Greeks on Greekness Colloquium Abstract Ruth Webb, Princeton University “Fiction, Mimesis, and the Performance of the Greek Past in the Second Sophistic” What strikes the modern reader most forcibly about the practice of declamation, which lay at the heart of Philostratos’ conception of the ‘Second Sophistic’ is the apparent obsession with the Classical past. In this paper I argue that, despite its subject matter, historical declamation was very much a… Read more
Greeks on Greekness Colloquium Abstract Greg Woolf, University of St. Andrews “Playing Games with Greeks.” This paper took its departure from Pliny Epistulae 4.22 which begins by relating Pliny’s participation at the consilium of Trajan when it discussed an appeal from the city of Vienne against the decision of one of its chief magistrates to suppress a gymnicus agon funded by the will of a civic benefactor whom Pliny leaves… Read more
Greeks on Greekness Colloquium Abstract Giusto Traina, University of Lecce “Looking for Greekness in Ancient Iran and Armenia” Imperial interpretation of Hellenism, as we find it in the writers of the Second Sophistic, has strongly marked modern scholarship. But such witnesess are less than impartial: witness the analysis of Apollonius of Tyana’s Eastern travels, in Philostratus’ romanced biography. The classical concept of Hellenism implies a rigid opposition between East and… Read more
Greeks on Greekness Colloquium Abstract Tony Spawforth, University of Newcastle “Pellan twilight? Greek identities and the Hellenistic past under the Roman principate.” In current research much emphasis is (rightly) placed on the centrality of Classical Greece in contemporary perceptions under Roman rule of what it was to be ‘Greek’. On this view, the Hellenistic age and its works were, with the signal exception of Alexander himself, somewhat sidelined in the… Read more
Greeks on Greekness Colloquium Abstract Francesca Mestre, University of Barcelona “Heroes And Heroism As Patterns Of Greek Identity In The Roman Empire.” This paper focuses on one of the figures the Greeks used for this purpose, the traditional hero: what he is, what he represents, the ways in which the legend could be exploited, and what new functions the figure could take on inside this attempt to establish a Greek… Read more
Greeks on Greekness Colloquium Abstract Simon Goldhill, King’s College, Cambridge “Polytheism and Identity in the Late Antique and the Case of Artemis.” This paper is interested in the following questions: How is Artemis represented in the Greek texts of the Roman empire? What implications does this representation have for the history of Greek religion – and, more specifically, how does this late material construct a very different model for the… Read more
Greeks on Greekness Colloquium Abstract Ineke Sluiter, Universiteit Leiden “Truth or Construction? Working with the Past in the Second Sophistic” The special significance attached to the past in the Second Sophistic makes it highly desirable for “the past” to possess a certain stability: it should be possible to get to “the truth”, and in fact, truth-claims abound in discourse about the past. Yet, at the same time, second-sophistic intellectuals realize… Read more
Greeks on Greekness Colloquium Abstract Suzanne Saïd, Columbia University “The Rewriting of the Athenian Past: From Isocrates to Aelius Aristides” This paper examines the refashioning of the Athenian past in the Panathenaicus of Aristides. At first glance the Panathenaicus looks like a mere rehash of Isocrates’ Panegyricus. Like the Panegyricus, it is a demonstration of Athens’ many virtues by means of a catalogue of her benefactions both in mythical and… Read more
Tom Walsh back to Homerizon Conference main page Homer’s “Fragments” It will soon be 80 years since Milman Parry demonstrated, startlingly, that oral and traditional style has deep consequences for those who seek to understand Homeric poetry and narrative. These consequences, nonetheless, have not lead to a settled view of the fundamental matters of Homeric discourse. The Parryan paradigm shift, in fact, has not yielded,… Read more
Cashman Kerr Prince back to Homerizon Conference main page Poeta sovrano?: Horizons of Homer in Twentieth-Century English-Language Poetry My title begins with a citation from Dante, quoted in the call for papers for this Homerizon conference, then the balance of my title moves away from the Italian Trecento and towards a radically different time-period, one as unimaginable to Dante as to the ancients. Comments on Dante’s understanding of Homer… Read more
