Welcome to Living Poets

The aim of this project is to develop a new approach to classical poetry, based on how listeners and readers imagined the Greek and Roman poets. You can read more about the project and who we are, use our collections of ancient and modern representations of the poets, and read our guides to the collections. About the project Collections Guides

News and Events News & Events Paola Bassino will be presenting a paper entitled The Tradition of the Contest between Homer and Hesiod on 11th September 2015 at the international conference Contests of Speech and Song, St Anne’s College, Oxford. There will be a panel entitled Living Poets: Renaissance Visions of Ancient Authors at the annual Renaissance Society of America meeting on 26-28th March 2015. An exhibition entitled Face-to-Face Encounters with Ancient Authors: Portraits in Libraries is opening on 29th January 2015 at the History of the Book Gallery and Cosin's Library at Durham Palace Green Library. Erika Taretto will be presenting a paper entitled Sites of Memory and Ancient Reception of Poets: Archilochos on Paros at the 146th Annual Meeting of the Society for Classical Studies, January 8-11, 2015, New Orleans, LA. Nora Goldschmidt will be presenting a paper entitled Authoring Virgil on 6th December 2014 at the Virgil Society, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU. Nicholas Freer will be presenting a paper entitled Epicureanism and Vergil's Carthage Episode (Aeneid 1 and 4) on 19th November 2014, 11.30am, at the Classics and Ancient History Work-in-Progress Seminar, Palace Green 20, Durham University. There will be an event Face-to-Face Encounters with Ancient Authors: Portraits in Libraries on 17th-23rd November 2014, 2-4pm, at Cosin's Library, Palace Green, Durham. Barbara Graziosi will be presenting a paper entitled Homeros Kosmopolites: Homer, Citizen of the World on 15th November 2014 at the conference Odysseus Visiting the Capitals of Europe at the Museum of Modern Art, Ljubljana. The international conference Tombs of the Poets: Between Text and Material Culture will be held at Durham University on 12th-14th September 2014. There will be a free event Who Was Homer? featuring award-winning author Gillian Cross on 28th June 2014, 12-4pm, in the Pemberton Building, Palace Green, Durham. Francesca Richards has been awarded a grant from the Classical Association for schools workshops and public events in June 2014.

A 17th Century depiction of Homer, by an unknown painter. Homer is shown holding a text with the names of cities that claimed him as a native, written in Latin. Read more.