Book review of Ancient Samnium. Settlement, Culture, and Identity between History and Archaeology
By Rafael Scopacasa. Pp. xvi + 352, figs. b&w 22, tables 12. Oxford University Press, Oxford 2015. £75, $125. ISBN-13: 978-0-19-871376-0.

This extended review highlights an increasingly important aspect of the contemporary performance reception of the Odyssey in the UK, with growing numbers of practitioners and companies moving away from the straightforward dramatisation (or revisionist dramatic contestation) of Homer’s epic tale, and towards a deepening engagement with epic s…[Read more]

Our lack of reliable information concerning the physical and choreographic aspects of ancient tragic performance permits modern writers to construct their own imaginative re-creations of the ancient text/body relationship in a wide variety of modes. The range of ways in which texts translated or adapted from ancient tragedy are capable of…[Read more]

The translation of ancient tragedy is often considered at a linguistic level, as if the drama consisted simply of words being written, spoken and heard. This article contends that translation for the stage is a process in which literary decisions have physical, as well as verbal, outcomes. It traces existing formulations concerning the links…[Read more]

Alice Oswald’s recitation of her 2011 poem Memorial is an intensely modest, self-effacing performance. Yet it is also one which invites us to consider key questions about the ancient practice, and modern re-performance, of epic poetry. Oswald explicitly cites the antiphonal lament of Homeric funerary ritual as an influence upon her r…[Read more]

Ted Hughes’ version of Euripides’ Alcestis (1999) is a play which diverges significantly from its ancient source-text, most notably in an interpolated sequence during which the drunken Heracles re-enacts his own labours, before experiencing traumatic visions. This article identifies this un-Euripidean interlude as a characteristic instance of int…[Read more]

This review-essay discusses George Brant’s play Grounded (2013) in the context of its production at the Gate Theatre (London). It begins with a critical examination of my own “mis-seeing” of the play’s protagonist as a version of the tragic Heracles. The analysis which follows compares key aspects of The Pilot’s narrative with Euripides’ Heracles…[Read more]

A study of grappling (both athletic and martial) from ancient Egypt to Victorian England. It was written as a Classics & Ancient History PhD thesis, so half the verbiage focuses on the ancient world.

This monograph is the first in-depth examination of articulated Roman plate armour since H. Russell Robinson published his ground-breaking reconstructions of lorica segmentata in The Armour of Imperial Rome. With detailed discussion of all the significant evidence (including previously unpublished material), the book looks at each of the principal…[Read more]

Abstract: In Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe, springs are a central motif of the Prologue
and the novel as a whole. This motif counters male domination, since it
is associated with Chloe, while the flowers watered by springs in this novel
are identified with Daphnis. This study will examine how the motif of springs reflects
the resistance of D…[Read more]

English original of the entry for ‘Érudition (Grecque)’ in C. Urlacher & D. Meyer (eds.) Dictionnaire analytique de l’épigramme littéraire dans l’antiquité Grecque et Romaine, Turnhout, forthcoming.

English original of the entry for ‘Clôture, fermeture’ in C. Urlacher & D. Meyer (eds.) Dictionnaire analytique de l’épigramme littéraire dans l’antiquité Grecque et Romaine, Turnhout, forthcoming.

An Honours course taught by me at Edinburgh in 2011

An Honours course taught by me at Edinburgh in 2009 and 2012

Part of a much larger study in the intellectual history of Sophocles (and Greek tragedy in general) in the 18th century, this chapter brings to light, for the first time, Jean Terrasson’s incisive and highly influential attempt to dismantle Christianising and Neo-Classicist interpretations of both Greek tragedy and Aristotle’s Poetics and to…[Read more]

Review of Edward J. Watts, Hypatia. The Life and Legend of an Ancient Philosopher

This essay examines what the paradigm of ‘globalization’ can tell us about the Achaemenid Persian Empire (c. 550-330 BCE).

This essay examines what the paradigm of ‘globalization’ can tell us about the Achaemenid Persian Empire (c. 550-330 BCE).

Being part of a monography on the origins of Portuguese and Galician identities, this paper studies how future Portugal and Galicia, being part of a same polty in the Early Middle Ages, became different countries although maintaining strong cultural and historical links.

Case study on the territorialization of Early Medieval Galicia (NW Iberia) centered on the land of O Salnés, taking into account the meaning of the place-name, the Roman past, the political organziation (county of Slnés), the appropriation of the land and the defensive system agains the Northmen iand Moslem sea-attacks.