Tag Archives: Conference

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

Greek Song Conference 2013 – Now on Storify

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The Department of Classics was delighted to host the 2013 conference of the Network for the Study of Archaic and Classical Greek Song (6-8 September), in collaboration with the University of Oxford, organised by Prof. Ian Rutherford (Reading) and Dr Bruno Currie (Oxford).

The theme of this year’s conference was ‘The Reception of Greek Lyric Poetry, 600BC-AD400’, under the umbrella of which participants were able to discuss a wide range of issues around the topics of transmission, canonization, and paratext.

With an excellent line-up of speakers as well as more than sixty guests from all over the world in attendance, we were proud to celebrate Greek Lyric Poetry and its reception in the ancient world. It is our intention to publish the proceedings in a conference volume in due course.

Meanwhile, if you would like to find out more and cannot wait for the volume to come out, the conference was covered live on Twitter, and our PhD student Kate Cook kindly assembled the highlights of the Twitter feed on Storify, accessible via this link: http://storify.com/KatExe/the-reception-of-greek-lyric-poetry-600bc-400ad-tr

Some photos taken during the conference (click on images for larger versions):

30th Biennial Conference of the Classical Association of South Africa (CASA)

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The Classics section of the Department of Classical and Near Eastern Studies hosted the 30th Biennial Conference of the Classical Association of South Africa (CASA) at the University from the 8th to the 11th July, 2013. Eighty national and international classicists attended and many of these were postgraduate students presenting papers for the first time. This is a very healthy sign and bodes well for the future of the discipline. Keynote addresses by Professor Barbara Goff (University of Reading, UK), Judge Deon van Zyl (CASA Patron), Professor Johan Henning (UFS) and Professor Christa van Wyk (UNISA, UFS) were well received at this very successful conference.

CASA

Photo: (from left to right) Judge Deon van Zyl, Mr Mike Lambert (CASA Chairperson), Prof Christa van Wyk, Prof Christoff Zietsman (Conference organiser), Prof Barbara Goff and Prof Johan Henning.

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

Luwian Identities

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We are pleased to announce the publication of ‘Luwian Identities: Culture, Language and Religion Between Anatolia and the Aegean’, co-edited by Prof. Ian Rutherford, Dr Alice Mouton (CNRS), and Dr Ilya Yakubovich (Moscow State University).

Luwian Identities

Luwian Identities

The Luwians inhabited Anatolia and Syria in late second through early first millennium BC. They are mainly known through their Indo-European language, preserved on cuneiform tablets and hieroglyphic stelae. However, where the Luwians lived or came from, how they coexisted with their Hittite and Greek neighbors, and the peculiarities of their religion and material culture, are all debatable matters.

A conference convened in Reading in June 2011 in order to discuss the current state of the debate, summarize points of disagreement, and outline ways of addressing them in future research. The papers presented at this conference were collected in the present volume, whose goal is to bring into being a new interdisciplinary field, Luwian Studies.

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

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.

Classical Association Conference 2013 – Plenary Lecture

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If you had to miss it, or if you would like to relive Prof. Charlotte Roueché’s powerful lecture ‘Back to the Future? Rediscovering Classics in a Digital World’, you can now do so on YouTube. The lecture was delivered on occasion of the 2013 Classical Association conference at the University of Reading:

Reading Classics Students at the British Conference of Undergraduate Research 2013

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The British Conference of Undergraduate Research (BCUR) is an annual conference that offers undergraduates the opportunity to present a research project to fellow students and staff from universities across the UK and internationally. In this year’s conference, which was held in Plymouth in April, the wealth of student talent included no fewer than 9 delegates from the University of Reading, among them 2 students of the Classics department: Mathew Britten (Part 1 BA Ancient History and Archaeology) and myself.

Mathew said:

Mathew Britten and his presentation on Roman toilets entitled “Don’t get the wrong end of the stick”

Mathew Britten and his presentation on Roman toilets entitled “Don’t get the wrong end of the stick”

I was inspired to complete a research piece for the BCUR to challenge myself as a first year to commit towards completing an extra-curricular project I could be proud of. My lecturers were very encouraging and positively supportive, which helped to boost my inspiration to complete a project that was backed by my department. I chose to present a research paper on Roman toilets, because I thought it was interesting and something quite quirky that you don’t really get to grips with in day to day lectures.

My own inspiration for this project came, really, from the fact that I could be as independent as I liked when it came to choosing what to present. I thought “here is an opportunity to explore the topic that inspired me to pursue a Classics degree – the myths” (and most specifically dragons). My lecturers were enthusiastic with their support and advice and helped me overcome the challenge of condensing such a wide subject into a poster with a single conclusion, which was quite well received at the conference.

Both of us found it to be a brilliant experience, we relished the independence and creativity of the project and made a few new friends along the way. We would heartily recommend it to any undergraduate from any year because you are encouraged to go in any direction you see fit and the staff do a superb job in supporting you throughout the process!

Josh Panteli
BA Classics (Part 2)