We hope you have been enjoying The Cambridge Forum webinar series! A couple of weeks ago, we had a great session exploring what coins can tell us about the Classical world....
Read MoreThink of the lies. Climate change is a hoax. Colonization benefits the colonized. Rape is your fault. Grief is your fault. Mortality is your fault. Tragedy exposes these lies. I argue in my book that modern writers like Thomas Hardy, Virginia Woolf, Albert Camus, and Samuel Beckett thought of Greek tragedy in this way – […]
Read MoreThe 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 of which were the Antonine and Justinianic plagues. How would the Romans have reacted to the risks posed by the arrival of a […]
Read MoreCovid-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 cause. The Greek commander, Agamemnon, had in fact wronged and abused Apollo’s priest, Chryses: disease is a hidden enemy which must have […]
Read MoreThe 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 greens in the country, it could not feel further removed in space or time from the Mediterranean world in the ‘Age of Justinian’. Yet this […]
Read MoreIn 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 for him was the whole known world. His purpose in writing was to discover by careful research the truth about events in […]
Read MoreToilet 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 is not one of the disease’s side effects. Hypotheses abound, from the sociology of herd response (copy-cat behavior) over the economics of panic buying […]
Read MoreEach evening the world awaits with anxiety the new numbers John Hopkins University provides for the spread of COVID-19 around the globe. This fascination with mortality rates during an epidemic is nothing new. The Historia Augusta, a biography of Roman emperors composed in late antiquity, reports that during the peak of a pandemic in 262 […]
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