Haverford Classics Strike Statement

November 3rd, 2020

As members of the Department of Classics we write to express our outrage at the killing of Walter Wallace Jr., our condemnation of institutionalized violence against Black communities and individuals, and our continuing commitment to anti-racist action. In keeping with this commitment, we support the strike organized by the Women of Color House, the Black Students Refusing Further Inaction, the Black Students’ League, and others; we acknowledge the importance of their goals, and we express our respect for the careful thought, hard work, and resolve that have gone into this action.

In keeping with our support:

  • We have suspended classes from the start of the strike and will continue to do so through Friday November 6; all ongoing assignments and deadlines are also suspended.  Students in our courses can expect a further update from the department as well as their individual professors by Sunday November 8.
  • Students participating in the strike will at no point suffer any penalties.
  • When classes are resumed, we will seek flexible and creative ways of reworking our syllabi and modifying our expectations in order to complete the semester in a satisfactory way.
  • Individual faculty members will be available to meet with students to address questions or concerns, as well as to discuss their views of the ongoing situation and the Department’s decisions. 
  • Individual members of the department have donated to the Strike Fund and the Nest and are committed to continuing this support as we are able in order to provide material assistance to striking students.

For our larger action plan, click here.

Sincerely,
Matthew Farmer
Bret Mulligan
Deborah Roberts
Ava Shirazi
Hannah Silverblank

Alumni News: Claire Blood-Cheney (’20) publishes article, “Marooned in Morocco: An Asian American’s Experience,” in Morocco World News

Today I woke up in the beautiful beach town Essaouira. Although I am unable to return home to the US, I must admit, Morocco is not a bad place to be stuck. After making breakfast in a brightly lit Airbnb and getting ready to start the day, my boyfriend and I decided to take a walk to explore our home for the foreseeable future. Upon stepping outside, we passed a group of young men. “Nihao! Japan? Corona?” one shouted, snapping me back to the present: What had started as a senior spring break trip turned into a month (or longer) adventure. 

Read more…

Faculty Publication: Farmer, Theopompus’ Homer: Paraepic in Old and Middle Comedy in Classical Philogy

Farmer, M. 2020. “Theopompus’ Homer: Paraepic in Old and Middle Comedy.” Classical Philology 115.3:339–364

Abstract: The remains of the comic poet Theopompus suggest an author preoccupied with Homer: three of twenty titles reference the Odyssey (Odysseus, Penelope, Sirens), a fragment without title shows Odysseus talking about Homer, and even in the otherwise politically oriented The Mede we find hexameters and Homeric formulae. This article examines Theopompus’ approach to paraepic comedy, arguing that his fragments show sophisticated parody, early literary criticism, and a delight in anachronism and in the humor of quotation. Paraepic had fallen out of fashion in Aristophanes’ day, but I argue that Theopompus’ works provided a bridge between the early Homeric comedies of Epicharmus and Cratinus and the rebirth of paraepic in the later fourth century.

Open Letter from the Faculty of the Haverford Classics Department

On Friday, June 12, 2020, the Bryn Mawr and Haverford Classics departments shared a statement on the murder of George Floyd, the field’s complicity within and perpetuation of racist systems, and our commitment to dismantling anti-black racism in all forms. The faculty of Haverford’s Classics department are writing to expand on this statement with a description of our ongoing and new departmental initiatives to work toward an anti-racist future for Classics in our community and our discipline. In addition, as a member department of the Society for Classical Studies, and as individual members, we endorse and participate in the statement by the Society for Classical Studies, and will post our endorsement on our website with a link to that statement.

In the time since we released our original statement, two letters have been brought to our attention: the first is an open letter addressed to the Bi-College Community, written by thirteen current Bi-Co students, and the second, written by Bi-Co alumni/ae/a, is one addressed specifically to the Bi-Co Classics departments, calling for actions and reforms to promote anti-racism and other forms of equitable and inclusive practice. We want to begin by thanking the students and alumni who put together these letters: we value your insights and your calls for expeditious and  vigorous action to make Bi-Co Classics an actively anti-racist and inclusive community. We acknowledge that trust within our community has been broken and that our students are suffering, and we commit ourselves, in our ongoing work on these issues,  to answering their calls to action.

We recognize that this work must be part of an ongoing departmental prioritization of anti-racist work within and beyond Classics. To that end, we append to this letter the draft of our departmental Plan for Anti-Racism, Equity, and Inclusion. This version of our plan to make Bi-Co Classics an anti-racist and inclusive program began to emerge through conversations among the department’s faculty during the Strike For Black Lives on June 10th and has been significantly revised and expanded in consideration of the Open Letters. Our conversations as a department have taken their cues from student feedback (the open letters mentioned above; senior exit interviews; anonymous course evaluations; individual conversations and experiences with students) as the most crucial starting point from which we situate our commitment to anti-racist action. We recognize that the five faculty members currently at Haverford lack the perspective of black classicists. In response to this, we reaffirm our commitment to seeking and hearing the testimony of our students and of BIPoC classicists and to being transparent about our departmental efforts. 

As part of our commitment to heightened transparency about our efforts, we intend to post our evolving plan to our website (classics.sites.haverford.edu/equity) where it can serve as a focus for dialogue, continual improvement, and long-term accountability. We recognize that the conversations — both among the Haverford faculty and with our colleagues at Bryn Mawr — and the plan itself can only be preliminary to broader conversations and actions involving all constituencies within the Bi-Co Classics community. We invite collaborative discussion regarding these initiatives; the work is ours to do, but we eagerly look forward to engaging with the feedback, ideas, and perspectives of our current, past, and future students. 

Deborah Roberts (incoming interim Chair)
Bret Mulligan (outgoing Chair)
Ava Shirazi
Hannah Silverblank
Matthew Farmer

Department Welcomes Prof. Ava Shirazi!

The Department of Classics joyfully welcomes its newest faculty member, Prof. Ava Shirazi. In the fall, she will be teaching a first-year writing seminar and an upper-level Greek seminar, Poetics and Poiesis: Philosophy, Performance, and the Crafts, as well as leading a Mellon group on “Zombie Philologies”.

Here’s Prof. Shirazi describing her path to Haverford and her current research:

“I was born in Tehran, Iran, and later immigrated to Canada where I received my BA at the University of Toronto in Classics and English. What drew me to both majors was the study of language, but what kept me in classics was the creativity necessary to interpret silence: how do you read languages no longer spoken? How do you recreate from ruins? How do you retell the stories of the vanished? 

During my graduate studies at Stanford, a diverse community of scholars and students taught me just how resourceful a classicist can be: I learned how to combine words with things, how to merge philosophy and literature with material culture, and how to use a variety of methodologies to recover and reevaluate the historic and contemporary significance of antiquity. Ever since, classics, for me, has become much bigger (and better!) than any great book itself: classics is about learning how to confront and embrace the complex and critical questions that arise when we encounter the past and their impact on our conception of modernity and the future. 

Before joining the Haverford faculty, I was a Perkins-Cotsen Postdoctoral Fellow at the Princeton Society of Fellows (2017-2020). Both inside and outside of the academy, I have been active in theater (directing, producing, and stage managing various ancient and modern dramas) as well as writing for film.

I work primarily on Greek literature and cultural history and in particular on topics of visuality and aesthetics. The broader question underlying my research is how literature and literary studies can capture and revive the non-verbal moments and experiences of the ancient world (the sights, sounds, smells and overall material and affective experiences of the everyday). My holistic approach to antiquity is best reflected in my current book project, “The Mirror and the Senses: Reflection and Perception in Classical Greek Thought”. Working across a wide array of materials, from poetry, philosophy, and technical treatises, to actual bronze mirrors, painting and iconography, as well as practices of beautification and ritual, my book argues for an inextricable

link between the materiality of Greek mirrors and the transformative intellectual work on vision and sensation at the time. I have also published and prepared forthcoming work on Greek drama, philosophy, oratory and literary theory.”

Fellini’s Satyricon 1969 Summary by Junior Nguyen

Today on February 27th, I attended a screening of Fellini’s Satyricon (1969). The movie was in Italian, and though I never studied Italian, Latin was able to provide me some translation of the screening with similarities between both languages (e.g. gracias= thanks, curre!=run!). In summary of the movie, it follows the main character is Encolpius, a character who is in love with Giton and they have a homosexual relationship. Between their relationship is the joyfully arrogant Ascyltus.

The story was difficult to understand due to sudden transition from a group of characters to another, but the beginning is a brawl between Encolpius and Ascyltus who fight over Giton’s love. The environment seemed to be a jail cell, and the population of poor slaves. What stood out to me in the art of the movie is how hellish it seemed, as for someone without context the movie appeared apocalyptic and filled with despair. Encolpius takes back Giton from Vernacchio, an actor with a pig mask. Encolpius and Giton sleep together in a bed and make love, but Ascyltus appears and takes half of Encolpius’ belongings. Ascyltus also made Giton to choose between the two men, and Giton chose to be with Asycltus which broke Encolpius’ heart.

A short story that appeared is the story of Trimalchio, a wealthy man. I think he enacted his own death, and his wife loses him and weeps for days with an intent to starve herself. A guard who watches over a hungman comes to the widow’s aid, and offers her a new love but also fails in his job of making sure nobody takes the hanging corpse. The widow and guard make out and the story cuts. According to my research, this is a story within a story and I do not quite understand the reasoning for this.

Encolpius, Giton, and Ascyltus are captured by Lichas, a old man who falls in love with Encolpius and forces a marriage. Ascyltus taunts Encolpius and laughs at the marriage, which is a common character of him. Caesar dies and a new emperor is in place, which forces old slave-owners to free their slaves. Encolpius and Ascyltus escape from the slave ship of the overturned Lichas, and move into a home of former slave-owners. Both Encolpius and Ascyltus flee from this home and hear about a demigod who has magical healing powers.

The two steal the demigod but the demigod dies of thirst in the desert. Encolpius has to brawl a “minotaur”, a man with a helmet who is able to overpower Encolpius. Encolpius proposes his poetic powers to the clan of people to spare him, then he has to make love to a woman but fails to do so because of a erectile dysfunction. 

Encolpius goes on a quest with Ascyltus to regain his “potence” and successfully does so, but Ascyltus dies due to a brawl with the ship captain. Encolpius sets sail to find new lands.

Hello, Goodbye (Beatles) Translation by Andrew Arth

You say yes, I say no, you say stop, and I say go, go, go
Oh no – You say goodbye, and I say hello
Hello, hello – I don’t know why you say goodbye I say hello
Hello, hello – I don’t know why you say goodbye I say hello

Full English lyrics: https://www.lyrics.com/lyric/2762363/The+Beatles/Hello%2C+Goodbye

Latin:

inquis, “vēro,” inquam “nōn”

inquis, “consiste!” sed inquam “ī! ī! ī!”

Ō nōn

inquis, “valē!,” et inquam “salvē, salvē, salvē”

nōn sciō cur dicas, “valē,” inquam “salvē, salvē, salvē”

nōn sciō cur inquis, “valē,” inquam “salvē”

inquam, “altus” inquis “humilis”

inquis “cur” et inquam “nōn sciō”

O nōn

inquis “valē” et inquam “salvē, salvē, salvē” (salvē, valē, salvē, valē)

nōn sciō cur inquis “valē” (salvē, valē)

inquam “salvē, salvē, salvē” (salvē, valē, salvē, valē, salvē, valē)

nōn sciō cur inquis “valē,” inquam, “salvē” (salvē, valē”

Cur, cur, cur, cur, cur, cur, inquis, “valē, valē, valē, valē”

O nōn

inquis, “valē,” et inquam “salvē, salvē, salvē”

nōn sciō cur inquis, “valē” inquam “salvē, salvē, salvē”

nōn sciō cur inquis, “valē” inquam “salvē,”

inquis, “vero” inquam “nōn” 

inquis, “consistē!” sed inquam “ī! ī! ī!” (maneam donec tempus est īre.)

O, O nōn!

inquis “valē,” et inquam “salvē, salvē, salvē”

nōn sciō cur inquis “valē” inquam “salvē, salvē, salvē”

nōn sciō cur inquis “valē” inquam “salvē, salvē, salvē”

nōn sciō cur inquis “valē” inquam “salvē-babae!, o salvē”