Series: Critical Antiquities

A consideration of how modern revolutions have employed tropes of classical antiquity. Despite its Latin etymology, "revolution" in its modern understanding arguably did not exist in antiquity, and revolution as we know it today is considered by many theorists to be a term born in modernity. While they certainly had times of momentous political upheaval, the Greeks and Romans tended...

Nine short essays exploring the K’iche’ Maya story of creation, the Popol Vuh. Written during the lockdown in Chicago in the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic, these essays consider the Popol Vuh as a work that was also written during a time of feverish social, political, and epidemiological crisis as Spanish missionaries and colonial military deepened their conquest of indigenous...

Complacency is a critical reflection on complacency and its role in the decline of classics in the academy. In response to philosopher Simon Blackburn’s portrayal of complacency as a vice that impairs university study at its core, John T. Hamilton examines the history of complacency in classics and its implications for our contemporary moment. The subjects, philosophies, and literatures of...

Acclaimed author and translator Sophus Helle considers an ancient creation story with themes of humanity, class warfare, and catastrophic climate change. The Babylonian poem Atra-hasis is a forgotten masterpiece of political thought. Written in Akkadian in what is now southern Iraq during the early second millennium BCE, Atra-hasis gives us a glimpse of how ancient poets understood the society growing...

How an ancient Indigenous earthwork travelled from Ohio to Washington state in the mid-1970s. In Transit, Chadwick Allen chronicles the surprising history of how the ancient snake effigy known as Serpent Mound, located in what is now southern Ohio, travelled to Seattle, Washington in the 1970s, at the height of American Indian activism associated with the Red Power movement. Allen...