Reading Classics in Omnibus

Temple of Apollo at CorinthThe research of two Reading colleagues is featured in this month’s Omnibus, the magazine of the Classical Association.  Now in its fortieth year and eightieth issue, the first edition of Omnibus came out in March 1981, and so it is also exactly the same age as one of its Reading contributors!

Professor Barbara Goff’s article on ‘Greek tragedy in a time of mass migration’ examines recent productions of Greek tragedy emerging from the Syrian civil war and the migrant crisis.  These include several different stagings of Sophocles’ Antigone, in which Syrian refugee participants had some very different ideas about who the characters of the play most resembled in their own lives and experiences.

In ‘Greeks, Egyptians and their languages in Ptolemaic Egypt,’ Professor Rachel Mairs looks at a court case from the second century BC involving two Egyptian women, named Taesis and Sachperis, who belonged to community of priests.  Taesis and Sachperis used all the resources at their disposal, including both the Egyptian and Greek languages, and two legal systems, to protect ownership of their property.