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. In Michaelmas 2010, Dr Amin Benaissa spoke on his work editing mythological papyri while Dr Tesse Stek introduced us to the archaeology of central Italy. In Hilary 2011, Dr Llewelyn Morgan talked on The Buddhas of Bamiyan and Dr Jonathan Katz lectured on his work as a student of Sanskrit.

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 2010, we enjoyed an amazing lecture by Prof. Joshua Katz of Princeton University on word-play in Cicero and many other Greek, Latin and Hebrew writers. He was followed in Hilary Term 2011 by Dr. Costas Panayotakis of Glasgow University, who spoke about Roman Farce and Mime. In Trinity 2011 Dr Paul Roche of Sydney University spoke about Pliny's Panegyricus.

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; the Lusiads by Camões; and the Orlando Furioso of Ariosto. In June 2010 we spent a wonderfully sunny week studying the Finnish epic the Kalevala. As ever, there was plenty of time to cook, walk and swim together. 

The reading party in 2010

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.