Verses from the Antique 1: Poems of Love and War from the Ancient World

In each session, a scholar will read out three or four ancient poems in translation and then discuss them informally. The session is open to all and assumes no prior knowledge of the poems. The theme for the term is ‘love and war’, which we have asked our colleagues to interpret as broadly and narrowly as they see fit: the poems they choose may be about love or war or both.

In this first session of the series, we will be joined by Maddalena Italia who will share her favourite poems from the Sanskrit. Maddalena is a Research Fellow in the UCL Department Greek & Latin working on the Leverhulme-funded project “Comparative Classics: Greece, Rome, India”. Before joining this research project, she taught Sanskrit at SOAS – where she completed her PhD in 2018 – and at the British Museum; she also taught Classical Greek and Latin at City Lit in London. She is currently completing a monograph on the modern reception of Sanskrit erotic poetry. View her UCL profile here. 

Future sessions will see the reading of poems from the Babylonian, Latin, Greek and Hebrew. 

Come and join us for what promises to be a lively and thought-provoking hour of verse and conversation. No registration required. Tea & biscuits will be served!

Image: Head of Krishna: cartoon for a mural of the Raslila.  Attributed to Sahib Ram (Rajasthan, India), ca. 1800.  The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 1918. Accession Number: 18.85.2. www.metmuseum.org