Tag Archives: Greek

Celebrating the Greek poet Cavafy

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We are delighted that our teacher of Modern Greek, Dr. Dimitra Tzanidaki, is compering an event in London on Friday 8 November to celebrate the life and work of the famous Alexandrian Greek poet Cavafy (1863-1933).

The event is being organised by the Embassy of Greece, and will include lectures on the teaching of Cavafy in secondary schools, and readings of selected by poems by Dr. Tzanidaki. A drinks reception will conclude the evening.

Click here to retrieve a full programme of the Cavafy event.

Herodotos and Plutarch Workshop – A Report

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On 4th October 2013 the Department of Classics at Reading, hosted a one-day workshop on the subject of Herodotos and Plutarch.  The workshop was organised by two of the Department’s doctoral students, Lucy Fletcher and Niki Karapanagioti, with the support of Professors Timothy Duff and Phiroze Vasunia.

We were delighted to welcome as participants: Christopher Pelling (Oxford), Judith Mossman (Nottingham), Timothy Duff (Reading), Michele Lucchesi (Oxford), Tim Whitmarsh (Oxford), Tom Harrison (Liverpool), Aristoula Georgiadou (Patras), Suzanne Saïd (Paris/Columbia), John Marincola (Florida), Carolyn Dewald (Bard College), Rosaria Munson (Swarthmore College), Tim Rood (Oxford) and Phiroze Vasunia (Reading).  The papers and responses aimed to explore in-depth the relationship between these important Greek authors.  Subjects ranged from the representation of individual Greek states in the writings of Plutarch and Herodotos, through Plutarchan re-working of Herodotean material, Plutarch’s peculiarly ethical Herodotos, Plutarch as reader of Herodotos and more broadly the readership of the Histories, and on to more individual instances of Plutarch’s engagement with Herodotos in specific works and for specific historical events and themes.

The organisers were delighted with the response they received from interested parties prior to the event, and were pleased to welcome to Reading approximately fifty delegates, including a number of current Reading students – both undergraduate and postgraduate – and staff.  The response on the day from all participants was equally pleasing.  The papers sparked enthusiastic responses and extensive discussion, as manifest in the way in which we quickly departed from the timings advertised on the programme!

The workshop was immensely successful in generating debate and opening new lines of enquiry into this subject as a fruitful area of study.   Existing scholarship had focused on Plutarch’s reception of Herodotos in his polemical treatise, De Herodoti Malignitate, and on specific instances where the Histories function as a source within Plutarchan texts.  The conference proved particularly revealing, however, of the much greater potential inherent in this relationship as a subject of study for both Plutarchan and Herodotean scholars.  It made apparent the value of a retrospective turn to Herodotos from Plutarch for illuminating the text of the earlier writer, and the wider value of looking proleptically at Plutarch from Herodotos.

The organisers were extremely pleased with the event, and were delighted to receive so many messages from delegates to express how much they had enjoyed the day, and how much they felt it had achieved.  It is a pleasure to take one final opportunity to thank all the participants for making the day so successful and rewarding.  We would also like to thank the Department of Classics at Reading (and especially Prof. Peter Kruschwitz, former Head of Department), the Jowett Copyright Trust, the Institute of Classical Studies, the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies, and the Graduate School at Reading for their support.  Lastly, we are delighted to thank Professors Timothy Duff and Phiroze Vasunia once again for their kindness and generosity in offering so much invaluable help and advice.

Lucy Fletcher

Animals in the Classical world – New Book by Reading Doctoral Researcher

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Congratulations to our doctoral researcher Alastair Harden on the publication of his book Animals in the Classical world: ethical perspectives from Greek and Roman texts.

Harden, AnimalsThe sourcebook is a collection of nearly 200 specially-translated excerpts from Classical authors from Homer to Plutarch. It  aims to contextualize modern animal rights debates within the civilizations of Greece and Rome, and to provide an introduction to the uses of animal imagery in Classical literature with the ultimate goal of understanding the place of the non-human animal in the moral and ethical parameters of the ancient world.

Topics such as warfare, science, farming, vegetarianism and public entertainment join the more traditionally-philosophical corners of this growing area of Classical studies, and passages are included from authors of all genres of Classical literature including poets, novelists and historians.

The book suggests that we can learn as much about ancient ethical parameters from a Homeric simile, a passage of Sophocles or a throwaway comment from Thucydides as we can from the nuanced language of philosophical discourse, if we look in the right places.

The book joins the Animal Ethic series published by Palgrave Macmillan (www.palgrave.com/philosophy/animal_ethics.asp) in conjunction with the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics, which recently founded the new print Journal of Animal Ethics. The photograph on the cover was taken in the Ure Museum.

Conference: The Reception of Greek Lyric Poetry 600BC-AD400

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The Reception of Greek Lyric Poetry 600BC-AD400: Transmission, Canonization, and Paratext

Classics Department, University of Reading, 6th-8th September 2013

A conference organized by Oxford University and Reading University under the auspices of the Network for the Study of Archaic and Classical Greek Song
(http://greeksong.ruhosting.nl).

Greek lyric, elegiac and iambic poetry have come down to us through the filter of selection, editing, and commentary by ancient scholars. This amounts to a textual and diachronic context for lyric poetry no less crucial to its understanding than the oral and synchronic context of an original performance. This conference aims to appraise the variety of ways in which the reading of the scholarly ‘paratext’ affects our reading of the lyric poems.

Participants: Lucia Athanassaki (Rethymno), Kristina Bartol (Poznan), Hans Bernsdorff (Frankfurt),  Anton Bierl (Basel), Gregor Bitto (Eichstätt-Ingolstadt), Deborah Boedeker (Brown), Elsa Bouchard (Montreal), Ewen Bowie (Oxford), Joannes Breuer (Mainz), Michel Briand (Poitiers), Stefano Caciagli (Bologna), Claude Calame (Paris/Lausanne), Vanessa Cazzato (Nijmegen), Willy Cingano (Venice), Thomas Coward (UCL), Bruno Currie (Oxford), José Antonio Fernandez Delgado (Salamanca), Massimo Giuseppetti, (Roma Tre), Theodora Hadjimichael (LMU Munich), Maria Kazanskaya (Paris), Jacqueline Klooster (Ghent), Peter Kruschwitz (Reading), André Lardinois (Nijmegen), Richard Martin (Stanford), Glenn Most (Pisa/Chicago), Greg Nagy (Harvard), Arlette Neumann-Hartmann (Freiburg), Dirk Obbink (Oxford), Anastasia-Erasmia Peponi (Stanford), Tom Phillips (Oxford), Enrico Prodi (Oxford), Xavier Riu (Barcelona), Jessica Romney (Bristol), Ian Rutherford (Reading), Eveline Rutten (Nijmegen), Renate Schlesier (Berlin), Kristina Tomc (Vienna), Maria Xanthou (Thessaloniki).

For further details, see: http://www.reading.ac.uk/classics/research/songconference.aspx.

For further information, contact Ian Rutherford (i.c.rutherford@reading.ac.uk) or Bruno Currie (bruno.currie@oriel.ox.ac.uk)

Programme

Day One: Friday 6th September

12.30 pm Registration and Lunch
1.00 pm Introduction: Bruno Currie and Ian Rutherford
1.30 pm Canons 1 : Transmission

  • Glenn Most (Chicago/Pisa): “Τὸν ᾽Ανακρέοντα μιμοῦ. Imitation and Enactment in the Anacreontics”
  • André Lardinois, Vanessa Cazzato, and Eveline Rutten (Nijmegen): “A New Philological Approach to the Textual Transmission of Archaic Greek Lyric Poetry”
  • D.Obbink (Oxford): “Sailing to Naukratis: Saphho on her Brothers”

3.00 pm Coffee

  • 3.30 pm Biographical Paratexts
  • Elsa Bouchard (Montreal): “The status of lyric in ancient poetics: Chamaeleon’s method and the lyric ‘I'”
  • Massimo Giuseppetti (Roma Tre): “Archilochus between Biographical Fictions and Performance Tradition”
  • Kristina Tomc (Vienna): “Μουσάων ἱερὸν στόμα: Pindar as an inspired poet in the ancient vitae, epigrams and Pindaric scholia”

6.00 pm Reception

7.30 pm Dinner

Day Two: Saturday 7th September

10.00 am Canons 2: Canons and Paratexts in the 5th – 4th Centuries

  • Jessica Romney (Bristol): “The Vaguarities of ‘We’. Solon and his Democratic Biographical Tradition”
  • Kristina Bartol (Poznan): “Structuring the Genre: The 5th-and 4th-Century Authors on Elegy and Elegiac Poets”

11.00 am Coffee

11.30 am Ancient Scholarship 1

  • Tom Phillips (Oxford): “History and Historians in Ancient Pindaric Scholarship”
  • Michel Briand (Poitiers): “Pindar in the Scholia Vetera in Pindari Carmina, or the lyric poet as a paratextual fiction”
  • Theodora Hadjimichael (LMU Munich): “The Peripatetics and the Transmission of Lyric.”

1.00 pm Lunch

2.00 pm Canons 3. The Fifth Century

  • Claude Calame (Paris/Lausanne): “Poètes et formes méliques dans les comédies d’Aristophane: genres poétiques et choix canonique”
  • Greg Nagy (CHS): “On the Odeum of Pericles and the shaping of the Lyric Canon”
  • Maria Kazanskaya (Paris): “Sappho’s Kertomia.”

3.30 pm Coffee

4.00 pm Reception 1. The Second Sophistic

  • Renate Schlesier (Berlin): “Athenaios’ Sappho”
  • Jacqueline Klooster (Ghent): The (ab)use of poetry in Plutarch’s Life of Solon”
  • José Antonio Fernández Delgado (Salamanca) “The Plutarchan reception of the oldest melic poetry”

6.00 pm Conference Dinner

Day Three: Sunday 8th September

10.00 am Ancient Scholarship 2

  • Enrico Emanuele Prodi (Oxford): “De poematum titulis apud Pindarum Bacchylidem Simonidem”
  • Hans Bernsdorff (Frankfurt): “105 (or so) ways to start a poem: a list of lyric and tragic incipits on a new Michigan papyrus”
  • Stefano Caciagli (Bologna): “Sympotic Sappho? The tradition of Sappho’s text”

11.30 am Coffee

12 noon Reception 2. Rome

  • Gregor Bitto (Eichstäett Ingolstadt): “Pindar, Paratexts, and Poetry”
  • Johannes Breuer (Mainz): “Greek Lyric Poetry in Horace and his commentators”
  • Peter Kruschwitz (Reading): “Innoventing Roman lyric poetry: the paradigm of Laevius”

1.30 pm Lunch

2.30 pm Pindaric Paratexts

  • Arlette Neumann-Hartmann (Freiburg): “Why cite Pindar? Eustathius of Thessalonica and his works on Pindar”
  • Maria Xanthou (Thessaloniki): “Challenging the pseudo-canonical status of Pind. P.2 and 3 M. post S. in the corpus of Pythian odes: the extrapolation of a new category through hard core text”
  • Thomas Coward (KCL) “Pindar before Alexandria: Evidence for the Early Transmission of Lyric Poetry”

4.00 pm General Discussion

Herodotos and Plutarch Workshop 2013

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We are very pleased to announce a workshop on ‘Herodotos and Plutarch’ to be held in the Department of Classics at the University of Reading on Friday, 4th October 2013.

The event will take place at the University of Reading’s Whiteknights Campus, in the Humanities and Social Sciences Building, room 125.

The programme for the day is included below.

To register for the event, please send an email to the organisers, Lucy Fletcher and Niki Karapanagioti at the conference address: herodotosandplutarch@gmail.com.  The deadline for registration is 15th September 2013.

Thanks to the generosity of the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies, we are pleased to offer a number of graduate bursaries.  Interested parties should write to the organisers and explain the nature of their interest in the event, and how the topic is related to their studies.   The deadline for bursary applications is 8th September 2013.

The workshop is generously sponsored by the Department of Classics and the Graduate School at the University of Reading; the Jowett Copyright Trust; the Institute of Classical Studies; and the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies.

For further information or queries please contact the organisers: Lucy Fletcher and Niki Karapanagioti at: herodotosandplutarch@gmail.com.

Programme

9.30 Registration
9.45 Introduction

10.00-11.30: Session One

  • Christopher Pelling, ‘Athens and Sparta in Herodotus and Plutarch’
  • Judith Mossman, ‘Plutarch and Herodotean tyrants’

11.30-12.00: Coffee

12.00-1.30: Session Two

  • Tim Whitmarsh, ‘Plutarch’s ethical Herodotus’
  • Tom Harrison, ‘Plutarch and the audiences for Herodotus’ Histories’

1.30-2.30: Lunch

2.30-4.00: Session Three

  • Suzanne Saïd, ‘The use of Herodotus in Plutarch’s Aristeides’
  • John Marincola, ‘Plutarch at Plataea: In the footsteps of Herodotus’

4.00-4.30: Coffee
4.30-5.15: Final Session

  • Aristoula Georgiadou, ‘Plutarch on the malice of Herodotus’

5.15-5.30: Break
5.30-6.15: Final Discussion

  • Respondents: Carolyn Dewald, Rosaria Munson, Tim Rood

6.15-7.00: Reception

An interdisciplinary summer school in Greece

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Our Doctoral Research Student Elena Chepel has just returned from an interdisciplinary summer school in Greece. Here is her report:

The summer course ‘Challenging Limits: Performances of Ancient Drama, Controversies and Debates‘ brought together for 10 days a brilliant team of 30 students and 14 professors of Classics and Drama Studies throughout Europe to share knowledge and experience of Greek tragedy and comedy in modern theatre.  The programme included lectures, workshops, visits to archaeological sites and performances of ancient plays such as Iphigeneia in Aulis by Euripides, Antigone by Sophocles and Plutos by Aristophanes. Epidauros

Discussing such problems as ancient and modern theatrical space, adoptation. audience’s emotional response, and staging chorus with people who are professionally engaged in theatre production proved to be invaluable experience that changed crucially my ideas about potential of ancient Greek theatre in modern time.PlutosInEpidauros

The intensive course on the Study and Practice of Ancient Greek Drama is organised annually by the European Network of Research and Documentation of Performances of Ancient Drama (http://ancient-drama.net/) and the Department of Theatre studies of the University of Athens. This year it focused on performances that raised political, social or aesthetic controversies. OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Contemporary Greek Film Cultures Conference 2013

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Reading’s Department of Classics and our Centre for Hellenic Studies are delighted to sponsor the Interdisciplinary, International Conference on Contemporary Greek Cinema, 5-6 of July 2013, at the Hellenic Centre, London.

Details of the conference programme and further information can be found here:

http://contemporarygreekcinema2013.wordpress.com

Online registration closes on the 4th July.

Dr Sonya Nevin on Classics Confidential

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New on Classics Confidential:

In the fifth interview recorded at the Classical Association meeting and the second shot on location in the Ure Museum CC’s Anastasia Bakogianni talks to Dr Sonya Nevin about the project to create animations based on the characters and stories depicted on ancient Greek vases. This was also the subject of her presentation at the conference on the Classics and Museums (1) panel.

Sonya helped to create these animations as the Classics consultant working in collaboration with Steve K. Simons, who specialises in the digital restoration and animation of ancient Greek vase images. For more information about their on-going work see: www.panoply.org.uk

The first animation they produced based on Exekias’ vase depicting Achilles and Ajax playing a game of dice was entitled the Clash of the Dicers

It was produced as part of the Ure-View project, an outreach initiative that brought together Classics students and young people from two Reading secondary schools, Kendrick and Maiden Erlegh. The two groups were asked to work collaboratively to produce story boards based on what they saw depicted on ancient vases housed in the Ure Museum.

These animations also featured on the Stories of the World programme presented as part of Arts in Parliament series at Westminster Hall (24 July 2012). The animations help to draw attention to the importance of athletics in the classical world but they can also be used as a teaching resource.  An exhibition of a new set of animations from the recent Ure Discovery project, will be launched on 17th June 2013 at the Ure Museum.  The animations, with insights into their backstories, will be appearing on the Panoply website from that date.

Another animation The Cheat was created specifically for The Open University’s module The Ancient Olympics: Bridging Past and Present, which also drew attention to the links between the ancient Olympic games and their modern reincarnation.

As Sonya points out what all these animations have in common is that help to focus the viewer’s attention on the ancient artefacts. They utilise the new technologies available to us, but the stars of the show are the ancient vases themselves.

Click on the image below or follow this link to watch the interview!

Greeks & Egyptians-themed Day School

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Thirty keen adult learners joined members of the Department of Classics for a Day School, planned in collaboration with the Ure Museum of Greek Archaeology, for a presentation of their research on the topic of Greeks & Egyptians, on 18 May 2013.

During the day 30+ participants learned about the interactions of ancient Greeks & Egyptians in Egypt, from members of the department and two of the Department’s recent PhD recipients.

Participants were also given the opportunity to view the Ure Museum collections, some relevant artefacts in which were discussed by Dr. Smith (Curator) and Prof. Rutherford (on the topic of mummified cats).

Participants gave enthusiastic feedback and called it ‘… a most enjoyable and stimulating study day…’, commenting that ‘the range of topics and their enthusiastic presentation were excellent’.

Collections-based Research in Classics at Reading

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In its efforts to bring present and future students’ attention to the wide range of research facilities available at the University of Reading the Research Review has highlighted Dr Amy Smith and her research in the Ure Museum of Greek Archaeology:

http://www.reading.ac.uk/research/ResearchReviewonline/res-welcometoure.aspx

In this audio Dr Smith introduces the Ure Museum and explains how the collection and its database are used by students and scholars, including the complications inherent in studying 3d objects and relevant conservation issues.

This is the second ‘unusual space people use for their research’ highlighted in a series that started with the ‘Gut lab’ (Nutritional Sciences).