Letter from the Editors

How ancient is ancient?

We get this question a lot. With good reason—the word is in our title, after all: the lone modifier distinguishing us from the journal in whose image we modeled our own, in response to a question first posed by one of its contributors. Since then we’ve avoided drawing chronological bounds in our submission calls, hoping the word “ancient” would be enough to signal to potential contributors and readers that they're in the right place. That ambiguity has served us and has helped expand our scope beyond the traditional Classics canon and into a global view of literature from antiquity.

But at other times, that ambiguity gives us pause. After all, “ancient” isn’t a precise time period, any more than “poetry” is a genre defined by any one formal structure or rule. It’s a word we make sense of primarily in relation—ancient vs. modern, past vs. present, “them” vs. “us.” It’s a delineation of difference; a definition by negation. “Ancient” is what came before, what isn’t any longer. More often than not, it's regarded as a time when humans lacked something: progress, knowledge, advancement. Stranger still, it's a time before "we" came along, and without us, it might as well be another universe altogether.

With this issue, we re-examine what it means to study and teach literature from a time before and to construct our worlds in relation to those traditions. These pieces transport us across a vast expanse of time, beyond what the words “ancient” and “antiquity” might bring to mind. That's how we find ourselves revisiting Dante’s Paradiso through Mary Jo Bang’s translation, which locates the original’s subjectivity in a bold contemporaneity of language—a fitting homage to an author who chose his own vernacular over the literary Latin to tell his story. This reminds us that language is a way to call out to one another, in order to be understood and understand. This heavenly ascent is mirrored in artist Christopher Patton's reimagining of Inanna's descent to the Underworld, a blend of whimsy and scholarship that recasts the Sumerian goddess as a future incarnation of a voice-activated Siri. A no less iconic katabasis, Orpheus' attempt to retrieve his lost Eurydice from Hades is retold by translator Anna Jackson as two poems that condense Ovid's account into a shadowy reflection on our own acts of translation and interpretation.

Unlike Orpheus, we don't return to earth empty-handed: we are accompanied by guides and tools for navigating and interpreting the world. A seventeenth-century Spanish dictionary translated by Janet Hendrickson becomes a kind of map, a constellation of lexical entries re-presenting a universe of language through translation and memory. A Lokanit, or Guide to the World, compiled in the mid-19th century from anonymous Thai sources and translated here anew by Noh Anothai, offers advice both practical and profound, reminding the reader what is advantageous and sweet about living in the world. Kevin Solez’s translation of a fragment of archaic Greek elegy puts into words even older traditions of community attested in art and visual culture from across the ancient Mediterranean, while Chiara Sulprizio's vaudevillian translation of a rare surviving piece of early Latin satire playfully counsels us on the meaning of virtue. Together, these attempt to give order to human experiences, laws of behavior, and customs that are older than the words themselves.

But sometimes order is nowhere to be found. In a glimpse of Senecan tragedy, translator Julie Levy offers a portrait of the world thrown into chaos by a vengeful god, whose pain is born from unjust systems of power that mirror humanity's own. Lily Stewart’s translations condense tumultuous passages from Vergil's Aeneid into sensitive and intricate poems that explore the intense emotions clawing at the epic's surface and foreground the landscape of natural beauty that lurks in the margins. In their translation of the introduction to Seneca’s Quaestiones Naturales, Jamie Banks articulates ancient Stoic philosophy for modern ears, reminding us that some questions (about the nature of gods, humans, and the world itself) may never find their answers—but are still worth investigating.

In a worthy investigation of his own, Ryan Tribble’s “In the Classroom” essay confronts ancient environmental problems through a modern ecological lens. Delicately weaving in and out of Ancient Exchanges’ pages, past and present, Tribble brings together the disciplines of Classics, translation, and environmental humanities, urging us to explore the shifting borders of ancient spaces, the bounds of nature, and the role we play as humans in creating those delineations.

In opening this issue with a question, we hope you find inside not an answer, exactly, but an environment where we can encounter past alongside present and stand to gather the lessons offered by both. This is the space we’ve cultivated together: defined not by the narrowness of chronology, but by the expanse of time.

Happy exploring.

the Ancient X editors

Adrienne Rose
Laura Moser
Echo Smith
Hannah Kent
Lindsay Vella