On Monday, February 23rd, the Fox classics lecture discussed a recent discover of lines of a lost play the ancient Greek writer Euripides.
The Monmouth Classics department hosted Laurialan Reitzammer of the University of Colorado at Boulder who delivered the lecture titled “The Recently Discovered Ancient Texts of Euripides: The Myth of Ino, Human Sacrifice, and Greek Women’s Ritual.” Reitzammer told the story of how a couple of lines of a lost play of the ancient Greek tragedian Euripides were found in the sands of Egypt.
Reitzammer studied French while going for her undergrad because she had loved the idea of foreign language. She loved it so much she started learning Ancient Greek before sleeping every night. Reitzammer ended up not liking the job that she had after college and made the o decision to go back to college to go into the Classics. She graduated and is now an Associate Professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Laurialan Reitzammer at the podium during her speech.
At first, Reitzammer started talking about the process of how these lines were found and excavated safely and legally from the ground in Egypt, along with all the people and the processes that went along with that work. Throughout the whole lecture, she would go on to talk about how in parts of the play, it discussed how a man would cheat on his wife, and in revenge would kill his children in ways that wouldn’t only impact him, but the entire town.
Since 1985, this lecture honors the late Bernice L Fox and highlights the continued importance of classics in the modern world. Fox taught classics at Monmouth from 1947 to 1981.