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2018

	Monday, November 5, 2018 *EVENT CANCELED FOR FALL 2018* The Germs of Rome: Modern Science and the Fall of an Ancient Empire *Jon K. Harper, Senior Vice President and Provost, Professor of Classics & Letters,* University of Oklahoma** RKC 103 5:00 pm – 6:00 pm EST/GMT-5 This lecture will explore the ways in which the natural sciences, particularly paleogenomics, are providing us exciting new insights into important questions about the ancient past such as the fall of Rome. And it will consider how the study of human history can deepen our understanding of health, disease, and the evolution of pathogens like smallpox and plague.
	Tuesday, October 23, 2018 Dance at Work in Euripides’s Ion Sarah Olsen, Assistant Professor of Classics at Williams College RKC 103 5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4 This talk compares Euripides’s Ion (ca. 413 BCE) with Fredrick Ashton’s ballet Cinderella (1948), arguing that in both productions, dance serves to foreshadow the titular character’s transformation from rags to royalty. I will further demonstrate that Euripides’s play, in sharp contrast to Ashton’s playful ballet, exploits the ambivalent status of solo dance in the ancient Greek cultural imagination to underscore the tragedy of Ion’s transformation, using the language and imagery of movement to unsettle our assumptions about both Ion and his mother, Creusa.
	Monday, October 1, 2018 The Pythagorean Harmonics of the Parthenon Michael Weinman, Professor of Philosophy, Bard College Berlin RKC 103 5:00 pm – 6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 Drawing on arguments from The Parthenon and Liberal Education (SUNY, 2018), a monograph recently coauthored with my Bard College Berlin colleague Geoff Lehman, I will point to the resonance of the work in number theory, astronomy, and harmonics of Philolaus, a near contemporary of Socrates, with central features of the design principles of the Parthenon. In this way, I hope to show that the Parthenon can be seen as a mediator between the early reception of Ancient Near-Eastern mathematical ideas and their integration into Greek thought as a form of liberal education, as the latter came to be defined by Plato and his followers. Prominently in its pursuit of harmonia (harmony; joining together) without resolving tensions between opposites, the Parthenon engages dialectical thought as we encounter it in Plato's dialogues and in ways that are of enduring relevance for the project of liberal education.
	Friday, September 14, 2018 Herakles Gone Mad: Moral Injury and Just War Olin 102 5:30 pm – 7:30 pm EDT/GMT-4 A dramatic reading of Euripides's play Herakles, translated by Dr. Robert Meagher (Hampshire College), followed by a moderated discussion of Moral Injury and Just War with Dr. Meager, Col. David Barnes (West Point Military Academy), and Dr. Mark Santow, University Massachusetts Dartmouth and the Clemente Course in the Humanities. Moderated by Dr. Jack Cheng, Clemente Course in the Humanities. The part of Herakles will be read by Emily Donahoe O'Keefe and the part of Theseus will be read by Wayne Pyle. Free and open to the public!
	Friday, April 27, 2018 Translating the Odyssey Again: How and Why Emily Wilson, Professor of Classics, University of Pennsylvania Moderated by Wyatt Mason RKC 103 4:30 pm – 6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 This presentation is a keynote address for the Translation Symposium at Bard, sponsored by L&L and Bard’s Translation and Translatability Initiative.
	Friday, April 27, 2018 Translation Symposium A conference on the theory and practice of translation, organised by Bard's Translation and Translatability Initiative. Bard College Campus 9:00 am – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
	Tuesday, April 17, 2018 An Amulet for Abortion? Ancient Reproduction from a Modern Perspective Tara Mulder, PhD Visiting Assistant Professor, Vassar College Olin Humanities, Room 203 5:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 There are hundreds of Greco-Egyptian magical gems from the 1st–4th centuries CE that have been found all around the Mediterranean. Of these, more than a hundred have been identified as “uterine amulets,” distinguished by a symbolic representation of a uterus accompanied by Egyptian deities and Greek lettering. Current interpretations of these amulets reflect an ignorance of female experience in the ancient world, attributable in part to being written by male scholars. For example, most interpretations focus on only a narrow range of uterine conditions that the amulets may be aimed at curing, and they assume abortion was always an unwanted outcome. In fact, it is likely that certain amulets were intended not to prevent but to induce abortion. In this talk I will give an overview of ancient ideologies of reproduction, with a focus on attitudes toward abortion. I will demonstrate what modern scholars have missed in their analysis of the ancient evidence, including medical and scientific texts, magical papyri, and the uterine amulets.
	Monday, February 26, 2018 Recomposing Romanness: Asceticism and Poetry in Late Antique Gaul David Ungvary, PhD Candidate, Harvard University Olin Humanities, Room 102 5:00 pm EST/GMT-5 This talk takes as its focus the intersection of Christian asceticism, Latin poetry, and Roman identity at the twilight of the Western empire. Under the influence of asceticism, Gallo-Roman writers experimented with poetry—a traditional literary tool of the Roman nobility—as an instrument of pious practice, spiritual transformation, and Christian identification. The talk investigates how innovations in ascetic poetry leveraged the power of classical literature to promote radically new cultural agendas that shaped the postimperial West. At the center of the investigation are the final poems of Sidonius Apollinaris. After renouncing poetic composition for more than a decade, Sidonius returned to verse writing at the end of his career to contemplate the relationship between poetry and Christian life. Close examinations of texts and context reveal how Sidonius’ authorial practice evolved in his post-imperial environment to meet the demands of conflicting social roles and ideologies—Christian and Roman, secular and spiritual, ascetic and poetic.
	Tuesday, February 20, 2018 Shakespeare's Aristotle: The Poetics in Renaissance England Micha Lazarus, Research Fellow, Trinity College, Cambridge University Olin Humanities, Room 102 5:00 pm – 6:00 pm EST/GMT-5 Aristotle's Poetics upended literary thought in the Renaissance, mediating classical models, stimulating generic experiment, and isolating an emergent literary field. Yet it has long been considered either unavailable in England, linguistically inaccessible to the Greekless English, or hopelessly mediated for English readers by Italian criticism. Scholars have thus resisted reading the Poetics into the literary development of sixteenth-century England even where it seems most influential, and the period has been confusingly insulated from the vibrant classical and continental traditions of poetic thought from which, at times, it clearly drew. In fact, there is plenty of hard evidence that the Poetics was, on the contrary, a real force in Renaissance England, and the untold story of its reception casts both the Poetics and the period in a new light. In this paper I will present two methodological approaches to a restored Poetics. The first traces its arrival in 1540s England through the Byzantine trivium, the Greek pronunciation controversy, scriptural tragedy, and academic readings of classical drama, locating the Poetics within a network of intellectual affiliations now mostly forgotten. Yet restoring the Poetics to critical prominence opens new paths for literary criticism as well as literary history. My second case study will suggest how we might read the Poetics into the fabric of literary composition itself, as close comparison of Hamlet and King Lear finds Shakespeare on the trail of Aristotle's elusive notion of catharsis.
	Monday, February 19, 2018 Bizarro Hercules: The Omphale Myth in Augustan Rome Matthew P. Loar Assistant Professor, University of Nebraska–Lincoln Olin Humanities, Room 102 5:00 pm EST/GMT-5 Following decades of civil war in the first century BCE, two separate myths of Hercules attained sudden popularity in Augustan Rome (ca. 31 BCE–14 CE): his epic battle with the robber-monster Cacus, and his transvestite servitude to the Lydian queen Omphale. Traditionally, both myths have been seen as part of an elaborate propaganda campaign orchestrated by/for Rome’s first emperor, Augustus, where the monster-slaying Hercules stands in for Augustus while the cross-dressed Hercules stands in for Marc Antony, Augustus’ onetime rival. However, lost amidst this political jousting are some of the striking similarities between the two myths and the contexts in which they appear. This talk will focus on how one Augustan poet in particular, the Roman elegist Propertius (ca. 47–16 BCE), treats the two myths, arguing that Propertius casts the Omphale myth as a kind of multiform of the Cacus myth, using the former to dress up some of the more troubling aspects of Hercules’ violent interventions in Rome’s mythic pre-history.
	Monday, February 12, 2018 Bellona in Flavian Epic: Romanizing the Greek Past Laura L. Garofalo, Visiting Assistant Professor of Classics, Loyola University, Maryland Olin Humanities, Room 102 5:00 pm EST/GMT-5 The talk will analyze the character of the Roman goddess of war, Bellona, in Statius's Thebaid and Valerius Flaccus's Argonautica as a marker of the Roman cultural past. I will also discuss several contemporary parallels in Flavian-era material culture and Roman religious history.