Author: Classics Department

By Gregory Chin ’18

This past Tuesday Natasha Meyer ’16 visited the Introduction to Archaeology class taught this semester by Prof. Ellen Perry. Natasha talked to us about her senior thesis work and research concerning the micro-excavations of the Kylindra infant cemetery on the Greek island of Astypalaia. Her goal was to foster an ongoing dialogue and understanding between cultural anthropology and biological archaeology concerning how and why the funerals in the Kylindra cemetery occur. That’s some pretty intriguing stuff, and it is hard to believe that a current student is doing such groundbreaking work — part of the average day and life of a Holy Cross student, I guess.

Natasha first delved into the logistical background behind Astypalaia, addressing its population, history, and location. After establishing this foundation, she went about dating the cemetery by using information gained from items found during the excavation, such as amphorae (tall jars) and other burial pottery in which the remains had been placed. This connected almost seamlessly to what we were doing in class (and what we would have to do on a slide exam the following class day!).

She also explained how a “micro” excavation worked, and how members of a field school would have to carefully deal with the infants’ remains, trying to keep them intact and in their exact position before taking pictures and measurements. In addition to this, Natasha acknowledged that, biologically speaking, it would be difficult to uncover the cause of death for the approximately three thousand infants found so far.

However, it would be too easy to stop there, to have an “oh well, we tried” moment that Holy Cross students refer to jokingly in the face of all of our studies. What was perhaps the most interesting point of Natasha’s presentation was her possible explanations for why the infants were buried here at Astypalaia, and in the way they were. Natasha considered and then cast doubt on both infanticide and the existence of a widespread plague or disease as explanations for the many burials in this cemetery. Instead, she argued that the evidence hinted at the possibility of Astypalaia serving as a birthing or healing sanctuary.

Furthermore, according to Natasha’s research, the placement of the babies within the pots perhaps suggested a symbolic rebirth of the infant into the afterlife, a movement proposed to “fix the universe” according to Natasha, Prof. Perry, and her thesis director Prof. Rodgers of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, who was also present for the presentation.

I do know one thing, though. Natasha’s conversation has definitely “fixed” what would have been a normal Tuesday afternoon after class, filling it with questions, answers, and the notion that perhaps the human body is an artifact itself, revealing not only who we are, but who we are in the context of our culture and communities as well. It was an amazing experience, and I can tell that Natasha will go on to do amazing things in the future.

Troy? The gods? Love? Nature? Arms and the man? These topics and more were the subject of spirited discussion among students and faculty from Holy Cross and beyond at the Classics Department colloquium “Vergilian Beginnings: Looking Ahead from Aeneid 1-4” on the afternoon of April 14.

The colloquium was centered around presentations by groups of students from Prof. Aaron Seider’s spring seminar on the Aeneid. After each presentation, Professors Sarah McCallum of Harvard University and James Uden of Boston University offered commentary and questions, as did members of the audience.

Jack Champagne ’19, Nicholas Jalbert ’16, Liam Prendergast ’19, and Melody Wauke ’17 began the event with a consideration of the epic’s deer similes, a group of passages which lend an air of inevitability to Turnus’ doom at the end of the poem.

Questions of Fate were taken up once more by the following student group, as Toni Armstrong ’19, Claude Hanley ’18, and Julia Spiegel ’19 provocatively questioned whether Fate, like so much else in Vergil’s masterpiece, may simply be a matter of perspective.

Offering one last bit of intellectual sustenance before the colloquium’s first break for cheese, cookies, and drinks, Maretta Guiendon ’16, Michael Kelley ’18, Andrew Morfill ’18, and Corey Scannell ’18 provided a bracing take on Aeneas’ leadership or, rather, lack thereof. In the colloquium’s final student presentation, Luke Griese ’18, Chris Ryan ’16, Charlie Schufreider ’17, and Jason Steranko ’17 wove together many of our themes in a nuanced consideration of how the same divine forces that set the epic’s plot in motion return once more in its final scenes.

Lastly, Professors McCallum and Uden treated the group to presentations of their own scholarship on the Aeneid. Professor McCallum spoke about how the genre of elegy enriches Vergil’s epic and Professor Uden discussed the intersection of medicine and poetry in Aeneid 12.

With our colloquium complete, all joined in to continue the conversation over refreshments and to begin mulling over questions that will remain with us for the remainder of this academic year and, hopefully, much longer.

Post post by Prof. Aaron Seider.

By Allyn Waller ’18

On Friday afternoons, Fenwick 4 comes alive with the sounds of students in the Manuscripts Club decoding the works of Jerome, Homer, and Euclid. Along with these famous authors, however, one group is working on a digital edition of a manuscript of Gregorian chants written by anonymous monks in the late tenth century.

Studying this kind of manuscript brings unique challenges. The manuscript contains text, as most manuscripts do, but also contains musical notation for the chants in the form of neumes, markers that signify the note or notes to be sung on a given syllable.

One challenge for the group working of this manuscript has been figuring out how to represent these neumes in digital form. Also, unlike the Iliad or other classical texts, there is not a way to canonically refer to a specific line of a chant. Much of the group’s work last semester was spent on ways to try to overcome these problems.

Thankfully, there is a talented troupe of teammates trying to tackle this treatise. This team includes Allyn Waller ’18, Classics major and Computer Science minor, Michael Shun ‘18, Classics and Music double major, Nicholas Guarracino ‘18, Classics major; Classics major Julia Spiegel ’19; and Ying Hong ’19, presently undeclared. Consulting the students on their work are Prof. Neel Smith of the Classics Department, the Manuscripts Club adviser; and Prof. Daniel DiCenso of the Music Department.

Of their work on the project Michael said, “I really feel like I’m in my element here. This research covers both of my fields of study; so even though I’m not taking a Latin course this semester, I still get to use some of the Latin muscles I’ve built over the years. Plus, it’s really comforting to know there are others out there that are interested in the same things I am.”

Nicholas shares Michael’s excitement about exploring these manuscripts: “After so many years of training, it feels good to finally get my hands dirty and work with real manuscripts.”

Julia, who is beginning her second semester at Holy Cross, is enthusiastic about this research opportunity: “It’s exciting to dive into research like this early in my college career. These chants are really interesting and the more we learn about them, the more interesting they get.”

“My favorite part of the Manuscripts Club, and this project in particular, is that I feel I am contributing to the overall store of human knowledge,” commented Allyn. “I’m not just reading old texts; I’m using my knowledge of those texts to create new knowledge and understanding.”

In November Prof. Tom Martin traveled to Atlanta to the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature, the largest meeting of scholars of religion in the world. At the meeting Prof. Martin and Prof. David Levenson of the Dept. of Religion at Florida State University presented a talk on the Latin manuscripts of the works of Flavius Josephus, the most important (and controversial) historian of the history of the Jews in antiquity.

The presentation came out of their current collaborative project, a commentary on Book 6 of Josephus’ The Jewish War. Their talk concentrated on the so-called Latin Josephus, until now mostly unstudied but critical evidence  for understanding the relationship between Jews and Christians from the time of the early Roman Empire to the modern era. In their presentation Prof. Martin and Prof. Levenson enthusiastically recognized the substantial contributions to their project made by undergraduate students in Classics at Holy Cross and undergraduate and graduate students in Religion at FSU. This group of students took a joint course on Josephus during the Fall 2014 semester, offered simultaneously on both campuses through video conferencing.

The course was a pioneering one at Holy Cross in two significant ways. It was a bilingual course; that is, the students were looking at Josephus’ writings in the original Greek as well as the ancient Latin translations made during the later Roman Empire (the “Latin Josephus”). Secondly, it was the first Classics seminar at Holy Cross in which a cohort of graduate students was also contributing to the conversation – through the wonders of Skype.

“The course was different from all the classes I had previously taken in that it provided students with the opportunity to read both Greek and Latin,” recalled Melody Wauke ’17. “This allowed us to compare the works of Josephus in both languages in order to debate ambiguities and to obtain a better sense of the meaning of the text.”

“Comparing the Latin and Greek texts highlighted both similarities and differences between the two languages,” said Maggie MacMullin ’16. “Where one language may be more precise, the other is more ambiguous, which resulted in lively discussions about the author’s and the translator’s intended meanings. For example, if the Latin says ‘freely’ and the Greek says ‘happily,’ how does the translator compose his English? Of course, Classics students are often faced with challenges of interpretation, but this course introduced even more. We not only considered the two languages side by side, but also variations in manuscripts, and attempted to derive accurate translations with these considerations.”

Of the opportunity to work with the FSU graduate students, Joe MacNeill ‘16 remarked, “It was very helpful for me to see how philological research operates on a graduate level. This course gave me the philological tools I would need for tackling my investigation of John’s logos [in Joe’s Fenwick Scholarship thesis; see further here].”

The opportunity to work with two professors in one course also proved to be fruitful.

“We all greatly benefited from Prof. Levenson’s expertise in all matters Josephan and paleographical,” remembered Steven Merola ’16. “He and Prof. Martin were the founts of erudition that sustained the mutually semi-virtual table extending from Tallahassee to Worcester.”

“Skyping in class with Prof. Levenson and the FSU students was intimidating at first, because there were now two professors present with whom to discuss our insights,” recalled Maggie. “However, we quickly learned that Prof. Martin and Prof. Levenson were just as happy on opposite sides of a given point as on the same side.”

The work of the collaborators in this course has taken on much life since class meetings wrapped up a year ago. Meagan Freeze ’16 published her translation and commentary on Josephus’ brief account of the life of Jesus Christ (Jewish Antiquities 18.63–64) in the May 2015 issue of Holy Cross’ undergraduate Classics journal, Parnassus. And their findings continue to live on, in conference presentations and in the Josephus commentary by Professors Martin and Levenson that is now in the works.

By Charlie Schufreider ’17 and Alex Simrell ’16

Friday afternoons on Fenwick 4 tend to be dominated by the Holy Cross Manuscripts, Inscriptions, and Documents (MID) Club. Yet last Friday, August 6, the club’s presence was reduced just a bit, as four of its members traveled to Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, home of Bucknell University. There Claude Hanley ‘18, Stephanie Neville ‘17, Charlie Schufreider ‘17, and Alex Simrell ’16 attended the Bucknell Undergraduate Digital Scholarship Conference. Fearing to miss our 2 p.m. Sophocles seminar, the team didn’t depart until 3:30 on Friday afternoon. This left us battling Hartford rush hour traffic, rubberneckers all along I-84, and indigestion from Oreo overindulgence.

After a late night arrival at the Country Inn and Suites, the team arose with the sun in order to run over the final details of our presentation before the conference breakfast, for which we were first in line. Our talk was part of the panel titled, “Student Success through Digital Scholarship Initiatives.” Our talk, which followed two presentations by administrators about their respective undergraduate research programs, offered an example of the type of work that can be accomplished when undergraduates are given ample opportunity. For it focused not only on the structure of the MID Club, but it also highlighted our recent summer research on the Venetus A manuscript of Homer’s Iliad.

For the abstract to our presentation, click here: http://dsconf.blogs.bucknell.edu/2015/09/14/digital-editions-of-primary-documents-a-collaborative-modern-approach-to-ancient-texts/

We were pleased by the overwhelmingly positive response to our presentation. Audience members expressed genuine interest in our club, and many even asked how to create such a dedicated research club on their own campuses. What really amazed us was the incredible response all over the Twitter-verse (the hashtag of the conference was #BUDSC15; our Twitter handle is @HCMID). It certainly made for fun reading as we, with lightened hearts, re-embarked to make our seven-hour trek back to Worcester. So now, the Friday after our adventure, we return to Fenwick 4 to resume our studies of manuscripts, inscriptions, and documents, carrying on the tradition we represented the Friday before.