Past Lectures | Lecture Schedule

2023-2024

Building Community at Ancient Eleon: Monumental Constructions of the Mycenaean and Archaic Ages

Professor Bryan Burns, Wellesley College

Date: Tuesday, March 26
Time: 5:15 p.m.
Location: Herter 301, UMass Amherst

Greek-Canadian excavations have documented several phases of activity at Eleon, a small settlement in eastern Boeotia. This talk will present the architectural projects that redefined the site at two critical moments. During the Early Mycenaean era, a group of tombs were consolidated within a perimeter wall and then mounded over by a massive mud brick tumulus. In the Late Archaic period, a complex polygonal wall framed the location of religious activity on the elevated acropolis, part of a larger network encircling the dispersed constructions of a lower town.

Electra

Date: Thursday, February 29; Friday, March 1; Saturday, March 2
Time: 8:00 p.m.
Location: Holden Theater, Amherst College

Finally, a family more dysfunctional than yours! After a decade of reliving the night her mother killed her father, Electra confronts her moment of truth when her long-lost brother returns to avenge their father’s murder.

Directed by Classics/Theater and Dance major Caspian Rabaia ‘24 for their senior project, Nick Payne’s 2011 adaptation of Sophocles’s tragedy stars a cast of seven students, featuring Petra Brusiloff ‘24 in the title role for her senior project. Set designed by Jeff Bird, costumes designed by Kyle Artone, lights and sound designed by Julian Brown.

Free and open to the public. Reserve tickets here.

Seneca's First Intervention: The Consolation to Marcia

James Ker, University of Pennsylvania

Date: Thursday, March 7
Time: 5:00 p.m.
Location: Herter 301, UMass Amherst

In his earliest surviving work, The Consolation to Marcia, Seneca publicly intervenes in the time of a Roman woman's grief and also in Rome's literary, social, and political space. This paper re-examines the consolation, particularly its opening pages, and sets it in the context of Seneca's early public life.

Songs of Praise for Mortals: What They Can and Cannot Do

Mary Lefkowitz, Professor Emerita of Classical Studies, Wellesley College

Date: Thursday, November 30
Time: 4:30 p.m.
Location: Babbott Room (Octagon 200), Amherst College

Mary Lefkowitz, retired after forty-six years of teaching at Wellesley College, has remained an active scholar of Ancient Greek literature and culture. Recent publications include The Greek Plays, co-edited with James Romm (Penguin Random House, 2016) and Euripides and the Gods (Oxford University Press, 2015), which was shortlisted for the Phi Beta Kappa Gauss award in 2016. Earlier works released in new editions over the past fifteen years include Women's Life in Greece and Rome, co-edited with Maureen B. Fant (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), The Lives of the Greek Poets (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012) and Women in Greek Myth (2007). She is a Trustee of the American School of Classical Studies in Athens.

This lecture is sponsored by the Georges Lurcy Lecture Series Fund at Amherst College and the Amherst College Department of Classics.

The Anax Altar: Cult, Myth, and Worship on the Peak of Mount Lykaion

Kyle Mahoney, Swarthmore College

Date: Thursday, November 16
Time: 4:30 p.m.
Location: UMass Amherst, Herter 301

This lecture focuses upon the earliest use of the great Ash Altar dedicated to Zeus Lykaios atop the southern peak of Mt. Lykaion, the mountain believed to be the birthplace of Zeus by some ancient sources, located in the region of Arcadia in the Peloponnese of Greece. In addition to providing a review of the recent archaeological discoveries made by the Mt. Lykaion Excavation and Survey Project, we will explore the possible beliefs underlaying the material culture and residue of sacrifices found within the altar across the late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age periods (ca. 1550-700 BCE).

Prof. Mahoney has taught at Swarthmore since 2018 and is also Assistant Director of the Mt. Lykaion Excavation and Survey Project, having worked at the site since 2010.

Old Houses, New Viewers: Domestic Renovation in Roman Sicily

Nicole Berlin, Assistant Curator at the Davis Museum, Wellesley College

Date: Monday, November 6
Time: 5:30 p.m.
Location: Dwight 101, Mount Holyoke College

This talk explores three case studies (i.e., three houses) that were originally built in the Late Hellenistic period then renovated in the Roman Imperial period. Berlin considers wall painting, architecture, and mosaics to understand how Sicilian homeowners negotiated between the island's rich tradition of native Hellenism and the island's incorporation into the Roman Empire.

Remembering Octavia, People’s Princess of Neronian Rome

Lauren Ginsberg, Duke University

Date: Thursday, October 26
Time: 5:00 p.m.
Location: Seelye 201, Smith College

Octavia grew up as the daughter of one emperor, died the wife of another, and remained exceedingly popular with the people throughout her short life. When Nero tired to divorce her, the people of Rome rioted in the streets, leading to her brutal execution. So why is Octavia rarely included in studies of women in the early Roman empire?

Through a series of case studies, both textual and material, this talk will uncover the evidence for Octavia's popularity during her life, and the evidence for her enduring cultural memory at Rome after her death, including on theatrical stages of Rome.

Lauren Donovan Ginsberg is an associate professor of classical studies and theater studies at Duke University. Her work focuses on the intersection of Roman Literature (especially drama) and Roman cultural memory. She is the author of Staging Memory, Staging Strife: Empire and Civil War in the Octavia (Oxford University Press, 2016) and is currently writing a biography of Octavia for OUP's Women in Antiquity Series. Her work has been supported by the American Academy in Rome, the Loeb Classical Library Foundation, and the Memoria Roman project.

This lecture is supported by the Smith College Endowed Lecture Committee and the Department of Classical Languages and Literatures.338 BCE and the Transformation of Ancient Afro-Eurasia

Dan-el Padilla Peralta, associate professor of classics and associated faculty in African American studies
and affiliated faculty in Latino studies, Princeton University

Date: Tuesday, October 17
Time: 4:30 p.m.
Location: Amherst College, Pruyne Lecture Hall (Fayerweather 115)

The second half of the 4th c. BCE witnessed a series of dramatic transformations throughout Afro-Eurasia, foremost among them a rapid escalation in state formation processes and the emergence of new (or newly aggressive) territorial empires. Concentrating on the 330s BCE, this lecture will pair a thick description of these transformations—focusing on changes to practices of citizenship, slavery, and religious observance—with an attempt at their analysis.

Dan-el Padilla Peralta researches and teaches the religious history of the Roman Republic and Empire, global histories of slavery and citizenship, and critical race theory’s bearing on the historical and contemporary study of classics and classicism. He is the author of Undocumented: A Dominican Boy’s Odyssey from a Homeless Shelter to the Ivy League (Penguin 2015) and Divine Institutions: Religions and Community in the Middle Roman Republic (Princeton 2020). He has co-edited Rome, Empire of Plunder: The Dynamics of Cultural Appropriation (Cambridge 2017) and Making the Middle Republic: New Approaches to Rome and Italy, c. 400 – 200 BCE (Cambridge 2023). He is currently working on "Classicism and Other Phobias," the subject of his 2022 W. E. B. Du Bois Lectures at Harvard. He is a volume co-editor for The Cambridge History of the African Diaspora and sits on the board of
the RaceB4Race collective.

The annual Hugh Hawkins Lecture is hosted by the Amherst College Department of History and, this year, supported by the Amherst College Department of Classics.

Managing and Curating Yale University's Numismatic Collection

Dr. Benjamin Hellings, Head of the Department of Numismatics, Yale University Art Gallery

Date: Thursday, October 5
Time: 5:30 p.m.
Location: UMass Amherst, Herter Hall 601

For Zoom attendance, register here: https://tinyurl.com/y8dbuncy

Large and active numismatic collections are few and far between: in the United States, there are only a handful of actively managed ones, with most being housed in a university. Yale University’s Numismatic Collection is preeminent and is unquestionably the largest university collection in the country. Although there are many numismatists and specialists of the ancient world who study coins, numismatic curators who work in the United States are much fewer in number. This presentation will explore the history of the Yale Numismatic Collection, including coins from the Dura-Europos excavations, as well as the historic and present curation of the collection, including the management of physical storage, coin identification, publications, acquisitions and donations, exhibitions, and teaching. A behind-the-scenes overview of the first and only permanent numismatics gallery at an American university, which opened in May 2022, will also be presented.

The AIA National Lecture / William E. Metcalf Lecture in Numismatics is sponsored by the Western Massachusetts Society of the AIA and hosted by the UMass Amherst Department of Classics.

2022-2023

The Sentient Sponge: Between Natural History, Art History, and Philosophy

Verity Platt, Cornell University

Date: April 25, 2023
Time: 5:30 p.m.
Location: Amherst Room, 10th floor of the Campus Center, UMass Amherst

Remote option: https://umass-amherst.zoom.us/j/98290946935

Professor Verity Platt, professor of classics and history of art at Cornell University, will present this year's David F. Grose Memorial Lecture, sponsored by the Department of Classics at UMass Amherst.

Exploring how physical artifacts played an active role in the ancient production of knowledge, this lecture focuses on a rather unexpected object that was ascribed epistemic value in antiquity: the humble sponge. As naturally-formed products of the deep, sea sponges helped thinkers across a wide variety of literary genres and philosophical positions to formulate relations between matter and mind, perception and knowledge, and reality and representation. In the history of art (and especially in Pliny the Elder’s Natural History), the sponge was even hailed as a co-creator of images that transcended Platonic ontologies of representation to attain a form of visual “truth,” offering an ecology of ancient art that speaks to contemporary sensitivities to object-oriented and nonhuman modes of becoming.

Dr. Platt specializes in Greek and Roman art history, with a particular interest in the relationship between ancient literary and visual cultures, especially in the Hellenistic and Roman periods. Her research and publications focus on ancient theories of representation and sense-perception; media and intermediality; the material and visual culture of religion; the historiography of ancient art (especially the author Pliny the Elder); art and ecology; Roman wall-painting and funerary art; Graeco-Roman seal-stones; Hellenistic poetry (especially epigram); and Greek literature under the Roman Empire.

Archaeology, Museums, and War

Brian Rose, James B. Pritchard Professor of Archaeology at the University of Pennsylvania

Date: Saturday, April 1, 2023
Time: 11:00 a.m.
Location: Graham Hall, Smith College (Brown Fine Arts Center)

The wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria during the last two decades have profoundly influenced scholars and how they deal with the art and material culture of antiquity. In this lecture, archaeologist C. Brian Rose draws on his own experiences with museums, foreign wars, and archaeology to discuss the ways in which the past now dominates the present. He gives an overview of cultural heritage destruction and preservation programs in conflict zones and considers the subject of museums and repatriation requests in an age of increasing nationalism.

The 30th Annual Phyllis Williams Lehmann Lecture is sponsored by the Western Massachusetts Society of the Archaeological Institute of America.

Decolonizing Museums and the Case of the "Elgin Marbles": Exceptionalism vs. Solidarity?

Professor Elizabeth Marlowe, Colgate University

Date: Thursday, March 23, 2023
Time: 5:30-7:00 p.m.
Location: Kendade Hall, Room 305, Mount Holyoke

How have the arguments supporting the return of the Parthenon Marbles from the British Museum to Greece changed over time? Does the alleged Western "exceptionalism" of the sculptures help or harm the larger cause of the decolonization of museums?

Elizabeth Marlowe is associate professor of ancient and medieval art, chair of the Department of Art and Art History, and director of the Museum Studies Program at Colgate University. Her path-breaking book, Shaky Ground: Context, Connoisseurship and the History of Roman Art (2013), has generated a subfield of “groundedness” as a way of thinking about ancient art. Professor Marlowe has become a leading voice on the modern uses of the classical past, the art market, cultural property, and antiquities looting and repatriation.

This lecture is presented by the McCulloch Center for Global Initiatives and co-sponsored by the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum and the Departments of Art History and International Relations.

Model Minorities and Perpetual Foreigners in Euripides’s Heraclidae

Dr. Katherine Lu Hsu, College of the Holy Cross

Date: Tuesday, March 7, 2023
Time: 5:30 p.m.
Location: 601 Herter Hall, UMass Amherst

Sponsored by the UMass Department of Classics.

Ecology and Citizenship in Antiquity

Kevin Corrigan, Emory University

Date: Wednesday, March 8, 2023
Time: 5:30 p.m.
Location: Herter Hall 601, UMass Amherst

“The desire for more destroys what one has,” according to the ancient atomist Democritus (fr. 224) some 2,400 years ago. Democritus’s words seem particularly appropriate for our contemporary world, a world of unlimited material desire, dwindling material resources, and an ever-growing gap between the rich and the poor. In fact, strange as it might seem, just about all the major principles of ecology (a modern science that seeks to balance desire and resources) can be found in some form or other in the earliest recorded forms of human thinking. Does this mean that the ancients were wiser than we are or just that we are reading back our own preoccupations into earlier times? The aim of this talk is not to treat of the whole of ancient thought or to tell scientists or philosophers how to do science and philosophy, but to trace certain connections that have been virtually lost between the ancient and modern worlds and to build a bridge between two forms of practice and thought that have seemed light years apart: contemporary science (specifically, ecology and environmental philosophy) and Neoplatonism. Prof. Corrigan argues that we need to rediscover some of its fundamental thinking if our species is to survive into the next century, even into the second fifty years of the present century.

Kevin Corrigan is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Interdisciplinary Humanities in the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies (associated in Classics, Philosophy, and Religion) at Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia. A student of A. H. Armstrong, former Dean, and Professor of Philosophy, of St. Thomas More College, University of Saskatchewan, he works in the fields of Classics, Philosophy, History, Religion, Theology and Literature. He has written many articles ranging over the history of philosophical and religious thought from the Presocratics, Plato, and Aristotle, through Patristics, late Antiquity and Medieval thought, to Whitehead, Bergson, Levinas, and Derrida in contemporary thought. Among his recent books are Plotinus. Ennead VI.8: On the Free Will of the One, text, translation and commentary, for Las Vegas/New York/Zurich: Parmenides Press, 2017 (with John D. Turner); Love, Friendship, Beauty and the Good: Plato, Aristotle, and the Later Tradition, Wipf and Stock, Cascade Books, USA/UK, 2018; and Plotin. Oeuvres complètes, Traités 30- 33, Tome 2, Collection des Universités de France, Série grecque, 482. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2020 (with Jean-Marc Narbonne, Lorenzo Ferroni, John D. Turner, Zeke Mazur, Simon Fortier).

The Five College Faculty Seminar in Late Antiquity’s annual lecture is made possible by generous support from the Amherst College Religion Department, the UMass History Department, and Five Colleges, Inc.

Artifacts and Archaeological Processes: The Lives and Afterlives of Objects at Pompeii

Dr. Catherine Baker, Mount Holyoke College

Date: Monday, February 13, 2023

Time: 5:00 p.m.

Location: Herter Hall 601, UMass Amherst

For Zoom attendance, register here: https://bit.ly/3R8sJBY

From the chipped corners of an ancient die to the mortar on a reused inscription, artifacts tell stories. Archaeologists reconstruct these object biographies, tracing the lives of ancient artifacts from their creation to their final deposition. In this talk, I explore the stories of some of the artifacts excavated by the Pompeii Archaeological Research Project: Porta Stabia (University of Cincinnati), including dice and gaming pieces, statuettes, tools of potters, and even nails. These object biographies shed light not only on the way people first used these objects, but on their afterlives—the ways in which objects were discarded, recycled, and reused. These lives and afterlives of objects, in turn, shape the archaeology of a site, allowing us to trace the complex patterns of use, reuse, and discard which characterized the history of one neighborhood in the Roman city of Pompeii.

The Ellen and Charles S. La Follette Lecture is sponsored by the Western Mass Society of the Archaeological Institute of America and the UMass Amherst Department of Classics.

Myth as Method: An American Poet in Greece, through Modern Crises

A. E. Stallings

Date: Wednesday, November 16
Time: 5:30-7:00
Location: Integrative Learning Center 240, UMass Amherst

A. E. Stallings is an American poet and translator who lives in Athens, Greece. She has published four volumes of poetry (most recently Like, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize) and has a selected poems (This Afterlife) forthcoming in December from FSG. She has also published three volumes of verse translation, including Lucretius's The Nature of Things, Hesiod's Works and Days, and the Pseudo-Homeric Battle Between the Frogs and the Mice. She is currently working on a Georgics for Liveright. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur foundations and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. She is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Since 2015, she has run a poetry workshop for refugee women at the Melissa Network for Migrant Women in Athens.

The lecture, free and open to the public, is sponsored by the UMass Department of Classics with support from the Classics Departments of Amherst, Mount Holyoke and Smith Colleges.

Holding the Bag: A Contested Symbol in the Funerary Art of Late Roman Gaul

Jane Sancinito, UMass Lowell

Date: Tuesday, November 15
Time: 5:30-7:00 p.m.
Location: Herter Hall 601, UMass Amherst

This paper discusses a piece of common iconography in late Roman Gaul and Germania: purses or moneyboxes. Numerous figures, including known merchants and artisans, chose to be depicted holding these objects in a break from contemporary Italian practice, where even moneychangers avoided using images of money. Prof. Sancinito will discuss several historical theories about the meaning of these objects, and then propose a new way of reading the images that fits into a larger argument about the changing definition of greed in the second through fourth centuries CE.

Imperial Psychopathologies: Thucydides, Pushkin, Daneliya

Prof. Boris Maslov, University of Oslo

Date: Tuesday, October 25, 2022

Time: 4:30-6:00 p.m.

Location: Amherst College Center for Russian Culture (Webster Hall 202)

As the first European empire, that of classical Athens, collapsed during the Peloponnesian war, Thucydides reflected on what it is in human nature that makes imperial rule possible. Thucydidean analysis is an inspiration behind this talk, in which Maslov will present a set of philological case studies that illustrate how tyrannis ‘tyranny’ (the word Thucydides uses of the Athenians’ rule over other Greek cities) affects its subjects emotionally and morally. Following on an examination of alluring allegories of the old régime in Russian 19^th and 20^th c. literature and film, Professor Maslov will focus on Pushkin’s critique of empire in The Bronze Horseman.

Boris Maslov is Associate Professor of Classical Languages at the University of Oslo. He specializes in Russian literary theory and Ancient Greek literature, and is the author of Pindar and the Emergence of Literature (Cambridge UP, 2015). He also co-edited Persistent Forms: Explorations in Historical Poetics (Fordham UP, 2016), Poniatiia, idei, konstruktsii: ocherki istoricheskoi semantiki (NLO, 2019) and, most recently, a cluster of articles on transhistoricism in Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, vol. 174.

Reception to follow.

Seeing the Roman Empire through Ancient Souvenirs

Kimberly Cassibry, Wellesley College Department of Art

Date: Friday, October 21
Time: 4:00 p.m.
Location: Herter Hall, Room 227, UMass Amherst

The UMass Amherst Classics Department invites Five College faculty and students to attend a lecture by Professor Kimberly Cassibry, the author of the recent monograph, Destinations in Mind: Portraying Places on the Roman Empire's Souvenirs (OUP, 2021).

Material Encounters in a Hellenistic Egyptian Fortification

Jennifer Gates-Foster, Associate Professor, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Date: Thursday, October 6
Time: 5:00 p.m.
Location: Campus Center 205, Smith College

During the third century BCE, the Ptolemaic state created a network of forts and waystations that linked the Red Sea coast with the Nile Valley by providing support to caravans crossing the mountainous Eastern Desert. These remote outposts varied in size and infrastructure but shared a common purpose—to facilitate travel and protect state interests in the resources of the region and lands beyond, especially the horn of Africa and lands to the south. The population of these desert fortresses is revealed both through the rich textual record provided by ostraca recovered in the trash dumps and rooms, but also the material traces of the fort’s residents whose activities and connections are revealed through the contents of the abandoned quarters. Through this material, we discover a diverse community of transients that includes Egyptians, nomadic desert-dwellers and emigres from the Mediterranean and beyond.

Please note: audience masking is required.

Otherness and the Edges of Race: Orientalisms from the Emperor Nero to Modern America

Prof. Timothy Clark '12, Boston University

Date: Thursday, September 29
Time: 4:30 p.m.
Location: Paino Lecture Hall (Beneski 107), Amherst College

In recent years, events at home and abroad have demonstrated the urgent need to highlight and uproot structures of racism and inequality that dominate American life. Academic complicity in these structures has also come under increased scrutiny. How might fields like classics and history support renewed efforts to combat racism, Orientalism, and other forms of “othering,” and contribute to the creation of a more just and equitable society?

In this lecture, Professor Timothy Clark ’12 will show how comparing the ancient and modern worlds sheds new light on the conceptual frameworks that underpin racism and othering. Professor Clark will show how Roman officials under the emperor Nero and the American legal system in the 21st century situated Eastern “others” in conceptual and legal positions where their exact status was left ambiguous. He will explain why this form of Orientalism persists and how it personally impacted ancient Eastern nobles and modern Iranian-Americans alike. This lecture will show the dangerous consequences that result when the categories we create for different ethnic and racial groups are taken for granted.

This lecture is sponsored by the Departments of Classics, History, and Asian Languages and Civilizations, and the Georges Lurcy Lecture Series Fund at Amherst College.

Operation Demeter: What Italy’s Largest Antiquities Bust Reveals About Archaeological Looting Today

Dr. Fiona Greenland, University of Virginia
Archaeological Institute of America 2022-2023 National Lecture Program

Date: Tuesday, September 27
Time: 5:30 p.m.
Location: 601 Herter Hall, UMass Amherst
Zoom link: https://umass-amherst.zoom.us/j/93635373215

In 2018, the Italian Art Squad announced the conclusion of a four-year investigation into a vast looting network that traversed five European countries. "Operation Demeter" was the largest investigation in the unit's history. It recovered 20,000 artifacts valued at some 40 million Euros and resulted in the arrest of 23 people. What did Operation Demeter teach us about the looting and selling of archaeological materials? Today, nearly five years onward, what has changed—if anything—in the looting landscape?

Dr. Fiona Rose Greenland is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia, and founder and director of the CURIA Lab (Cultural Resilience Informatics and Analysis). She received a DPhil in Classical Archaeology from the University of Oxford and a PhD in Sociology from the University of Michigan. She works at the intersection of cultural sociology, comparative and historical sociology, and archaeology to investigate how archaeological materials feature in modern social life. She has conducted fieldwork in archaeological sites, museums, and antiquities shops in Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Her research is supported by the National Science Foundation and the Institute of the Humanities and Global Cultures at the University of Virginia. Her book, Ruling Culture: Art Police, Tomb Robbers, and the Rise of Cultural Power in Italy (Chicago 2021), received the 2022 Mary Douglas Prize for Best Book in Culture from the American Sociological Association.

This lecture is sponsored by the Archaeological Institute of America and the UMass Amherst Department of Classics.

2021-2022

Living with the Dead: Urbanism in the Roman Suburb

Allison Emmerson, Tulane University

Date: Friday, April 29
Time: 5:30 p.m.
Location: Herter Hall 601, UMass Amherst
Zoom attendance link: https://umass-amherst.zoom.us/j/96568895848

The Roman city was a bounded space, surrounded by barriers both physical and conceptual. Fortification walls, natural features, the edges of orthogonal grids, and religious borders like the pomerium all worked together to distinguish the urban from the non-urban, to define the city versus everything beyond it. The dead made up one of the primary groups regulated by such boundaries. From the codification of Rome’s earliest law code, the Twelve Tables, in the fifth century BCE, the dead were banned from the city proper and their tombs restricted to the zone outside it. Nevertheless, from the first century BCE Roman cities across the Italian peninsula began to develop suburbs, densely urbanized neighborhoods located beyond their traditional urban boundaries. Here, houses and shops, workshops and sanctuaries, rubbish dumps and major public buildings jostled cheek-to-jowl with the tombs of the dead, which grew increasingly monumental in the same period. This lecture examines the suburbs of Roman Italy as a historical phenomenon, calling on recent archaeological evidence to reconstruct these neighborhoods, which effectively urbanized the dead and tied them into patterns of daily life. Considering the factors that led to the development of suburbs, I argue that tombs were key; these were not simply passive memorials, but active spaces that both facilitated and furthered the social and economic life of the city.

Professor Emmerson received her PhD from the University of Cincinnati, specializing in Roman archaeology. She studies cities, and is especially interested in "marginal" areas and activities, like waste management and the treatment of the dead. Her first book, Life and Death in the Roman Suburb (Oxford 2020) won the James R. Wiseman Book Award in 2022, the Archaeological Institute of America's top honor for new books. Other ongoing projects involve publishing the results of fieldwork in Pompeii, Italy and Isthmia, Greece. She is a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome (FAAR '19) and of the American Council of Learned Societies (F'18).

This lecture is sponsored by the UMass Amherst Department of Classics. Reception to follow.

Towards an Archaeology of Identity: Late Classical Olynthos (Greece) and Beyond

Lisa Nevett, University of Michigan Ann Arbor

Date: Tuesday, April 26
Time: 5:30 pm
Location: Herter Hall Room 601, UMass Amherst
Zoom attendance: https://umass-amherst.zoom.us/j/99641067427

Between 2014 and 2019 the Olynthos Project (an archaeological research project sponsored by the Greek Archaeological Service and the British School at Athens) undertook field survey, geophysical survey and excavation at the site of ancient Olynthos in northern Greece. This lecture explores some of the ways in which preliminary results of this work can be used to explore how the city's inhabitants created their collective and individual identities through their daily practice, for example through their culinary practices and in selecting consumer goods. Professor Nevett suggest that extending this method of analysis to other ancient communities offers a means of evaluating cultural similarities and differences between them.

Lisa Nevett (PhD Cambridge) is a classical archaeologist whose particular interest is in using the material culture of the Greek and Roman worlds as a source for social history. To date, her research has focused on domestic architecture, and she has used the construction, decoration and articulation of space within houses to shed light on broader social questions. She is co-director of the Olynthos Project, a multi-disciplinary archaeological field project focused on the Classical city of Olynthos in northern Greece, and she has been involved in other survey and excavation projects in Greece, Turkey, Libya and Britain.

This lecture is sponsored by the UMass Amherst Department of Classics. Reception to follow.

On Sacred Ground: Interpreting Votive Images at Metaponto in Southern Italy

Rebecca Miller Ammerman, Colgate University

Date: Thursday, April 21
Time: 5:00 p.m.
Location: Pruyne Lecture Hall (Fayerweather 115)

The chora or territory lying beyond the walls of the urban center of Metaponto, a Greek colony in southern Italy, has been the focus of pioneering archaeological fieldwork by Dinu Adamesteanu of the Italian Archaeological Superintendency and Joseph C. Carter of the University of Texas for more than half a century. Metaponto’s chora may thus rightly boast to be perhaps the most thoroughly investigated of any city-state in the ancient Greek world. This path-breaking research on the dynamic landscape of the countryside forms the backdrop to Dr. Rebecca Miller Ammerman’s study of the statuettes and relief plaques made of baked clay that generations of worshippers dedicated as votive offerings at the rural sanctuary of Pantanello. Dr. Ammerman will illustrate the different angles from which she has analyzed this large assemblage of figured terracottas in order to shed light on the nature of the cult practiced at Pantanello and the concerns that worshippers hoped would be addressed by the patron deity of the sanctuary to whom they made their votive gift.

Rebecca Miller Ammerman is the Roy D. and Margaret B. Wooster Professor of the Classics at Colgate University. She is currently the director of excavations at the Temple of Athena as part of the North Urban Paestum Project. Her archaeological research concentrates on the material evidence for the practice of cult in Magna Graecia with a special focus on the dedication of terracotta figurines and reliefs. She is the author of The Sanctuary of Santa Venera at Paestum II. The Votive Terracottas (Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2002) and has published several studies on excavated assemblages of terracottas from Metaponto, such as those in The Chora of Metaponto 7. The Greek Sanctuary at Pantanello, J.C. Carter and K. Swift, eds. (University of Texas Press, Austin 2018) 1087-1392.

Her lecture will supplement the content of Professor Rebecca Sinos's spring course, Archaeology of Greece. It is made possible by support from the Lamont Fund.

COVID protocols: Attendees not participating in the Amherst College COVID testing program will be required to show either proof of full COVID vaccination and proof of booster, or a negative result from a test taken within 72 hours preceding the event. Indoor masking is required.

Student Workshop

The Satyr, the Goddess, and the Oriental Cast: Subversive Classicism in The Conjure Woman

Date: Monday, April 4
Time: 4:30 p.m.
Location: CHI Think Tank, Frost Library

CHI fellow Trent Masiki presents a student workshop exploring Black classicism. In “Superstitions and Folk-lore of the South” and “Post-Bellum—Pre-Harlem,” Charles W. Chesnutt acknowledges the debt The Conjure Woman owes to Afro-folkloric traditions and practices, but neither of these essays acknowledges the debt The Conjure Woman owes to classical mythology. Although these two works of literary criticism are silent on Chesnutt’s engagement with the classics, his fiction, journals, essays, speeches, and marginalia are not. They demonstrate that he deploys the classical myths and histories of the ancient world to critique the injustices of racial slavery, Reconstruction, and the Nadir. I argue that "The Goophered Grapevine" is a revision and fusion of “Transformation of the Maenads” and “The Rape of Persephone,” two Greco-Roman myths. Furthermore, I argue that "Po' Sandy" is a revision of “Of Isis and Osiris,” an ancient Egyptian myth. The antebellum Southern settings, gothic plots, and enslaved protagonists of "The Goophered Grapevine" and "Po' Sandy" mask the classical myths which these stories subversively revise. Chesnutt uses this narrative strategy to associate the capitalist destruction of the natural world with the dismemberment of slave marriages, families, psyches, and bodies, his purpose being to promote African American intellectual, moral, and civic aptitude in the Nadir by debunking the postbellum myths of benign slavery, contented slaves, and African American conjugal and familial apathy. This examination of Chesnutt’s subversive classicism amends the prevailing theories of the mythological provenances of "The Goophered Grapevine" and "Po' Sandy" and thereby constitutes a unique and corrective intervention in the interpretive history of The Conjure Woman.

Trent Masiki earned his PhD in Afro-American Studies from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst in 2017. He has an MFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College and an MA in English from Texas A&M University. His research interests focus on African American and Latino American literature and culture from 1865 to the present.

Polychromy, New (and Old) Technologies, and the Parthenon Metopes

Date: Tuesday, April 5, 2022
Time: 5:00 p.m.
Location: Pruyne Lecture Hall (Fayerweather 115)

Dr. Katherine Schwab will speak on a selection of Parthenon metopes to analyze technologies, past and present, to better understand the original compositions and their polychromatic appearance. The original ninety-two carved marble panels displayed four major mythological battles prominently positioned above the columns on all four sides of the temple. Today we have a greatly altered impression due to their current state of damage and location. From graphite drawings to Virtual Reality, we are in a position to better understand these nearly life-sized compositions that formed the public face of Athena’s temple on the Athenian Acropolis.

Dr. Schwab is Professor of Art History & Visual Culture in the Department of Visual and Performing Arts, Director of the Classical Studies Program, and Curator of the Plaster Cast Collection for the Fairfield University Art Museum, at Fairfield University in Connecticut.

A specialist in ancient Greek art and archaeology, her research focuses on the Parthenon sculptural program, especially the metopes. Scans of her metope drawings are on permanent display in the Acropolis Museum. The original graphite drawings formed a traveling exhibition in the US, An Archaeologist’s Eye: The Parthenon Drawings of Katherine A. Schwab, from 2014 to 2018 organized by the Fairfield University Art Museum in collaboration with Creighton University and the Timken Museum in San Diego. Her drawings and photographs have formed three separate exhibitions at the Greek Consulate General in New York City. Most recently she has served as a scholarly consultant concerning the Parthenon metopes for the Virtual Reality project, Athens Reborn: Acropolis, made by www.flyoverzone.com, with an anticipated launch in April 2022. Dr. Schwab’s other primary scholarly interest concerns the meaning and function of ancient hairstyles beginning with the Caryatids on the Athenian Acropolis.

Her lecture will supplement the content of Professor Rebecca Sinos's spring course, Archaeology of Greece. The event is sponsored by the Amherst College Department of Classics and the Lamont Fund.

“The most richly imagined fabrics of the past”: Breaking Categories and Reassembling Ancient Worlds

Date: Thursday, April 7
Time: 5:30 p.m.
Location: UMass Amherst, Herter Hall 601; also on Zoom
Registration in advance is required for in-person attendance; please register here.
(The registration form will remain open until seating is full.)

The University of Massachusetts Amherst Department of Classics is pleased to announce the eighteenth annual David F. Grose Memorial Lecture with Dr. Dimitri Nakassis, professor and chair of classics at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Forty years ago, in his book Europe and the People Without History (1982), the anthropologist Eric Wolf impatiently asked, “If there are connections everywhere, why do we persist in turning dynamic, interconnected phenomena into static, disconnected things?” We could ask the same question today. Our scholarly tools and institutions typically replicate disconnected Greeks, Romans, and Phoenicians instead of an interconnected Mediterranean. While much progress has been made, this paper argues that the study of the ancient world needs to rigorously identify and destroy the categories that prevent us from understanding what Dan-el Padilla Peralta has recently (2021) described as “the most richly imagined fabrics of the past.”

Dr. Nakassis specializes in the textual production of early Greek communities and is the co-director of the Western Argolid Regional Project (WARP). His book, Individuals and Society in Mycenaean Pylos (2013) illustrates through the application of a new prosopographic methodology that palatial organization and social status within the Pylian kingdom were more fluid than accounted for in previous models. He has also published on Homer and Hesiod, Greek religion and history, archaeological survey, and Linear A. In 2015 he was named a MacArthur fellow.

A reception will follow in Herter Hall 301.

Philomela’s Tongue: Speech, Silence, and the Voice of Gender

Date: Friday, October 22
Time: 4:00 p.m.
Location: UMass Amherst, Herter 601

The UMass Classics Department is pleased to announce a lecture by Professor Daniel Libatique (College of the Holy Cross) entitled “Philomela’s Tongue: Speech, Silence, and the Voice of Gender.” There will be a reception to follow the lecture, also in Herter Hall. Please note that this is an in-person event.

Conference: "Virgilian Space and Places"

The Departments of Classics of Amherst College and UMass Amherst, supported by the Lamont Fund, are hosting a conference on Virgilian space and places on Friday and Saturday, October 15 and 16. The speakers are Alessandro Barchiesi (NYU/Siena), Brian Breed (UMass), Cynthia Damon (Penn), Elena Giusti (Warwick), Alison Keith (Toronto), Micah Myers (Kenyon), Aaron Seider (Holy Cross), Sarah Spence (Georgia), Richard Thomas (Harvard), Graham Zanker (Canterbury/Adelaide), and Tom Zanker (Amherst).

The full conference schedule can be found here (revised 9-29-21). All sessions will allow for both in-person and virtual attendance.

The event is free and open to the public but registration is required both for in-person attendance (on a space-available basis and as campus Covid-19 protocols allow) and to receive a link to participate remotely via Zoom. Early registration is encouraged (by October 1 if ordering lunch on Saturday).

The registration form is available here.

Please contact the organizers with any questions: Brian Breed (bbreed@umass.edu) and Tom Zanker (azanker@amherst.edu).

Celebrating Isis: Ritual and Ethnicity in Apuleius’s Metamorphoses

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Professor Vassiliki Panoussi, Chair of Classical Studies at William and Mary, will deliver a lecture entitled “Celebrating Isis: Ritual and Ethnicity in Apuleius’s Metamorphoses.” This is an in-person event at the University of Massachusetts on Friday, October 1 at 4:00 p.m. in Herter Hall, Room 301.

Khameleon Productions Presents Uprooting Medea

Date: Thursday, February 17
Time: 5:00 p.m.
Location: Zoom Webinar
Registration in advance is required. Please use this link:
https://amherstcollege.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_Q2HHWmdfQ2aPmPBuX3FsSQ

UK-based Khameleon Productions, led by Shivaike Shah, will introduce the first BIPOC translation and production of Euripides’s Medea, with discussion to follow. Khameleon's Medea questions the pertinent topics of race, belonging and identity, themes already prevalent in Euripides’s original. The presentation will cover the development and adaptation of the work since the production's original conception at Oxford in 2018, and explore the creative practice of elevating global-majority artists through multimedia forms including theater, film, music and poetry. Further, it will provide insight into the upcoming short film version of the project (to be released later in 2022); excerpts
and behind-the-scenes footage will illuminate Khameleon's vision for Medea.

More information about Khameleon's US tour is available here.

This virtual event is sponsored by the Amherst College Department of Classics, the Program in European Studies, the Global Pre-Modern Working Group of the Center for Humanistic Inquiry, and the Eastman and Georges Lurcy Lecture Series Funds at Amherst College, as well as Smith College and the Brown Arts Institute.

Daisies at the Hinterland: Trans-Saharan Decoration from Meroitic Nubia

The University of Massachusetts Classics Department hosts Dr. Annissa Malvoisin of the Bard Graduate Center and Brooklyn Museum.

Date: Monday, February 28

Time: 5:30 p.m.

Place: via Zoom; viewing party in UMass, Herter Hall Room 301

Zoom attendance: https://umass-amherst.zoom.us/j/93667018282

Reception to follow.

Nicias the Superstitious?

Dr. Michael Leese, Associate Professor, Department of History, University of New Hampshire

Date: Friday, March 11, 2022
Time: 5:30 p.m.
Place: UMass, Herter Hall 601

The Athenian politician and general Nicias is typically seen as extraordinarily superstitious by ancient and modern scholars alike, his panicked terror blamed for the destruction of the Sicilian Expedition in the Peloponnesian War. But a reassessment of the sources and a new approach tells a different story. In this lecture, Dr. Michael Leese will examine Nicias’ business management and military commands through the lens of economic mentality, which reveals that Nicias was just as rational in his everyday decisions as modern individuals described in economic theory. His use of seers was limited to specific contexts of unavoidable uncertainty, and he typically pursued profit and managed risk without consulting the gods. Moreover, a close reading of Thucydides’s account actually suggests that it was the terror of the soldiers under his command and not Nicias’s own fear that can be most accurately labeled as superstitious. Nicias’s role in the episode where he is blamed for superstition can better be explained by decision fatigue theory than irrational fear of the gods.

Sponsored by the UMass Amherst Department of Classics. Reception to follow.

2020 - 2021

Classics and White Supremacism in the United States: a Brief History

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Thursday, April 22
5:00 p.m. (EDT)
Zoom registration: https://trincoll.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_dxZxAfKkTLigQv1K_YXK-w

Rebecca Futo Kennedy, who studies notions of race and ethnicity in the ancient world, will speak on the reception of classical antiquity within the US white supremacist movement. Kennedy is associate professor of classics, women’s and gender studies, and environmental studies at Denison University and director of the Denison Museum. She is the author of Immigrant Women in Athens: Gender, Ethnicity, and Citizenship in the Classical City and editor of the Handbook to Identity and the Environment in the Classical and Medieval Worlds. She is a translator and editor of Race and Ethnicity in the Classical World: An Anthology of Primary Sources and editor of The Companion to the Reception of Aeschylus.

This lecture is sponsored by the Department of Classics at Amherst College and the Department of Classical Studies at Trinity College, with support from the Lamont Fund. All Five College faculty, staff and students are welcome.

Kalamianos: the Brief but Brilliant Life of a Mycenaean Harbor

Kalamanos: The Brief but Brilliant Life of a Mycenaean Harbor

Friday, April 16
4:30 p.m.

The University of Massachusetts Classics Department hosts Thomas Tartaron of the University of Pennsylvania for the annual David F. Grose Memorial Lecture.

Xenophon and the Athenian Democracy: The Education of an Elite Citizenry

Thursday, April 1, 2021
5:00 p.m.

The UMass Amherst Department of Classics invites Five College colleagues and students to join Prof. Matthew Christ for a lecture based on his recent book (Cambridge University Press, 2020). Christ examines how Xenophon instructs his elite Athenian readers on transforming themselves to lead the Athenian democracy successfully, thereby simultaneously serving Athens’s interests and their own.

Global Learning Through the Pandemic and Beyond: Ancient Archaeology Lectures

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Thursday, March 18

10:55 a.m.-12:10 p.m.

"Exploring Domestic Decoration at Pompeii and Herculaneum"

Ambra Spinelli of the Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies in Rome will speak about her work on the tablinum.

Thursday, April 1

12:15-1:30 p.m.

"Current Archaeological Work on Bronze Age Corinth"

Dr. Ioulia Tzonou of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens will speak on the excavation and recent findings at Corinth.

Both virtual lectures sponsored by the Lewis Global Studies Center at Smith College.

Gods and Robots: Imagining Artificial Life in Antiquity

March 4, 2021
5:00 p.m.

Adrienne Mayor's book, Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines and Ancient Dreams of Technology (Princeton), explores how ancient myths envisioned artificial life, automata, self-moving devices, and human enhancements—and how these visions relate to and reflect the ancient invention of real animated machines. Mayor is also the author of The Amazons: Lives and Legends of Warrior Women across the Ancient World (Princeton) and The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome’s Deadliest Enemy (Princeton), which was a finalist for the National Book Award. She is a research scholar in classics and the history of science at Stanford University.

Sponsored by the Department of Classics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Girls Will Be Boys? Investigating Images Of Athletic Women In Ancient Etruscan Art

February 25, 2021
5:00 p.m. (EST)

Bridget Sandhoff of the University of Nebraska offers a virtual lecture organized through the University of Massachusetts and sponsored by the Archaeological Institute of America.

Any mention of the human body in the art of classical antiquity often conjures up images of well-muscled Greek athletes such as Polykleitos’s Doryphoros, Myron’s Diskobolos and the Riace bronzes. The primacy of the idealized nude male body is ubiquitous in Hellenic culture. Though Etruria emulated multiple facets of Greek civilization, the Etruscans modified Greek models to fit their own, distinctive needs. The same is true for Etruscan representations of the human body.

The artistic record provides a wealth of information from which we can determine how the Etruscans viewed the body and recorded it. A general survey of their art shows a clear debt to Greek examples, yet a closer examination reveals a distinctive somatic aesthetic for women that flouts conventional paradigms. Female representations are diverse, ranging from elaborately clothed women to nude females rife with muscle. On several occasions, nude men accompany the muscular women. This lecture examines the nude, athletic female somatotype that becomes popular in fourth century BCE Etruria, its frequent pairing with a nude, male partner, and the reason for such imagery.

John Kachuba speaks on Shapeshifters: A Brief History from Antiquity to Modern Times (Virtual Lecture)

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Sponsored by the UMass Amherst Department of Classics

Thursday, October 22, 7:00pm (EDT)

2019 - 2020

Canceled.

THURSDAY, MARCH 26 7:00 PM

THE FRANK AND LOIS GREEN SCHWOERER '49, ANNUAL HISTORY LECTURE

Guilt and Enslavement Habits of Thought from the Ancient World to Modern America

Noel Lenski, Yale University

This lecture will examine the mental connection between notions of guild and justifications for slavery. From Noah's "curse of Ham," to the mals usos of medieval Spain, to vani marriages in South Asia, to convict leasing in 20th-century America, the attribution of guilt has been used to lock people into bondage across time and space globally. We will explore the consequences of this mental slide continuing right up to contemporary America's carceral state.

Professor Noel Lenski, a historian of the Roman Empire in late antiquity, has produced important studies - such as Failure of Empire: Valens and the Roman State in the Fourth Century A.D. and Constantine and the Cities - that highlight the roles of emperors and responses to their autocratic power. He has also focused on slavery in, e.g., "Violence and the Roman Slave" (2016) and "Peasant and Slave in Late Antique North Africa, c. 100-600 CE" (2017).

SMITH COLLEGE, FORD HALL- RM. 240

Cancelled.

THURSDAY, APRIL 2 5:30 PM

Reading Plautus with Frederick Douglass

Matthew Leigh, St. Anne's College, Oxford

DWIGHT 101, MOUNT HOLYOKE COLLEGE

Cancelled.

SATURDAY, APRIL 4

The 30th Annual Phyllis Williams Lehmann Lecture

Brian Rose, University of Pennsylvania

SMITH COLLEGE

Cancelled.

THURSDAY, APRIL 9 5:00 PM

Rebecca Ammerman, Colgate University

AMHERST COLLEGE, BENESKI BUILDING- RM. 107 (Paino Lecture Hall)

Cancelled.

THURSDAY, APRIL 16 5:00 PM

The Sixteenth Annual David F. Grose Memorial Lecture

Kalamianos: The Brief but Brilliant Life of a Mycenaean Harbor

Thomas F. Tartaron, University of Pennsylvania

UMASS AMHERST, HERTER HALL #227

Cancelled.

THURSDAY, APRIL 23 Time TBA

Lisa Nevett, University of Michigan

Cancelled.

THURSDAY, MARCH 12 5:00 PM

The Ancient Studies Annual Lecture at Smith College

Fictions of Citizenship in Livy's History of Rome

Denis Feeney, Princeton University

SMITH COLLEGE, SEELYE 201

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 4 5:00 PM

Space, Scale, and Canon in Ancient Literary Culture

Reviel Netz, Stanford University

UMASS AMHERST, HERTER HALL- #301

THURSDAY, MARCH 5 5:00 PM

Archaeological Institute of America- Western Mass Society presents

Where Did the Pompeians Go? Searching for Refugees from the Eruption of Vesuvius, AD 79

Steven Tuck, Miami University

AMHERST COLLEGE, BENESKI BUILDING- RM. #107 (Paino lecture hall)

MONDAY, MARCH 2 4:00 - 6:00 PM Agosti and Oswald on Greek Epigraphy

Poetry on Stone: Reading Late Antique Metrical Inscriptions

Gianfranco Agosti, Università di Roma "La Sapienza"

Professor Agosti is one of the foremost authorities on late antique Greek philology, especially the language of Greek epigraphic poetry. A prolific and imaginative scholar, he comes to us from the largest department of Classical Philology in world, the Università di Roma "La Sapienza." He will continue from here to give talks at Yale, Princeton, and Brown.

The Origin of Victory Epigrams

Simon Oswald, UMass Amherst

Both will look at the language, layout, and modes of reading Greek poetry on stone from the classical period to late antiquity.

UMASS, HERTER HALL, RM. 601

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 27 5:00 PM

THE FIVE COLLEGE FACULTY SEMINAR IN CLASSICS*

Parce, Pater: Martial's "Augustan" Commentary on Domitianic Rome in Ep. 5.7

A work in progress by Virginia M. Closs, UMass, Amherst

UMASS, HERTER HALL, RM. 301

* All 5-C faculty are welcome.

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 20 5:30PM

Cincinnatus at Home: Urban 'Meadows' and the Topography of Ancient Rome

Nicole Brown, Williams College

MOUNT HOLYOKE COLLEGE, DWIGHT 101

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 3 5:30 PM

THE FIVE COLLEGE FACULTY SEMINAR IN CLASSICS*

Fake News Thucydides, Sad!

A first look at a work in progress by

Simon Oswald, UMass Amherst

UMASS, ILC (INTEGRATED LEARNING CENTER) - N111

*All 5C faculty are welcome.

NOVEMBER 21 5:00 - 6:30 PM

Race and Representation in the Roman Empire: Images of Africans between Myth, Stereotype, and Reality

Sinclair Bell, Northern Illinois University

UMASS, HERTER HALL, ROOM 301

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 7 5:00 PM

Dreams in Greek and Roman Religion: The Evidence of Inscriptions

Gil Renberg, University of Michigan and Western MA AIA, LaFollette lecturer

UMASS AMHERST, HERTER HALL #301

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 8 3:00 - 6:00 PM

UMass Classics Department Colloquium

Flavian (Re)Configurations: Civic Ideals and Urban Realities

UMASS, INTEGRATIVE LEARNING CENTER (ILC), S331

Additional details

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 24 5:00PM

Looking for Lyric Poetry in Homer's Iliad

Andrew Ford, Princeton University

SMITH COLLEGE, SEELYE #201

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 31 5:00 - 8:00PM

New England Ancient Historians Colloquium

Program and registration information

UMASS CAMPUS CENTER, 10TH FLOOR, AMHERST ROOM

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 26 5:00 PM

From Spoils to Saviors: Re-valuing the First Roman Wives as Civic Actors in Livy's "From the Foundation of the City"

Meredith Safran, Trinity College

Many of Rome’s founding civic myths conjoin the community’s political transformation with sexualized violence against women. Since the “women in antiquity” movement took off in the 1980s, feminist scholars have sought to understand the role of such gendered violence in Roman culture and its implications for the reception of ancient Rome in the Western classical tradition, given how many societies continued to draw inspiration from Roman practices and ideas throughout modernity. This talk will focus on the episode traditionally known as “the rape of the Sabine women,” in which the first Romans staved off the extinction of their new community and established Rome’s version of marriage, but did so by obtaining their wives through a mass bride abduction. Unlike most of the women who fall victim to violence in Rome’s founding myths, the Sabine women not only survive their assault; by the end of their story, as told by the Roman historian Livy, they’ve won universal respect and recognition for saving both new and old communities, which they risk their own lives to defend. We’ll explore how such a triumph could result from a story that begins with assault and consider why these women’s remarkable rise in status is not how people tend to remember this story today.

Sponsored by the Georges Lurcy Lecture Series Fund at Amherst College and the Department of Classics.

AMHERST COLLEGE, BENESKI HALL, PAINO LECTURE HALL

2018-2019

MONDAY, APRIL 29 5:00PM

Revenge of the Trojans~ Polemon of Ilion, Demetrios of Skepsis, and Pergamon's Quest for Authenticity

Noah Kaye, Michigan State University

The Library of Pergamon competed with its Alexandrian rival for books and personnel, seems to have
left behind its own textual traditions of Homer and Aristotle, and is even reputed to have given us the
word “parchment.” What good did it ultimately do for its funders, the Attalid kings? It has often been
assumed that the Library served chiefly to burnish the Hellenic credentials of an ethnically Anatolian
dynasty. The most pressing ideological need, however, was reinforcement of a shaky claim to rule
western Anatolia. To understand how the Attalids sought to achieve this, we must revisit what Rudolph
Pfeiffer called Pergamon’s “antiquarianism” and reinterpret the well-publicized affinity of Pergamon’s
kings with the Trojan past as a play for Priam’s former subjects.

UMASS AMHERST, HERTER HALL 301

Friday, April 26th

Transforming History: Generic Interaction in Greek and Roman Historiography in Honor of Professor Elizabeth Keitel

Speakers:

Jane Chaplin- When Historians Make History

Timothy Joseph- Ubique lamenta: The place of lament in Latin epic and historiography

Christina Kraus- Multiplying disasters: the many-fronted, multiplex bellum in Livy 5

John Marincola- Asinius Pollio and the Roman Revolution

UMass Amherst, Campus Center

Additional details to follow.

TUESDAY, APRIL 23rd 5:00 PM - 6:30 PM

The Radicalism of Roman Decline and Renewal: The History of a Dangerous Concept

Edward Watts, Department of History, University of California San Diego

Notions of Roman decline and calls for Roman renewal appears continually in Roman literature stretching from the time of Plautus and Cato the Elder to the end of Byzantium. This talk examines three distinctive instances in which ideas about Roman decline emerged to justify a particular sort of radical Roman renewal. The first instance spans the last years of the Republic and early principate of Augustus and sees Rome's first emperor respond to the declinism of the late Republic with aggressive statements about the Roman renewal he brought. The second concerns the so-called Altar of Victory controversy of 384 AD in which pagans root calls for the restoration of traditional religion in a series of claims about famine and declining crop yields. And the third centers around the sixth century Constantinopolitan and ninth-century Carolingian attempts to use Roman decline to justify aggressive actions against people who saw themselves living in a Roman Empire. These are, then, three cases of Roman decline that confuse the standard narrative of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire that we have all become familiar with. And they also show how deeply connected claims of decline and calls for radical renewal usually are.

AMHERST COLLEGE, FROST LIBRARY, CENTER for HUMANISTIC INQUIRY (2nd floor)

FRIDAY, APRIL 12TH 2:30 - 4:30 PM

Haute Couture in Ancient Greece: The Spectacular Costumes of Ariadne and Helen of Troy

Bernice R. Jones, Ph.D

SMITH COLLEGE, SEELYE HALL 201

Workshop for Students

A chance to take a closer look at (and maybe even try on) the costumes and fabric that may have been used during the Aegean Bronze Age.

SMITH COLLEGE, DEWEY HOUSE, DEWEY COMMON ROOM

MONDAY, APRIL 15TH 4:30 PM

Imagining the Underworld: Life after Death in Ancient Greek Religion

Radcliffe G. Edmonds III, Bryn Mawr

How did the ancient Greeks imagine the underworld? The depictions of the life after death reveal the variety of conflicting ideas in the Greek tradition, from the continuative existences after death that preserve cultural memories to the compensatory afterlives that rectify the incompleteness of justice in the mortal world to the grand cosmic visions that bring together life and death, mortal and immortal, chthonic and celestial, into a single system. All these imaginings of afterlife make use of familiar tropes, names, and images from the Greek mythic tradition, and each of the authors of an afterlife vision thinks with and through an imagined underworld in different ways for different ends.

AMHERST COLLEGE, BENESKI BUILDING, PAINO LECTURE HALL (RM.#107)

TUESDAY, APRIL 9TH 12:00 PM

Consent and Consensuality in Ancient Greek and Roman Marriage

Judith Hallett, Professor Emerita of Classics, University of Maryland

SMITH COLLEGE, SEELYE HALL 304

Lunch will be provided.

THURSDAY, APRIL 4TH 6:00 - 7:30 PM

Text, Intertext, Paratext: Reading the Emperor Julian

Alan Ross, University of Southampton

AMHERST COLLEGE, VALENTINE HALL, LEWIS-SEBRING LOUNGE

SATURDAY, APRIL 6TH 11:00 AM

The 29th Annual Phyllis Williams Lehmann Lecture

The Archaeological Institute of America, Western Mass. Society

Rediscovering the Villa dei Papiri at Herculaneum

Kenneth Lapatin, Curator of Antiques at the J. Paul Getty Museum

SMITH COLLEGE, STODDARD HALL

THURSDAY, MARCH 21ST 5:30 - 7:00 pm

Annual Five College Lecture in Late Antiquity

Ascent to God: The Gospel of Mary reads The Gospel of John

Karen L. King, Harvard University

AMHERST COLLEGE, FROST LIBRARY (2nd floor), CENTER FOR HUMANISTIC INQUIRY

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 20TH 5:30 pm

Fake News on Aeneas' Shield? Possible Responses to Lying, Exaggeration, and Encomium in Aeneid 8

James O'Hara, UNC Chapel Hill

UMASS AMHERST, HERTER HALL, ROOM #301

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 15TH 4-6 pm

Symposium. Pre-Modern Global First-Year Seminar: Contexts, Challenges, Futures.

Nigel Nicholson, Reed College & Denise Schaeffer, Holy Cross

AMHERST COLLEGE, FROST LIBRARY [2ND FLOOR], CENTER FOR HUMANISTIC INQUIRY

This symposium features two veterans of Liberal Arts College First-Year Seminars, who will discuss a range of issues concerning the seminars taught at their institutions, including recent curricular and design changes and the evolving landscape of the First-Year Seminar in U.S. higher education. They'll address questions of programming, course design, pedagogical aims, crucial contexts and conflicts, and community building, among other topics.

Open to faculty, staff, and students of the Five Colleges. Please come join the conversation!

Sponsored by The Global Pre-Modern First Year Seminar Working Group, The Dean of the Faculty, The Center for Humanistic Inquiry, the Department of the Classics, and the Program in European Studies

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 14TH 4:30-6 PM

Greek Doctors and Money

Nigel Nicholson, Reed College

AMHERST COLLEGE, FROST LIBRARY [2ND FLOOR], CENTER FOR HUMANISTIC INQUIRY

Sponsored by Ampersand, the Department of the Classics, the Corliss Lamont Lecture Fund, the Health Professions Committee, and the Center for Humanistic Inquiry

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 13TH 5:30 pm

AIA Society: Western Massachusetts lecture

Revolt! Why the Jews took on Rome

Andrea Berlin, AIA Norton Lecturer, Boston University

MOUNT HOLYOKE COLLEGE, ART BUILDING, GAMBLE AUDITORIUM

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 29TH 4:30 PM - 6:00 PM

Five College Classics Faculty Seminar*

"Silva sonans: The Metapoetic Pastoral Landscape in Virgil's Georgics"

Julia Scarborough, Amherst College

AMHERST COLLEGE, FROST LIBRARY [2nd floor], CENTER FOR HUMANISTIC INQUIRY

* Open to Five College Faculty

Friday, October 19th 3:00 PM

The Fifteenth Annual David Grose Memorial Lecture

Cosa: Past, Present, and Future

Russell Scott, Bryn Mawr College

UMass Amherst, Integrative Learning Center (ILC) , S240

The lecture will be followed by a round-table discussion on the future of work at Cosa with the next generation of Roman archaeologists. Reception to follow.

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 16TH 4:30 PM

Contextual Relevance and the Meaning of Formulaic Epithets in Iliad 1.1-100

Seth Schein, University of California Davis

UMass Amherst, Herter Hall #301

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 27TH 5:30 PM

Archaeological Institute of America, Western Massachusetts Society

Places for the Living and Places for the Dead

Paul Miller, President, Denver AIA Society

UMass Amherst, Integrated Learning Center, Room S231

2017 - 2018

SATURDAY, APRIL 7th 10:30 AM

28th Annual Phyllis Williams Lehmann Lecture

The Archaeological Institute of America, Western Mass Society

Jack Davis and Sharon Stocker, University of Cincinnati

Excavation of the Griffin Warrior's Grave at Pylos

Smith College, Brown Fine Arts Center, Graham Hall

THURSDAY, MARCH 29th 5:30 PM

New England Ancient Historians Colloquium (NEAHC)

Joseph McAlhany, University of Connecticut

"One Head is Better than Three: Varro's So-Called Trikaranos and the First Triumvirate."

Britta Ager, UMass- Amherst will provide the commentary.

Mount Holyoke College,Willits-Hallowell Center, Wiese-Meriwether room.

Registration required.

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 28th 4:30 PM

Mark Abbe, University of Georgia

Mimesis and More: The Polychromy of Greek and Roman Marble Portraits

Today the “realism” of the white marble portraits that survive from Greek and Roman antiquity is frequently associated with their highly detailed physiognomy and apparent specificity, which suggest a relationship to an individual subject. In antiquity, of course, the engaging and often arresting appearance of these sculpted images was defined in no small part by their nuanced lifelike painting and rich polychrome detailing. Although now most of the painting and other forms of polychromy that defined these images in antiquity is lost to us, detailed examination increasingly allows us to glimpse vestiges of ancient polychromy and thereby how the visual language of portraits was defined not by form alone but in combination styles of coloration varying from lifelike naturalism to sumptuous radiance. This talk presents case studies of marble portraits – royal, imperial, and private – with extant polychromy that, upon close examination, elucidates the definition and meanings of these subjects in antiquity.

Amherst College, Beneski Earth Sciences Building, Paino Lecture Hall

TUESDAY, MARCH 20th 5:30 - 7:00 PM

John Matthews, Yale University

The Foundation of Constantinople: Four Problems and Three Answers

John Matthews is John M. Schiff Professor Emeritus of Classics and History at Yale University. Professor Matthews’ research interests focus primarily on the social and cultural history of the later Roman period. His many published works include most recently The Journey of Theophanes: Travel, Business and Daily Life in the Roman East (Yale University Press, 2006), the winner of the 2007 James Henry Breasted Prize of the American Historical Association. He is currently working on the early history of the city of Constantinople.

Amherst College, Frost Library, Center for Humanistic Inquiry

Sponsored by UMass Dept. of History

THURSDAY, MARCH 8th 5:00 PM

Archaeological Institute of America presents:

Hillary Becker, Binghamton University - SUNY

Counterfeit goods in the Roman commercial landscape

UMass- Amherst, Herter Hall- room #601

MONDAY, MARCH 5th 5:00 PM

The 14th Annual David F. Grose Memorial Lecture

Patty Baker, Senior Lecturer of Classics & Archaeology, University of Kent at Canterbury

Salubrious Spaces: Gardens and Health in Roman Italy (c. 150 B.C. - A.D. 100)

UMass Amherst, Integrated Learning Center (ILC) 131

THURSDAY, MARCH 1st 5:00 PM

Egbert Bakker, Yale University

The Odyssey between Canon and Fan Fiction

Egbert Bakker will present on the theme of the multiple possible endings to the Odyssey, both Homer's surviving version and other versions known from the epic cycle. Prof. Bakker writes on oral poetry, poetic performance, the linguistic articulation of narrative, and the differences between speaking and writing.

Smith College, Seelye Hall 201

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 27th 5:00 PM

John Oakley, William and Mary

Daily Life on Athenian Vases

John is the Chancellor Professor and Forrest D. Murden, Jr. Professor of Classical Studies at the College of William and Mary. A classical archaeologist with a specialty in iconography, in particular the iconography of Greek vase paintings, he is the recipient of numerous academic and teaching awards and the author or editor of more than a dozen books. He has been honored by professorships around the world, including a term as the Mellon Professor at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens.

Amherst College, Beneski Earth Sciences Building, Paino Lecture Hall

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 24th 4:00 PM

FIVE COLLEGE FACULTY SEMINAR IN CLASSICS

Jackie Murray, University of Kentucky

Apollonius and the Ptolemaic Court: Current Research and New Questions

Amherst College, Frost Library, (2nd floor), CHI Think Tank

* Open to Five College faculty

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 26th 4:30 PM

Jackie Murray, University of Kentucky

W.E.B. Du Bois' Quest for the Silver Fleece: the Education of Black Medea

CELEBRATING BLACK HERITAGE MONTH AND HONORING THE 150th ANNIVERSARY OF

THE BIRTH OF W. E. B. DU BOIS

UMass- Amherst, Integrated Learning Center (ILS) S140

Sponsored by: UMass Classics, UMass HFA, W. E. B. Du Bois Library

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 20th 5:00 PM

Five College Faculty Seminar in Classics

Turn, Turn, Turn: Reflections of Flexion in Lucretius

Paula Debnar, Mt. Holyoke College

Amherst College, Frost Library, (2nd floor), CHI Think Tank

* Open to Five College faculty

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 6 5:00 PM

David Gilman Romano, University of Arizona

Recent Discoveries at the Sanctuary of Zeus at Mt. Lykaion, Arcadia

Important new discoveries continued to be made at the Sanctuary of Zeus at Mt. Lykaion in Arcadia during the 2017 summer season. Known as the ‘birthplace of Zeus’ by ancient authors, the mountain top sanctuary served as a primitive ash altar for burnt animal sacrifices to Zeus, and the lower mountain meadow hosted famous athletic festivals. Since 2004 a Greek-American team has been working at the sanctuary and the results have been very informative and rewarding.

Amherst College, Beneski Earth Sciences Building, Rm. 107 (Paino)

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 30 5:00 PM

Denise McCoskey, Miami University of Ohio

Classical Studies, Race, and the Alt-Right: Contesting the Modern Meanings Made from Ancient Bodies

Denise McCoskey is the author of Race: Antiquity and its Legacy and many articles on this and related topics. Prof. McCoskey has become a prominent voice on constructions of race in the ancient Mediterranean and on how the classical world has been enlisted in ideological, often racist, causes in subsequent eras. This historical and cultural analysis/background is of obvious interest in our current political climate.

Smith College. Seelye Hall, Rm. 201

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 16 6:30 - 8:00 PM

Five College Faculty Seminar in Late Antiquity

Prof. Laetitia La Follette

"What's a Nice Boy Like You Doing in a Place Like This?"

Her paper will examine the mid to late 2nd century marble portraits found together with sarcophagi in an underground burial chamber on the Via Salaria that probably belonged to descendants of the Licinii Crassi.

UMass, Herter Hall, Rm. #601

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10 4:00 PM

Annual Classical Legacy Lecture

Jessica Wolf, University of North Carolina~Chapel Hill

"'Men are lived over again': Thomas Browne and the Pythagorean transmigration of souls"

UMass Renaissance Center, 650 E. Pleasant St., Amherst

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 3rd 3:00 - 6:30 PM Reception following.

UMass Annual Fall Colloquium

THE TENTH MUSE~ Resonances of Sappho in Greek and Latin Poetry

Speakers: Leanna Boychenko (Loyola U. Chicago), Lauren Curtis (Bard College), Laurel Fulkerson (FSU), Melissa Mueller (UMass Amherst), Teresa Ramsby (UMass Amherst)

UMass Amherst, Campus Center, 10th floor (Amherst Room)

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 2nd 4:30 PM

Lisa Maurizio, Bates College

The Pythia's Oracles and the Nymph's Dice: Types of Divination at Delphi

This talk explores literary, visual, and archaeological evidence to distinguish the divinatory ritual of the Pythia, Apollo's priestess at Delphi, from divinatory activities in the cave of the Corycian nymphs near Apollo's temple. A brief demonstration of how ancient divinatory dice worked- with opportunities to use them- will follow the talk.

Amherst College, Beneski Building, Paino Lecture Hall (rm. #107)

MONDAY, OCTOBER 30th 4:30 PM

Becky Martin, Boston University

The Perennial Struggle Between East and West: The "Alexander Sarcophagus" Reconsidered

Becky Martin is Assistant Professor of Greek Art and Director of Undergraduate Studies, Department of History of Art & Architecture, Boston University. She is a Smith alumna who graduated in 1997 with a major in Ancient Studies. She received her PhD in the history of art from Berkeley in 2007. Professor Martin recently published a book entitled The Art of Contact: Comparative Approaches to Greek and Phoenician Art (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017).

Her public lecture will stem from her recent work on art produced by the interaction of Greeks and Phoenicians. She will explore the difficulty of using visual art to interpret group characteristics, what scholars describe as ethnicity, culture, or simply identity.

Smith College. Seelye Hall, Room 106

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 24th 4:30 PM

Isabella Tardin-Cardoso, University of Campinas, Brazil

The Saint and the Sow: Poetics of Illusion in a Brazilian Imitation of Plautus

Written in 1957, the popular Brazilian comedy O Santo e a Porca (The Saint and the Sow) has its classical source of inspiration already stated in its subtitle: a “Northeastern Imitation of Plautus”. Its author, Ariano Suassuna (1927-2014), alludes in particular to the play Aulularia (The Pot of Gold) by Titus Maccius Plautus (3^rd- 2^nd century BC). As we shall see, the allusiveness of the play goes beyond its subtitle: it is apparent in Suassuna’s plot, in his imitation of Plautine speaking names, word-games, and other comic techniques. Professor Tardin-Cardoso will first illustrate the way the Brazilian play calls attention both to its proximity to and distance from its Roman model. By means of such a dialogue, Suassuna underlines (just as Plautus had) his inspirations in popular culture. She will also argue that in Suassuna’s reception of the way Plautus represents deception in his theater, the modern playwright provides a fresh kind of illusion that reflects the image of life and Brazilian culture represented in his drama.

Amherst College, Fayerweather Hall #115 (Pruyne Lecture Room)

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 19th 5:00 PM

Elizabeth Marlowe, Colgate University

(author of Shaky Ground: Context, Connoisseurship and the History of Roman Art. Debates in Archaeology)

Antiquity and the Art Market: Why We Can't All Just Get Along?

Mount Holyoke College, Art Museum, Gamble Auditorium B

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 17th 5:30

Emily Greenwood, Yale University

A Human Being is Not a Thing: Aristotle's Politics, Slavery, and the complex legacies of Classics

Mount Holyoke College, Dwight Hall- rm. #101

MONDAY, OCTOBER 16th 4:30 PM

Professor Stanley Chang, Wellesley College

Mathematical Models for Minoan Civilization and Archaeology

Archaeology is a subject that generates a great amount of numerical data, but in practice the research is usually qualitative in nature. The presence of large datasets promotes the possibility of a new line of inquiry perhaps called digital archaeology. In this talk, Professor Chang will be discussing the ongoing research taking place on Mochlos, an island settlement off the coast of Crete which experienced unbroken and continuous occupation from 3000-1500 BCE. In particular, we will examine the ways in which mathematics and statistics might be useful to support or refute hypotheses about architecture, cultural practices, and economy. Conversely, we will deliberate the limitations of mathematics in archaeological studies in such cases as network theory.

Amherst College, Seelye Mudd- rm.#206.

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 12th 5:00 PM

Five College Faculty Seminar in Classics (5CFSC)

The theme will follow that of the November 3rd UMass Colloquium

"The Tenth Muse: Resonances of Sappho in Greek and Latin Poetry"

UMass, Herter 301

2016 - 2017

THURSDAY, APRIL 20th 5:00 PM

Bulgaria's Cultural Heritage: Thrace, Greece, Rome

Vyara Kalfina, Sofia University, Bulgaria

UMass Amherst, Integrated Learning Center- S240

JANUARY 24 ~ MAY 28

Exhibit: The Legend of the Lares

Mount Holyoke College Art Museum

APRIL 1 through DECEMBER, 2017

Plants of Pompeii: Ancient and Modern Medicinal Plants

This exhibit features plant portraits created by Victoria I and Lillian Nicholson Meyer for Jashemski's book A Pompeian Herbal. The illustrations portray medicinal plants identified in the excavations and those that still grow in the area today. The text, adapted from the book, documents the varied ways both ancient Romans and the modern Pompeians have used these plants. Manyof them can be found in the Botanic Garden's beds and greenhouses, or perhaps in your own garden.

The Botanic Garden of Smith College, Church Exhibition Gallery

MAY 1 through MAY 31, 2017

Plants of Pompeii

A live display of some of the plants that are featured in the gallery exhibition. Come and immerse yourself in the scents and greenery of botanical Pompeii.

Smith College, Physiology House, Lyman Conservatory

TUESDAY, APRIL 18 4:30 PM

In honor of Earth Day~

Earth and Empire: How Ancient Rome can Reveal Contemporary Truths about Sustainability and Capitalism

CECELIA FELDMAN, Archaeological Institute of America, Western MA

followed by a presentation by Book & Plow Farm regarding their water practices. Includes a 'Water Tasting'.

Amherst College, Mead Art Muesum

TUESDAY, APRIL 18th 7:00 PM

Slave Life in the Roman Luxury Villa

Lauren Hackworth Petersen, University of Delaware

Enslaved people were everywhere in the world of ancient Rome. Yet visitors to sites along the Bay of Naples walk through a landscape that appears untouched by slavery. Scholars and tourists alike have been trained to recognize owners and the free in the archaeological record of ancient Italy and to overlook and "un-see" slaves living and laboring in the same place. In her book, The Material Life of Roman Slaves (co-authored with Sandra Joshel), Dr. Lauren Hackworth Petersen seeks to make slaves appear or, more accurately, searches for ways to see them – to make slaves visible where evidence tells us they were in fact present. In her lecture, Dr. Petersen will discuss slavery in ancient Rome and explore the presence of the enslaved at Villa A at Oplontis.

Smith College, Hillyer Hall, Graham Auditorium

THURSDAY, APRIL 13th 4:30 PM

Flowers for the Dead: An Attic Funerary Stele in the Mead Art Museum

Seth Estrin, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art

Emotion does not usually play an important role in our interpretations of ancient sculpture today. But for the ancient Greeks, it could transform how viewers experienced the most basic features of a work of art. Focusing on a fourth-century BCE Attic gravestone in the Mead Art Museum, this talk explores the deeply affective mechanisms through which sculpture functioned in the cemeteries of Classical Athens.

Amherst College, Mead Museum, William Green Study Room

THURSDAY, APRIL 13th 5:30 Wine & conversation 6:00 Dinner 7:00 Discussion of paper

Late Antiquity Seminar- Five College Faculty Seminar in History

The First Official Contact between Rome and China? a Roman Embassy to the Han Emperor's Court in A.D. 166

Richard Lim, Smith College

Amherst College, Valentine Hall, Lewis-Sebring Commons

Dinner cost: $18 for faculty $9 for graduate students

Reservation information can be found at History seminars UMass

Open to Five College faculty.

TUESDAY, APRIL 11th 5:30 PM

Five College Faculty Seminar in Classics

Rebecca Worsham, Visiting Assistant Professor of Classical Languages & Literatures at Smith College

E470 in South College at UMass Amherst

Open to Five College Faculty.

FRIDAY, APRIL 7th 4:00 PM

Baring Arms, Not Bearing Arms: Sea Nymphs and the Absent Arms of Achilles on Marine Sarcophagi

Mont Allen, Southern Illinois University Carbondale

Amherst College. Location: William Green Study Room, Mead Art Museum.

MONDAY, APRIL 3rd 5:00 PM

The Thirteenth Annual

DAVID F. GROSE MEMORIAL LECUTRE

"Defeat in the Arena"

Kathleen M. Coleman, Harvard University

University of Massachusetts Amherst, Integrated Learning Center S131

SATURDAY, APRIL 1 1:30 - 4:00 PM

A CAREER IN CLASSICS AT SMITH

A Symposium in Honor of Justina Gregory

Smith College, Neilson Library Browsing Room

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 22nd 5:30 PM

After Attila: Rethinking Steppe Nomads in Roman Late Antiquity

Michael Maas, Rice University

Amherst College, Fayerweather 115 (Pruyne Auditorium)

THURSDAY, MARCH 23rd through SATURDAY, MARCH 25th

CONFERENCE hosted by the Theater and Dance Department at Amherst College

Re-imagining the Greeks: Contemporary and Cross-cultural Approaches to Greek Tragedy

Each day will be devoted to a different region of the world, and its cultural relationship with the ancient Greeks. The first day will be about Japanese adaptations, the second about Black interpretations (African and American), and the third about American adaptations. The conference will combine scholarly discussions, workshops, non-western performative approaches. And live performances. Participation in the workshops is open to students and professionals with experience in performing.

Amherst College, Holden Theater in Webster Hall

Additional details and registration

SATURDAY, MARCH 25th 11:00 AM

27th Annual Phyllis Williams Lehmann Lecture

John R. Clarke, University of Texas at Austin

New Research Strategies and Recent Discoveries at Oplontis

John R. Clarke, Regents Professor at the University of Texas at Austin, will present results of the work of the Oplontis Project with emphasis on the current exhibition, Leisure and Luxury in the Age of Nero: The Villas of Oplontis near Pompeii. Since 2006, Dr. Clarke's research team has had the charge from the Italian Ministry of Culture to study, excavate and write about the Roman villas first uncovered in 1964 at Torre Annunziata, Italy. Dr. Clarke will highlight the most innovative techniques employed in the Project’s investigations and will present the discovery, in 2014–2016, of the long-lost sea façade of the structure known as Villa A.

Presented by the Archaeological Institute of America- Western Massachusetts Society and co-hosted by the Smith College Museum of Art

Smith College, Wright Hall, Weinstein Auditorium

MONDAY, MARCH 20th 5:30 PM

The Magnetic Looking Glass - New Insights into Old Objects. Frescoes, Paintings and Violins

Dr. Bernhard Blümich

Prof. Blümich will provide an introduction to mobile nuclear Magnetic Resonance Imaging and report on different applications to nondestructive studies of objects of art and cultural heritage, especially on frescoes at the ancient Roman site of Herculaneum in the Bay of Naples.

UMass Amherst, South College- room W245

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 8th 5:30 PM

Five College Faculty Seminar in Classics.

Sarah Olsen, Visiting Assistant Professor of Classics at Amherst College

Amherst College, Frost Library, Center for Humanistic Inquiry (CHI)- 2nd floor.

Open to Five College Faculty.

SATURDAY, MARCH 4th 9:00 -4:00 PM

Symposium: The Futures of Classical Antiquity

A one-day symposium on possible futures for Classical Studies in twenty-first century America. Five speakers address the challenges facing the Classics and the Humanities in general, and offer their views on approaches and areas of inquiry that may best serve an increasingly diverse and globalized citizenry.

Smith College, Seelye Hall 106

More information and registration available at: https://www.smith.edu/classics/futures.php

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 28th 7:30 - 9:00 pm

"Mapping Sexuality in Ancient Rome"

Dr. Luca Grillo, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Dr. Grillo will give a talk titled "Mapping Sexuality in Ancient Rome." Dr. Grillo asks, "How did the ancient Romans conceive sex and sexuality? Did they have the same categories we can easily take for granted today? Could sexual inclinations elicit admiration, disparagement or disapproval?" This talk will address these and similar questions by locating Roman habits in their historical and cultural context and by discussing formalist and constructivist approaches.

Amherst College, Merrill Science Center, Lecture Room 4

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 23rd 5:30 PM

AIA of Western MA presents:

Ancient Bronzes as Art Objects: Roman Collectors and "Corinthian Bronzes"

Christopher Hallett, University of California Berkeley

Mount Holyoke College, 101 Dwight Hall

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 21st 5:30 PM

Five College Faculty Seminar in Classics

Vyara Kalfina, University of Sofia

Amherst College, Frost Library, Center for Humanistic Inquiry

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 16th 5:00 PM

The Classics and the Information Revolution of the Late 15th Century

Samuel Ellenport

Samuel Ellenport will present a wide perspective of the fate of the Classics from the fall of the Roman Empire through the 15^th century, with attention to why classical texts were maintained, how they were used, and how they were kept and copied. He will also discuss the effect of new printing technologies on the surviving texts. He will illustrate his talk with samples, available for the audience to examine, of early printed books as well as elements of earlier book production.

Mr. Ellenport, Amherst College class of 1965, graduated with a degree in History and continued his study of History at Berkeley, Brown, and Oxford University. Since then he has spent his career in the world of books, a career of craftsmanship as well as historical study, and teaching, at Brown and Suffolk University. A master bookbinder and former owner of Harcourt Bindery, he has served as President of the Society of Printers and of the Guild of Bookworkers in New England; he received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Guild. Mr. Ellenport was also one of the forces behind the establishment of a bookbinding program at the North Bennet Street School in Boston, a trade school founded in 1885 by the Boston Athenaeum. He is well known in his field for his workshops and as a lecturer and author of books on his craft, as well as for his fine craftsmanship. He has restored many early editions of Greek and Latin texts, books that belong to the textual tradition that we inherit today.

AMHERST COLLEGE, PORTER LOUNGE (CONVERSE HALL, 3RD FLOOR)

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 2nd 5:30 PM

The Roman Lares: Gods of the Home and Journey

Harriet Flower, Princeton University

Mount Holyoke College, Gamble Auditorium

Spring Opening Reception to follow.

See more at: https://artmuseum.mtholyoke.edu/event/roman-lares?bc=node/1#sthash.l5yTRJes.dpuf

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 10th 6:30 - 8:00 PM

Late Antiquity Seminar

Pseudo-Quintillian's Major Declamation XIII

Christopher van den Berg, Amherst College

Amherst College, Valentine Hall, Lewis-Sebring Commons

Refreshments will be served.

Open to Five College faculty.

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 4th 4:30 PM

Poggio Civitate~ A Half Century of Discovery

The Classics Department at UMass Amherst invites you to a colloquium celebrating 50 years of excavation at the Etruscan site of Poggio Civitate. There will be papers by two renowned Etruscologists, Alessandro Naso and Gretchen Meyers. This will be followed by a reception and conversation.

The Lords of Poggio Civitate: Archaeology and Power in Early Etruria

Alessandro Naso, Università Federico Il a Napoli

"It's Not All About Him: The Archaeology of Gender at Poggio Civitate"

Gretchen Meyers, Franklin & Marshall University

UMass Campus Center, 10th floor, Amherst Room

This event is sponsored by the Department of Classics at UMass, the College of Humanities and Fine Arts, and the Etruscan Foundation.

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 3rd 4:30 PM

Heroism and Model Book: Aspects of Brecht's Antigone Project

Martin Revermann, Professor of Classics and Theatre Studies, University of Toronto

Amherst College, Fayerweather 115 (Pruyne)

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 2nd 4:00 PM

UMASS RENAISSANCE CENTER'S ANNUAL CLASSICAL LEGACY LECTURE ~

Humanism and Experience in Post-Conquest Mexico: The Poetry of Fray Cristóbal Cabrera

Andrew Laird, Brown University

Renaissance Center, 650 E. Pleasant St., Amherst

http://www.umass.edu/classics/event/andrew-laird-brown-classical-legacy-lecture-umass-renaissance-center

MONDAY, OCTOBER 24 5:00 - 6:30

Five College Faculty Seminar in Classics

Amherst College, Center for Humanistic Inquiry (2nd floor of the Robert Frost Library)

Open to Five College Faculty.

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 20th 5:00 PM

Archaeological Excavation at Sinop, Turkey:

Exploring the Origins of Trade at the Nexus of Civilizations

Owen Doonan, California State University Northridge

UMass, Integrated Learning Center, Room S204

The George M.A. Hanfmann Lecture is sponsored by the Archaeological Institute of America & the UMass Classics Department

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 15

International Archaeology Day

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 5th

Patricia Mangan

Mount Holyoke

Details to follow.

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 4 7:00 PM

Rome: The Greatest Theatre in the World

John Pinto, Princeton University

Smith College, Wright Hall, Weinstein Auditorium

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 27th 5:00 PM

Joe Goodkin's Odyssey: a Folk Opera

Mount Holyoke College, Dwight 101

Sponsored by the Department of Classics and Italian, Mount Holyoke College.

2015 -16

THURSDAY, APRIL 21, 5:00 PM

The Discovery of the Sanctuary and Mystery Cult at Pantanello (Metaponto, Southern Italy)

JOSEPH CARTER, Amherst '63, University of Texas at Austin

Joseph Carter is the Centennial Professor of Classical Archaeology and Director of the Institute of Classical Archaeology at the University of Texas at Austin, and Director of excavations at Tauric Chersonesos and at Metaponto.

Amherst College, Beneski 107 (Paino Lecture Hall)

SATURDAY, APRIL 23, 2:00 PM

LECTURE ON HARRIET BOYD HAWE'S FELLOW EXCAVATOR AT GOURNIA

My Buried Life: Adelene Moffat in Crete 1903

FRANCES FREEMAN PADEN, Northwestern University

Historic Northampton, 6 Bridge Street, Northampton, MA

MONDAY, APRIL 25, 5:00 PM

How to Build a Humanities Start Up: Marketing the Humanities

DR. JASON PEDICONE, Paideia Institute for Humanistic Study, Inc.

UMass, Amherst~ Integrated Learning Center S231

MONDAY, APRIL 11, 5:00 PM

ARCHAEOLOGICAL INSTITUTE OF AMERICA, WESTERN MASSACHUSETTS SOCIETY

"A 5th Century BC Supper Club: evidence of semi-public dining from the Athenian Agora"

KATHLEEN LYNCH, University of Cincinnati

Amherst College, Fayerweather 115 (Pruyne Lecture Hall)

La Follette Lecture

Co-sponsored by The Georges Lurcy Charitable and Educational Trust and the Amherst College Department of Classics

MONDAY, APRIL 11, 7:00 - 9:00 PM

KEYNE CHESHIRE, Davidson College, NC

KEYNE CHESHIRE is Professor of Classics at Davidson College, shoeless runner, and beekeeper. He has published articles primarily in the areas of Hellenistic and Greek lyric poetry, authored a textbook, Alexander the Great (Cambridge UP, 2009), and translated Sophocles’ Women of Trachis, retitled Murder at Jagged Rock, for a setting in a mythic Wild West (The Word Works, 2015). His current projects include a “transmigration” of Aristophanes’ Birds and a translation of Homer’s Iliad that emphasizes the epic’s intrinsic orality.

Smith College, Seelye Hall 106

For more information contact Carolyn Shread: cshread@mtholyoke.edu.

MONDAY, APRIL 4, 5:00 PM

THE 12TH ANNUAL DAVID GROSE MEMORIAL LECTURE

BONNA WESCOAT, Emory University

Professor Wescoat, Director of Excavations in the Sanctuary of the Great Gods, Samothrace, will speak on recent work on Samothrace and the Winged Victory.

UMass, Integrated Learning Center, Rm. #331

Hosted by the Department of Classics, UMass Amherst.

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 6, 4:15 PM

Women's Corporealities and Choreographies of Authority: From Antiquity's Learned Ladies to Entrepreneurial Modern Ballerinas

ZOA ALONSO FERNANDEZ, Harvard University

LAURA KATZ RIZZO, Temple University

Smith College, Neilson Library Browsing Room

MONDAY, MARCH 21, 5:00 PM

"What is a Representative Writer? The World Republic of Letters and Its Ambassadors"

TOBIAS BOES, University of Notre Dame

Amherst College, Beneski 107, (Paino Lecture Hall)

Co-sponsored by the departments of Classics and German at Amherst College, and by the Lucius Root Eastman 1895 Fund and the Corliss Lamont Lectureship for a Peaceful World.

TUESDAY, MARCH 22, 5:00 PM

"Law, Ethics, and Underwater Archaeology: The Wreck of Cesnola's Napried"

ELIZABETH S. GREENE, AIA Lecturer, Brock University~ St. Catherine's, Ontario

UMass, Integrated Learning Center 211

Sponsored by the Archaeological Institute of America, Western Mass. Society and the UMass Department of Classics.

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 29, 5:30 PM

"Measured Victory or Cataclysmic Doomsday? Caesar and Lucan on the Battle of Pharsalia"

TIMOTHY JOSEPH, College of the Holy Cross

UMass, Amherst. Herter Hall, rm. #301

Free and open to the public. For additional information contact Elizabeth Keitel (eek@classics.umass.edu)

Sponsored by the UMass Department of Classics.

AIA LECTURE

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 23, 5:00 PM

"New Discoveries at Sardis in Anatolia"

NICHOLAS CAHILL, University of Wisconsin- Madison

Mt. Holyoke, Gamble Auditorium

Please note: the lecture scheduled for Tuesday, February 23 at Smith College has been cancelled; weather disrupted the speaker's travel plans. This lecture will be rescheduled.

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 23, 4:30 PM

"Saving Syria's Cultural Heritage"

PROFESSOR AMR AL-AZM, Shawnee State University, Ohio

Smith College, Neilson Library Browsing Room

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 3, 5:00 PM

How Lawyers Became Villains: Delation from Cicero to Tacitus

CHRISTOPHER VAN DEN BERG, Amherst College

Smith College, Seelye Hall 110

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 2, 5:00 PM

Daughters of the Sun: Apollonius Rhodius' Medea and the Egyptian Eye of Re

LEANNA BOYCHENKO, UMass

UMass, Herter Hall #301

NOVEMBER 16, 4:30 PM

Apocalypse When? The End of the World in Ancient Thought

CHRISTOPHER P. STAR, Middlebury College

Visions of the end of the world, familiar today from several sources ranging from the Bible to Hollywood films, are largely absent from Greek and Roman literature. There is one striking exception: the philosophy and tragedies of Seneca the Younger (c. 4 BCE-65 CE). After a survey of some of the ways in which the fate of humanity and the cosmos was conceived in the ancient world, we will focus on the visions of the end in Seneca’s writings. Our investigation will consider the various motives—poetic, rhetorical, philosophical, and political—that may lie behind Seneca’s fascination with universal destruction.

Amherst College, Beneski Museum, Paino Lecture Hall (rm. #107)

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 12, 4:00 PM

Fifth Annual Classical Legacy Lecture and residency

Performing the Past: Shakespeare and Classical Literature from Humanist Schoolroom to Early Modern Stage

LEAH WHITTINGTON, Harvard University

Massachusetts Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies

CANCELLED. TO BE RESCHEDULED AT A LATER DATE.

MONDAY, NOVEMER 9 AIA of Western Mass Lecture

KATHLEEN LYNCH, University of Cincinnati

"A 5th Century BC Supper Club: evidence of semi-public dining from the Athenian Agora"

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 7 9:00 - 5:00

Colloquium: Urban Disasters and the Roman Imagination

The Department of Classics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, with the support of the UMass College of Humanities and Fine Arts, will host a one-day colloquium on the theme of “Urban Disasters and the Roman Imagination”, Saturday, November 7, 2015. Speakers are Brigitte Libby (Harvard University), “Out of the Ashes: Rome’s Beginnings at Troy”; Tom Zanker (Amherst College), “Horace and the Rhetoric of Decline”; Virginia Closs (University of Massachusetts Amherst), “The Unmaking of Rome: Clades Publica and Censorship in Senecan Thought”; Joseph Farrell (University of Pennsylvania), “The Sacks of Rome”; Andrew Johnston (Yale University), “Ruin, Reconstruction and History”; Jessica Clark (Florida State University), “The Spoils of War: Victory as Urban Disaster”; Elizabeth Keitel (University of Massachusetts Amherst), Caesar and the Urbs Capta at Massilia”; and Honora Chapman (California State University, Fresno), “Josephus’ Memory of Jerusalem: A Study in Urban Disaster.”

For more information and to register, go to https://www.umass.edu/classics/disaster.

University of Massachusetts Campus Center, Amherst Room (10th floor)

5-COLLEGE FACULTY SEMINAR

Disasters

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 27 5:00 PM

Amherst College, Frost Library, Center for Humanistic Inquiry

"Hatshepsut: How a Woman Ascended the Throne of Ancient Egypt"

KARA COONEY, LEHMANN LECTURER, University of California

OCTOBER 6, 4:30 PM

Smith College, Graham Hall

Archaeology Day Event

OCTOBER 3

Amherst College, Mead Museum

Hildegard von Bingen's Ordo Virtutum

ENSEMBLE MUSICA HUMANA

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 2 8:00 PM and SATURDAY, OCTOBER 3, 8:00 PM

Composed by Hildegard von Bingen around 1151, Ordo Virtutum depicts a struggle for the fate of a soul, Anima. The Virtues encourage Anima to stay on a righteous path while the Devil taunts and tempts. The Devil's laughter clashes with Hildegard's gorgeous lines of Plainchant in Ensemble Musica Humana's fully staged production of this battle of wills.

First Churches of Northampton, MA

Erring, Errors and Female Work: Women's Rituals in Homer

ANDROMACHE KARANIKA, University of California, Irvine

SEPTEMBER 22, 5:00 PM

Smith College, Seelye Hall- Room 106

Pericles

SEPTEMBER 9-12, Amherst College, HoldenTheater

North Carolina Stage Company brings Shakespeare’s Pericles to Amherst's Holden Theater for one weekend only. Pericles is an epic story of one man’s quest to solve a riddle — a quest that takes him on a high-seas odyssey, complete with shipwrecks, assassins, pirates, romance and the heartbreaking story of a family torn apart. The production is the creation of director Ron Bashford and the NC Stage cast, who worked together to create an imaginative, five-actor version that the Asheville Citizen-Times called “a spectacular experience of cutting-edge theater.”

Tickets are free, but reservations are recommended; call (413) 542-2277. Performances are Wednesday through Saturday at 8 p.m., with an additional matinee performance on Saturday at 2 pm

2014 - 2015

Thursday, April 30, 4:00 p.m.

Christina Kraus, Yale University

Commenting on Tacitus' Agricola

Amherst College, Converse Hall, Porter Lounge (3rd floor)

Thursday, April 9, 5:30 p.m.

Malcolm Bell, III, University of Virginia

Sicily in the Age of Archimedes

The lecture will be illustrated by works of art and architecture from Syracuse and the outlying cities, including Morgantina.

Mount Holyoke College, Gamble Auditorium

Sponsored by the Archaeological Institute of America together witih the Department of Art History and the Department of Classics and Italian, Mount Holyoke College

Workshop sponsored by The Alliance to Advance Liberal Arts Colleges

New Directions in Gender and Sexuality in Classical Antiquity

Friday, March 27th and Saturday, March 28th

Friday, March 27, 5:00 p.m.

Marilyn Skinner, University of Arizona

Ancient Sexuality at a New Crossroads: Beyond Binarism

Amherst College, Converse 108 (Redroom)

Reception to follow.

Marilyn's public talk is part of a workshop sponsored by The Alliance to Advance Liberal Arts Colleges on the theme "New Directions in Gender and Sexualaity in Classical Antiquity"

Wednesday, March 25, 7:00 p.m.

Stephen Mitchell, Professor Emeritus, University of Exeter

The How and Why of Creating New English Versions of Venerable Classics

Smith College, Seelye 207

Tuesday, March 24, 7:30 p.m.

Stephen Mitchell, Professor Emeritus

University of Exeter

Smith College, Stoddard Hall Auditorium

Wednesday, March 11, 5:00 p.m.

Kris Trego, Bucknell University

Ancient Shipping and Underwater Archaeology in the Mediterranean

Sponsored by the Corliss Lamont Lectureship for a Peaceful World, the Archaeological Institute of America, Western Massachusetts Society, and Amherst College, Department of Classics

Amherst College, Beneski Earth Sciences Bldg., room #107 (Paino)

David Grose Memorial Lecture

Monday, March 9, 5:00 p.m. Gregory Nagy, Harvard University

Song 17 of Sappho revisited (in the light of new supplements)

The 11th annual David Grose Memorial Lecture is sponsored by Charles Gross and the UMass Amherst Department of Classics.

UMass Amherst, Bartlett Hall, room 65

Thursday, February 26 , 5:00 p.m.

Peter T. Struck, University of Pennsylvania

Divination and Intuition: Thinking Differently about Signs in the Closing Books of the Odyssey

Smith College, Seelye Hall 106

Sponsored by the Departments of Classics, Philosopy and Religion and the Smith College Lecture Fund

Seminar for Five College Faculty

Monday, February 23, 2015, 5:00 - 6:30 p.m. Carrie Mowbray, Smith College

The Senecan vates Prophecy, Poetry, Problems, and Possibilities

Location: Smith College's Neilson Library, Caverno Room

The Renaissance Center announces its 4th annual Classical Legacy Lecture

Wednesday, November 19, 4:00 p.m. James Hankins, Harvard University

The Virtue Politics of the Italian Humanists

Refreshments are co-sponsored by the Amherst Women's Club.

Renaissance Center, Reading Room 650 East Pleasa St., Amherst

For more information go to www.umass.edu/renaissance or call 413.577.3600

The Archaeological Institute of America presents

The 25th Annual Phyllis Williams Lehmann Lecture

Thursday, November 13, 5:00 p.m. Richard Neer, University of Chicago

The Invisible Acropolis: Democracy and the Senses in Classical Athens

Graham Hall, Brown Fine Arts Center,Smith College

Wednesday, November 12, 5:00 - 6:30 Jane Chaplin, Middlebury College

"Chronological Disorder in Livy"

301 Herter Hall, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Saturday, November 8, 9:00 a.m.- 4:00 p.m.

UMass Amherst, Campus Center

Classical Monsters & Their Medieval Afterlife

RECEPTION: 4:00-4:45, Amherst Room (open to all)

Additional information may be found at http://www.umass.edu/classics/monstersconference.html

Tuesday, October 7, 4:30 p.m.

Professor Seth Schein, University of California, Davis

'War, What is It Good For?' in Homer’s Iliad and Four Receptions

Professor Schein discusses the representation of war in the Iliad and the Iliad-receptions of Simone Weil, Rachel Bespaloff, Alice Oswald, and Christopher Logue.

Amherst College, Pruyne Lecture Hall (Fayerweather 115)

Friday, October 3, 1:00 p.m.

Brian Walters , University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Violent Metaphors and Political Diseases in Late-Republican Rhetoric and Poetry

Amherst College, Alumni House

Thursday, October 2, 7:00 p.m.

Outside the Wire

Sophocles' Philoctetes

Amherst College, Kirby Theater

Sponsored by the Amherst College English Department, Theater Department, and First-Year Seminar

PRESS RELEASE:

THEATER OF WAR: PHILOCTETES IS PRESENTED AT AMHERST COLLEGE

Outside the Wire, a social impact company, will present a performance of Sophocles’ Philoctetes in the Kirby Theater at Amherst College on Thursday, October 2nd at 7:00 p.m. The performance will feature David Strathairn (Lincoln, Dido, The Bourne Ultimatum, Good Night and Good Luck), Bryan Doerries, and Greg Taubman.

Philoctetes tells the story of decorated warrior who is abandoned on a deserted island because of mysterious chronic illness that he contracts on the way to the Trojan War. Nine years later, the Greeks learn from an oracle that in order to win the war they must rescue him from island. When they finally come for him, the wounded warrior must overcome nine long years of festering resentment and shame in order to accept help from the very men who betrayed him.

The reading will be followed by discussion with panelists from the local civilian and military communities, and a facilitated town-hall style audience discussion.

About Outside the Wire

Outside the Wire is a social impact company that uses theater and a variety of other media to address pressing public health and social issues, such as combat-related psychological injury, end of life care, prison reform, political violence and torture, and the de-stigmatization of the treatment of substance abuse and addiction.

To date, there have been more than 250 performances of Theater of War for military and civilian communities throughout the United States, Europe and Japan. Over 50,000 service members, veterans, and their families have attended and participated in Theater of War performances and discussions.

Visit Outside the Wire’s website: www.outsidethewirellc.com to find more information about the project, watch a short video of a performance, and find out about recent and upcoming performances. You can also find Theater of War on Facebook: www.facebook.com/TheaterofWar.

Press Contact: Greg Taubman, Associate Artistic Director, Theater of War gtaubman@theater-of-war.com / (718) 624-0351

Thursday, September 25, 5:00 p.m.

Corinne Pache, Trinity University

Penelope's Craft: Finding Home in the 21st Century

Smith College, Dewey Hall Common Room

Tuesday, September 23, 5:00 - 7:00 p.m.

Steven Ellis, University of Cincinnati

Superstition in the (re-)shaping of shop-fronts and street activity in the Roman world

UMass, Herter Hall, Room #227

Seminar for Five College Faculty:

Thursday, September 11, 4:30 - 7:30 p.m.

Seminar topic: Monsters Conference at UMass on November 8

Readings:

1. Jeffrey Cohen's "Monster Theory: Reading Culture" is available as an e-book via the 5-College library system. We’ll read his preface (6 pages) and first chapter (18 pages).

2. Stephen Asma's "On Monsters" is also available as an e-book via our libraries (and print copies are held in some libraries). We’ll discuss Introduction (14 pages) and Part I (Ancient Monsters, 42 pages, but very fast reading, lots of pictures).

Location: UMass Amherst Campus, Herter Hall, Room 112

2013 - 2014

24th Annual Phyllis Williams Lehmann Lecture

Thursday, April 17th, 5:00 p.m.

Prof. Andrew Wilson, All Souls College, Oxford University

Water, Nymphs and a Palm Grove: The so-called 'South Agora' at Aphrodisias

Graham Hall, Brown Fine ArtsCenter, Smith College

campus map

Sponsored by the Archaeological Institute of America, Western Mass. Society

Friday, April 18th, 2:30 p.m.

Ayelet Haimson Lushkov, University of Texas at Austin

Voting Under fire: Livy on Choosing Leaders and Fighting Wars

Ayelet Haimson Lushkov is an Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of Texas at Austin. She will talk about how elections in the Roman Republic came to be a mechanism for generating precedents and political exempla for peace during both war and peacetime.

Fayerweather 115, Pruyne Lecture Hall, Amherst College campus map

Thursday, April 24th, 4:30 p.m.

Denise Demetriou, Michigan State University

Beyond Polis Religion: Aphrodite in Multiethnic Settlements

Denise Demetriou is an Associate Professor of History at Michigan State University. Her book, "Negotiating Identity in the Ancient Mediterranean: The Archaic and Classical Greek Multiethnic Emporia" was published by Cambridge University Press in 2012.

Beneski 107, Paino Lecture Hall, Amherst College

campus map

Sponsored by the Corliss Lamont Lectureship for a Peaceful World and the Department of Classics at Amherst College.

Thursday, March 27th, 5:00 p.m.

Eleanor Winsor Leach, Indiana University

Italian Pliny: Sesterces and Status for a Transpadane Senator

Younger Pliny, the letter writer, best known for his eye-witness account of the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 CE and the death of his uncle, the natural historian, while investigating the eruption, was a native of Como in Northern Italy, and maintained his connections there throughout his life. He owned villas and agricultural properties in the area and made generous donations to civic institutions. Keeping Italian possessions and identity was a significant component of Pliny’s prestige and senator and official in Rome. Professor Leach will take up letters related to property ownership and farming, patronage donations, friendships in Como and some touristic views of picturesque Italian places.

Sponsored by the Corliss Lamont Lectureship for a Peaceful World and the Department of Classics at Amherst College.

Babbott Room, Octagon Building, Amherst College campus map

David F. Grose Memorial Lecture

Thursday, March 13, 2014, 5:00PM

Dr. Alan Shapiro, Johns Hopkins University

Orientalism and Greek Identity on a Masterpiece of Athenian Vase-Painting

Amherst Room, Campus Center 10th floor, UMass campus map

AIA LECTURE

Thursday, March 6th, 4:30 p.m.

Maria Liston, University of Waterloo

Death comes to the Theban Band: Skeletons from the Battle of Chaironeia (338 B.C.)

The Battle of Chaironeia was a turning point in Greek history. Macedonian forces under the command of Phillip II and his son Alexander defeated a combined Greek force of Athenians, Thebans, and others near the town of Chaironeia, establishing Macedonia dominance over much of the Greek mainland. Anchoring the Greek line on the right was the Theban Sacred Band, an elite military unit consisting of 150 pairs of hoplite soldiers, who were purportedly lovers as well as comrades in arms. Opposite them on the Macedonian left was the cavalry force led by Alexander, then 18 years old. In the course of this decisive defeat of the Greeks, the Theban Sacred Band was almost entirely annihilated. Excavations in the 19^th century recovered skeletons of the Theban soldiers interred at a battle monument near the acropolis of Chaironeia. This lecture presents evidence from these skeletons for death on the battlefield and subsequent mutilation of the corpses, and explores the use and efficacy of weapons and armor in ancient warfare.

Sponsored by the Archaeological Institute of America, Western Mass. Society, the Georges Lurcy Lecture Series Fund at Amherst College and the Department of Classics at Amherst College.

Amherst College, Paino Lecture Hall, Beneski campus map

Tuesday, March 4th, 5:00 p.m. Egbert Bakker, Pofessor of Classics Yale University

In and Out of the Golden Age: The Temporality of Odysseus' Return

Smith College, Dewey House Common Room campus map

Sponsored by The Lecture Committee of Smith College and The Department of Classical Languages and Literatures

For Five College Faculty:

Five College Faculty Seminar in Classics

January 27, 4:30 p.m.

Craig Russell, Amherst College

Imaginary Futures in the Iliad

Chapin Lounge, Amherst College

campus map

November 18th, 5:00 pm

Richard J. Tarrant, Harvard University

Witness to Catastrophe: The Chorus in Senecan Tragedy

Dewey House Common Room, Smith College

campus map

Sponsored by The Department of Classical Languages and Literatures and the Lecture Committee of Smith College.

November 19th, 4:00 pm Professor Craig Kallendorf

Texas A&M University

The Protean Virgil: Book History and the Reception of the Classics in the Renaissance

The Renaissance Center announces its fourth annual Classical Legacy Lecture.

Free and open to the public.

The Massachusetts Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies

650 East Pleasant Street, Amherst

AIA LECTURE

November 7th, 5:00 pm

Morag Kersel, DePaul University

The Politics of Public Display: Archaeology, Museums and Artifacts from the Holy Land

In 2002 the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) displayed the James Ossuary – a commonplace limestone burial box from the 1st century CE bearing the Aramaic inscription “James, Son of Joseph, Brother of Jesus”. Timed to coincide with the annual meetings of the Society of Biblical Literature and the American Schools of Oriental Research, the ROM brought the ossuary together with an audience of experts. With this display the museum took on simultaneous roles: custodian of a sacred relic, a shaper of public interpretation, and as a fiduciary institution. Recent acquisitions of Dead Sea Scrolls and other biblical artifacts by academic institutions like Azusa Pacific University and Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary demonstrate that the desire to “own”, display and interpret the past continues to an important aspect of institutional missions., missions which also have competing roles. This lecture will examine the differing strands of obligation – obligation to the public; to students; to board members; the academic community; the country of origin; and ultimately to the archaeological record. Using case studies of artifacts from the Holy Land we will investigate the politics of public display and the role of the museum.

UMass, Herter 301 campus map

November 4th, 4:30 p.m.

Professor David Schloen,University of Chicago

Economy and Society in Ancient Israel

Professor Schloen specializes in the archaeology and history of the ancient Levant (Syria and Palestine) from ca. 3000 to 300 BCE. Over the past two decades he has conducted archaeological excavations in Israel and Turkey. As a historian of ancient culture, his longstanding ambition has been to understand the structure and operation of the small kingdoms that flourished in the eastern Mediterranean region during the Bronze and Iron Ages, and especially to explicate the interaction between day-to-day social practices and the shared metaphors and narratives that sustained, and were sustained by, those practices. He is the author of The House of the Father as Fact and Symbol focuses on the Bronze Age (3000–1200 BCE) and he is currently completing a book entitled The Bible and Archaeology: Exploring the History and Mythology of Ancient Israel which explains how ancient artifacts, inscriptions, and other archaeological discoveries shed light on biblical narratives.

101 Chapin Hall, Amherst College

Campus map

Sponsored by the Religion Department and the Willis D. Wood Fund

Thursday, October 31st, 4:00 p.m.

Dr. Joseph A. Howley, Columbia University

How to burn a book in ancient Rome

Professor Howley’s lecture is the second of a two-part series aimed at considering the history of books, libraries, and readers while Amherst is thinking about their future as well. He will discuss the representation of book-burning in connection with the civic order and forms of censorship in the Roman Empire.

Frost Library, 1st floor, Amherst College campus map

November 1st, 4:30 pm

Dr. Elizabeth Bartman, President Archaeological Institute of America

A Closer Look: Amherst's Roman Sea Nymph Sarcophagus

Join renowned Roman sculpture expert Elizabeth Bartman for a closer look at Amherst’s recently acquired Roman sarcophagus. Amherst’s marble sarcophagus, beautifully decorated with sea nymphs riding marine centaurs, was made for ten-year-old Laberia Alexandria and her six-year-old brother Sylvanus. An inscribed poem, newly translated by Richard Wilbur, records the grief of their mother. Dr. Bartman will offer a brief overview of Roman sarcophagi and discuss the significance of this major new addition to the Mead’s collection.

Mead Art Museum, Amherst College campus map

Friday, October 25th, 9:30 a.m.

Lucilius colloquium at UMass

Speaking of the Republic: Lucilius and His Contexts

The Department of Classics at UMass Amherst, with the support of the UMass College of Humanities and Fine Arts and the Classics Departments of Smith, Amherst, and Mt. Holyoke College, will host a one-day colloquium on the fragments of Lucilius, Rome’s first satirist, in their republican linguistic, social, and literary contexts. Speakers are Brian Breed (UMass), Anna Chahoud (Trinity College Dublin), Sander Goldberg (UCLA), and Angelo Mercado (Grinnell College).

For more information, contact the organizers:

Brian Breed bbreed@classics.umass.edu and Rex Wallace rwallace@classics.umass.edu

View the full conference program at http://umass.academia.edu/BrianWBreed/Events.

Student Union Ballroom, UMass campus map

Thursday, October 24th, 4:00 p.m.

Sander Goldberg, UCLA

The Roman Face of Learning

Sander Goldberg's lecture is the first of a two-part series aimed at considering the history of books, libraries and readers, while amherst is thinking about their future as well. His address will look at the ways in which physical objects, including books, were essential to the ancient learning. It will include illustrations of ancient books to help explain the mechanics of reading in antiquity.

Frost Library, Amherst College campus map

Friday, October 18th,

10:30 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.

For Five College Faculty: Reading and discussion session devoted to the Lucilian corpus.

110 Morgan Hall, Amherst College

campus map

Thursday, October 10th, 5:00 p.m.

Theresa Huntsman, Washington University, St. Louis

"Sometimes you CAN take it with you: Etruscan Banquets and Burials at Chiusi"

Sponsored by the Department of Classics and The Center for Etruscan Studies

301 Herter Hall, UMass campus map

Tuesday, September 24th, 4:30 pm

Tessa Rajak, Professor Emeritus of Classics, University of Reading

"Josephus: Everybody's Historian"

Professor Rajak will discuss all of Josephus' writings as formative of a post-destruction Jewish identity in a Greek and Roman context.

This lecture is sponsored by the Departments of Classics and Judaic and Near Eastern Studies at UMass.

301 Herter Hall, UMass campus map

AIA LECTURE

Sept. 19, 2013, 5:00 PM

Prof. John Younger Dept. of Classics, University of Kansas

"The Temple of Zeus at Olympia: an Archaeological Biography"

Technical observations on the sculptures from the Temple of Zeus at Olympia allow a reconstruction of their appearance at installation and of the major changes made afterward. At installation, many sculptures were unfinished; the west pediment had more centaur groups than are preserved today; and the horse blocks on the east pediment were separated, one in front of the other. By the time of Pausanias’s visit in a.d. 174, the sculptures had suffered major damage at least twice (in the mid-4th century and the early 2nd century b.c.); his identification of Kaineus in the west pediment may refer to a headless Apollo propped up on his knees, flanked by centaurs. To resist the Herulean Raid (267), the temple had been converted into a fort, and afterward were outfitted with the last series of rainspouts. In the 4th century, a Byzantine village had grown up around the temple, which was left to deteriorate. The Zeus statue was transferred to Constantinople in the early 5th century and destroyed by fire by 475. Earthquakes in 522 and 551 completed the final destruction of the temple. Soon after, the Alpheios River flooded and covered the entire site with some 3–4 m of silt.

Mount Holyoke College, Gamble Auditorium campus map

AIA Lecture Hosted by the Mount Holyoke College Department of Classics & Ancient Studies

Tuesday, September 3rd, 4:15 p.m.

Pavel Onderka, Egyptologist from Prague

Archaeology in Sudan

Thanks to a grant from the European Union, an Egyptologist from Prague, Pavel Onderka, will be giving a lecture on his ongoing archaeological research in present-day Sudan. The lecture shall present the current state of our knowledge about the ancient site and the role it played within the Meroitic state.

Wad Ben Naga. A Royal City in the Heart of Africa

Wad Ben Naga is the name of a village and archaeological site in the present-day Republic of the Sudan, located some 130 km north of the capital, Khartoum. The archaeological site, which covers an area of almost four square kilometers, encompasses the remains of a royal city dated to the period of the Kingdom of Meroe (ca. 300 BCE – 350 CE), as well as extensive cemeteries dated to both Meroitic and Post-Meroitic times. The culture of the Meroitic period combined Egyptian and Hellenistic influences with native traditions, producing a unique African civilization. The site of Wad Ben Naga is known as the place where, in 1844, Carl Richard Lepsius discovered a bark-stand with bilingual names of the pyramid builders King Natakamani and Queen Amanitore, which later provided a clue to the decipherment of Meroitic script by Francis Llewellyn Griffith in 1911.

Based on the decision by UNESCO, the archaeological site should in the near future be added to the serial cultural property of “Archaeological Sites of the Island of Meroe,” which has since 2011 been inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List.

In 2009, the National Museum of the Czech Republic launched its excavations at Wad Ben Naga. After initial seasons dedicated to revising excavations unearthed by previous excavators of the site, the mission began with exploration of a long-lost temple, the so-called Typhonium, known from accounts of early European and American travelers.

Pavel Onderka is the Deputy Director, Keeper of Collections, and Curator of Ancient Africa at the National Museum (Náprstek Museum) in Prague, Czech Republic. Since 2009, he has served as Director of the Archaeological Expedition to Wad Ben Naga in present-day Sunday. He is the author of numerous publications and exhibition catalogues (including Thebes. City of Gods and Pharaohs [2007, with Jana Mynářová], The Tomb of Unisankh at Saqqara and Chicago [2009] and Wad Ben Naga 1821–2013 [2013]

This lecture is co-sponsored by the Center for Heritage and Society.

601 Herter Hall, UMass campus map

2012 - 2013

Thursday, April 18 , 4:30 p.m.

Gregory Staley, University of Maryland

MAKING OEDIPUS ROMAN

Aristotle and Freud have taught us to read Sophocles’ Oedipous Tyrannos as a story of recognition and self discovery. Seneca, a Stoic philosopher who emphasized the imperative to “know ourselves” and who wrote the only surviving version of Oedipus’ story by a Latin author, would, we might have expected, have been drawn to Oedipus for these same reasons. His version of Oedipus, however, replaces the hero’s courageous and almost psychoanalytic search for self with a series of scenes which the Romans called monstra: the wise man Tiresias consults the entrails of animals and finally calls up from Acheron the spirit of Oedipus’ father, Laius, in order to reveal the truth about who Oedipus is and what he has done. Seneca has long been condemned for turning this story into the literary equivalent of the public spectacles Romans enjoyed in the arena and the circus. Lessing in his Laokoon (1766) wrote that “a theatre is surely not an arena.”

The Sophoclean process of self-discovery could be staged as a public and dramatic event; in imperial Rome such an act could only be private and internal. To create theater, Seneca had to transform the revelation of the truth from a verbal and dialogic form in Sophocles into a series of monstra, vivid events which search for the truth in the signs of nature, the signs of the body. For Seneca as a Stoic and as a prominent figure at Rome, truths are hidden and need to be inferred. The search for truth is quite literally “scrutiny,” the probing of the hidden and inward. I would suggest that for Seneca “scrutiny” is in its primary sense an act of extispicium that only metaphorically becomes an act of self-analysis. His Oedipus returns to the reality behind the metaphor.

Amherst College Paino Lecture Hall, Beneski Earth Sciences Building

Tuesday, April 16, 4:30 p.m.

Lindsay Oxx, Amherst College Class of 2014

THE PART AND THE WHOLE: AN ASSYRIAN SYNECDOCHE

Ms. Oxx unlocks a museum mystery by examining how and why one slab of the Mead's renowned Assyrian palace reliefs was incorrectly restored in the 1850's and does not belong with the others. She demonstrates how this "alien" element, only recently recognized, sheds light on the reception and interpretation of these reliefs when they first arrived in bucolic Amherst from exotic Mesopotamia.

In January 2013 Ms. Oxx delivered a version of this lecture at the Annual Meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America in Seattle, WA, as part of the first Undergraduate Paper Session. Her lecture at the Mead is co-sponsored by the Archaeological Institute of America, Western Massachusetts Society.

Mead Art Museum, Amherst College

AIA LECTURE

Thursday, April 11th, 5:30 p.m.

Professor Alexandra Carpino, Northern Arizona University

BEAUTY AND VIOLENCE: MATRICIDE MYTHS ON ETRUSCAN BRONZE MIRRORS

Intricately engraved bronze mirrors not only symbolized the status, prosperity and superiority of their owners but they also reinforced the cultural importance of adornment, marriage and the family in aristocratic Etruscan society. While their polished obverses provided multiple opportunities for self-transformation, the changeless scenes on the non-reflecting sides functioned as a sophisticated form of visual communication within the domestic sphere, evoking the values, beliefs, aspirations, and fears of their patrons and users. Not surprisingly, their themes varied considerably, from the joys, challenges, and tensions of family life to reflections on beauty, fertility, heroism, power, fate and immortality.

In this talk, I will focus on some of the narratives that embodied the Etruscans’ social and cultural expectations about motherhood, a subject that appears on mirrors produced throughout Etruria between the fifth and early third centuries BCE. While most of these scenes proclaim a close bond between mothers and their sons, others illustrate moments rife with tension and hostility, portraying women whose behavior transgresses social and cultural paradigms. Sometimes, as in the case of Uni (Hera), who rejected her baby son Sethlans (Hephaistos), there is a positive outcome to the conflict that is portrayed, but at other times, the hostility results in a horrific act: matricide. The broader implications of the mirrors’ matricide myths will be at the center of my discussion, which will focus, in particular, on the scenes that depict the moment just before Cluthumustha (Klytaimnestra) dies at the hands of her grown son, Urusthe (Orestes). What justified the inclusion of this shocking confrontation on these objects of beauty and transformation? To whom was the narrative directed, and how does it correlate with the apparent privileges enjoyed by elite Etruscan women? By comparing the mirror representations to the story’s treatment in funerary and religious art, it will become clear that their functional context—the domestic sphere—played an important role not only in terms of the narrative’s visualization but also with respect to its message to their users, individuals very much like Klytaimnestra herself.

Hosted by the UMass Classics Department

University of Massachusetts Campus Center Reading Room

Wednesday, April 3, 5:30 p.m.

Dr. Christine Kondoleon, MFA, Boston

The Classics Department at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst,will host its 9th annual David Grose lecture

PLAYING WITH EROS: RIDDLES AND RHYMES

Presented by Dr. Christine Kondoleon, George and Margo Behrakis Senior Curator of Greek and Roman Art of the Ancient World, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Aphrodite always had serious competition from her son Eros, the Greek god of desire. He was the darling of ancient artists who expressed the popular fascination of his irresistible power in poetry and art. Eros was active everywhere in Greek and Roman daily life, and his interferences in the affairs of gods and mortals were as much a cause for celebration as for lamentation. Christine Kondoleon discusses ancient perceptions of Eros and his role in the realm of human desire, sex, and love.

University of Massachusetts, Amherst

School of Management, room 137

Thursday, March 28, 5:00 p.m.

Richard Buxton, University of Bristol

The AMBIGUITY OF METAMORPHOSES from HOMER TO DU MAURIER

Metamorphosis has been a major theme of myths and texts since classical antiquity. In this lecture Richard Buxton will explore a particular aspect of the theme, namely its ambiguity: in many narratives, determining how - and indeed whether - a transformation has occurred may be left open to the interpreter. Examples will be drawn from authors ranging from Homer and Ovid to Shakespeare, Hawthorne, Kafka and du Maurier.

Smith College, Browsing Room, Neilson Library

Wednesday, March 27, 5:00 p.m.

Kathleen Lynch, University of Cincinnati

GREEKS BEARING GIFTS: ATHENIAN POTTERS AND THEIR ANATOLIAN CUSTOMERS

During the Archaic and Classical periods (ca. 600-350 B.C.) the potters of Athens produced high-quality finewares, some of which were decorated with figured scenes (Attic black-figure and red-figure). While Athenians certainly used Athenian pottery in their daily lives for dining, offering at sanctuaries, and as gifts in their graves, a large proportion of Athenian pottery was exported to the west and east. The western consumers of Athenian pottery, especially the Etruscans in Italy, have been the focus of extensive study, but their eastern consumers have not. This paper will focus on the pottery exported to Anatolia with brief comments on the presence of Athenian pottery in North Africa and the Levant. Particularly interesting is that the peak of importation of Attic pottery in the east was during the period of Persian rule. Despite their enmity with Athens in this period, the Persians eagerly bought and used Athenian pottery. The role of Attic pottery at Gordion, which was the Phrygian capital and subsequently became a provincial center under the Persians, will receive special discussion since the quality and quantity of Athenian pottery at this inland site near Ankara defies expectations. An examination of Athenian pottery in the various cultural centers of Anatolia shows that non-Greek residents of the east were not passive recipients of whatever Athenian pottery made it their way. Instead, Athenian potters savvily marketed their wares to their eastern customers, and a comparison of the western and eastern markets underscores the shape and image preferences of the easterners. These preferences, in turn, can help us understand the cultural meaning and use of the imported Athenian pottery in Anatolia.

Smith College, Stoddard Auditorium

4:15 p.m. ~ Refreshments in the Alumnae House

Tuesday, March 26, 4:30 p.m.

Jonathan Master, Emory University

THE COST OF ROMAN IMPERIALISM ON PROVINCIAL SOLDIERS

Beginning with the complaints of Batavian revolutionary Julius Civilis about the insulting returns provincial soldiers receive on behalf of their massive contribution to the Roman Empire, this lecture asks whether Tacitus’ Histories may actually support the claims of this antagonist. It will explore whether the meager rewards the Roman Empire offers its subjects contribute to the chaos of AD 69, the year of the four emperors.

Amherst College, Chapin Hall, room #201

Thursday, March 7th, Lynne Lancaster, Ohio University

OLIVE OIL AND ARCHITECTURE IN NORTH AFRICA

In this lecture I examine a building technique used in Roman North Africa for constructing vaults by means of small hollow terracotta tubes that are inserted one into another and “glued” together with mortar. By examining this unique building technique, she demonstrates how the building industry in North Africa was intimately connected with the production of olive oil destined for Rome and how the use of these tubes ultimately resulted in the creation of new forms of vaulting not found elsewhere in the empire. Recent field surveys have produced a wealth of new information regarding ancient agricultural technology for olive production, ceramic production for the amphoras containing the olive oil, and also fine ware production. The proliferation of the vaulting tubes was also part of this period of economic growth related to increased agricultural production. This unique construction technique eventually was adopted elsewhere in the western Mediterranean, including Rome and Ravenna, where it was used to construct the dome of the famous Byzantine church of San Vitale. Through a series of interconnected technologies, the necessity to provide food for Rome ultimately resulted in a vaulting technique that created spectacular new architectural achievements.

Gamble Auditorium, Mount Holyoke College South Hadley, MA

Thursday, February 28th, Amanda Wilcox, Williams College

EPISTOLARY RHETORIC AND SOCIAL NEGOTIATION INCICERO'S AD FAMILIARES

Members of the Roman elite relied on correspondence to conduct business of all sorts, but to modern ears, their letters rarely sound businesslike. Rather, Roman correspondentsused euphemistic vocabulary and subtle rhetoric to blur or finesse differences in opinion,policy, and status, and constantly to disavow self-interested motivations. This lecturefocuses on two of Cicero’s letters (Ad familiares 5.7 and 13.16) that exemplify his skill as a correspondent and suggest its limits.

Smith College, Dewey Hall Common Room Northampton, MA

Tuesday, November 27th, 4:00 p.m.

Alison Brown, Royal Holloway College

Classical Legacy Lecture

"TRANSGRESSION AND MODERNISM IN THE THINKING OF LUCRETIUS AND MACHIAVELLI"

Massachusetts Center for Renaissance Studies- Reading Room (413-577-3600)

650 East Pleasant Street, Amherst

Free of charge and open to the public

Thursday, November 15th 4:30 p.m.

Luca Grillo, Amherst College

POLITICAL AND POETIC INVECTIVE IN THE LATE ROMAN REPUBLIC

Smith College, Seelye Hall 106

Thursday, November 1st

David Ferry '46

From the College Event Calendar:

"One of America's best poets, David Ferry '46, will read from his work on Thursday, Nov. 1, at 4 p.m. in the Cole Assembly Room (Red Room) of Converse Hall. Ferry's latest, just-published book is "Bewilderment" (University of Chicago Press), which is a finalist for this year's National Book Award for poetry. The public is cordially invited."

Mr. Ferry is not only a distinguished poet in his own right but also has translated Horace and is now translating Virgil's Aeneid. He is the recipient of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Award for Lifetime Achievement.

Thursday, October 18th, 4:30 p.m.

Jacques Perreault, Universite de Montreal

The Kilns of Thasos: an Island Potter's Workshop in Ancient Greece (6th c. B.C.)

Pottery Production increased greatly during the Archaic period in the Greek world and we know of many different styles and production centres. Unfortunately, very few pottery workshops of this period have been found. A team of French, Canadian and Greek archaeologists excavated the only known pottery workshop on the Northern Greek island of Thasos, and one of the very few in Greece. This lecture will present the results of the excavation of this workshop, where apart from the impressive quantity of vases uncovered, all structures necessary to the production of pottery have been found. We will examine the particular architectural features, the extremely diversified production, and the distribution of the workshop's production in the North Aegean and the Black Sea.

Amherst College, Paino Lecture Hall, Beneski Earth Sciences Building

campus map

Thursday, September 20th, 5:00 p.m.

Sarah Morris, UCLA

Passing Children Through the Fire: Ritual Infanticide in the Ancient Mediterranean

Smith College, Graham Auditorium

see campus map, building #5, Hillyer Hall - Graham Hall

Tuesday, September 11, 4:30 p.m.

Christopher B. Krebs, Stanford University

A Dangerous Book? How Tacitus's Germania Became the Nazis' Bible.

Christopher B. Krebs studied classics and philosophy in Berlin, Kiel (1st Staatsexamen 2000, Ph.D. 2003), and Oxford (M.St. 2002).

He has taught at University College (Oxford), École Normale Supérieure (Paris), and Harvard University and was the APA fellow at the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae in Munich in 2008-2009.

Prof. Krebs’ visit is sponsored by the Department of Classics, the History Department, the Department of German, the European Studies Program, and the Lucius Root Eastman 1895 Lecture Fund, Amherst College.

Pruyne Lecture Hall, 115 Fayerweather, Amherst College campus map

CONFERENCE:

Thursday, September 13 - Saturday, September 16

Caesar: Writer, Speaker and Linguist

This conference brings together the contributors to The Cambridge Companion to Caesar, co-edited by Luca Grillo (Amherst College) and Christopher Krebs (Stanford University). In accordance with the aim of Cambridge Companions, the conference aims simultaneously to advance research on Caesar and to make it available to a broader public. Specifically, we want to further the appreciation of Caesar as a versatile intellectual, by taking various approaches – narratological, rhetorical, linguistic, and historical – to his oeuvre. Caesar as general and politician still fascinates the general public and scholars alike, as he has for generations. But contemporaries also celebrated him as a leading intellectual, and we can still discern this Caesar in the fragments of his orations, linguistic treatises, and polemic pamphlets, letters to friends and the senate, and, of course, his famous Commentaries. This Caesar has most recently started to enjoy a much-deserved comeback, as proved by recent publications and by his inclusion in the new AP Latin programs; but much more work remains to be done.

Amherst College For more information click here

2011 - 2012

Thursday, April 5
Title: TBA
Speaker: Jeffrey Hurwit (University of Oregon)
Location: Graham Hall, Smith College
Time: TBA
Sponsor: Archaeological Institute of America, Western Massachusetts Society.

Tuesday, March 27
Title: Investigating the Surface: Hairstyles of the Athenian Caryatids
Speaker: Katherine Schwab (Fairfield University)
Location: Pruyne Lecture Hall, 115 Fayerweather, Amherst College
Time: 4:30 p.m.
Sponsor: Department of Classics, Amherst College
Katherine Schwab brings the eye of an artist to her study and reconstruction of Greek sculpture. Her drawings of the east and north metopes of the Parthenon, permanently installed in the Parthenon Gallery of the new Acropolis Museum, reveal details that contribute to a deeper understanding of this building's whole sculptural program. Recently she has turned her attention to the Caryatids of the Erechtheum, the sculpted female figures that served as supports in the south porch of this Acropolis temple. Their intricate hairstyles are among the most decorative elements of this temple. With the help of student volunteers, Professor Schwab has brought new evidence to bear on the technique and meaning of these elaborate hair arrangements.

Wednesday, March 7
Title: The Unsolved Mystery of the Agora Bone Well; Abstract
Speaker: Susan Rotroff, Washington University
Location: Fayerweather 115 (Pruyne Lecture Hall), Amherst College
Time: 4:30 p.m.
Sponsor: Archaeological Institute of America, Western Massachusetts Society. Hosted by Amherst College Classics Department.

Monday, March 5
Title: Sophocles and Athenian Politics
Speaker: Sarah Ferrario (Catholic University of America)
Time: 5:00 p.m.
Location: Browsing Room, Neilson Library, Smith College
Sponsor: Department of Classical Languages and Literatures, Smith College

Wednesday, December 7
Title: Apuleius in the Renaissance
Speaker: Julia Haig Gaisser (Bryn Mawr)
Location: Reading Room, Renaissance Center, University of Massachusetts
Time: 4:00 p.m.
Sponsor: Classics Department at UMass
For more information, please contact Elizabeth Keitel

Thursday, December 1
Title: From Ben Hur to Nascar: Fans, Fame, and the Roman Circus
Speaker: Sinclair Bell ( University of Northern Illinois)
Location: Herter Hall, Auditorium 231, UMass Amherst
Time: 5:00-6:30 p.m.
Sponsors: UMass Classics, UMass Art History, and the Archaeological Institute of America, Western Massachusetts Society

Tuesday, November 15
Title: Making Up a Woman in Ancient Greece
Speaker: Ada Cohen (Dartmouth College)
Location: Gamble Auditorium, Art Building, Mt. Holyoke College
Time: 4:30 p.m.
Co-sponsored: Mount Holyoke College Art Museum and the Art History Program

Monday, November 14
Title: Re-conquering the West: Warfare and Politics in Ostrogothic Italy
Speaker: Dr. Maria Kouroumali (Byzantine Studies, Hellenic College/Holy Cross)
Location: Skinner Hall, #216, Mount Holyoke College
Time: 4:30 p.m.
Sponsors: Departments of History and Classics, MHC; Department of Classics, SC; Departments of History and Classics, AC; Department of History, UMass; Five Colleges, Inc.
Poster Kouroumali

Thursday, October 27
Title: Reconstructing Antiquity: Sex, Lies and Politics: Portraits of Rome's Bad Empresses
Speaker: Eric Varner (Emory University)
Location: Gamble Auditorium, Art Building, Mt. Holyoke College
Time: 4:30 p.m.
Sponsor: Mount Holyoke College Art Museum
Reception to follow

Monday, October 24
Title: Procopius of Caesarea, enigmatic historian of the emperor Justinian
Speaker: Geoffrey Greatrex (University of Ottawa)
Location: 202 Skinner Hall, Mt. Holyoke College
Time: 4:15 p.m.
Sponsor: Departments of History and Classics at Mount Holyoke in addition to Five College support. For more information about Professor Greatrex
For more information: please contact Professor Shawcross

Saturday, October 22
Event: An Afternoon with an Archaeologist
Site-mapping field trip at the Smith College Ada and Archibald MacLeish Field Station. An exciting opportunity to experience hands-on how a field archaeologist maps and surveys an archaeological site.
Trip Leader: Matt Emerson
Location: Smith College MacLeish Field Station (Whately MA)
Time: 1:30-4:30
Sponsor: Archaeological Institute of America, Western Massachusetts Society
For more information please contact Matt Emerson or Scott Bradbury
FieldTripPoster -- Refreshments Served

Tuesday, October 18
Title: Reconstructing and Testing Ancient Linen Body Armor: The Linothorax Project
Speaker: Gregory Aldrete, (University of Wisconsin, Green Bay)
Location: Gamble Auditorium 106B , Mt. Holyoke College
Time: 5:00 p.m.
Sponsor: Archaeological Institute of America, Western Massachusetts Society
Please contact Paula Debnar for Dutch-treat dinner.

Monday, October 17
New England Ancient History Colloquium (NEAHC)
Deliberative Oratory in the Annals and the Dialogus
Keynote Speaker: Christopher van den Berg (Amherst College)
Commentary by: Elizabeth Keitel (University of Massachusetts)
Location: UMASS Boston (Campus Center, Room 3545, 100 Morrissey Blvd.)
Time: 5:30-6:30 Gathering and Dinner by pre-arrangement
7:30-9:30 Discussion of paper

Section Navigation

2023-2024

Building Community at Ancient Eleon: Monumental Constructions of the Mycenaean and Archaic Ages

Electra

Seneca's First Intervention: The Consolation to Marcia

Songs of Praise for Mortals: What They Can and Cannot Do

The Anax Altar: Cult, Myth, and Worship on the Peak of Mount Lykaion

Old Houses, New Viewers: Domestic Renovation in Roman Sicily

Remembering Octavia, People’s Princess of Neronian Rome

Dan-el Padilla Peralta, associate professor of classics and associated faculty in African American studiesand affiliated faculty in Latino studies, Princeton University

Managing and Curating Yale University's Numismatic Collection

2022-2023

The Sentient Sponge: Between Natural History, Art History, and Philosophy

Archaeology, Museums, and War

Decolonizing Museums and the Case of the "Elgin Marbles": Exceptionalism vs. Solidarity?

Model Minorities and Perpetual Foreigners in Euripides’s Heraclidae

Ecology and Citizenship in Antiquity

Artifacts and Archaeological Processes: The Lives and Afterlives of Objects at Pompeii

Myth as Method: An American Poet in Greece, through Modern Crises

Holding the Bag: A Contested Symbol in the Funerary Art of Late Roman Gaul

Imperial Psychopathologies: Thucydides, Pushkin, Daneliya

Seeing the Roman Empire through Ancient Souvenirs

Material Encounters in a Hellenistic Egyptian Fortification

Otherness and the Edges of Race: Orientalisms from the Emperor Nero to Modern America

Operation Demeter: What Italy’s Largest Antiquities Bust Reveals About Archaeological Looting Today

2021-2022

Living with the Dead: Urbanism in the Roman Suburb

Towards an Archaeology of Identity: Late Classical Olynthos (Greece) and Beyond

Lisa Nevett, University of Michigan Ann Arbor

On Sacred Ground: Interpreting Votive Images at Metaponto in Southern Italy

Student Workshop

The Satyr, the Goddess, and the Oriental Cast: Subversive Classicism in The Conjure Woman

Polychromy, New (and Old) Technologies, and the Parthenon Metopes

“The most richly imagined fabrics of the past”: Breaking Categories and Reassembling Ancient Worlds

Philomela’s Tongue: Speech, Silence, and the Voice of Gender

Conference: "Virgilian Space and Places"

Celebrating Isis: Ritual and Ethnicity in Apuleius’s Metamorphoses

Khameleon Productions Presents Uprooting Medea

Daisies at the Hinterland: Trans-Saharan Decoration from Meroitic Nubia

Nicias the Superstitious?

2020 - 2021

Classics and White Supremacism in the United States: a Brief History

Kalamianos: the Brief but Brilliant Life of a Mycenaean Harbor

Xenophon and the Athenian Democracy: The Education of an Elite Citizenry

Global Learning Through the Pandemic and Beyond: Ancient Archaeology Lectures

Gods and Robots: Imagining Artificial Life in Antiquity

Girls Will Be Boys? Investigating Images Of Athletic Women In Ancient Etruscan Art

John Kachuba speaks on Shapeshifters: A Brief History from Antiquity to Modern Times (Virtual Lecture)

2019 - 2020

Canceled.

THE FRANK AND LOIS GREEN SCHWOERER '49, ANNUAL HISTORY LECTURE

Guilt and Enslavement Habits of Thought from the Ancient World to Modern America

Noel Lenski, Yale University

Cancelled.

Reading Plautus with Frederick Douglass

Matthew Leigh, St. Anne's College, Oxford

Cancelled.

The 30th Annual Phyllis Williams Lehmann Lecture

Brian Rose, University of Pennsylvania

Cancelled.

Rebecca Ammerman, Colgate University

Cancelled.

The Sixteenth Annual David F. Grose Memorial Lecture

Kalamianos: The Brief but Brilliant Life of a Mycenaean Harbor

Thomas F. Tartaron, University of Pennsylvania

Cancelled.

Lisa Nevett, University of Michigan

Cancelled.

The Ancient Studies Annual Lecture at Smith College

Fictions of Citizenship in Livy's History of Rome

Denis Feeney, Princeton University

Space, Scale, and Canon in Ancient Literary Culture

Reviel Netz, Stanford University

Archaeological Institute of America- Western Mass Society presents

Where Did the Pompeians Go? Searching for Refugees from the Eruption of Vesuvius, AD 79

Steven Tuck, Miami University

Poetry on Stone: Reading Late Antique Metrical Inscriptions

Gianfranco Agosti, Università di Roma "La Sapienza"

The Origin of Victory Epigrams

Simon Oswald, UMass Amherst

Dan-el Padilla Peralta, associate professor of classics and associated faculty in African American studies
and affiliated faculty in Latino studies, Princeton University