Lampas - Volume 58, Issue 1, 2025

Abstract In many classrooms pupils are not encouraged to develop their own interpretations of literary texts. I developed an educational design to address this problem. My design is based on the principles of creativity, the highest order of thinking according to the taxonomy of Bloom/Krathwohl. Pupils are asked to fill a lacuna in a poem of Sappho (Fragment 16) and to discuss their supplements with classmates. Read More

Abstract Virgil’s epic poem Aeneid is well known for its multiplicity of meanings and contradictions, often referred to as ‘ambiguity’. Many of its ambiguities pertain (sometimes implicitly) to the relationship between the legendary and mythological past that the poem narrates and the Trojan future under Augustan rule that it repeatedly foreshadows. In light of the 2025 Dutch Central Examination in Latin Language and Culture Read More

Abstract In recent decades insights from the cognitive sciences, especially the cognitive-psychological study of theory of mind/mindreading, have increasingly been brought to bear on the study of literary character portrayal, including in Antigone. This article argues that the scope of cognitive approaches to characterization should be extended beyond mindreading alone to include insights from psycholinguistics (on discourse p Read More

Abstract Few female characters in Greek mythology are as widely admired as Sophocles’ Antigone, the daughter of Jocasta and Oedipus who was willing to defy the authority of the ruler of Thebes, her uncle Kreon, and to sacrifice her life so that her brother Polyneikes could be buried. In this contribution, I first contrast Antigone’s character and actions with those of similar tragic parthenoi in order to define what makes her so Read More