Classics Reflections

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26
May
2020

What if the Romans had Contracted Coronavirus?

The dramatic impact of the Coronavirus has highlighted how thankfully rare pandemics are in the modern world. The Roman empire, by contrast, suffered from regular bouts of contagion, among the most deadly...
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20
May
2020

Would the Byzantines Have Noticed a Coronavirus...

“If it bleeds, it leads” – the cynical motto of the modern media, which uses fear and sensationalism to drive up ratings and sell advertising. But were medieval and Byzantine narratives sources...
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19
May
2020

Social Distance

Covid-19 has had many people reaching back to the plague which Apollo sends on the Greek army at the very beginning of Homer’s Iliad; Western literature begins with a devastating disease of unknown...
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19
May
2020

Reading OVID in a Time of Social Isolation

On Friday March 20, the Roman poet Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso) turned 2062. In the last decade of his life he was exiled by the emperor Augustus for offences known and unknown to a small frontier town...
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19
May
2020

Pandemics and Psychology

In addition to the medical and economic aspects of the current crisis, the psychological challenges it poses have over recent weeks increasingly claimed our attention. Even if one is not affected personally,...
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18
May
2020

Pandemics Ancient and Modern

The village of Barrington, in Cambridgeshire, presents the viewer with a quintessentially English rural scene: with its thatched cottages and village pub, and one of the best-preserved and extensive village...
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14
May
2020

Classics and Crisis

In the preamble to his History of the Peloponnesian War Thucydides declares that the twenty-year conflict between Athens and Sparta was a war like no other, an object lesson for humanity involving what...
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13
May
2020

Hoarding in Times of Corona: Thoughts on Storage,...

Toilet paper has become the unlikely posterchild of the coronavirus. Toilet paper, and its absence. Much has been written about what seems, at first sight, an unlikely association: after all, diarrhea...
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