Classics outside Classics

Classics as an academic discipline appears to belong to the lecture hall and the seminar. But Classics is alive outside Classics, as the studies collected in this volume show. We engage with Classics in the 19th century through the hymn “Gaudeamus Igitur” and a popular song on Herman the German, we meet Classics in the Early Modern school, in the 19th century celebrating the Olympics in King Otto's Greece, and identifying the gorilla, and in the 20th century invention of Spartacus as a Bulgarian. We encounter frauds, hoaxes, and the lexicographical tradition, by looking at two works fraudulently ascribed to a Byzantine author, at a joke presented as a New Testament “agraphon”, at the lexicographical invention of Euboean Cyme, and at the tradition of poking fun at lexica in lexica themselves. We learn about classicists ousted from Classics through the lives of Richard Laqueur and Victor Ehrenberg, and we engage with two publications which were highly influential in popularizing Classics: Falke' s cultural history of Greece and Rome, and Asterix. The volume thus presents fourteen studies on Classcis outside Classics.

Kai Brodersen is a Classicist at the University of Erfurt in Germany and Margaret Braine Fellow in Classics and Ancient History at the University of Western Australia.