Presented by Marilynn Desmond
(English, General Literature and Rhetoric: SUNY Binghampton)

Monday, February 24th @ 5:00PM | HUMN 250

Troy was of immense importance in the dynastic politics of the Middle Ages, with all the major polities claiming their origins in a Trojan founder. The Roman de Troie (c. 1165) was a French verse romance on the matter of Troy which circulated widely in medieval French-speaking regions and survives in over sixty manuscripts and fragments (more than any other twelfth-century French text). It was translated into Latin, Demotic Greek, Italian and German, and five distinct prose “intralingual” versions were produced. In addition to these textual traditions, the Roman de Troie also generated extensive visual traditions that then migrated into other textual traditions on the matter of Troy. Prof. Desmond’s talk will focus upon five manuscripts of the Roman de Troie produced in fourteenth-century Italy which contain elaborate programs of illustration that exhibit a shared iconography entirely distinct from the visual programs in Roman de Troie manuscripts produced in the Kingdom of France. This paper will use the illustrations to explore the networks and materiality of the artistic tool-world that enabled this specialised iconography to migrate throughout the Italian peninsula, offering a distinctive interpretation of the political significance of Troy.  The event should be of interest to classicists, historians and art historians, medievalists, and those working in the Romance languages, as well as humanists in general."

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Pompeii as a Platform: The Present and Near-Term Future of Reusable Data from a Roman City

Presented by Dr. Sebastian Heath (Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York University) 

ABSTRACT: This talk reports on the work of the Pompeii Artistic Landscape Project (PALP), which was a Getty Foundation funded collaboration between the speaker and Prof. Eric Poehler of UMASS Amherst, and on the current Pompeii Linked Open Data (P-LOD) initiative, a more open-ended effort under the same direction. PALP produced a website that supports sitewide investigation and P-LOD is now focused on the long-term availability of reusable data, on developing new computational approaches to exploring that data, and on delivering new forms of public interaction with its resources. The talk will follow this same arc.

The PALP website demonstrates that applying the principles of Linked Open Data (LOD) to Pompeii enables both sitewide and detailed exploration of the contents of Pompeian wall-painting. Our goal is to make issues of association and distribution easily browsable by all. Myth, natural history, daily life and other topics can now all be explored. PALP is, however, just a website. P-LOD is engaged in delivering reusable data with a particular focus on using it in modern, low-cost computational environments that many people can access. This will be demonstrated, with an emphasis on the ability to conceive and implement new research agendas. It is also the case that change is in the air. Generative AI is an opportunity to explore new forms of interaction with large datasets.

This talk takes the point-of-view that it is archaeologists (or classicists or historians) who should be exploring these tools to see what contribution - if any - they can make. Such early - though results oriented - explorations will be shown in the context of the massive dataset that PALP and P-LOD have compiled for Pompeii.

PALP:
P-LOD:

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

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

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

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Divine Witnessing and Dramatic Performance in Ancient Greece

Thursday, November 7th@ 5:00PM

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ABSTRACT

Theaters are ubiquitous pieces of monumental architecture in the ancient Greek landscape.  They dominate landscapes, take advantage of sweeping vistas, and leave a tangible impression of ancient performance venues through their easily apprehended forms.  Despite their ancient (and modern) popularity, however, they have frequently been left out of critical accounts concerning the articulation of sacred space.  When they do appear in such studies, it is generally a cursory treatment or simple acknowledgement that some sort of performance took place in or adjacent to a sanctuary.  On the other hand, accounts of ancient festivals involving dramatic performance, such as the Great Dionysia, or studies of Mediterranean-wide theoria networks, often leave the physical venue of performance in the background, as a static entity in which the dynamic ritual occurred.  In both cases, the theater itself becomes a mere backdrop or footnote, unchanging, achronological, and uncomplicated.

It is perhaps the relatively simple architectural form of the theater, with its tripartite division of theatron (or cavea), orchestra, and skene, that belies its ritual and performative complexity.  But within this straightforward schematic is a more dynamic space than generally acknowledged.  Through an investigation of viewsheds and movement patterns, this paper demonstrates how theaters functioned as active participants in the ritual-architectural events that dominated the religious life of ancient Greece, thereby shaping the nature of dramatic performance and generating the expectation of divine witnessing on the part of the audience.  Viewed in this light, theaters become complex and critical spaces of ritual, reflection, and transformation, for both their actor and spectator participants.  Ultimately, such an approach, by centering theatral space within religious performance and knitting together threads of architectural and textual analysis, facilitates a more nuanced and deeply contextualized account of dramatic performance in ancient Greece.

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Wednesday, November 6, 2024 @ 7PM
Eaton Humanities 250 & Zoom
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ABSTRACT

Sensory studies of embodiment have gained traction in recent years as unparalleled tools for examining the vicissitudes of ancient lived experience.  When used in conjunction with cognitive studies, it becomes possible to tease out the links between (over)stimulation, deprivation, and religious transformation.  Kinesthetics, in particular, can facilitate a nuanced embodied account of approach, (in)accessibility, and viewshed orchestration, by prioritizing the role of the body in movement within the landscapes and edifices of the built environment.  The intersection of space, place, and body within the religious setting of the sanctuary thus becomes a nexus of gradually unfolding experience, understanding, and transformation.

Through a series of three case studies drawn from the 5th-3rd c. BCE, this paper focuses on how divine epiphany, made manifest through the multisensory experiences within the Greek sanctuary, served as the key to the transformative effect of ritual, a crucial component to understanding ancient religion.  Eleusis, the site of the renowned Mysteries, serves as an example of how the combination of sensory overstimulation and deprivation can prime the body of the worshipper to receive the divine knowledge at the root of the ritual.  Delphi, the oracular heart of Greece, showcases how physical exertion in service to the gods constituted its own form of worship and prepared both worshippers and priestly attendants to communicate with the god.  And Samothrace, home of the Sanctuary of the Great Gods, ties together the strains of sensory stimulation and physical expenditure of energy into a synesthetic encapsulation of ritual transformation within a charged sacred landscape.

Ultimately, this paper reveals the role of multisensory experience in the religious transformation that lies at the heart of Greek ritual practice by foregrounding kinesthetics as the link between the human participant and sacred built environment.

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