About

Ariana Traill is an Associate Professor in the Department of the Classics at the Illinois School of Literatures, Cultures & Linguistics. She holds a B.A. in Classical Philology from the University of Toronto (1991) and a Ph.D. in Classical Philology from Harvard University (1997). Her research interests include Greek and Roman comedy, women in antiquity, and the reception of ancient comedy. She is the author of Women and the Comic Plot in Menander and co-editor of A Companion to Terence. Her current projects include a volume on Plautus' Cistellaria and a translation of Menander's Periceiromene. Traill's teaching focuses on Greek and Latin language and literature, with an emphasis on ancient drama and teaching writing skills through advanced composition classes. She also works with MAT students and runs annual Classics Summer Camps for children aged 8-11. She has received awards such as the Campus Executive Officer Distinguished Leadership Award and is a LAS Dean’s Distinguished Professorial Scholar.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Criminology
• Literature
• Art
• Law

Selected publications

• Plautus: Cistellaria

  Bloomsbury Publishing Plc eBooks · 2025-01-01

  book1st authorCorresponding

  <JATS1:p>This volume is the first book-length introduction to Plautus’ Cistellaria (The Jewelry Box), offering an incisive overview for both students and scholars coming to it for the first time. This play is a story of young lovers defying social norms and disapproving parents in order to be together, featuring a memorable cast of characters and moments of both high humor and drama. This classic mistaken-identity plot includes witty interchanges and a lively conflict of values and ideals.</JATS1:p> <JATS1:p>Drawing on performance and cultural studies, gender and sexuality, and philology and intertextuality, Ariana Traill combines a lucid exploration of Cistellaria's setting, characters, plot and themes, with detailed analyses of its literary and socio-cultural contexts. Readers are able to appreciate the play both as a literary artifact, with its attendant issues of generic conventions and variations, and language and imagery, and as a performance script written for a rich tradition of acting, singing and stage movement at Rome, with its conventional costumes, masks and venues. With its majority female line-up (seven of the twelve roles are female), Cistellaria offers an unusual focus on women’s thoughts and feelings as they struggle for their economic and social existence, making it a fascinating source for the study of women and gender in ancient Rome. The play continues to cast a shadow in the western dramatic tradition through its history of reception and adaptation.</JATS1:p>

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• Domestic violence, tragedy, and reconciliation in Menander’s Perikeiromene

  Deleted Journal · 2021 · 2 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Law

  Menander’s Perikeiromene centers on a haircut forcibly imposed on a free woman by her lover, a recently demobilized soldier. This paper interprets the haircut against evidence of domestic violence in ancient Greece, tragic models of self-sacrificing virgins, and contemporary studies of intimate partner violence. Glykera’s loyalty to her natal home shows an internalization of patriarchal values, in the tragic tradition. Although Polemon shows striking similarities with modern perpetrators and victim disfigurement is common, the actual act of cutting the victim’s hair is not and he shows some elements of the kind of abuser who can change.

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• Forward with Classics: Classical Languages in Schools and Communities ed. by Arlene Holmes-Henderson, Steven Hunt and Mai Musié

  The Classical Journal · 2019-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Reviewed by: Forward with Classics: Classical Languages in Schools and Communities ed. by Arlene Holmes-Henderson, Steven Hunt and Mai Musié Ariana Traill Forward with Classics: Classical Languages in Schools and Communities. Edited by Arlene Holmes-Henderson, Steven Hunt and Mai Musié. London, UK, New York, NY and Oxford, UK: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. Pp. xvii + 276. Paperback, $40.95. ISBN 978-1-4742-9767-7. Anyone planning a class activity around Hannibal’s crossing of the Alps will be hard pressed to beat “Vita Hannibalis SPQR Day,” sponsored by the University of Pretoria’s Academia Latina in the 1980s. Four elephants wearing SPQR cloaks attracted so much attention that they caused a traffic jam. The photograph (Fig. 12.3) tells it all. This collection surveys the state of classics in K-12 education world-wide: from places where Classics is barely holding on (the Academia Latina, despite its effectiveness in bridging “the gap between the privileged and the underprivileged” (Schumann and Theron, 182) unfortunately closed in 2017) to places like the Netherlands, where it is so firmly ensconced that a web site exists to help former gymnasium students keep up their Latin and Greek—for fun (www.addisco.nl, Bulwer, 75). An enviable situation, indeed. There is politics to this, of course. Latin is unassailable in Italy; ancient Greek, in Greece. European Classics as a whole is boosted by the EU’s Lisbon Treaty recommendation that students learn “one plus two languages” (Bulwer, 77), i.e. their native language and two second languages. In Germany, this has helped put Latin in third place after English and French. Conversely, France saw a decline after a recent national decision to reduce the hours for Latin and Greek in schools. The problems are familiar: determined political opposition, charges of elitism—“that Classics has always been for ‘toffs’,” Beard, xv)—or mere irrelevance. Classically educated politician, and now prime minister, Boris [End Page 510] Johnson has given some of these myths new currency, famously disparaging Classical Civilization as not “crunchy” enough as a subject (Hunt, 16). The best answer to all of this is exactly what Forward with Classics offers: example after example of Classics programs succeeding with all kinds of people: an Odyssey storytelling project in Spennymoor, a former coal town among the “top 20 per cent most deprived areas nationally” (Richards, 193); “Latin in the Park,” open-air Latin classes at an affordable one pound each, sponsored by the University of Swansea (Bracke, 198-9); or OxLAT, a Saturday class for children from low income households run by Oxford University. Even more ambitious, “Projecto Minimus,” sponsored by the University of São Paolo, has been teaching Classics in a nearby school for five years. All fourth graders learn from Minimus (translated into Portuguese); fifth graders learn from a version of Athenaze. Success was not easy. The school has two shifts and operates in two enormous multi-grade rooms. Many children read below grade level or have special needs. Yet despite all cohorts of up to twenty teachers at a time (mostly undergraduates) have worked with the school’s system and won over the students. “After a couple of classes most pupils love it” (da Cunha Corrêa, 63). This collection offers a wealth of good advice: non-specialist teachers can play a huge role in bringing Latin into schools; programs in the regular curriculum last longer than extracurriculars; senior school administrators need to be on board; and effective outreach programs are the ones that show “long-term ongoing engagement and support” (Searle, 29). There are handy resources, like the Open University’s free online beginning Latin course or the online game Hadrian: The Roamin’ Emperor (players move Hadrian around the Roman world while answering educational questions). Ideas worth stealing include the “healing and poison stall” created by the Iris Project for visiting schoolchildren, complete with “the opportunity to have fresh wounds painted onto arms and faces” (Robinson, 151). Need I say more? There are some gems, like Edith Hall’s “Classics in our Ancestors’ Communities,” which profiles a colorful and impressive cast of working class Classicists, and Arlene Holmes-Henderson’s and Kathryn Tempest’s...

  PublisherDOI

• S. PAPAIOANNOU (ED.), TERENCE AND INTERPRETATION (<i>Pierides</i>: Studies in Greek and Latin Literature 4). Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014. Pp. x + 307. <scp>isbn</scp> 9781443863858. £52.99.

  The Journal of Roman Studies · 2016-02-15

  article1st authorCorresponding

  S. PAPAIOANNOU (ED.), TERENCE AND INTERPRETATION (Pierides: Studies in Greek and Latin Literature 4). Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014. Pp. x + 307. isbn 9781443863858. £52.99. - Volume 106

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• Review: A.K. Petrides' Menander, New Comedy and the Visual

  2016-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

• Menander, New Comedy and the Visual by Antonis K. Petrides (review)

  The Classical World · 2016-02-21

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Reviewed by: Menander, New Comedy and the Visual by Antonis K. Petrides Ariana Traill Antonis K. Petrides. Menander, New Comedy and the Visual. Cambridge Classical Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Pp. xii, 322. $99.00. ISBN 978–1-107–06843–8. This book offers a sophisticated understanding of how New Comic masks could be read by ancient audiences for information about dramatic character. Menander’s comedies, Petrides argues, were as richly engaged with fourth-century visual culture as with anterior texts: the “intervisual,” as he terms it, is as important as the intertextual. Building on earlier work, notably D. Wiles, The Masks of Menander: Sign and Meaning in Greek and Roman Performance (Cambridge, 1991), Petrides reads masks as a semiotic system that functions according to Greek physiognomic principles; that is, physical elements serve as signs of ethical proclivities. Petrides brings a fresh and illuminating perspective in recognizing that the notorious ambiguities of physiognomics—some features must be ignored, others carry multiple meanings—could be an asset in a theatrical context. Masks were never white or black hats but part of a complex dialectical system, typically read in pairs (for example, braggart soldier and flatterer) and seen as reflecting an understanding of character (ethos) that tolerates inconsistencies. Reading a mask, consequently, meant deciding whether a raised eyebrow signified arrogance or bravery from moment to moment. This is what Greeks were doing in fourth-century public life, Petrides argues; why would they not do it in the theater? The book’s five chapters move from theory to application, beginning with the “realism” attributed to Menander since antiquity. Petrides offers a useful scheme of strata in the plays. At the level of law, psychology, language, and topography, the plays reflect the lived reality of their audiences, but there is also a stratum for allusion to other texts and one for the “magical” solution that often resolves the plot, with all its ideological baggage. A chapter on intertextuality recognizes the hybridity of Menandrian comedy, deriving from both Old Comedy and Tragedy, in its performative aspects. Petrides’ treatment of the Dyskolos illustrates both the strengths and limits of his approach. There is a rich discussion of tragic elements in the play’s spatial organization, with its polarities—from the wild Knemon (stage left) to the civilized Kallippides (offstage right)—and its nondomestic central door (Pan’s cave). In the water-carrying scene, Sostratos faces a choice of tragic intertexts: Euripides’ Ion, with its rape in another cave of Pan, and his Electra, where the kindly farmer’s offer of help is benign. Petrides sheds important light on nonverbal relationships between individual dramas, helping to recapture some of an original audience’s depth of engagement. His readings sometimes push extant texts a bit hard. The Ion cave was empty, but the one in Phyle in the Dyskolos is full of revelers, including Sostratos’ own mother, which makes one wonder how active an Ion rape reference could have been for an audience who knew far more tragedy than we do. The application of fourth-century physiognomics produces a similar mix of results. Petrides demonstrates cogently how the ἄγροικος mask, which many assign to Gorgias (Dyskolos), ironically contrasts with his responsible behavior since its physiognomy suggests “lust, sluggishness and stupidity” (151). Petrides shows brilliantly how the Eleusinian audience described at Sikyonios 176–271 read the play’s two rivals physiognomically. As the soldier’s words gain favor, the youth’s white, beardless skin, although initially ambivalent (he is handsome, after all), comes to signify μοιχεία, while the soldier now appears ἀνδρικός—despite being equally beardless. This is a good example of masks working dialectically and of physical features carrying multiple potential meanings. A similar analysis [End Page 267] of Plautus’ Miles Gloriosus, however, raises the question of the application of Greek physiognomics, which Petrides justifies by emphasizing a fourth-century “culture of viewing” (5) that puts a “novel kind of theatrical mask at Menander’s disposal” (281), to a non-Menandrian play from late-third-century Rome. This is a scholarly study for specialists in ancient drama and related fields. The book’s carefully considered and strongly articulated theoretical positions will make dense reading for a general audience. In particular...

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• Shakespeare and the Roman Comic Meretrix

  University of Wisconsin Press eBooks · 2015-04-27 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
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• Adelphoe

  2013-05-03 · 3 citations

  other1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Introduction

  2013-05-03

  otherSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• M. J. Pernerstorfer, Menanders Kolax: Ein Beitrag zu Rekonstruktion und Interpretation der Komödie. Untersuchungen zur antiken Literatur und Geschichte, Bd 99, Berlin - New York: De Gruyter, 2009, pp. x + 188, 2 p. of plates, ISBN 978-3-11-022127-5

  Exemplaria Classica · 2012-01-23

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Just enough of this badly preserved play survives to raise tantalizing questions.The Kolax was widely read in antiquity: Athenaeus cites it, Timachidas of Rhodes wrote a commentary on it, and Plutarch may have used it to compose De adulatore et amico.The figure of Strouthias, mentioned by Aelian and the Suda, had a firm place in the ancient pantheon of yes-men.What is less clear is whether he represents a new type, a variant of the parasite, or possibly even an antecedent of it.Terence borrowed him in the Eunuchus and gave him the play's best linesa pseudo-philosophical lecture on the lucrative art of professional flattery.Yet these lines have no counterpart in the extant Kolax fragments, virtually none of which can be securely attributed to the title figure.It is not even clear that the two parasite names they do preserve belong to two separate parasites.Despite considerable efforts over the past century to identify the dramatis personae, reconstruct the plot, and determine Terence's changes, there is still fundamental disagreement about most of the major issues in this play.It has, consequently, attracted relatively little attention among Menander scholars.M. J. Pernerstorfer has been working to change this.Since 2005, he has published a series of articles on the Kolax and now this fine new text, translation and commentary, a revised version of his dissertation in Theater Studies from the University of Vienna.His text is framed with a succinct but informative overview of scholarship since 1903, when the first fragments were published.He rightly faults early scholars for their preoccupation with justifying the low value generally placed on Terence's artistry.His description of the papyrus sources and Roman comic evidence is fuller than Arnott, though largely in agreement.The most noticeable difference from Arnott's 1996 text is the new line numbers, adopted to leave more space around the excerpts that make up the longest source, P. Oxy. 409 + 2655.There can be no argument that traditional line numbers serve the Kolax especially badly, but it is hard to welcome a fifth numbering in five major editions, especially with the uncertainties that surround this play.The author himself concedes its limitations (excerpt A, for example, probably does not lead directly to B, although he numbers them continuously).This numbering is unlikely to be definitive.Pernerstorfer's text is as inclusive as possible: virtually everything for which a case for attribution can be made is printed, along with a generous selection of conjectures from earlier editions, fragments which other editors print as dubious, Gnatho's speech at Eun. 232-64, tentatively inserted after line 46, and a papyrus

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Frequent coauthors

• Rajend Mesthrie

  University of Cape Town

  9 shared

• Robert K. Herbert

  The Ohio State University

  3 shared

• Francesca Tataranni

  2 shared

• Krisanna Zusman

  2 shared

• J. Keith Chick

  1 shared

• Laurie Jolicoeur

  1 shared

• Sarah Slabbert

  1 shared

• William Branford

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• Campus Executive Officer Distinguished Leadership Award (201…
• Loeb Classical Library Foundation Fellowship for AY 2010-11