and spring quarters I lived and
studied between Brussels and Ghent
as an exchange PhD researcher in
the Department of Archaeology at
Ghent University. I enjoyed my time
in Ghent, and I am very grateful for
the opportunity to work alongside the
department’s many graduate students
and postdoctoral researchers. It was a
very rewarding experience.
In June I returned to Italy to lead
excavations at la Villa Romana di Poggio
Gramignano, an Augustan villa located
near the Umbrian town of Lugnano in
Teverina. This was our fourth season.
Our time in Lugnano resulted in many
new discoveries, as well as stronger
connections with the local community
and other archaeological projects
nearby. Our main focus remained the
late Roman child cemetery discovered
within some rooms of the villa. Eight
new burials were uncovered. The new
burials, together with those discovered
in recent seasons, brings the total count
of distinct individuals found deposited
within the villa’s ruins to sixty. In
addition, a study of burials uncovered
during excavations of the villa in the
'80s and '90s has found evidence of
midwife-assisted birth. We also set in
motion a new paleo-genomic study of
many of the children in collaboration
with the Soprintendenza dell’Umbria and
the Ancient DNA Centre at McMaster
University. This effort focused on
ancient pathogen DNA traceable within
the remains, including malaria DNA.
We hope this analysis will provide
interesting information as to the health
and possible disease burden of these
children.
Finally, we completed the excavation
of a pre-Roman deposit of artifactual
material, found to have been cut by
the villa’s foundation walls in close
proximity to the area of the child
cemetery. Although study of this
material is ongoing, it likely originates
from an archaic settlement formerly
located on or near Poggio Gramignano.
We plan to continue our work next
year, holding a study season. I am very
grateful for the support and funding
offered by the department, which made
this work and other research possible.
Catherine Teitz
This summer has been a whirlwind
of travel, research, and adventure. I
planned my Mediterranean Summer
travels to expand my knowledge of
Roman provincial cities, specifically
the French cities of Roman Gaul. I
started in Nîmes and Orange, and a
tiny museum in Orange yielded one
of the most interesting finds of the
summer: a marble plan of the area’s
land allotments. I visited Vaison-la-
Romaine and Glanum and admired the
engineering at the Pont du Gard before
continuing to Arles and Marseille. Each
city had a mixture of monuments and
small archaeological sites, as well as
detailed museums, making it possible
Dillon Gisch and Catherine Teitz visited
the Musée d’Orsay, where they went to
see some very interesting architecture
and an excellent exhibition on the black
model in art.
19
to piece together a picture of urban
life. I spent a week in Paris and, fueled
by croissants, visited as many sites and
museums as possible. I also had the
great fortune to meet up with a number
of Classics grad students. I must thank
Gabie, Dillon, and Peter for making
a big city feel like home. Due to a
sudden change in fieldwork, I headed to
Portugal, Lisbon, and Evora to compare
urban sites in the far western province
with the center. I made a final stop in
Lyon, one of the largest Roman cities
in France. To wrap up the summer, I
joined the excavations at Vindolanda,
a Roman fort and settlement along
Hadrian’s Wall. Vindolanda is a
cornerstone of my dissertation
research, and it was invaluable to work
on the site and discuss my project with
the team. It was an entirely exciting and
productive summer!
Lizzy Ten-Hove
I spent the 2018-19 academic year
working on the first few chapters of
my dissertation, “Aeschylus and the
Cultural History of Tragedy: Dramatic
Connoisseurship, Ideology, and
Aesthetics from the 5th C. BCE to
the 5th C. CE.” I had the opportunity
to collaborate with Krishni Burns
(University of Illinois, Chicago)
on a production of Aristophanes’
Assemblywomen for the Committee on
Ancient and Modern Performance at
the SCS in San Diego, as well as on
a joint conference paper at Ancient
Drama in Performance, "She Said/
She Said: Staging Sexual Coercion in
Aristophanes’ Assemblywomen.”
In the upcoming year I look forward
to teaching the department's full
beginning Greek sequence, starting a
three-year term as a member of the SCS
Committee on Ancient and Modern
Performance, and continuing work
on my dissertation with the goal of
defending in the spring.
Verity Walsh
In my third year in the doctoral
program, I served as SCIT’s eleventh
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20
president, took and passed my
remaining general and modern
language exams, taught Intermediate
Latin (selections from Vergil’s
Aeneid), and completed (almost…) my
coursework requirements, enjoying
seminars on the philosophy of
biology and methods in the history of
science and technology in addition to
departmental offerings.
Then in June I traveled to the island
of Ischia in the Gulf of Naples to take
part in the Ischia Summer School on
the History of the Life Sciences, a one-
week program for 25 graduate students
and early-career scholars from a broad
range of HPS and STS backgrounds. As
the only pre-modernist in attendance,
I learned a tremendous amount about
the methodologies of scientific studies
through lectures and seminars on topics
from Early Modern surgery to the
politics of contemporary cryogenics.
I also presented a brief paper on
population ethics approaches to Francis
Bacon’s Historia vitae et mortis. All this
took place at the Villa Anton Dohrn,
the picturesque home to the laboratory
of benthic ecology of the Stazione
Zoologica Anton Dohrn, whose
headquarters in Naples is one of the
most significant research stations for
the history of marine ecology. While
on Ischia I climbed the mountain’s
highest peak, Mt. Epomeo, explored
the island’s beaches and thermal vents,
and visited the Villa Arbusto Museum
to see the ‘cup of Nestor’ and other
artifacts from Pithekoussai. After visits
to Pompeii and Naples, I continued
to Rome and then to Athens, where
I caught up with colleagues from the
American School and did sightseeing
in Attica and the Argolid. I also spent
time in Berlin, where I participated
in another weeklong summer school,
‘Structuring Nature,’ a cooperative
venture between Humboldt Universität,
Topoi, and the Max-Planck-Institut
für Wissenschaftsgeschichte. There I
presented work on marine ecological
nomenclature in Pliny’s Naturalis
historia and was inspired by lectures
STANFORD UNIVERSITY
on ancient and medieval science and
nature studies.
I am very grateful to have been able
to use my Med Summer not only to
explore the sites and museums of the
Mediterranean but also to spend time
connecting with broader communities
of ancient (and contemporary) science
scholars and get up to speed in the
history and philosophy of science—
fields which have become important
to me personally and vital for any
dissertation I might end up writing.
The chance to immerse myself in
these fields was restorative after a
rough year in the program, where
I struggled to balance classics with
the interdisciplinary work I want to
pursue, and where I came up against
the challenges of doing graduate school
in the face of mental and physical
hardships. This summer, I’m grateful
for the freedom of finding my own
way.
Now back at Stanford, I look forward
to teaching Advanced Greek (Plato’s
Symposium) and working on my
dissertation prospectus in earnest.
Sarah Wilker
During the summer of 2019 I had
the opportunity to work on two
field projects and visit a third site for
research. This research was generously
funded by Stanford’s Department of
Classics, the Archaeology Center, and
the Europe Center.
I spent the first part of the summer
working as a ceramics specialist on
the Marzamemi Maritime Heritage
Project. I have worked for this project
for several years, and it was incredibly
rewarding to continue my research
into the transport amphoras (a type
of ceramic storage jar used on ships
to carry organics) found on the wreck
site, as well as several other small
ceramic assemblages from areas nearby.
After finishing work in Marzamemi, I
spent several days visiting the Ephesus
Excavations directed by Professor
Sabine Ladstätter. While visiting the
excavation, I spent my time looking at
the collection of amphoras found at the
site. Finally, I spent the latter portion
of my summer working on the Burgaz
Harbors Project, led jointly by Professor
Leidwanger and Professor Elizabeth
S. Greene and in collaboration with
Professor Numan Tuna of the Middle
East Technical University. I have
worked on the ceramic material
from this project for several years,
and I spent my time this summer
researching a specific subset of locally
produced transport amphoras with
an eye towards better understanding
production and economic patterns in
the area.
Vladimir Zuckerman
This past year I finished my coursework
The Stanford Classics Department is grateful for
the generous contributions of all our donors and
supporters.
Because of the gifts we receive, our students
travel to museums, universities, research centers,
conferences, and archaeological sites around the
world. These experiences provide opportunities to
enhance what they learn in the classroom and to
engage in research.
Thank you for your support!
.....................................................................................................................................................................................................
DEPARTMENT OF CLASSICS
requirements with fascinating courses
about ancient and modern aesthetics,
Philodemus, Aristophanes, and
Classical Arabic. I also spent a fair
amount of time on the other side of
the classroom. I enjoyed teaching
Herodotus and reading Lucretius’ De
Rerum Natura with an exceptionally
motivated group of students whose
perspectives taught me much about this
amazing poem. This summer, I stayed
here at Stanford and taught an intensive
Latin course. I was so impressed to see
my students cover an entire year of
Latin in just eight weeks! In November
2018, thanks to the support of the
Classics department, I attended the
quadrennial Socratic studies conference
in Buenos Aires and presented a
paper about Socrates’ conversation
with artists and his peculiar theory of
physical representation in Xenophon’s
Memorabilia. The conference itself was
entirely dedicated to Socratic authors
who are not Plato, and it was truly an
eye-opening perspective. One highlight
was witnessing the foundation of the
International Society of Socratic Studies
(imagine a room full of philosophers
and philologists trying to agree on
the wording of the society's statute!).
Perhaps most importantly, I spent
this year juggling various ideas for my
dissertation project, and I eventually
settled on a topic which I look forward
to developing this year: Xenophon’s
representation of Athenian cultural
institutions, particularly the way
in which he understands aesthetic
phenomena as profoundly political.
21
Undergraduate Stories with translations,
transcriptions,
and drawings of
the inscriptions
on the tablets,
which redirected
the course of
my summer
work. While the
discovery of these
files was certainly
unexpected, the
challenge they
presented came
to be one of the
most rewarding
experiences of my
Sophia Colello
summer work.
As a classical archaeologist, I have had the privilege to
Such unexpected
participate in a number of archaeological excavations around
obstacles helped
the world. This summer was my first research experience
me further develop my ability to spontaneously adapt and
with artifacts outside of a fieldwork context. Working closely
respond to research questions and concerns in formal
with staff at the Cantor Center, I studied 26 cuneiform
settings. These skills, along with the basic Sumerian I learned
tablets from the museum collections and prepared digital
through self-study, have strengthened my confidence as an
scans of their surfaces for inclusion in databases from
archaeological researcher and philologist able to produce
several institutions. Hunting through dusty filing cabinets, I
tangible results from fascinating material.
discovered long-forgotten paperwork which included display
placards and object files from the beginnings of the museum.
These files also contained previously unpublished research

Gillian Dee
I spent the summer of 2019 at Harvard University, where
I took an intensive beginning Ancient Greek course. The
course covered a year of college language material in seven
weeks.

This experience has greatly enriched my study of Classics. I

can now translate the original texts I have been studying at
Stanford, like Plato’s assertions of poetry’s corrupting power
and Sophocles’ lyrical description of the story of Oedipus.
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22 STANFORD UNIVERSITY
Going forward, I will continue my studies of Greek at the
intermediate level. I plan to take advantage of the amazing
advanced courses Stanford offers in Greek and Classics before
I graduate.
The academic skills I learned in this demanding and fast-
paced class are also valuable. The class demanded a higher
level of stamina, concentration, and will than I ever needed
before. I am grateful for the memorization techniques and
tricks I developed while studying for this course, as well as
the knowledge of my newfound ability to wrestle with a
challenging subject and learn it in a short amount of time.
These are skills I will carry into all fields I study at Stanford.
Thank you to the Classics Department for this extraordinary
and enriching opportunity!
Emma Grover
My summer at the Accademia Vivarium Novum improved
my abilities as a Classicist immeasurably. The coursework
helped, certainly, but more important than that was the
simple experience of living wholly immersed in the Latin
language, day in and day out. Through discussions outside
of class on topics ranging from the theological (what is the
nature of faith?) to the political (what are the impacts of
different countries’ gun control laws?) and even the culinary
(this lasagna is incredible!), I did not just learn about Latin
speaking style but internalized it through repeated and
practical use. Returning to Stanford, I find myself able to dive
headfirst into the Latin texts I read, free of the translational
mindset and sensitive to stylistic nuance in a way I never
have been before.
Tianyi Huang
This summer I participated in a two-week overseas seminar
led by art history professor Marci Kwon. In addition to
spending several days at the Venice Biennale, we visited
many art museums and churches in Venice. The trip was
very well organized, and we had a professional tour guide for
each site. On some days we had morning class sessions to talk
about our observations and impressions. In Venice I found
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DEPARTMENT OF CLASSICS
myself in one of the most diverse student groups I have come
across at Stanford, and our discussions made me think deeply
about issues related to representation. Art history has come
very far from when it used to be entirely about white men,
and today we see many artists add colors to the contemporary
art scene who are women, Asian, Black, and so on. Classics as
a discipline is now undergoing a critical transition to include
more perspectives, and being in a space that used to be—and
is still very much—predominantly white but is learning to
embrace more diversity encouraged me to reflect more on
my experience studying Classics as a minority student, and
on how people like me can contribute to the discipline in our
own ways. While visiting art museums throughout Italy, I
paid close attention to Classical influences in the works that
I saw, especially works of contemporary art. One episode
from Greek mythology that went on to stir the imagination
of many artists is Apollo’s pursuit of Daphne. Contemporary
reinterpretations tend to do away with the actual figures, but
nevertheless find ways to capture and convey the intensity
and sensation of Apollo catching up to Daphne. Anyone who
gazes at these works with an appreciation for Classics will
certainly be touched. It is fascinating to see with my own
eyes how the Greco-Roman world is still inspiring so much
creativity today, and to think about what new opportunities
this brings up for my career after Classics.
Carolyn Manion
In February I traveled to the greater Los Angeles area to
attend the Late Antique and Medieval Studies Symposium
at Pomona College in Claremont. At this symposium, I saw
research presentations from four professors and nine current
or former graduate, law, and divinity students, all of whom
had studied Late Antique and Medieval Studies at one of
the Claremont colleges. Many Claremont undergrads also
attended. The presenters spoke not only of their research on
religion, law, literature, and history, but also about how they
found themselves in the admittedly obscure study of the late
antique and medieval era. As a Classics student focusing on
late antique Latin for my honors thesis, I was amazed to see
the myriad and diverse ways in which students with similar
interests pursued their passion for the same era which I
have found so captivating, especially since most of them had
gone on from a LAMS or Medieval History degree to study
23
at prestigious institutions such as I was able to stop by the National
Oxford, Cambridge, and University Archaeological Museum of Cerveteri
of Toronto. Hearing their stories to see the vase in its new home.
and seeing the field’s methodology At the Vatican Museums, another
at work in their presentations was highlight of my trip, I devoted equal
an incredible boost for my honors time to the reverential contemplation
thesis project and my consideration of ancient masterpieces like the
of how I might continue to research Belvedere Torso and to amused
the same topics as part of future observation of the way that
graduate study. museumgoers interact with exhibits.
The Vatican Museums are a
The conference was organized notorious museological case study in
by Ken Wolf, an expert in the crowd control and challenging floor
medieval Mediterranean whose plans.
work has been invaluable to my own
research. Connecting with him and At archaeological sites, inspired
other academics and students has by Dimitris Plantzos’ fascinating
already proved a lasting value of my description of the Athenian
experience at the Symposium. Acropolis as a “simulacrum of a ruin,”
I struck up conversations with visitors about their thoughts
During my time in LA I also visited the Getty Villa, a place on this issue. Did it matter to them that the statuette of Amor
of pilgrimage for Classicists and tourists alike. When I and Psyche in Ostia and the famous bronze faun in Pompeii
took the Classics Majors Seminar in Spring 2017, which are copies (the real ones are in the museums), or that much
dealt significantly with museum culture and relics of the of the Arch of Titus is a nineteenth-century travertine
past, I realized that my perception and appraisal of Classical reconstruction? The responses were incredibly varied and
artifacts on display rarely took gave me insight into the
into account the controversies ways that tourists interact
inherent in the acquisition of with classical cultural
such artifacts and the amount Congratulations, 2019 Honors Students heritage—although on more
of behind-the-scenes work that than a few occasions I was
curators put into exhibitions. Anna Widder called, in not so many words,
The Getty is at the center of Roma Aeterna: Memory, Language, and Space a pedantic buzzkill.
many of these controversies, in Rome
but its architecture and display The other thing I got
boast countless hours of artistic Advisor: Grant Parker from this trip, something
effort, crowd containment, and Second Reader: Justin Leidwanger that is a bit fuzzy and not
maintenance. Witnessing this particularly academic, is a
center of debate and experiencing Carolyn Manion renewed sense of awe at
the beautiful art and Classical Gens Fortissima et Florentissima: Reading how many generations have
heritage displayed there gave Isidore of Seville's Historia through the been engaging with the
me a great deal of material to Twofold Lens of Bishop and Historian classics. My travels were full
consider in my continued journey of these moments: staring
toward understanding how best to Advisor: Richard P. Martin slack-jawed at Bernini’s
communicate Classical heritage. Second Reader: Christopher B. Krebs Baroque reinterpretations
of classical mythology
Justin Muchnick at the Villa Borghese,
In September I traveled to Italy reading from my copy of
for two weeks with support from the Classics Department. Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian while lounging
I stayed mostly in and around Rome and the Bay of Naples. by the Canopus at Hadrian’s Villa (I wanted to read on his
Many of the stops along my itinerary were sites that I have private island in the center of the Maritime Theater, but
encountered in my studies. During my quarter abroad in unfortunately the island itself is currently off limits), or even
Oxford last winter, for instance, I wrote a tutorial paper encountering the opening line of Cicero’s First Catilinarian
about the repatriation of the Euphronios Krater from the spray-painted on a wall near Termini by a disgruntled
Metropolitan Museum of Art to Italy. When I was in Rome modern Roman.
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24 STANFORD UNIVERSITY
Alumni Updates
Andre Amarotico (Minor, 2016) has been performing
with the San Francisco Mime Troupe. This year, he played
“Bones” in a modern adaptation of Treasure Island. This
version of the character from Robert Louis Stevenson’s
novel is a greedy San Francisco real estate developer. Next
up, Andre will perform in Sweeney Todd at 6th Street
Playhouse in Santa Rosa.

Raleigh Browne (BA, 2019) started working as the

Research Director for the Office of Condoleezza Rice at the
Hoover Institution here at Stanford.

Marden Nichols (BAH and Humanities MA, 2004), a Marshall Scholar, is an Associate Professor of Classics at
Georgetown. Her book, Author and Audience in Vitruvius' De architectura (Cambridge, 2017), received glowing
reviews.

Jacob E. Nyenhuis (MA, 1961; PhD, 1963) concluded his second

term as director of the Van Raalte Institute at Hope College.
Last year, he was honored by his colleagues with a book (Jack: A
Compassionate Compendium) commemorating his four-decade-plus
career in teaching and administration. His sesquicentennial history
of Hope College, Hope College at 150: Anchored in Faith, Educating for
Leadership and Service in a Global Society was published in 2019 and
received the State History Award from the Historical Society of
Michigan.

Rachel Patt (BA, 2009) won the David E. Finley Fellowship from
the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National
Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.). She is spending the first year of
her fellowship in Rome.

Christina Smith (BAH, 2016) received an MA in Early Medieval

Archaeology at Durham University. Her MLitt at Glasgow won the
First Marquis of Montrose Award for Scottish Studies. A Durham
Doctoral Scholarship funds her PhD at Durham.

Zack Smith (BA, 2014) wrapped up the final classroom portion of med school. He took Step 1 of the licensing
process at the end of February and started clerkships in April. Over the summer, he created an improvised
medicine class focusing on acute trauma management for medical students, combining civilian and military trauma
medicine. He plans to run a full 10-session elective class as a fourth-year student.

Eliseo Valerio (Minor, 2018) finished the academic year as a Student Engagement Coordinator with Stanford Arts
and then moved to DC to work as the Engagement and Education Fellow at the Shakespeare Theatre Company.

Adriana Vazquez (BA, 2006; MA, 2009) started a tenure track position as Assistant Professor of Classics at UCLA
in autumn 2018.

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DEPARTMENT OF CLASSICS 25
Marble Carving Workshop

In April the Classics Department,

the Stanford Arts Initiative, and the
Archaeology Center hosted a one-
day workshop on marble carving.
We examined the processes and
practicalities of marble production
with the help of two professional
carvers, Matt Auvinen and Nathan
Hunt, one of whom had partially
prefabricated a Roman Corinthian
capital that was our major focus.
Juxtaposed with demonstrations
and hands-on opportunities
was a series of short illustrated
discussions on different facets of
the process in antiquity by some
of our local colleagues and visitors
including Ben Russell, Jen Trimble,
Fabio Barry, and Kaelin Jewell.

Photos by Amanda Gaggioli and Valerie Kiszka.

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26 STANFORD UNIVERSITY
Lorenz Eitner Lecture on Classical Art and Culture
Troubling the Classical Commonplace: Reading Ancient Athenian Legal
Speeches after Frederick Douglass by Professor Emily Greenwood
November 2, 2018 at Paul Brest Hall West

This lecture explored the relationship between narration, subjecthood,

embodiment, and identity in extant Athenian legal oratory in dialogue
with the writings and speeches of Frederick Douglass and subsequent
African-American thought, opening up critical questions about the role of
readers and audiences in shaping the Classics that we read.

Emily Greenwood is Professor of Classics and Chair of the Department

of Classics at Yale University. Her research focuses on Ancient Greek
historiography (Herodotus and Thucydides) and the complex dialogue
between Classical antiquity and modernity, especially in Black Diasporic
traditions.

The Lorenz Eitner Lectures on Classical Art and Culture publicize classics and classical scholarship
to a wider public. The series has been endowed by Peter and Lindsay Joost, great friends and
benefactors of Stanford Classics, in honor of the late Lorenz Eitner, director of Stanford’s art museum,
now known as the Cantor Center, in the 1960s-80s. He also chaired what was then the Department of
Art and Architecture and was a distinguished expert of French Romantic painting, and the author of a
dozen books on art and art history. In naming these annual lectures after him, we honor the memory
of a renowned scholar, teacher and writer who oversaw the expansion of our art museum to a leading
regional art collection.

Stanford Classics in Theater (SCIT)

Friday May 31 and Saturday June 1, 2019 at
Y2E2 Building, Room 111

This adaptation of Aristophanes’ Frogs, entitled Phrogs on

Phyre, was a comic romp through the music scene of today
and recent decades, featuring Britney Spears, David Bowie,
and cameos by such characters as John Mayer and Ariana
Grande.

SCIT is a community of Stanford graduate students,

undergrads, and peers who translate, adapt, and perform
ancient comedy. Learn more at scit.stanford.edu.

Special thanks to the Office of the Vice Provost for Graduate

Education (VPGE) for their continued financial support
through SPICE grants.

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DEPARTMENT OF CLASSICS 27
 Stanford University
Department of Classics Non-Profit Org.
450 Jane Stanford Way, Building 110 US POSTAGE
Stanford, CA 94305-2145 PAID
Palo Alto, CA
Permit No. 28
650-723-0479

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edu) for news, events, and
updated profiles of faculty
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If you would like to receive

event announcements via
email, please contact us at
classics@stanford.edu, and
we will add you to the list.

Layout: Kenney Mencher

Design: Foug Design
Copy Editing: Jack Martinez
and.....................................................................................................................................................................................................
Raleigh Browne
28 STANFORD UNIVERSITY