JCL Club 2013-14

Welcome back to campus or, for those new to HW, welcoming to campus! I'm sure you all are as excited as we are for the new school year, and we're happy to announce that our JCL club meetings will resume on Tuesday, 9/10 in HC310. All are welcome to join the club and participate in our activities — Latin is not a prerequisite!

We have another exciting year of activities, including a fall trip to the Getty Villa (details forthcoming; cf. the video on the installation of the "Lion Attacking a Horse" exhibition below). Additionally, the CJCL state convention will be held on April 4-5 (the last weekend of spring break), so be sure to mark your calendars.

Best of luck with the new academic year, and we'll see you all very soon!

Prometheus Bound at the Getty Villa

Coinciding perfectly with the start of the new academic year, the Getty Villa's fall "Outdoor Theater" series will feature Prometheus Bound (attributed to Aeschylus but not without problems). From the Villa:

"The Titan Prometheus, progenitor and champion of humankind, has stolen fire from Mount Olympus, giving rise to human civilization. As punishment, he is doomed by Zeus to spend eternity chained to a mountaintop, where Prometheus rails against the gods and all the world's injustices. Witness the timeless tragedy—and victory—of the prisoner who refuses to be silent in the face of tyranny."

The 90-minute performances will take place Thursday-Friday-Saturday at 8pm throughout the month of September, and tickets ($42) can be purchased here. It should be a fantastic spectacle, so be sure to get tickets quickly, since they will certainly sell out.

Prometheus Wheel installation, from the Getty Villa's Facebook page

Sicily: Art and Invention between Greece and Rome

Over our spring break, the Getty Villa's exhibition Sicily: Art and Invention between Greece and Rome opened, which focuses on the life and culture of ancient Sicily from the 5th through 3rd c. BCE and will run through this summer to August 19.

Despite its title, the materials in the exhibition are primarily Sikeliote Greek, including some sculpture, unique pottery, rare coins, and a few other interesting pieces (e.g. the spectacular golden "Phiale of Achyris").

Of especial interest are the materials devoted to the Sicilian engineer Archimedes, including a page from a palimpsest recording his work on his famous stomachion problem ("Archimedes' square").  Novelty versions of the square are available in the Villa's gift shop.

Poppies

The exhibition is organized thematically, with features on the island's initial colonization by the Greeks, its literary culture, and its religion (focusing, of course, on Demeter).  The materials on literature and art are particularly interesting, given that several prominent Greek literary figures like Pindar and Aeschylus, visited Sicily, leaving their mark on its culture.

Marigolds beside a fig tree

The Villa's side production for the exhibition, as is customary, is fantastic, and the exhibition catalog, which is designed to bridge the gap in scholarship in this period, is beautiful.

As an added bonus for visitors right now, several of the flowers in the Villa's several gardens are in bloom, making the Sikeliote art not the only attraction worth visiting.

The Latin program will sponsor a tour of the Getty Villa later this spring on Sunday, May 19 on behalf of the HWPA Partybook, and we'll certainly explore this exhibition in great detail.

The Hidden Classical World in Los Angeles

Though the Last Days of Pompeii exhibition has recently moved on from the Getty Villa (it's now at the Cleveland Museum of Art), there are other interesting pieces of art with connections to ancient Rome and Greece to be found in Los Angeles right now.  That items of this sort can be found almost randomly in Los Angeles goes to show just how pervasive Greco-Roman culture was in the ancient world and now, and it also attests to the fact that we live in a city remarkably rich in art.

Roman costume from Spartacus

The Stanley Kubrick exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art has materials from all of the director's work. Items from his 1960 film Spartacus are on display, including costumes and storyboards from the movie. The degree of detail that Kubrick put into his movies was extraordinary, and the small corner of the exhibition dedicated to this film provides a fascinating glimpse into how movies on ancient Rome were made in his time. The Kubrick exhibition runs through June 30, 2013.

The Art of Continuity at the Pacific Asia Museum 

The Pacific Art Museum in Pasadena currently has on display The Art of Continuity: Revering our Elders, which collects Asian traditions of revering and honoring ancestors.  It's worth visiting to compare the Asian traditions to the Roman mos maiorum, in that the values that both traditions had are similar in some interesting ways.  Revering our Elders is on display until Jan. 5, 2014.

Buddha Shakyamuni

Also in Pasadena, the Norton Simon Museum houses a remarkable collection of Asian art, including spectacular pieces of Buddhist art. One piece in particular, a statue of Buddha Shakyamuni from Gandhara dating to c. 200CE (pictured above), is remarkable for its multicultural features. The Buddha shows the classical hand mudra and ushnisha above his head. But because ancient Gandhara (modern Pakistan) was at a confluence of Greek and Asian culture, thanks to the conquest of Alexander the Great, much art from the region shows Greek influence. Here, the statue possesses a flowing gown and curled hair that are not characteristic of Buddha depictions in older Buddhist art, but rather are standard features belonging to Hellinistic sculpture. This Buddha is part of the Norton Simon's permanent collection. Interest in ancient Gandhara has been on the rise, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York currently has a beautiful exhibition Buddhism art along the Silk Road through Feb. 10, 2013 that also includes several similar examples of Buddhist art with Hellenistic features.

Feel free to add any other potentially interesting items of Classical interest in the greater Los Angeles area below in the comments.

Digital Classical Texts

In reading the Getty Museum's recent blog post about an ancient Greek curse tablet dating to about 100 BCE and found in Morgantina that's now on display at the Villa, I noticed in the post a link to a website devoted to curse texts from Roman Britain.  It's an excellent site worthy of use in Latin classrooms for multiple reasons, with several interesting curse texts that are fairly easy to read (if not strange), and it can now be placed beside the rest of the digital "Vindolanda" tablets, which are also available online.

Given the current push toward digital texts in classrooms, it seems like a good time to share other online resources for reading Latin with the goal of discovering others.  The gold standard, of course, is still the Perseus Project, but the Latin Library is also very useful.  A short list is given below:

• Perseus Project
• Latin Library
• Vindolanda Tablets Online
• Curse Tablets of Roman Britain

Are there any other digital resources for Latin (or Greek!), including dictionaries, that Classics students have found interesting and useful?  Please comment, if so!

Welcome to HW JCL!

Welcome to the Harvard-Westlake JCL Club blog!  We'll be using this blog to share news and events about the Latin program at Harvard-Westlake.  All are welcome to follow and comment on blog posts here.

I created this blog with a twofold purpose in mind:  to get my students thinking about Classical culture outside of a classroom and to give them an opportunity to improve their digital literacy in the expression of their ideas.  To that end, I will encourage them to keep their own blogs in a similar fashion, with posts on anything related to the Latin language, Classical literature and myth, art, history, architecture, etc. that they see in their daily lives. This is an experiment, and I don't know how successful it will be.  Ideally, though, we can work towards a deeper appreciation of our Classical heritage together.

Helen at the Villa in September

The Getty Villa will be staging Euripides' Helen this fall Thursdays-Saturdays in the month of September.  Tickets are $42 ($38 for students), and $25 preview shows will be held 8/30-9/1.  Don't miss it!

Beautiful Evil: The Challenge of Helen of Troy

Ruby Blondell is coming to the Getty Villa Saturday, 9/15 at 2pm to give a free public lecture Beautiful Evil: The Challenge of Helen of Troy.  She's a well-known Classicist from the University of Washington, and the lecture should be very interesting.