We’re delighted to announce the second book in our “Telling Tales in Nature” series: Telling Tales in Nature: Forest Tales. Take a journey through ancient forests with four beautiful trees from Greek mythology: walnut, elm, holm oak, and black poplar. In each chapter, the voice of a hamadryad nymph, whose life was said to be tied to an individual tree, tells her tale,…
Welcome
Welcome to the Iris Classics Centre’s blog! The Iris Classics Centre, hosted at Cheney School, is a vibrant community learning venue for people of all ages to attend events, workshops, lessons, and exhibitions. The Centre opened in October 2013, and a schedule of events is available on our website. The Centre is founded and run…
Talk: Thetis in the Iliad
We are delighted to welcome Dr Martina Astrid Rodda to speak about the role of Thetis in the Iliad on Wednesday 22nd February, 3.30 to 4pm. Martina is the Julia de Lacy Mann Fellow and Leventis Early Career Researcher in Ancient Greek at Merton College, Oxford, with a special interest in disability and gender in…
‘Chaos in Knossos’ now out!
We are delighted to announce that “Chaos in Knossos”, a graphic novel written by Year Eight Classics students at Cheney School is now out! You can read the full book here (please click on the cover): In September 2022, two Year Eight Latin classes at Cheney School took part in a project to design, write…
Phaethon: Myth and Voice Workshop
In collaboration with the Myth and Voice Initiative, run by Dr Efi Spentzou from the Classics Department at Royal Holloway, University of London, we are delighted to announce a workshop where people can explore the themes in the ancient Greek story of Phaethon. The workshop will be informal, friendly and fun, encouraging participants to think…
Musical Storytelling Performance
On Tuesday 13th December, three storytellers, Pandvani 108, will be spending the day at the Iris Classics Centre at Cheney School delivering exciting performances for students. Along with three musicians playing sitar, bass, electric guitar, tabla, dohl, French horn and other instruments, they will tell tales of deception and illusion from Greek, Indian, Norse and…
Linear B Workshops
Year Eight Latinists were very lucky to welcome Dr Philomen Probert to their lessons this week. Philomen is a lecturer at the Department of Linguistics and Classics at the University of Oxford, and she visited to show how Linear B worked and what it was used for. She brought a range of different examples of…
Creating stories set in Minoan Crete
In this week’s lessons, we are very lucky to be joined by local artist Lydia Hall. Lydia will be working with you over the next few weeks on your graphic novel short stories, and eventually turning your stories, sketches and characters into a published graphic novel set in Minoan times and incorporating some of the…
What’s in the Jars?
For our next lesson, we looked at an area of the Palace at Knossos which appeared on the site map as lots of very long, very narrow rooms. There were various interesting guesses from the groups about what these rooms might be for. Suggestions included a gallery or slave rooms. In fact, these were storage…
Introducing the Labyrinth!
We started this term’s first lesson by discussing what a labyrinth was and where the idea of a labyrinth originated – the story Theseus, the Minotaur, Ariadne, and Daedalus’ dark and complicated maze. Archaeologist Arthur Evans had long been obsessed with finding the civilisation behind the labyrinth story; when he uncovered the remains of a…
Classics Summer School, 22nd – 24th August 2022
This week, we were delighted to run our eighth annual classics summer school at the Iris Classics Centre at Cheney! Over forty children aged seven to eleven arrived on the first morning to take part in a range of sea myth-themed activities over three days, as well as being introduced to Latin or ancient Greek…
apolloandartemisblog.wordpress.com 