This talk speaks from my classroom experiences using antiquity to discuss critical, volatile problems of modernity. I draw upon theories of ‘estrangement’ to argue that, through their cultural, linguistic, and temporal distance, the classics can provide a frame for difficult conversations that might not be possible if addressed directly. A perceived “‘safe’ space away from disturbing” and “contemporary problems” (Gold 2014: 210-11) offered by the classics in actuality creates a productive entry point into these very problems.

As an illustrative case study, I discuss my experience using Aeschylus’ Oresteia to frame polarizing discussions around police violence, social justice, and structural racism. In 2014, a grand jury decided not to indict police officer Darren Wilson for the lethal shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, in Ferguson, Missouri, USA. In the announcement’s wake, the city of Ferguson erupted in demonstrations (or riots, depending on one’s perspective). The tensions in Ferguson were felt throughout the United States and the galvanic moment brought the Black Lives Matter movement to national prominence.

The morning after the legal decision and the outbreak of unrest, I taught a university course on classical mythology and I felt the events in Ferguson and their reverberations throughout the country were too important not to address. By chance, my students had read the Eumenides for that day’s meeting. How could Aeschylus help to reframe debate and to understand the discontent and conflict in ways that might bring the class’ disparate viewpoints together? How might the Michael Brown/Darren Wilson case and the dramatic scenes unfolding on the news enrich our reading of Greek tragedy? My anecdote, its methods, and the issues it addresses extend well beyond this particular American moment and point towards opportunities for bringing the classics to bear on a multitude of fraught and polarized discussions.

Cited Work

Gold, Barbara K. 2014. “Teaching Ancient Comedy: Joking About Race, Ethnicity and Slavery.” In N. S. Rabinowitz and F. McHardy, eds., From Abortion to Pederasty: Addressing Difficult Topics in the Classics Classroom, 209-222. Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press.

Educators from Brazil must alert the young women and adolescents of the necessity of identifying the so-called toxic relationships, to teach them how to identify the initial signs of abuse and to convince them of the value of their independence and women's empowerment. The violence against women, based on their gender, is a historical and naturalized structure in Brazil, perpetuated by her subordinate position in the patriarchal sociocultural order. Starting from the principle that violence and death have become a spectacle to be seen, we invite listeners to reflect on the uses of the Medea tragedy, represented in Athens in the classical period of 431 BC. We propose to analyse the plot of the drama which shows the trinomial: woman, violence and death. The Medea myth is a theme that exposes the subordination of women to the male figure, an action that remains active, modern and present in the face of the concerns of the woman, wife and mother abandoned by her husband and who decides to react against the violence and the subordination imposed by him only for being a woman. While educators we can analyse the drama of Medea through classroom discussions and highlight the violence against women. The decision to use Medea from an ancient history perspective is potentially sensitive to the students and it promotes the emotional impact in the youths and adults education. As a result of the debate students can be stimulated to reflect and examine the drama of Medea and seek to understand how conflicts resolution in both ancient and modern world depict the frontier of insanity. The younger participants may explore and interpret Medea’s drama and share their experience with the group creating a poem, a rap or through the performance of the myth with an alternative ending.

Pompeii is one of the most famous and most visited excavation sites of the Roman world. Although Pompeii is known as the site of a natural disaster, the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE, it is far less known that the town was shaken by conflicts during most of the 1st cent. BCE which were results from the Civil War and the subsequent foundation of a Roman colonia in the former independent Oscan town.

In the paper I will address the literary and epigraphical sources which prove internal conflicts in the years following the conquest of Pompeii by Roman troops. Then I will analyze the archaeological evidence (including the results of recent excavations) as manifestations of conflict and consequences of the fundamentally changed social, political and economic situation – an interpretational approach which has been seriously neglected thus far.

Nevertheless, it can be shown that these conflicts between old-established and new-comers have been resolved in a relatively short time resulting in a new period of prosperity in Augustan times. Political and economic as well as infrastructural means taken for conflict resolution shall be the focus of the second part of the contribution. Further some more recent models of conflict resolution will be addressed against the background of late Republican Pompeii.

In a last part experiences made during a scientific fieldtrip with 25 students last September will be reported, especially regarding the difficulties in focusing on a time span of conflict/conflict resolution which fits not to the historical narrative favoured in Guide books to Roman Pompeii.

This paper intends to put the ancient rhetoric into relation to the production of argumentative texts in Brazilian Secondary School. The specific objective is to introduce the concept of “place” (locus; τόπος) among the essential elements for the elaboration of argumentative texts. My perception is that the “places” of the argument organize ideas and expand the resources available for students to produce persuasion. The theoretical reference is Cicero's Topics(Topica), in which “places” are presented as a technique for formulating arguments from a cause. Focusing on argumentative text definitions in textbooks, a teacher training course, a student workshop, and a course completion paper, my intention is to describe how the integration between ancient rhetoric and discourse theory takes place, and present the final results of classroom experiments concerning this subject.

Según establece la teoría literaria clásica, la esencia de la tragedia griega radica en su carácter dilemático e inevitable. Sus personajes parecen enfrentados a situaciones inescapables en las que apenas juega un papel su capacidad de decisión. El destino los conduce irremediablemente a las peores consecuencias. Sin embargo, subyace en última instancia a ella un conjunto de elecciones y acciones que son resultado de las creencias, valores y compromisos de unos personajes que se encuentran sometidos a una situación límite, y cuya perspectiva y actividad permea y modela cada uno de los acontecimientos que tienen lugar. La tragedia esconde, pues, un conflicto exclusivamente humano y su análisis permite entender los factores que la detonan, los mecanismos para evitarla y, ante todo, la naturaleza de los hombres y mujeres que las desencadenan.

Para realizar este análisis, propondremos a nuestros estudiantes llevar a cabo una lectura detenida de tres tragedias del ciclo tebano (Edipo en Colono, Los siete contra Tebasy Antígona), con objeto de identificar y desentrañar los cursos de acción de los personajes que vertebran el desarrollo del conflicto y su final trágico. Nos preguntaremos qué tan dilemática o inevitable es en realidad la situación o hasta qué punto esas características surgen de la perspectiva del personaje. Esta actividad se llevará a cabo de forma paralela en la Universidad de los Andes (Colombia) y en la Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (España), cuyos estudiantes trabajarán conjuntamente en foros de discusión centrados en algunos de los personajes del ciclo. Esperamos que esta experiencia contribuya a explorar las posibilidades que ofrece la literatura clásica a la hora de entender y afrontar el conflicto.

In his 2002 volume Odysseus in America, Jonathan Shay suggested that the performance of Athenian plays served as a form of cultural therapy, that helped reintegrate combat veterans returning to civilian life. Peter Meineck’s Aquila Theatre and Bryan Doerries’ Theater of War Project recently demonstrated the suitability of Classical texts as frameworks for discussing issues of overcoming trauma and surviving violence on modern stages. Odysseus’ journey offers a paradigm for exploring the difficult process from conflict to peace, within a structure that invites reflections about identity and displacement, considerations about how to return home and provocations about what home is.

Our paper focuses on the pedagogy behind The Odyssey Project, a program that employs theater arts and education to inspire life affirming choices and to empower the voices of incarcerated youth, through a collaborative theater process that brings together undergraduate students and incarcerated youth in California. The project was created in 2011 by Dr. Michael Morgan as a course that uses the template of Homer’s epic to explore conflict resolution skills and employs Classical literature in communicating these skills to incarcerated youth. Using the framework of the Odyssey, conflict-affected youth can reflect on issues of traumatic returns, to or from prison, and reconstruct the epic poem in their own voices.

The first part of the paper will center on the description of the program and on the choice of Homer’s Odyssey as a template for the exploration of conflict resolution strategies among incarcerated youth. The second part of the paper will focus on the program’s pedagogical goals and will draw from recent studies to show that participation in prison theater programs is therapeutically, socially, and educationally valuable. The paper will conclude with suggestions for future Classics-related modules on conflict resolution.

In the first two workshops of “Conflict Resolution through Classical Literature” project (held in Bogotá and London in 2019) I have shown data to endorse the benefits of applying Team-Based Learning (TBL) activities in Greek and Roman Literature courses, in which ancient topics were linked to Brazilian political context and modern societal issues. It is my aim, now, to explore how another kind of group task can promote meaningful learning (Ausubel, 1963, 1968, 2000) while enhancing negotiation skills through nonviolent communication. In the 1960s, at Cornell University, Prof. Joseph Novak developed a technique – the concept map – to display knowledge graphically. A concept map could be described as a diagram that depicts facts and ideas hierarchically in a system of relationships mediated by verbal propositions. It creates a visual scheme that helps to organize information and at the same time it discloses aspects of the learning process such as keywords considered important and their relation to additional content according to each group of discussion. At the Federal University of Juiz de Fora (UFJF-Brazil), after a 2-year gap in face-to-face encounters, students of Greek and Roman Literature courses have been invited to present individual concept maps about their primary knowledge on each culture in the very first week of their course. By the end of the first month of classes, divided in trios, they get the chance to review their first map and add information according to what they were able to learn so far. Their maps are then distributed randomly to another group in charge to evaluate and comment on their classmates’ work. After debate, they are encouraged to consider teacher’s and colleagues’ remarks to modify their original map, if needed, and to acknowledge criticism, compromise, and frustration as part of the process. There have been previous studies about how concept mapping can be applied in the discursive context of the humanities in a university-level Classics course (Kandiko, Hay, Weller, 2016), as well as about concept mapping initiatives related to conflict management mechanisms (Chiu, 2004; Behfar, Mannis, Trochim, Peterson, 2008), references that have helped to guide my teaching plans after Covid-19.

This paper will examine how we can apply the example of ancient Rome’s Vestal Virgins to teach students about the significance of the involvement of religious women in global peace-making initiatives. I will present a three-part lesson plan which may be used to teach conflict resolution while promoting diversity and inclusion. First, students will study a selection of sources by ancient authors which place varying emphasis on the roles of the Vestals as agents of conflict resolution. Whereas Valerius Maximus highlights the active agency of Vestals such as Claudia, who intervened in a conflict involving her father, Livy focuses on the victimization of Vestals who were buried alive amidst periods of conflict. These differences highlight how ancient and modern writers may control narratives about women in conflict resolution. Students will compare these accounts of the Vestals, sharpening their critical thinking skills as they learn to evaluate portrayals of women in conflict across cultures and media. Next, students will read about contemporary peace-making initiatives led by religious women, and will compare these accounts with the agency of the Vestals. For example, Claudia’s intervention parallels the actions of Catholic nuns in Colombia who have created “peace zones” (Hayward and Marshall 2015) around attorneys and human rights activists. This will illustrate the modern applicability of the Vestals as a case study for religious women in global conflict resolution narratives. Finally, students will produce creative writing pieces (such as letters and journal entries written by Vestals or newspaper articles about their work) which highlight the priestess’s advocacy and their perspectives in conflict resolution initiatives. Students will also produce written analyses discussing what they learned from the example of the Vestals about the significance of religious women in global peace-making initiatives, gaps in the sources, and the importance of including women’s work in conflict resolution narratives.

Cited Work

Hayward, Susan and Marshall, Katherine, eds. Women, Religion, and Peacebuilding: Illuminating the Unseen.Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace Press.

This paper presents a lesson plan for high school students starting from classic models for the teaching of conflict resolution by peaceful means. The lesson plan consists of three activities promoting students' understanding, analysis and reflection around the search for alternative means to settle disputes.

The first activity revolves around the Thebais by Stesichorus, a poem in which the Queen of Thebes proposes the division of the kingdom and its wealth among her children Eteocles and Polynices to avoid a fratricidal war for the control of the polis. In this activity students must imagine why the proposed solution failed and the consequences of the outbreak of war, because the poem lost significant parts due to the vicissitudes of textual transmission.

The second activity consists in the narration of conflict solutions following the Plutarch model in his Bravery of Women. In this treatise the stories of illustrious women follow the narrative parameters of the progymnasmatic exercise of the diegema or diegesis, so that students must structure their own narratives including six diegetic elements (action, protagonist, time, place, reason, circumstance), three virtues of the narrative (clarity, conciseness, and credibility), and a kind of closing sentence called epiphonesis or epiphonema that highlights the consequences and transcendence of the action carried out.

The third activity aims at the staging of some of the previous conflict resolutions or the creation of new ones following the model of Aristophanes, who, through comic elements, suggests solutions to the problems of the polis. The models of this activity are Lysistrata that proposes two ingenious solutions to end the Peloponnesian War (a cross-legged strike and the underfunding of the war) and Peace that raises the union of citizens to rescue Eirene from the hands of Polemos and Kydoimos, personifications of peace, war, and hubbub, respectively.

Starting with the assumption that playing cards are a ubiquitous, everyday part of life, the idea is to use them as a vehicle for raising ethical awareness. Fifty-two questions from across the broad area of military ethics have been carefully developed, based on professional military ethics education curricula, in conjunction with research and testing on military focus groups, and in consultation with specialist lawyers. The cards are available to military units and can be used to prompt informal discussion and debate, normalising the discussion of ethical challenges faced in military environments. Questions are generally open ended and encourage people to think about key issues that may arise in a military setting. For example:

· Should a soldier challenge an order if they consider it to be illegal?

· Is necessity ever a reason to break the laws of war?

· Can soldiers refuse to serve if they disagree with their government’s decisions?

Each card has a QR web link to the King’s Centre for Military Ethics webpages where there are additional prompts, questions, short video answers and information for each question, along with links to further reading. Groups of questions can be thematically linked so impromptu or pre-planned supported discussions can quickly be developed using the open-access material.

The cards, and the supporting website material, are currently available in English, French, Arabic, Spanish, Turkish and Serbian, and are being translated into further languages to support military ethics education initiatives in as many different environments as possible. The material available to support the cards will continue to expand, with a linked book coming out soon.

In the papers displayed in Bogotá and in London, various forms of an institutionalized abuse against women and their mechanisms of reparation in Roman Comedy as well as in the recently ended Columbian Armed Conflict were exposed. The first paper focused on analysing cases of abuse against women in Roman Comedies of Plautus and Terence and in testimonial narrative written by Colombian female authors. The second paper gave an account of the interpretation of the grammarian Aelius Donatus of one case of conflict resolution in the Commentary on Terence, specifically of the comedy Eunuchus.

The third paper, in the framework of a workshop on ‘The Pedagogy of Conflict Resolution’, will present how the analysis of the Role of Women in conflict management and peacebuilding in Roman Comedy can be useful for secondary and tertiary students as a starting point toward a post-conflict Colombia.

Aristophanes, whose most productive years of theatrical activity fall in the period of the Peloponnesian War, can be thought of as one of the pioneers of the pacifist literature/drama. His comedies contain an outward anti-war agenda (perhaps the best example is the final section of the Acharnians) and explicit political advice regarding peacekeeping. Yet, there is much more to it. In spite of some meta-literary declarations made by Aristophanes, the Old Comedy was not simply a teaching device whose role was that of transmitting an intellectual message. More importantly, it functioned within a festival context, as a mode of worshipping Dionysus, the god of what Victor Turner called communitas, a state in which everyday life, struggle and tensions were suspended. This was achieved by continuous references to the sphere, which were foreign to the militarist discourse: the banal pleasures of food, drink, idleness, music and the erotic. This could be taken as a reminder to the audience that they shared with their compatriots, allies as well as their enemies, the same human, or subhuman nature. This is, however, only one side of the coin. What can be stressed within the teaching practice is that Aristophanes achieves many of his goals by means that seem unacceptable in the contemporary public discourse, however widespread they still may be. The most fascinating and frightening mechanism that can be illustrated thanks to Aristophanes is the way of building a sense of a community within a group by means of exclusion of an individual (scapegoat mechanism), or a subgroup. Aristophanic comedy is often successful in creating a sense of belonging to the community of male Athenian citizens at the cost of those who did not belong to the group or who failed to meet its standards. On the opposite side of the scale, Aristophanes contributes to the creation of the Greek chauvinism, when, for example in the Lysistrata, he outwardly postulates the peace between Greek poleis and weighing a Panhellenic war against the “barbarians”. Briefly speaking, Aristophanes himself is not a good teacher of peacekeeping. Yet, his comedies offer priceless resources that help elucidate the mechanisms at work, where the seemingly innocuous discourse may trigger profound divisions and conflicts.

Aristophanes, whose most productive years of theatrical activity fall in the period of the Peloponnesian War, can be thought of as one of the pioneers of the pacifist literature/drama. His comedies contain an outward anti-war agenda (perhaps the best example is the final section of the Acharnians) and explicit political advice regarding peacekeeping. Yet, there is much more to it. In spite of some meta-literary declarations made by Aristophanes, the Old Comedy was not simply a teaching device whose role was that of transmitting an intellectual message. More importantly, it functioned within a festival context, as a mode of worshipping Dionysus, the god of what Victor Turner called communitas, a state in which everyday life, struggle and tensions were suspended. This was achieved by continuous references to the sphere, which were foreign to the militarist discourse: the banal pleasures of food, drink, idleness, music and the erotic. This could be taken as a reminder to the audience that they shared with their compatriots, allies as well as their enemies, the same human, or subhuman nature. This is, however, only one side of the coin. What can be stressed within the teaching practice is that Aristophanes achieves many of his goals by means that seem unacceptable in the contemporary public discourse, however widespread they still may be. The most fascinating and frightening mechanism that can be illustrated thanks to Aristophanes is the way of building a sense of a community within a group by means of exclusion of an individual (scapegoat mechanism), or a subgroup. Aristophanic comedy is often successful in creating a sense of belonging to the community of male Athenian citizens at the cost of those who did not belong to the group or who failed to meet its standards. On the opposite side of the scale, Aristophanes contributes to the creation of the Greek chauvinism, when, for example in the Lysistrata, he outwardly postulates the peace between Greek poleis and weighing a Panhellenic war against the “barbarians”. Briefly speaking, Aristophanes himself is not a good teacher of peacekeeping. Yet, his comedies offer priceless resources that help elucidate the mechanisms at work, where the seemingly innocuous discourse may trigger profound divisions and conflicts.

This paper discusses the reactions that the suppression of the so-called conspiracy of Catilina evoked among later generations of Romans. Still today it is well-known how one of the consuls of 63 BCE, M. Tullius Cicero, in the fall of that year reported to the Senate that the senator Sergius Catilina was leading a conspiracy which aimed to overthrow the legal government of the Republic. Cicero’s accusatory speech apparently provoked Catilina who left Rome. Later some damning documents and testimonies were presented in the Senate, which led to the apprehension of a group of Roman senators, who soon were executed by order of the consul Cicero although without following the required legal process. Eventually rebel forces led by Catilina and some associates of his were defeated on the field of battle.

The ancient Roman sources reveal that already quite soon after this apparently successful salvation of the Roman state, there were those within the Roman elite who thought that Cicero and his followers had acted in an inconsiderate way. The historian Sallust in his Bellum Catilinae presents a lively debate in the Senate in which one side strongly warns against taking the harsh measures that Cicero eventually chose. Sallust wrote only twenty year after the event, and it is clear that at least part of what he wrote reflected actual ideas of the moment. The fact that his historical work in turn became part of the Roman tradition, means that this “revisionist” view would remain part of the Roman cultural memory. There are more views of a similar kinds preserved in the literature surviving from the following centuries of Roman history. They reveal that the issue of how Cicero and the government ought to have resolved the conflict, which evidently was threatening the state in 63 BCE, continued to be an issue that engaged Roman intellectuals and statesmen. Perhaps a peaceful conflict resolution of some kind would not have been impossible, which undoubtedly would have saved hundreds or indeed thousands of human lives, since it would never have come to a final military engagement.

Because of this important and interesting series of events, which came to have wide repercussion also for Cicero’s future career, the so-called conspiracy of Catilina in 63 BCE is very well suited for a stimulating debate in the classroom.

After a workshop in 2019 at the Amorim Lima Public School in São Paulo, in which we introduced the students to exercises with fables that centered on conflict resolution skills, we shall now present similar online open-access exercises (with Portuguese and English interface) that may be used as ancillary exercises for each of the lessons of the new Ancient Greek method Basil Batrakhos and the Mystery Letter (© 2019 Classics for All). These exercises, like the progymnasmata that involve grammar and textual production, shall allow for more practice of the vocabulary and grammar presented in each lesson, and through the rewriting of the ancient fables, students will be encouraged to discuss different solutions to the conflicts the fables present.

Continuing from the discussion presented in London 2019, in which we suggested the use of NeoLatin as a form of creating bridges between Classics and the underpriviledged university students in Brazil, the purpose of this talk is to present and discuss how we have used the concepts of Canon and Classics with the same groups of students at the Federal University of Espírito Santo, in order to highlight the dynamics of creation and negotiation of identity of social groups, belonging and right of claim to cultural possessions and power implied in the choice of works deemed as Classics. By bringing into play these concepts through the works of authors such as Bloom, Avelar and Dalvi, we have been able, along with the students, to put into question the implicit criteria applied in making textbooks, creating curricula and selecting readings for schools and colleges. Taking into account the individual, social and historical dimensions of the experience of reading, we have been working on ressignifying the idea of Classics for the 21st century Brazilian students, so that it can include their own personal histories, conflicts and memories.

At one time, not so long ago, “Socrates” appeared in popular media across languages and borders not simply as a questioner but also as a steadfast resister to overreaching state power. Some artists and activists mobilized the story of the trial and death of Socrates as a symbol of the related practices of public truth-telling, dissent and fortitude in the face of tactical setbacks and injustice. Others treated him a symbol of disloyalty and self-absorption. Today I believe “Socrates” no longer broadly resonates in such complex political ways. To the extent that “Socrates” now popularly registers globally at all it is as an icon of the idea of intellectual inquiry stripped of complex political contexts, not enmeshed in them. The politics are obscured. A fine example of this state of affairs is the way Google branded its new artificial intelligence study tool for high school and college students. The 'free' application, “Socratic,” launched in 2019.

I have been collecting examples of the various ways in which “Socrates” signifies in modern vernacular contexts for some time. By vernacular sources I mean serious cultural products made by people who may know the ancient sources (to varying degrees) for audiences assumed to have no acquaintance with the ancient record at all. For this conference, I will report on my findings regarding the ways in which an explicit appeal to “Socratic questioning” has become part of the pedagogy of practices of conflict resolution. This includes practices that embrace digital media and practices that pushback against their ubiquity. Some examples (in addition to Google’s Socratic) are cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), U.S. army resilience training (prevention of post-traumatic stress), elementary school curriculum development in America, face-to-face nonacademic seminars on ethics for adults worldwide, and widely available software intended to facilitate virtual meetings. I am concerned to consider the salience of the modifier "Socratic" in the era of digital communications and its critical possibilities.