​Timothy Moore

​Timothy Moore

Classics Department Chair
Affiliate Faculty, Performing Arts Department
Affiliate Faculty, Comparative Literature and Thought
John and Penelope Biggs Distinguished Professor of Classics
PhD, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
research interests:
  • Ancient Music
  • Greek and Roman Theatre
  • Roman Historiography

contact info:

mailing address:

  • Department of Classics
    MSC 1050-153-244
    WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY
    242 Umrath Hall
    ST. LOUIS, MO 63130-4899

​Professor Moore's work concentrates on several areas of classical antiquity, including the comic theatre of Greece and Rome, Greek and Roman music, and Roman historiography.

Moore's current projects include articles on music, meter and dance in ancient theatre, an online database of the meters of Greek and Roman drama, and a long-range project on musical theatre in ancient Greece and Rome. He also has interests in the history of theatre, especially American musical theatre and Japanese Kyogen comedy.

Awards

Mellon Foundation Fellowship

The American Academy in Rome: Rome Prize Fellowship

The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation: Research Fellowship

Center for Hellenic Studies: Research Fellowship

Center for the Humanities, Washington University in St. Louis: Research Fellowship

Texas Foreign Language Teaching Excellence Award, University of Texas at Austin

The German Academic Exchange Service: Visiting Professorship

The Loeb Classical Library Foundation: Research Fellowship

National Endowment for the Humanities: Co-director, Summer Institute

Ovatio, Classical Association of the Middle West and South

President’s Associates Teaching Excellence Award, University of Texas at Austin

recent courses

Gender, Class, and Comedy: Ancient and Modern (CLASSICS 3540)

Few cultural products are effective as dramatic comedy in revealing, reflecting, critiquing how societies respond to differences of gender and social class. In this course we will consider how writer, performers, and audiences of dramatic comedies have responded to issues surrounding gender and class. We will read, discuss, and write about comedies from ancient Greece and Rome and from various modern nations, paying particular attention to the following questions: Do comic plays reinforce or challenge the preconceptions of their audiences surrounding gender and social class? Why does comedy have such power both to unite and divide people as they respond to gender and class? Does dramatic comedy have the power to change attitudes surrounding gender and class? This course has an extensive writing component, so much of our time will be spent writing about the comedies we will read, revising what we have written, and discussing how best to write about comedy and its responses to society.

Sophocles (GREEK 4210/5211)

In this course, we will read closely two plays by Sophocles: OEDIPUS REX and TRACHINIAN WOMEN.

Roman Theater (LATIN 5421)

Theater was a vital part of Roman life, and Roman drama and theatrical practices have had a profound effect on the history of theater. We will read and discuss extant plays of Roman comedy (Plautus and Terence) and tragedy (Seneca) and fragments of lost works of tragedy, comedy, mime, and pantomime. Along the way we will read and discuss works by modern scholars on various aspects of these genres and their performance. We will pay particular attention to areas of continuity and development in the 1000-year history of ancient Roman theater.

Intensive Beginning Greek I (GREEK 1590)

An intensive, accelerated study of Attic Greek. Students will gain sufficient proficiency to start reading ancient texts by the end of the semester.

Selected Publications

Books

Music in Roman Comedy (Cambridge 2012)
Roman Theatre  (Cambridge 2012)
The Theater of Plautus: Playing to the Audience (Austin 1998)
Artistry and Ideology: Livy's Vocabulary of Virtue (Frankfurt 1989)


Edited Volumes

Form und Bedeutung im lateinischen Drama / Form and Meaning in Latin Drama, ed. by Timothy J. Moore and Wolfgang Polleichtner.

Aristophanes and Menander: Three Comedies: Peace, Money, the God, Samia, translated by Douglass Parker, ed. with introductions and notes by Timothy J. Moore.  


Recent Articles and Book Chapters

“Ludic Music in Ancient Greek and Roman Theater,” in Ludics: Play as Humanistic Inquiry, edd. Vassiliki Rapti and Eric Gordon (Palgrave/MacMillan, 2021) 181-211.

“Music in Roman Drama,” in A Companion to Ancient Greek and Roman Music, edd. Tosca Lynch and Eleonora Rocconi (Wiley-Blackwell, 2020) 145-158.

“The State of Roman Theater c. 200 BCE,” in A Companion to Plautus, edd. George Fredric Franko and Dorota Dutsch (Wiley-Blackwell, 2020) 17-29.

“Music and Metre,” in The Cambridge Companion to Roman Comedy, ed. Martin Dinter (Cambridge University Press, 2019) 101-119.

“Music in the Time of Vergil: Insights from a Symposium,” Greek and Roman Musical Studies 6 (2018): 51-60.

“Stinging Auloi: Aristophanes, Acharnians 860-71,” Greek and Roman Musical Studies 5 (2017): 178-190.

“Sophocles after Ferguson: Antigone in St. Louis, 2014,” Didaskalia 13 (2016–2017): 49-68. http://didaskalia.net/issues/13/10/

“Music in Roman Tragedy,” in Roman Drama and its Contexts, edd. Stavros Frangoulidis, Stephen J. Harrison, and Gesine Manuwald (Trends in Classics Supplementary Volume 34, Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016) 345-361.

“Roman Comedy in Performance: Using the Videos of the 2012 NEH Summer Institute,” (with Sharon James), Didaskalia 12 (2015): 37-50. (http://www.didaskalia.net/issues/12/6/).

“The 2012 NEH Summer Institute on Roman Comedy in Performance: Genesis and Reflections” (with Sharon L. James and Meredith Safran), Classical Journal 111 (2015): 1-9.

“Using Music in Teaching Roman Comedy” (with T.H.M. Gellar-Goad), Classical Journal 111 (2015): 37-51.

“Music and Gender in Terence’s Hecyra,” in Women in the Drama of the Roman Republic, edited by Dorota Dutsch, Sharon James, and David Konstan (University of Wisconsin Press, 2015) 68-87.

“Meter and Music,” in The Blackwell Companion to Terence, edd. Antonios Augoustakis and Adriana Traill (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013) 89-110.

“Andria: Terence’s Musical Experiment,” in Form und Bedeutung im lateinischen Drama / Form and Meaning in Latin Drama, edd. Timothy J. Moore and Wolfgang Polleichtner (Bochumer Altertumswissenschaftliches Colloquium 95. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 2013) 87-114.

“Song in the Greek Classroom,” Teaching Classical Languages 4.2 (Spring 2013): 66-85 (http://www.tcl.camws.org/spring2013/Moore.pdf).

“Rodgers and Hart’s ‘The Boys from Syracuse’: Shakespeare Made Plautine,” in Ancient Comedy and Reception, ed. Douglas Olson. Boston University Studies in the Classical Tradition (Leiden: Brill, 2013) 762-785.

“Don’t Skip the Meter! Introducing Students to the Music of Roman Comedy,” Classical Journal 108 (2012/13) 218-234.

“An Aulos in Eelde, the Netherlands,” in Studien zur Musikarchäologie VIII, edd. R. Eichmann, F. Jianjun, and L.-C. Koch (Orient-Archäologie 27. Rahden: Leidorf, 2012) 91-101.

Music in Roman Comedy

By ​Timothy Moore

The plays of Plautus and Terence were profoundly musical: large portions of all the plays were sung to accompaniment, and variations in melody, rhythm and dance were essential elements in bringing both pleasure and meaning to their performance. This book explains the nature of Roman comedy's music: the accompanying tibia, the style of vocal performance, the importance of dance, characteristics of melody, the relationship between meter and rhythm, and the effects of different meters and of variations within individual verses. It provides musical analyses of songs, scenes and whole plays and draws analogies between Roman comedy's music and the music of modern opera, film and musical theatre. The book will change our understanding of the nature of Roman comedy and will be of interest to students of ancient theatre and Latin literature, scholars and students working on the history of music and theatre and performers working with ancient plays.

Three Comedies

Edited By ​Timothy Moore

Three Comedies features the work of three dramatic geniuses of the glorious, no-holds-barred tradition of ancient Athenian comedy. Here Aristophanes, the eight-hundred-pound gorilla of Old and Middle Comedy meets Menander, elephant in the room of New Comedy, in a match made possible by Douglass Parker--if not Athenian exactly, or even ancient, possibly the maddest chameleon ever to absorb the true colors of an ancient choral song, transpose a lost pun, or channel a venerable, giant, dung-eating cockroach for the benefit of those who couldn’t be there the first time.

 

Timothy J. Moore offers concise and informative introductions and notes to Parker's brilliant translation of Aristophanes' fantastical Peace and Money, the God and Menander's lively, domestic Samia--and includes, as a bonus, Parker's James Constantine Lecture at the University of Virginia, "A Desolation Called Peace: Trials of an Aristophanic Translator."