Michelle Berenfeld is the John A. McCarthy Professor of Classics at Pitzer College, one of the Claremont Colleges. An archaeologist and fellow of the American Academy in Rome, she has done research in Turkey, Jordan, Egypt, Greece, and Italy. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic and numerous scholarly publications. She lives in Los Angeles.
Berenfeld's new book is Lessons from a Lost Republic: What Ancient Rome Can Teach Us About This American Moment.
At Lit Hib the author tagged eight books to read if you’re interested in the Roman Empire. One title on the list:
Ursula K. Le Guin, LaviniaRead about the other entries on the list.
If you find yourself missing Virgil after the Aeneid, you can turn to this lesser known, but brilliant novel by Ursula K. Le Guin. It is an earlycontribution to what is now a cottage industry of stories told from women’s points of view in classical mythology. Lavinia was the young woman whose hand in marriage was promised to Aeneas, the hero of Virgil’s Aeneid and founder of the Roman people. Her role in the origin story of Rome is crucial but unvoiced. Le Guin not only gives Lavinia something to say but also conjures her whole life and her world as they could have been or should have been. A brief but essential bit of science fiction provides the marvelous, impossible conceit that gives Lavinia agency she never had even as she remains a character written by a man in the future. She knows what is to come but makes her choices and lives her life in a magnificently described world. Le Guin’s version of pre-Roman Italy is the version I now imagine whenever I read the Aeneid.
--Marshal Zeringue
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