Sine Spoliis: The Commemoration of the Third Macedonian War through the Porticus Octavia
presented by Julius Arnold

Friday, January 17th, 2025 at 4:30 P.M.
Eaton Humanities 250

Abstract: The lost Porticus Octavia, constructed after the Third Macedonian War, remains an enigmatic monument of the Middle Roman Republic. Built to commemorate Gnaeus Octavius’ capturing of the last Macedonian king Perseus, the building has received scant attention in surviving ancient literature and modern scholarship. In this talk, I argue that the monument likely served as a display space for spoils of war taken by Lucius Aemilius Paullus, who had defeated Perseus in battle. I shed light on how Lucius Aemilius Paullus and Gnaeus Octavius collaborated to control the public memory of their military successes, situating the Porticus Octavia within the broader context of the commemoration of victories over Hellenistic kingdoms and the display of war spoils in the city of Rome.

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Rome’s Other Twins: Ovid’s Gemini in Fasti V.

Rachel Dzugan

The head of Roma on the front and the two Dioscuri riding horses on the back. Münzkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.

The legendary she-wolf suckles Romulus and Remus. Musei Capitolini.

Thursday, February 1, 5:15pm
Eaton Humanities
Free and open to the public
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ABSTRACT

This talk offers a nuanced analysis of Ovid’s Gemini story in Fasti 5.693-720 in three complementary interpretative layers: firstly, by examining the poem’s generic and programmatic considerations; secondly, by reading through a metapoetical lens; and thirdly, by drawing parallels with the other twins in the Fasti, namely Romulus and Remus. My exploration of the Gemini narrative not only explores the challenges faced by Ovid’s poetry but also illustrates Ovid’s inventive strategies as he grapples with and adapts to the challenges of past and present history and politics. The Gemini story in Book 5, though only 28 lines of text, represents a microcosm of the complexity of Ovid’s poetry and the difficulty of any definitive interpretation of it.

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Defining Beer in the Ancient World
By Travis Rupp

Wednesday, November 29, 7:00pm
Eaton Humanities & Zoom
Free and open to the public
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ABSTRACT

This lecture will be a deep dive into the academic debate over what constitutes beer throughout history and how it was initially “invented” in the ancient world. Travis will discuss his most recent involvement in United States federal law where the definition of beer is being hotly debated and contested by macro breweries. As an expert witness in a recently decided federal case, Travis was called upon to discuss the origins and definitions of beer throughout antiquity and why the definition of beer is what it is today. Having been relieved of his legal duties (for now), he can share that message publicly. This presentation will demonstrate how beer is a timeless artifact that ties the present to the distant past.

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Phocion the Good and Philippe Pétain, Marshal of France: Parallel Lives?

Professor Peter Hunt

Thursday, April 20, 7:00 p.m.
Hale Science Building Room 230 & Zoom ()
Free and open to the public
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ABSTRACT 

This lecture imagines how the Greek biographer Plutarch might write a Parallel Lives of an ancient and a modern stateman: Phocion the Good was a fourth-century Athenian statesman, who capped his long career under the democracy with a leading position in an oligarchy imposed by the Macedonians; Philippe Pétain, the hero of Verdun in the first World War, collaborated with the Nazis after the defeat of France in the Second World War.  Both Phocion and Pétain ended their political lives on trial and then condemned by their own people.  This thought experiment can help us better understand the structure, methods, and ethical goals of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives.

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Uncovering the City of the Baboon: New excavations at Hermopolis Magna, Egypt

Professor Yvona Trnka-Amrhein

Thursday, March 16, 7:00 p.m.
Hale Science Building Room 230 & Zoom ()
Free and open to the public
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ABSTRACT 

In January 2023, CU’s Classics Department and the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities began a new excavation and conservation project at the Greco-Roman city of Hermopolis Magna in Egypt. This talk gives an overview of the history of Hermopolis (Pharaonic Khemenu), previous archaeological work at the site, and a preview of what the new excavations have discovered, focusing on the city’s magnificent 5th century CE Christian Basilica which was built from the pieces of several Ptolemaic buildings and other earlier structures. The work at the Basilica site has revealed important evidence for understanding the forms of early Ptolemaic architecture and the history of worship at Hermopolis. These discoveries are only the beginning of what the city has to offer historians of ancient Egypt.

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McClanahan Essay Prize Lecture

Athanasius Strikes Back: The Life of Antony as a Rebuttal of the Vita Apollonii
Jacob Horton, ��������

Thursday, January 26, 2023  |  5:00 p.m.  |  Eaton Humanities 135

By the 5th century CE, Christian hagiography had become a preeminent form of literature in the Roman world. What began with harrowing stories about martyrs tortured and executed during the imperial persecutions transitioned into idealized accounts of ascetic holy men and women who became figurative martyrs, relinquishing not their lives but worldly pleasures. Christian hagiography did not emerge out of nowhere, however, finding comparanda in the biographies of earlier pagan holy men. In this talk, I analyze Athanasius’ Life of Antony and Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius in light of the concept of the θεῖος ἁνήρ (holy man). Analyzing the narratological and thematic elements, as well as the political and religious climate of the late fourth century, I argue that Athanasius’ work can fruitfully be read as a rebuttal of the Life of Apollonius and by extension of the Neo-Pythagorean movement. More broadly, I propose the reading of early Christian hagiography as a calculated response to the burgeoning pagan revival of the third and fourth centuries.

A reception will follow after the lecture in Eaton Humanities 350.

This essay prize and lecture is sponsored by Mary E.V. McClanahan. The Department is grateful for her generous support.

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The Past in Fragments: Ennius’ Annals, Cato’s Origins, and the history of Rome

Professor Jackie Elliott

Wednesday, April 20, 7:00 p.m.
Hale Science Building Room 230

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ABSTRACT

The early Roman poet Ennius (239 – 169 BCE) and his contemporary, the statesman and censor Cato (234 – 149 BCE), each wrote groundbreaking accounts of the Roman past: Ennius by adapting the Greek hexameter— the meter in which Lucretius’ On the Constitution of the Universe, Vergil’s Aeneid, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and much else was subsequently to be written—and fitting to it an account of Roman history from its beginnings to his own present day. Cato’s narrative of the Roman past, the Origines (“Origins”), was the first prose history of Rome to be written in the Latin language. Each of these works had a profound influence on how Romans thought about the past in relation to their contemporary identity and on how that past was subsequently imagined in the genres of epic and historiography. Today, however, they each survive only in fragments: that is, as quotations or vaguer references relayed by later ancient authors, whose own dates stretch from the first century BCE to the ninth CE and even later. This talk describes some of the challenges and rewards of getting to grips with early Roman fragmentary material. 

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McClanahan Lecture Series

Lampreys and the Birth of Roman Imperial Jurisdiction
Dr. Zach Herz, ��������

Thursday, February 17th, 2022  |  7:00 p.m.  |  Hybrid

Vedius Pollio liked feeding people to lampreys. According to an urban legend that circulated in Imperial Rome, the emperor Augustus saved one of Pollio’s slaves from this grisly fate and punished Pollio for his brutality. In this talk, Dr. Herz considers what the Pollio story can tell us about how emperors worked. It reveals the complex mechanics of Augustan messaging, and offers a glimpse into the freighted moral questions raised by imperial power. What does it mean to go to the emperor for justice? What can he offer that other decisionmakers can’t? And what could justice even mean in the autocracy of the enslaving household, on one hand, or of the Principate on the other? Come for the man-eating fish, stay for the jurisdictional conflict.

This lecture is free and will be given in person (Eaton Humanities 250) and simultaneously hosted on Zoom.
This lecture is sponsored by Mary E.V. McClanahan.  CU Classics is grateful for her generous support.

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McClanahan Essay Prize Lecture

Dance of Dumuzi: the Choreography of Mesopotamian Space and Ritual
Hannah Slough, ��������

Thursday, January 20, 2022  |  7:00 p.m.  |  Virtual webinar

Modified Mesopotamian cylinder seal

In this study I examine the way ancient dancers in Mesopotamian region between the Tigris and the Euphrates used the movement of their bodies to create spaces of healing and protection and to connect with their gods. I argue that dance was a means to alter or access the religious potency in spaces that lay outside their usual discernible landscape–what I call “transpatial value.” Indeed, evidence from the proto-literate period through the Old Babylonian period (ca. 3400-1600 B.C.) provide us with three artistic motifs that suggest these dances were performed in ritual contexts: chain dances, the bow-legged dance, and the foot-clutching dance. I present a new interpretation of the “foot-clutching dance” as a staging of the Sumerian myth “The Death of Dumuzi” (ca. 1900-1600 B.C.). This dance, likely performed at public events, was a means for Mesopotamians to understand and ritually contend with unseen forces of good and ill.

This lecture is free and will be hosted on Zoom.

This essay prize and lecture is sponsored by Mary E.V. McClanahan.  CU Classics is grateful for her generous support.

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McClanahan Lecture Series

Death and Transfiguration:
The Tomb of Bibulus and the Remaking of Rome
Dr. Tyler Lansford, ��������

Monday, October 25th, 2021  |  7:00 p.m.  |  Virtual Webinar

Towards the end of the Roman Republic, a minor magistrate called Gaius Publicius Bibulus was accorded the honor of public burial at the southern end of the Campus Martius. Despite the small size and relative fragility of his tomb, its inscribed facade has remained in situ and visible for more than two millennia – a persistent if unlikely witness to the tremendous cycles of collapse and recovery, death and renewal that have transformed central Rome beyond recognition down the centuries.

This lecture is free and will be hosted on Zoom.
This lecture is sponsored by Mary E.V. McClanahan.  CU Classics is grateful for her generous support.

  View the PDF poster here

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