Essays on World Arts

Chinese revolutionary Mao Zedong is quoted as having said that a Chinese man has three mountains on his back. The first is colonial oppression, the second is the oppression of tradition, and the third is his own backwardness. A woman, however, has a fourth mountain...

Throughout both Roman and Greek ancient literature, well-renowned writers ranging from Aeschylus to Thucydides have demonstrated the major character flaws of mortals and the effects of their failings on their life and well-being. Although the outcome of each protagonist is different in each of these...

In Satire VI and In Catilinam I and II, Juvenal and Cicero both make attacks on their enemies’ personal conduct to construct a Roman identity while appealing to “Roman values.” Their projects are indeed very similar; both raise questions of class, expressing fear at the...

History, as humankind knows it, encompasses a body of words, and accompanied with these textual artifacts are the ideals, thoughts, and morals of a particular society. Culture, shaped by the thoughts of our predecessors and expanders, can be defined by history’s literary works and texts....

The Comedy of Errors, written by William Shakespeare, is mirrored to a major extent by Plautus’s play The Brothers Manaechmus, both of which deal with the issue of separated twins who find themselves in the same town and are mistaken for each other. However, although...

When you picture Islamic women, the image that immediately comes to mind is a woman cloaked in black, with not one part of her body visible. Even more so, it is hard to imagine this specter as possessing any sort of sexuality. Yet, in Tariq...

By 18 BC, morality among the citizens of Rome had depleted by such degree that the emperor was impelled to enact the lex Julia de maritandis ordinibus, which instituted adultery as a crime punishable by death or exile. This was the Rome of Ovid’s time,...