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ACROAMATA LATINA
Hic praebentur acroamata (vulgo: podcasts) varia quae in rete inveniri possunt. Certe opiniones hic expressae externae sunt Ephemeridi.
PAIDEIA MEDIA
Jacob L. Mackey | Belief and emotion in Roman religion: Reconsidering John Sheid's "civic model"
Was there any role for belief in Roman religion? Was there any place for emotion? I answer yes to both questions and moreover I argue that in Roman religion, emotion depended on belief. Simply put, only if a Roman believed that the gods were, say, vengeful, could she experience the religious emotion of, for example, fear. My approach to belief and emotion builds upon but goes well beyond that of John Scheid, a preeminent scholar of Roman religion at the Collège de France. In this talk I carefully reconstruct his position on the role of belief and the place of emotion in Roman religion. He takes what might be called a minimalist view on both questions, recognizing a certain rather basic role for belief and a sharply circumscribed role for emotion. Drawing on and building on my recent book, Belief and Cult: Rethinking Roman Religion (Princeton University Press, 2022), I show that careful attention to our sources and engagement with cognitive theory suggests that belief and emotion were much more deeply implicated in Roman religion than Scheid allows and I go beyond him in showing that they were in fact deeply interrelated. _ Jacob L. Mackey is Associate Professor of Classics at Occidental College in Los Angeles, where he teaches Greek and Latin languages and literatures, their transformative reception by African-American writers, their centrality to the American project of self-governance, and their power to transport us beyond our current culture of resentment. He is faculty advisor for the student Persuasion club, which provides a space for the free exchange of ideas on campus. He grew up between Austin, TX, and a small village in Kerala, in south India. The darker side of his experience in India—growing up in a cult—is captured in this film. He is planning a memoir about the brighter side. He is the author of Belief and Cult: Rethinking Roman Religion (Princeton University Press, 2022). _ https://www.paideiainstitute.org/
199 views • Aug 31, 2024
Abigail Palmer | Did That Really Happen? Compelling Instruction in the Classical Humanities
Teaching Latin and ancient history can be a challenging enterprise, but need it be a chore for both teacher and student? These subjects are often characterized as arcane or irrelevant; one look at the actual ancient world, however, can dispel these labels. The Classical world contains a wide variety of events that seem to defy natural or human limitations and continues to upend our preconceptions about the capabilities of the ancients. The key to student engagement with antiquity is in the teaching. In this lecture I will discuss the idea of teaching history as a story, one that makes use of the astounding and real events that happened in the ancient world. The development of my Ancient Humanities course has taken years and requires constant refinement, but the fruits of this work have been well worth the hours of planning and re-evaluation. The fruits of history as a story include greater student engagement and renewed enjoyment for the teacher. Who doesn’t love to tell a great story to a willing audience? Who doesn’t love to tell that story over and over, making it better every time? From the stories I tell and the stories that others have developed in the Montessori curriculum, I discovered ancient Alexandria. That ancient city was practically a footnote in my high school, college and graduate educations. Yet this fascinating place became the inspiration and primary setting for my first novel, Faelan and the Miracle Machines. The second half of my talk will discuss the outline of the novel, the city of Alexandria and its people, and the machines that inspired Heron’s ancient audience and continue to captivate my modern students. _ Abigail Palmer received her BA in Classics from University of Dallas and her MA in Classics from Fordham University. She is a member of Eta Sigma Phi and Phi Beta Kappa, and holds a certificate from Association Montessori Internationale for the adolescent level of instruction. Over the years she has written Classical curriculum for the high school level and published essays on a variety of topics. This spring she published her first novel, Faelan and the Miracle Machines, an historical fiction work set in ancient Alexandria, Egypt. Abigail has taught subjects ranging from Latin and Greek to History and Drama in private schools for seventeen years, working with students ages twelve through eighteen. She lives in the Napa valley with her husband and family. _ https://www.paideiainstitute.org/
133 views • Aug 15, 2024
Melissa Lane | Plato on Rule and Office: constitutionalism for the good of the ruled
In Juvenal’s sixth satire, the Roman poet famously asked, “Who will guard the guardians?” The phrase has become a proverbial way to think about the demands of good government: the need to identify, and safeguard, guardians who care for the good of those over whom they rule. The Juvenal conundrum (as I have called it)[1] speaks to democrats (small “d”) raised on Harry S. Truman’s insistence that “the buck stops here,” who can feel the intuitive force both of the need for someone who is responsible for caring about getting the ultimate decisions right, and of the danger posed by that person’s (or groups’) potentially getting it wrong—whether out of ignorance, corruption, or sheer negligence. Wherever the buck is supposed to stop, one may ask what happens if that safeguard, or stopgap, is not up to the task (one might say, buckles at the crucial moment). In acknowledging that democratic polities need guardians, and need to answer the question of how those guardians will be guarded, we can start to see Plato’s reference to guardians in the Republic—the infamous philosopher-kings and -queens who can otherwise easily raise democratic hackles—in a new light. I will argue that Plato’s appeal to guardians, and especially the highest philosopher-rulers whom we might call his super-guardians, arose out of his reflections on vulnerabilities in the constitutional polities of his day, including the ancient Athenian democracy, and so has potential relevance to how good government might be achieved in democratic polities today: dedicated to the good of the ruled. _ Melissa Lane is the Class of 1943 Professor of Politics at Princeton University, and also holds a non-teaching appointment as the Professor of Rhetoric at Gresham College in London. Her teaching in ancient Greek and Roman political thought at Princeton is cross-listed with Classics, Hellenic Studies, and Philosophy, and has been recognized with the university-wide Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Award and the Stanley J. Kelley Teaching Award of the Princeton Department of Politics. External honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship in the field of classics as well as fellowships and visiting professorships at Harvard, Oxford, Stanford, the American Academy in Rome, and the École Normale Supérieure. Professor Lane completed an MPhil and PhD in Philosophy at the University of Cambridge and then taught at Cambridge for fifteen years before moving to Princeton in 2009. Her most recent book, published in 2023 by Princeton University Press, is titled Of Rule and Office: Plato’s Ideas of the Political, and she will be drawing on it as part of this lecture. _ https://www.paideiainstitute.org/
142 views • Jul 29, 2024
Dr. Thomas P. Sculco | The Value of a Classical Education for STEM | Paideia Arete Award Gala
At the Paideia Institute's 2024 Arete Award Gala, Dr. Thomas P. Sculco, Surgeon-in-Chief Emeritus at the Hospital for Special Surgery, reflects on how his undergraduate studies in Classics have enriched his over 40-year career in medicine, and how performing a complex surgery is not so different from translating a passage of Cicero. Dr. Sculco and Dame Mary Beard are the 2024 recipients of the Arete Award, established in 2018 by the Paideia Institute and the Arete Foundation to recognize individuals who have had an outstanding impact on the field of Classics. We give the award to two honorees annually: a distinguished academic classicist, and a passionate supporter of the Classics who has gone on to success in other fields. The Paideia Institute is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting the study of the classical humanities. Since 2010, we have pursued that mission through travel programs, outreach to expand access to the classics, publications, curriculum development and digital language learning. Each year we teach the classics to more than 2,000 students of every age group, making us one of the largest organizations in our mission area. https://www.paideiainstitute.org/
230 views • May 31, 2024
MARY BEARD | Why the Classics Today are Better than Ever Before | Paideia Institute Arete Award Gala
At the Paideia Institute's 2024 Arete Award Gala, Dame Mary Beard, OBE reflects on the transformative wonder of seeing antiquity up close, and how the field of Classics today is made more interesting and promising than ever before by "different questions from different places". Professor Beard and Dr. Thomas P. Sculco, Surgeon-in-Chief Emeritus at the Hospital for Special Surgery, are the 2024 recipients of the Arete Award, established in 2018 by the Paideia Institute and the Arete Foundation to recognize individuals who have had an outstanding impact on the field of Classics. We give the award to two honorees annually: a distinguished academic classicist, and a passionate supporter of the Classics who has gone on to success in other fields. The Paideia Institute is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting the study of the classical humanities. Since 2010, we have pursued that mission through travel programs, outreach to expand access to the classics, publications, curriculum development and digital language learning. Each year we teach the classics to more than 2,000 students of every age group, making us one of the largest organizations in our mission area. https://www.paideiainstitute.org/
1243 views • May 31, 2024
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