Fall 2024
PhD candidate Julien Dechevez
Wednesday, October 9th, at 2:30 pm, in Watson Hall, Room 517
The Sale of Priesthoods in Greek Cities: Procedures, Mechanisms and Implications
In ancient Greece, there were four different ways to acquire a priesthood, which varied according to the customs of each city: by inheritance, by election, by lot, and by purchase. While the practice of selling a priesthood through public auction remains unknown in mainland Greece, it became widespread in the Aegean islands and Anatolia between the 4th century BC and the 2nd century AD. This process is well-documented through contracts that were drawn up on the occasion of these sales, some of which have been preserved on stone. This paper aims to explore the procedures and mechanisms behind the sale of priesthoods and its broader implications for the social, economic, and religious life of ancient Greek communities. Εxamining these detailed documents, which provide extensive information about the terms of holding a religious office such as age, gender, perquisites, and ritual duties allows us to investigate the practical aspects of assuming a priesthood in the ancient Greek world.
Dr. Michael Sampson
Department of Classics
University of Manitoba
Monday, September 23rd, 2024 from 4:00 - 6:00 pm, in Watson Hall Room 517
A Sapphic Scandal and Scholarly Ethics
When Dirk Obbink announced in January 2014 that he had discovered two new poems by Sappho on a recently surfaced papyrus fragment, the news caused a media frenzy and an outburst of scholarship on the new texts. In the decade since the announcement, however, scholarly scrutiny of the papyrus itself – as an archaeological object – has exposed the published accounts of its origins as bogus. Amazingly, the publisher Brill even retracted formally one of Obbink’s publications on the topic – a virtually unheard of event in the world of Classical scholarship. In this paper, I present the history of the discovery and the forensic exposure of the papyrus’ illicit origins before turning to the larger issues of research ethics in Classical scholarship and the importance of provenance research for the field in general – outside of exclusively archaeological circles.
Dr. Mantha Zarmakoupi
Morris Russell and Josephine Chidsey Williams
Assistant Professor in Roman Architecture
University of Pennsylvania
Monday, September 16th, 2024 from 2:30 - 4:00 pm, in Stirling Hall Room A
The Maritime Infrastructure and Network of the Delian Emporium
Delos underwent a rapid economic development after 167 BCE, when its Roman rulers granted the port of Delos ‘duty-free’ status under Athenian dominion and turned it into a commercial base connecting the eastern and western Mediterranean. The island became a free-trade commercial base under nominal Athenian supervision, but essentially under Roman rule. The result of this economic development was an unprecedented population increase and, by consequence, accelerated urbanization – changes attested by the formation of new neighborhoods and harbour facilities and the redevelopment of existing urban and harbour areas of the island. This presentation will discuss the island’s urban development, maritime infrastructure, and its commercial connections in order to shed light on this important key site in the history of Hellenistic Greece and the nascent Roman Empire.
Winter 2024
Dr. Joshua Paul
Wednesday, March 27th, 2024 from 2:30 - 4:00 pm, in Watson Hall Room 517
Flirting with the Enemy: Latin Love Elegy, Furies, and the Anxiety of Genre
Roman poets of the Augustan Age were generally expected to climb the hierarchy of genres, to gradually ascend from humble pursuits like bucolic, satire, and love elegy and eventually reach more prestigious aspirations like tragedy, didactic, and epic. I argue that the Latin love elegist Propertius raises but rejects the possibility of generic ascension by invoking the Furies at crucial junctures of his literary career. The Erinyes, in their capacity as guardians of boundaries and protectors of natural order, function as apt mythological metaphors through which Propertius might write polemic against incompatible genres. Latent and rationalized myths of the Furies signpost transgressions of genre (both hypothetical and realized) and serve as subtle recusationes, “refusals” to fully commit to tragedy, didactic, and aetiology.
Dr. Bice Peruzzi
Wednesday, March 13th, 2024 from 2:30 - 4:00 pm, in Watson Hall Room 517
Drunken Women with Spears? Funerary Practices and Female Identity in pre-Roman Apulia
Before the Roman conquest, Central Apulia was inhabited by a population traditionally known as the Peucetians. Although the Peucetians have left no written records and were largely ignored by ancient sources, the thousands of tombs excavated in Central Apulia speak of a society with a complex social hierarchy and long-range commercial contacts with Etruria, Greece, and other parts of Southern Italy.
Perhaps unexpectedly, these graves also show that in the Classical and Hellenistic periods, Peucetian women enjoyed a more emancipated existence than their Athenian counterparts. Besides objects related to what are traditionally understood as female roles (e.g., weaving, child rearing, performing libations) funerary assemblages dated between the 6th and 4th century BCE also included full banqueting sets, virtually identical to those found in male tombs. A few older women were even buried with spears, maybe to indicate their exceptional role in the community. This talk explores the relationship between the consumption of artifacts and the lives of Peucetian women in antiquity and discusses more broadly about how our modern ideas about “female assemblages” are often in contrast with the reality of the archaeological record.
Dr. Patrick Baker
Wednesday, February 28, 2024, from 2:30 pm - 4:00 pm in Watson Hall Room 517
Local celebrations on the territory of Xanthos in the late Hellenistic period. The work of the Canadian epigraphic mission to Xanthos-Letoon
From 2000 to 2010, the Canadian epigraphic mission of Xanthos-Letoon worked on collecting and studying the Greek and Latin inscriptions of the two sites in Lycia, Turkey, and publishing the results in print and online. Though the Turkish government suspended fieldwork in 2011, research has continued into the documents themselves. This paper begins with a brief overview of the mission, both during the 10 years devoted to fieldwork and since this was suspended. The emphasis is on the nature of the fieldwork carried out by epigraphists, as well as the use of 3D technologies for epigraphical research. We then turn to a particularly illuminating case. Survey work in 2009 on the site of Aklar, a village of the Xanthian eschatiai on the mountainous borders of the territory of Xanthos, led to the discovery of two similar inscriptions. The nearly 180 lines, once deciphered (a challenge in itself), present the regularly-structured list of contributors to an unnamed annual religious celebration. Drawing on Lycian parallels, notably from Phellos, we address a number of key questions, such as the status of the anonymous kōmē on the territory of Xanthos during the Hellenistic period, the nature of local cultic celebrations far from the urban center, and the validity of archaeologist F. Işık's initial interpretation of the site of Aklar.
Dr. Nicola Terrenato
Wednesday, January 31st, 2024, from 2:30 pm - 4:00 pm in Watson Hall Room 517
Urban borehole surveys and the Origins of the Roman Forum
The debate on the early phases of the Roman Forum goes back to the origins of urban archaeology in Rome, in the days of Giacomo Boni’s excavations at the Equus Domitiani. Since the 1990s, the dominant theory has envisioned seasonal flooding that needed to be mitigated before the city could come into existence. Recent hydrogeological data from boreholes in the neighboring Forum Boarium has been calling into question the accepted reconstruction. We now know that the environment of early Rome changed radically in the course of the 6th century BCE—a realization that is driving a broad-ranging reassessment of the first stages in the urbanization process. The paper reconsiders the new evidence, proposing a radically different sequence of events and placing it within the context of the emergence of piazzas in other central Italian urban centers.
Fall 2023