Prof Richard Thomas visits the Classics Society

The St Anne's College Classics Society exists to promote interaction between students and tutors across all years in the college.

We organize a guest lecture every term, help coordinate the Brasenose-St Anne's Classical Symposium, and host a variety of social events. In the course of the last ten years we have also arranged five summer reading parties to Cornwall and one visit to the Villa Virgiliana in Cuma on the Bay of Naples.

Brasenose-St Anne's Classical Symposium

The Classics schools at Brasenose and St Anne's enjoy very close relations. We share the services of Dr Ed Bispham as Tutor and Lecturer in Ancient History and teach the Mods Texts and Contexts option as a joint seminar. The colleges also meet once a term for a symposium in which one speaker from each college speaks briefly on an aspect of his or her research. The Trinity 2009 symposium featured Professor Matthew Leigh on Vergil's second Eclogue and Dr Fabienne Marchand on Epigraphy and the Lexicon of Greek Personal Names. In Michaelmas 2009, Giuseppe Pezzini outlined his doctoral work on prodelision while Barnaby Taylor spoke about analogy and perception in Lucretius.

Prof John Marincola with Prof Leigh and Gretta Mulaney

Speaker Meetings

The Classics Society's termly meetings have played host to a number of distinguished speakers from across the globe. Recent highlights include Prof Eric Csapo (Sydney University) on the interpretation of myth; Prof Alessandra Coppola (University of Padova) on hero cult and burial; and Prof Richard Thomas (Harvard University) on Horace.

In Michaelmas Term 2009, Professor Robert Fowler of Bristol University spoke on 'Early Greek Mythography and Herodotus'. He was followed in Hilary Term 2010 by Professor Donald Russell (St John's College, Oxford), who spoke on 'An Introduction to Rhetoric'. It was a great honour to host both speakers.

Prof Frederick Ahl signing copies of his 'Aeneid' translation

In Trinity 2008 we also held two special events. The first was a one-day symposium on Horace in honour of Margaret Hubbard, Honorary Fellow of St Anne's and former Tutor in Classics. This was addressed by Dr Llewelyn Morgan (Brasenose College) on the Fons Bandusiae ode and Dr Victoria Moul (Queen's College) on Horatian genres in Jonson and Donne. Seventy current and former students and friends from across the Classics Faculty joined us for the day. Later in the term we hosted Prof Frederick Ahl of Cornell University, who read from and discussed his new verse translation of the Aeneid. This was an extraordinary performance.

Lamledra House, Cornwall

Reading Party

The Classics Society is very lucky to have access to Lamledra House, a beautiful Edwardian family house on the coast of Cornwall. Here we are able to spend a week at the end of the summer term looking beyond the syllabus and reading great authors for their own sake.

Prof Leigh and Isobel Ramsden picking strawberries in Cornwall

The Classics Society hit the beach in Cornwall

Recent texts tackled include Dante's Inferno; Tasso's Jerusalem Liberated; and the Lusiads by Camões. We returned to Cornwall in June 2007 and spent the week reading Ariosto's epic Orlando Furioso. There was also plenty of time to walk, swim and cook together. We are booked to return in June 2010.

The Classsics Society on Mt Vesuvius

Our 2002 visit to the Bay of Naples saw a party of 20 take in such sites as Cumae and the Sibyl's Cave, the imperial palace at Baiae, Lake Avernus and the entry to the underworld, Capri and the Tiberian Villa Iovis, Pompeii, Stabiae and Herculaneum.