IDUS NOV. MMIX The VCLA/UVM Annual Fall Newsletter . . . and on the Web at: www.uvm.edu/~classics/VCLA NOTE: If you are reading this via email and know someone who might be interested, please forward this annual update on the activities of the Vermont Classical Languages Association and the UVM Department of Classics.

Latin Day will be FRIDAY, APRIL 9, 2010, and the Latin Day Planning Meeting will take place Saturday, December 12, 2009, 10 A.M. to 12 noon (see below for more details) (Mark Usher reporting) The VCLA Annual Meeting took place on Friday, October 23, 2009, at Harwood Union High School. Tami Munford, President, organized a fine program. Many thanks to Tami for the hospitality. Cristina Mazzoni, Professor of Romance Languages (Italian) at UVM, gave an outstanding presentation on the image of the Roman She-Wolf (Lupa) in ancient and modern Italian society. This nicely complemented Tami’s own presentation on the use of Art History in teaching Latin and Classical Civilization (with marvelous paintings by Waterhouse and Botticelli). Thanks to everyone for helping make this year’s program such an enjoyable success. Present at this year’s meeting (in no particular order): Mary Redmond (Montpelier), Lydia Batten (CVU), Leanne Morton (CVU), Priscilla Throop (independent scholar and teacher), Cliff Timpson (BFA, St. Albans), George LaPierre (BFA, St. Albans), Joshua Knox (MMUHS), Nora Cartier (Burlington HS), Jessica Evans (Stowe HS), Jacques Bailly, Angeline Chiu, John Franklin, Walter Roberts, Robert Rodgers, Barbara Rodgers and Mark Usher (all UVM faculty), Jason Schatz, Megan Alderfer, Nick Velez, Ally Carkin (grad students at UVM). Business Meeting (Tami Munford, President, presiding): The following officers were elected and/or reappointed: President and Co-Program Chair: Leanne Morton ([email protected]) Vice President and Co-Program Chair: Nora Cartier ([email protected]) Treasurer: Norm McClure ([email protected]) Representative to CANE: Lydia Batten ([email protected]) A word of grateful thanks to outgoing treasurer, Barbara Rodgers, for serving many years in that role and to Norm McClure for stepping up to fill that position. Financial Report: Treasurer Barbara Rodgers reported a balance of $1370.17 in the VCLA fiscus and urged payment of dues (only $10). If you have not paid your dues for the current year, please send them to Prof. Barbara Saylor Rodgers, The University of Vermont, Department of Classics, 481 Main Street, Burlington, Vermont 05405. NOTE: 1

It was raised as a troubling trend that there are too few dues-paying members of the VCLA (and that it always the same people in attendance at the annual meeting year after year). On the Registration form for Latin Day this year there will be a prominent reminder to please keep your VCLA dues current (many schools will cover membership in professional organizations for teachers). We are considering whether to make VCLA membership a prerequisite for participation in Latin Day. An additional reminder: the VCLA Directory of Members is available online at http://www.uvm.edu/~classics/VCLA/directory.html. Please send any changes, corrections or additions to this Directory to Pam Cunov, 802-656-3210, or email to [email protected] (NOTE: current and correct email addresses are especially important to have for the VCLA e-distribution list; please notify Pam of any changes or updates.) CANE News: This year’s CANE meeting will be held at The Moses Brown School in Providence, Rhode Island, March 19 and 20. Information about the 2009 CANE Summer Institute has not yet been posted. For further details about both events (including the call for papers), go directly to the new CANE webpage at: http://www.caneweb.org/ The CANE Student Writing Contest: The topic for 2009-10 is ”Loss and Recovery: An Ancient Example.” See the CANE webpage for guidelines: http://www.caneweb.org Note: Cash prizes of $50, $30, and $20 are awarded by the VCLA to the best three submissions from Vermont. Vermonters have fared very well in this competition. Encourage your students to enter! The deadline for submission of entries is December 15. Please send submissions to Lydia Batten, Champlain Valley Union High School, ([email protected]).

The 34nd Annual Vermont Latin Day: Date: Friday, April 9, 2010 Place: Patrick Gymnasium, UVM, Burlington Theme: ANIMALIA! Schools will choose from a list of animals with mythological associations for their skit theme. Probationes will include questions based on an extensive vocabulary list of various animals. Common readings will draw appropriately on animals in literature. We will again put on a parade of delegations this year. We will also be taking a collection for the animal shelter of Chittenden County. (1 dollar per person, should raise over 1,000 dollars for this worthy cause!) New and exciting this year: WE’RE DOING LATIN DAY T-SHIRTS! Design by Glynnis Fawkes (John Franklin’s wife, a professional artist) with proceeds going to support VCLA. Please come to the Latin Day Planning Meeting (see immediately below) to hammer out details on all of the above. Planning Meeting for Latin Day 2010: Saturday, December 12, 2009, 10-12 noon, at the Department of Classics, UVM, Burlington, 481 Main Street, Room 207 (Telephone 802-656-

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3210). PLEASE COME. Your input is essential to the success of Latin Day. Bagels, fruit, coffee and tea provided. (You may park behind the building.) The Vermont Sight Translation Contest, generously sponsored by Professors Robert Rodgers and Barbara Saylor Rodgers, is open to all Vermont students of Latin from public or private schools. The Contest pays cash prizes for sight translation of Latin texts at two levels: the Junior Level, for students with one or two years of Latin, and the Senior Level, for students with three or four years of Latin. 1st, 2nd, and 3rd prizes may be awarded at each Level, of $100, $75, and $50 respectively. Teachers should let the Rodgers know by mid-January if anyone in their school is interested in taking these exams. Packets with texts and instructions will be sent out to participating schools by February 1st. Exams are to be completed and returned by the first week in March. Winners will be honored at Latin Day.

UVM Department of Classics Newsletter ~ Fall 2009 Below is a brief description of some faculty activities over the past academic year. Wishing you all many happy returns, M. D. Usher Associate Professor and Chair

Faculty Activities PHIL AMBROSE (emeritus) regrets to have missed the VCLA meeting this year. He was lecturing and giving a seminar at the Music Institute of Hanyang University in Seoul on the musical rhetoric of J. S. Bach. JACQUES BAILLY continues to work on his commentary on Plato’s Theaetetus. He also continues as pronouncer for the Scripps National Spelling Bee, as well as the CanWest Canspell Canadian National Spelling Bee. He will be pronouncing for the Korean National Spelling Bee in Seoul in February. He also serves as our Graduate Studies Director and is President of Phi Beta Kappa. ANGELINE CHIU continues to research and write her book on Ovid’s Fasti, while also working on articles on Lucan, Silius Italicus, Plautus, and Ovid. She is preparing a new course on Shakespeare and the classical tradition for the Honors College and enjoying teaching Greek and Latin, including a new approach to using inscriptions in intermediate Latin. JOHN FRANKLIN spent the summer working on a book called Kinyras: The Divine Lyre, which explores an historical relationship between the legendary priest-king of Cyprus (mentioned by Homer, Ovid) and the god Kinnaru of Ugarit, who was the personified sacred lyre of West Semitic temple music of the Bronze Age. The essential question is: How does a deified musical instrument become the symbolic culture hero of pre-Greek Cyprus, and what is his afterlife in the historical imagination of first millennium Greeks and Greek-Cypriots? He is giving a paper called ‘Kinyras and the Musical Stratigraphy of Early Cyprus’ at a Near Eastern musicology conference in Leiden in December (the

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same paper was given by proxy at the MOISA conference in Ravenna (September). He also gave a talk called ‘The Global Economy of Music in the Ancient Near East and Egypt’ at UVM’s Fleming Museum, as part of their Egyptomania series. He’s also giving a demonstration of original Moog and Arp modular synthesizers to the Sci-Fi, Horror, and Fantasy Club. WALTER ROBERTS spent the recent summer reinvigorating his sensitivity for Ionic Greek by reading around Herodotus’ Histories in preparation for a upper-level reading course he will be teaching this coming Spring. On the Latin side of things he has been looking into Cicero’s Epistulae and ruminating about the so-called democratic character of Late Roman Republican political action as seen through the ideas of Fergus Millar and Robert Morstein-Marx. Last Spring he wrote a review of William B. Irvine’s A guide to the good life: the ancient art of Stoic joy for the Bryn Mawr Review. And he is now continuing to sharpen his interpretation of de Officiis to the point of spear-sharp persuasiveness. With his students he has enjoyed a recent survey of Caesar’s de Bello Gallico and Virgil’s Aeneid, and has enjoyed the second time around teaching Introduction to Roman Civilization. This time in teaching the latter he has added David Ferry’s translation of Horace’s Odes to the syllabus with nice results. Reading Lucretius, Virgil, and Horace the students come away with a good appreciation of the wide array of Latin poetic expression. BARBARA SAYLOR RODGERS has been working on a variety of things, inspired especially by the seminar in later Roman history in spring 2009, in particular translation and commentary on Symmachus’ fragmentary orations. She is also redoing an article on ruler-cult for a book on the Panegyrici latini and has discovered something interesting to say about the publication of Cicero’s oration pro Milone. This fall she is teaching a firstyear seminar on the end of the Roman republic (the Ides of March), a new honors course on civil war, and third-year Latin. After another year of no summer until late August her nose is a little out of joint. ROBERT RODGERS: This fall semester Robert is teaching (with Jeff Marshall, in Special Collections) a first-year seminar in the history of alphabets, writing, manuscripts and printed books. “We have a dozen students, pretty well sympathetic to the subject matter and fascinated by the variety of material. My Myths and Legends of the Trojan War class has over 100 students: thank goodness for Jason Schatz, who's an energetic TA!” Robert is also working his way through page-proofs for the Columella OCT volume (650 pages), with some patient assistance from Phil Ambrose. The publication date is set for June 2010. He’s debating whether to follow Columella with an edition of Varro’s Res Rustica or wrap up the Greek Geoponika edition (in the works for over 30 years). MARK USHER continues to serve as Department Chair. His article “Diogenes’ Doggerel: Chreia and Quotation in Cynic Performance” appeared in the Classical Journal, and his second children’s book, Diogenes, with pictures by Michael Chesworth (in which the Cynic philosopher is cast literally as a stray dog), was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in May. He’s given several talks and done a few school visits in association with the release of the Diogenes book. His latest effort, an adaptation of Apuleius’ The Golden Ass for all ages, will be appearing with David R. Godine books next fall, with illustrations by T. Motley. Other projects on the near horizon include a paper on Eastern motifs in [Seneca’s] Octavia, and a piece about classicist George Thomson and the 4

influence of his work on Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1969 film Notes for an African Oresteia. Meanwhile, Works & Days Farm has expanded to include pigs this year, and, with a view to the long term, a heritage breed of sheep (Wiltshire Horn), the first such sheep in Vermont. (This in addition to the Ushers’ flock of Dorsets.) BRIAN WALSH continues to mine textual and inscriptional corpora as he advances work on his dual textbook project, Universitas Latina and Universitas Graeca. A freshman seminar course (“Ancient Egypt through the Ages”) allows him to increase his repertoire. He jokes that he is going to be an Egyptologist when he grows up! Brian is thrilled to see so much enthusiasm among in the department—among faculty and students alike—for Near Eastern and Indo-European languages and culture: ‘felicia tempora’ indeed!

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