Seminars

Recent publications by prehistorians, classical archaeologists and ancient historians have drawn attention to the ‘Dark Side’ of the Roman Empire, stressing the themes of violence, tyranny, slavery, colonialism and epistemicide. While the facts are rarely at issue, the project marks a new phase in what Keith Hopkins called our “dialogues with the dead”. This paper will address some of the implications of these critiques, for our practice as historians, for our understanding of Roman antiquity and for the relationship between modernities and antiquities in general. It will also address the question of the particularity of Roman forms of domination.

The talk considers several intellectual developments taking place under the Achaemenid empire, and argues that we can find there – in Babylon, Jerusalem and the Indus Valley - a repeated pattern of priestly elites, beginning to develop more autonomous intellectual practices. How does this context help us understand Greek intellectual life itself? Not through a direct influence, or a direct analogy: the influence of the Ancient Near East was limited, and the Greeks do start out from a different starting point, as they do not have strong priestly elites to begin with. The analogy is rather with the belated formation of Greek scientific practices late in the fifth century – as Greek elites begin to form their own autonomous practices, through a structurally comparable, but historically distinct process.

This talk looks at Aristotle’s short treatises On Dreams and On Divination in Sleep to argue that, contrary to a widely shared scholarly opinion, Aristotle is receptive to and interested in the assumptions underlying traditional dream hermeneutics. Specifically, Aristotle incorporates traditional dream hermeneutics into his naturalistic explanation of dreaming and connects his explanation of dream interpretation with his own theory of metaphor, thereby pointing toward a physiological account of metaphorical thought.

In this presentation, my goal is to rehabilitate comedy. Most modern and contemporary interpreters consider tragedy to be Aristotle's paradigm of art, which implies, implicitly or explicitly, that in Aristotle's eyes, tragedy has more value than comedy. My goal is to show that this standard approach is the result of a (modern) prejudice and that it does not stand up to a careful reading of all the passages concerning comedy in Aristotle's work, in the Poetics, but also in certain passages of the Rhetoric and the Nicomachean Ethics, as well as in the (in)famous Tractatus Coislinianus which may derive from a summary of the second book of the Poetics. In particular, I would like to emphasize the importance of comedy in the leisure activities of educated people.

We have more Greek epic verse surviving from the fifth century AD than any other period of classical antiquity. At first sight this seems a paradox: were Christians not supposed to despise epic most of all the pagan literary forms? Was it not the source of all theological error? Was the Homeric tradition not full of adulterous gods, lying heroes, cheating wives and countless other improprieties? This lecture will explore the reasons why the Byzantine theocracy not only tolerated but even celebrated the epic tradition that reached back to Homer and to the distant roots of Greek culture.

In the first part of my seminar, I will provide a brief overview of my Marie Skłodowska-Curie Project titled ‘Powerful Words: Imperial Speeches of the Julio-Claudian dynasty’ (acronym: POWO). This project aims to create the first comprehensive collection and classification of speeches attributed to the Julio-Claudians as found in literary sources. In the second part, I will present a case study focusing on the third emperor of the dynasty, Caligula. I will explore Caligula’s notorious cruelty by analyzing the statements that Suetonius attributes to him in the biography dedicated to him. By compiling and examining several of these dicta regarding Caligula’s cruelty, I will illustrate how they contribute to the literary portrayal of Caligula as a ‘bad’ princeps characterized primarily by his saevitia (Svet. Cal. 27.1; 32.1). The expression oderint, dum metuant (Svet. Cal. 30.1) – one of Caligula’s favourite dicta – exemplifies a power rooted in odium and metus, which the princeps exerts not only through his terrifying actions but also through his frightening words.