ISAW Library hosts the New York Classical Club Greek and Latin Recitation Contest

By David Ratzan
04/08/2025

On a misty Saturday last week (April 5, 2025), some twenty-seven people climbed ISAW’s monumental staircase to its aptly-named, wood-paneled Oak Library to engage in or watch the spectacle of word-to-word combat in ancient Greek and Latin. This was the New York Classical Club’s annual Greek and Latin Recitation Contest. 

Nineteen undergraduate and graduate students from Hunter, Bard, Columbia, Princeton, CUNY, and one intrepid student from Middlebury, each performed a set passage for three judges. The passages were:

  • Plato's, Apology 41c7 (Ἀλλὰ καὶ ...) to d9 (... μέμφεσθαι): Socrates’ insistence that good men have nothing to fear from death
  • Homer, Illiad 9.406-420: Achilles’ revelation of his fateful choice, long life or a glorious death, but not both
  • Cicero, First Catilinarian 32-33: Cicero’s stirring peroration to his fellow citizens and curse on Catiline and his followers, in this life and the next
  • Catullus 3: A poet’s ironic obituary for his mistress’s pet sparrow.

Homer was favored by a margin of 2 to 1 by the Hellenists, while Latin oratores divided equally between the fiery rhetoric of Cicero and the urbane double entendres of Catullus. A couple of particularly brave souls followed the time-honored practice of committing their passages to memory, to the delight and amazement of a crowd that has grown accustomed to offloading the operations of memory to the cloud and Google instead to the mind and the Muses.

The ISAW Library was very happy to provide a suitable arena for the contest, and the Head of the Library David Ratzan also volunteered his services as a judge, an office he most thoroughly enjoyed. The other two judges were Prof. Katharina Volk (Columbia University, contest organizer, and one-time contest champion) and Lisa Mignone (Roman historian and ISAW affiliate). All pictures are courtesy of ISAW's Patrick Burns.

Until next year, perhaps, ave atque vale.

2025 NYCC Greek recitation champions

  • 1. Celeste Connell (Bard College)
  • 2. Jake Richards (Columbia University)
  • 3. Peter Fields (Bard College)

Three smiling contestants in a wood paneled library. The Greek winners of the 2025 NYCC Greek Recitation Contest. Left to Right: Celeste Connell (Bard), Jake Richards (Columbia), Peter Fields (Bard).

2025 NYCC Latin recitation champions

  • 1. Laurence Drayton (Princeton University)
  • 2. Celeste Connell (Bard College)
  • 3. Riley Young (Columbia University)

Three smiling contestants in a wood paneled library. The 2025 NYCC Latin Recitation Context winners. Left to Right: Celeste Connell (Bard), Laurence Drayton (Princeton), and Riley Young (Columbia).