The Paideia Institute

Summer Telepaideia courses are open for enrollment!

Paideia's live online courses allow you to study Latin, Ancient Greek, and other Classical humanities subjects with the support of our expert teachers and a vibrant global learning community of Classicists.

Classes will run for ten weeks from June 21st through August 29th, with a one-week break specified by the instructor.

The priority deadline to enroll in Summer 2026 Telepaideia courses is Sunday, June 14th.

More on individual course offerings, costs, and class times here: https://paideiainstitute.org/telepaideia

Join us on Saturday, May 16th at 12:00pm ET for a free online lecture with Classics professor (and farmer!) Mark Usher presenting his new book, How to Travel: An Ancient Guide for the Modern Tourist, from the Princeton University Press Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers series.

How to Travel gathers classic texts from Greek and Roman writers to explore what today’s readers can learn from ancient encounters with unfamiliar peoples, places, and customs. Homer, Herodotus, Seneca, Tacitus, Lucian, Pausanias, and Egeria will be our travel companions!

RSVP here: www.paideiainstitute.org/how_to_travel

"Let me try a new idea. Maybe it’s crazy, maybe not. But if I ever make it back to Sulmona and find that man in the piazza, this is what I’d want to tell him:
“Ovid may not have written an epic about civil war. He wasn’t Lucan. But he may have written something stranger. He may have written a completely unrelated myth whose structure quietly mirrors the most tragic double su***de in Roman history: namely, the Battle of Philippi.” [...]

Now, what is so remarkable about the Battle of Philippi is that it didn’t end simply with defeat. It ended with two su***des—the first of which was born of a mistake. Cassius, believing Brutus had lost, ordered his own death. Weeks later, after a second engagement, Brutus followed him.

In other words, the Republic collapsed not only under military pressure, but under the weight of a fatal misreading.

That is the decisive narrative element, and we must not lose sight of it."

Keep reading here: https://open.substack.com/pub/paideiainstitute/p/did-ovid-bury-philippi-in-a-love?r=527d0t&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

"“Lui era stupido.” (That guy was an idiot.) So said a man who approached me in the main piazza of Sulmona, Italy, in summer 2016. I was in Rome for the summer leading Paideia’s Living Latin in Rome, and I had a day off, so I hopped on the train and traveled the three hours it took to reach the birthplace of Ovid (“90 miles from Rome,” as he proudly puts it in Tristia 4.10). What is there to see in Sulmona? Not much, it turns out, but they do have a very cool statue of Ovid in the center of the main square.

It started raining lightly just as I got there, so I parked myself at a table under an archway across from the main statue till it stopped. The place was empty. That’s when the local man came over to me, pointed over to the statue of Ovid, and without further ado, pronounced a great poet stupid. Why? I asked, trying to steady my quickening pulse. (My Italian is pretty good, but it had been over a decade since I’d held a one-on-one conversation of any great length, as it was clear I was about to do. And this guy was already interesting.)

Over the next 90 minutes I learned a lot. The main takeaway—and this is the point the man wanted to impress on me when he learned I’m a professor of Latin—is that Sulmona is just down the street from the town of Corfinio. It’s only about eight or nine miles away. I must have given him a blank or stupid stare because I clearly couldn’t see his point. So he began to lay it out for me:

It matters, the man said, as we continued downing espressos, because Corfinium was the rebel capital city established during the Social War of 91-88 BCE.

It wasn’t just any old town during Rome’s Social War (or, as it’s sometimes jokingly called, “The War of Dependence.”) No, Corfinium was the insurgent Italians’ counter-Rome, the place where they planted a flag, built a senate, and declared, in effect, that Italy was a nation and not merely Rome’s manpower reservoir. Renaming the city “Italia,” they forged a political symbol as bold as any in Republican history, a declaration that citizenship, dignity, and power must be shared or fought for. From this Paelignian stronghold Rome’s socii (allies) coordinated both war and ideology, turning rebellion into a rival state and forcing Rome, at last, to rethink the meaning of the word Roman. The geography tells the story too: this was no distant frontier but the very heart of Italy, beside ancient Sulmo, in the country of Rome’s own soldiers and poets.

Nice lesson, I said. So what?"

Keep reading here: https://paideiainstitute.substack.com/p/f215073e-cf38-4a22-b5e4-ba42716445a3

🎉 Congratulations to Shinjini Sinha for being one of Paideia's 2026 High School Essay Contest winners!

In response to this year's contest theme of metamorphosis and change, Shinjini deconstructs transformation in ancient myth as a rupture that halts the metamorphosed character's storyline in its tracks, in an essay titled "Becoming Unable to Become: How Metamorphosis stops time".

Please join us in celebrating our accomplished young writers by reading their essays on In Medias Res!: https://www.paideiainstitute.org/becoming_unable_to_become

🎉 Congratulations to Hannah Gumpert for being one of Paideia's 2026 High School Essay Contest winners!

In response to this year's contest theme of metamorphosis and change, Hannah considers how Ovid's rendition of the myth of Arachne restores the protagonist's destroyed tapestry through text, in an essay titled "Ovid's Immortal Tapestry: Women of the Metamorphoses".

Please join us in celebrating our accomplished young writers by reading their essays on In Medias Res: https://www.paideiainstitute.org/ovid_s_immortal_tapestry_women_of_the_metamorphoses

Gazing on Ulysses: Theo Angelopoulos' Odyssey of Balkan Identity

"Homer's Odysseus was a (fictional) man of many things: twists and turns (polu-tropos), sufferings (polu-tlas), and wiles and guile (polu-mētis). What may not be so well known is that he was also a man of many names. 'Odysseus' is thought to be a kind of 'speaking' name, related etymologically to a Greek verb for grieving. He was also known, in Greek, as Oulixes, Oulixeus, Olysseus, Oliseus, all dialectal variants, all with 'l' for 'd'. As such, they point the way to his name's reception into a fellow Indo-European language, whose original native speakers, Romans and other inhabitants of Latium (today's Lazio), had chosen to borrow a dialectal variant of the Greek alphabet to transcribe their own phonemes. In Latin, Greek Odysseus became transmogrified into 'Ulysses', and it's as such that I'm interested in him here, in a short essay on his contemporary reception in the world of Greek moviemaking. For my subject is, in its English translation, Theo Angelopoulos's Ulysses' Gaze (1995).

In (modern) Greek the movie's title is of course 'Odysseus' Gaze (vlemma)', and the clue to that choice lies in our most widespread use of 'odyssey' today - to mean a voyage, a journey, including ones with, yes, many twists and turns, wiles and guiles, and indeed ... travails (that word is a direct calque on 'travel' - which can often be, well, painful). For Angelopoulos (1935-2012) was a filmmaker with a strong penchant for making movies about travelling and travellers: most famously, perhaps, The Travelling Players (1974/5, in Greek Thiasos, which means something rather different, a troupe with a common ritual, often religious purpose and identity), but also 1980's The Voyage to Cythera (a small island off the southern tip of mainland Greece). Ulysses' Gaze lacks the idea of travel in its title, but its content is instinct with it, especially the roamings of its lead character, a modern Odysseus."

Read more here: https://open.substack.com/pub/paideiainstitute/p/gazing-on-ulysses?r=527d0t&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

Don't forget: registration is open for Paideia's online Latin and Ancient Greek high school summer programs! Supercharge your Latin in preparation for advanced courses and build a strong foundation in the basics of Ancient Greek with:

🏛️ Living Latin Online | July 6-18 | prerequisite: one year of Latin or more
🏺 Living Greek Online | July 6 - August 14 | for beginners!

We do our best to accommodate a wide range of time zones so that students from all over the world can participate! Learn more and enroll by May 1st here: https://www.paideiainstitute.org/online_programs

"In Virgil’s first Eclogue (after 42 BCE), two herdsmen sing to each other against a background ripped from the headlines of Rome in Virgil’s own lifetime. The poem also incorporates a love story grounded in the work women do that makes households sustainable.

After Octavian and Antony defeated Brutus and Cassius at the battle of Philippi in 42 BCE, local inhabitants were driven out of lands in the Po Valley so that soldiers could be allotted farms. On the road in search of a new home, Virgil’s Meliboeus meets Tityrus, a herdsman composing songs about his beloved Amaryllis.

Tityre, tu patulae recubans sub tegmine fagi
silvestrem tenui Musam meditaris avena;
nos patriae fines et dulcia linquimus arva.
nos patriam fugimus; tu, Tityre, lentus in umbra
formosam resonare doces Amaryllida silvas. (Ecl. 1.1-5)

Tityrus, lying there protected beneath the spreading beech-tree,
with your delicate shepherd’s pipe you spend your time on the woodland Muse.
We abandon our dear fields and the boundaries of our native land.
We flee our country; you, Tityrus, relaxing in the shade,
instruct the trees to echo ‘lovely Amaryllis’.

Virgil imports the singing shepherd from the Idylls of the Hellenistic poet Theocritus: In Idyll 3, the speaker entrusts his herd to Tityrus and sings insistently to Amaryllis of his love – all while she in her cave ignores him. Virgil places all of this amidst the turbulent events of his own place and time. The main thrust of Virgil’s poem is that Tityrus is doing well because An Important Man at Rome - who must be Octavian- has seen to it that he can keep his land and keep making songs for Amaryllis. Tityrus praises her not only for being ‘lovely’ (formosam) but, apparently, for how she (unlike his previous spendthrift beloved Galatea) helped him make his herds and cheese business sustainable, thus making it possible for him to purchase his freedom."

Keep reading here: https://paideiainstitute.substack.com/p/amaryllis-cheesemaker?r=527d0t&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true

🌷The Paideia Institute is pleased to launch the call for submissions to the Spring 2026 issue of Ephebeia: A Youth Classics Journal, our online journal showcasing the best academic writing on Classics by high school students.

Since the inception of Paideia's online magazine, In Medias Res, our editorial team has been delighted to receive an overwhelming number of essay submissions from high school writers eager to share their passion for the Classics. Ephebeia is a sister publication to In Medias Res, offering a new venue to celebrate the wide array of original and interesting work being produced by high school students as they begin to write about Classical Antiquity.

The submission deadline is Sunday, April 19th. To participate, please consult the guidelines and requirements here: https://www.paideiainstitute.org/call_for_papers_ephebeia_spring_2026_issue