John Henderson, DPhil
John Henderson is professor of classics at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of King's College. He teaches like crazy, but has also written wicked books and weird articles across the range of classical topics, including a fun edition with text, translation, and commentary on Plautus, Asinaria: The One about the Asses (University of Wisconsin Press, 2006). His DPhil Oxon was on the fabulous Phaedrus, and his scholarly output since has centered on reacting enthusiastically to Roman texts, with quirky books on Seneca, Statius, Pliny, Juvenal, and Isidore, and storming articles on Latin poetry and history collected in Fighting for Rome: Poets and Caesars, History and Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 1998), with other outrages collected in Writing Down Rome: Satire, Comedy, and other Offences in Latin Poetry (Oxford University Press, 1999). Henderson is also the author of A Plautus Reader: Selections from Eleven Plays (Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers, 2009).
Books by John Henderson, DPhil
A Plautus Reader: Selections from Eleven Plays
- 6943
- 978-0-86516-694-3
The comic playscripts by Plautus—the earliest Latin texts we have—made it through the ancient world to reach ours because the moves and verbal jousting found in them have always made people laugh. Plautine comedies span a wide range of idioms, extending from saucy adventures in the sex trade with Father as the fall-guy who foots all bills, to the trouncing of bigmouth trooper by Ms. Hot Stuff; from the fairytale wishes come true of faraway foundlings fished up on a surprise romantic shore, to the caricature gospel that re-stages the myth of the birth of the hero, in true panto style, gods and all.
