Kevin's Classics

Ovid’s take on Orpheus  From the translations of book 10 and 11 , we can read a heart-breaking story of the hero Orpheus whose poetic prowess, though impressive enough to persuade deities and shades, cannot bring back his beloved wife. His sequential abjection of womanly love is suggested to be his downfall. Reading Orpheus’s story in this manner is a subtle implication of Ovid's own poetical superiority over Orpheus. No transformation of Orpheus & Eurydice A key point of Ovid’s work is its theme of describing transformations, i.e.  metamorphoses in nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas corpora,   my soul brings me to speak of figures changed into new bodies (Ovid. Met.I.1-2) This aspect of changing forms into new bodies seems completely absent from the characters Orpheus and Eurydice . It is only the surrounding characters that undergo metamorphoses. The first of them is the transformation of Cyparissus into a tree when Ovid narrates how Orpheus creates a ...

Introduction It was in my third year of secundary education (I believe that's the end of junior high school) when I first encountered this myth. Funnily enough, it was during a Latin exam, which tested our knowledge of the participle present. The exam consisted of some excersises that made us change verbs to their participle equivalents and vice versa, and it ended with a translation exercise. The text that we had to translate was a simplified version of this text, though it skipped to the part where Orpheus has already sung to Hades and Persephone. I don't remember what I got for that test, but the simplified Latin text, filled with present participles, is still in my mind when I think of Orpheus and Eurydice. It was a bummer to find out that Ovid's version was not so visually narrated as that simple text had been, but I was still enamoured by his style. Enfin, we are not here to recollect old school stories. We are here because we want to know how Ovid represents the myth...

What is Miraculous Myths? Miraculous Myths is a new series of blog posts centred around a myth. In this series, I want to give a good overview of a well-known myth by providing my translations and analyses of important source texts (Greek and Latin). Moreover, we will transgress the boundaries of ancient times and approach the myth from more modern retellings and stories. In a way, these posts will combine my skills of translation and interpretation with studies of reception. Thus, it's gonna be more than a mere overview of all the source material or common plot lines, as you can find on many other websites.  How did I come up with the idea? This series of miraculous myths is indebted to the podcast "Let's Talk About Myths, Baby!" by Liv Albert. As the title implies, this podcast is all about Greek & Roman mythological stories with sporadic interviews of professors on other ancient historical topics (her last series was on the Mediterranean Bronze Age). Liv likes...

When I read poetry, it is often either Greek or Latin, and preferably short. That's one of the reasons I like Greek epigrams as they meet both criteria. Hopefully you can appreciate these three poems too. There is not much to say more, rather than I have chosen them for their theme on love. The titles are my own as are the translations.

Hello everybody ( you who dared to come to this blog), If you found this blog somehow by googling, then I applause you for finding it in the first place and for wanting to read a blog about classics by a student. Perhaps you're the unfortunate person who discovered me by searching for "mosquito killer" with the hope that you could find a way to get rid of them? In that case, I have to apologize beforehand because this string is just a random tag I put in.  (Not to say that I am not a phenomenal bug smasher since I have already splashed two gnats, only the third one is still lurking in my room). But let's get to the point, shall we? I am a classics student named Kevin van der Hoek and I have recently attained my bachelor's degree in Greek and Latin language and culture. Hereafter, I am going to carry on with the research Master's in Literary Studies. As you might guess from my name, I am not from the UK or the USA, but from the Netherlands. This has all to ...