Remaking ancient Greek and Roman myths in the twenty-first century

Arachne weaving her final tapestry, by Carlyn Beccia (www.carlynbeccia.com) Reproduced by kind permission of the artist.

[Update 23rd May: All full-day spaces for this event are now filled. If you wish to be placed on a waiting list for a space please get in touch. There are still spaces available for the public event at 5.45pm.]

Registration is now open for this one-day colloquium, which brings together academics and creative practitioners working on contemporary versions of ancient myths. The event will be held at The Open University in London (1-11 Hawley Crescent, Camden, London NW1 8NP) on 7th July 2016.

Attendance at the event is free but booking is essential. Places are strictly limited and will be allocated on a first come, first served basis. Attendees may register either for the full event or for the public performance at 5.45pm. To reserve a place please email Emma Bridges (e.e.bridges@open.ac.uk) by Tuesday 28th June, stating whether you wish to register for the whole day or for the public event at 5.45pm only.

The programme for the event is as follows:

10.00 – Coffee/registration

10.25 – Welcome

10.30-12.30 – Session 1 (Chair: Lorna Hardwick)

Atreus, Trujillo and the myth-making of Junot Díaz. Justine McConnell (Oxford)

Border territories: transgressing ancient mythic voices in contemporary poetry. A reading and conversation with Josephine Balmer, Fiona Cox and Elena Theodorakopoulos.

”There is another story”: writing after the Odyssey in Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad. Emily Hauser (Yale)

Avid for Ovid: using music to enhance danced interpretations of Ovid’s mythical world. Malcolm Atkins (Open University)

12.30-1.30 – Lunch

1.30-3.30 – Session 2 (Chair: Jessica Hughes)

Twerking for Dionysus in Jan Fabre’s Mount Olympus. Emma Cole (Bristol)

A thoroughly modern maiden: Artemis myth and ritual in twenty-first century Kent. Frances Eley (Open University)

”Stranger still are waters charged”: metamorphosing Salmacis and Hermaphroditus (Ovid, Met. 4.285-388). Artist presentation by Anna Parker (Umeå Academy of Fine Arts).

Regendering Oedipus: from tragic drama to many-mouthed lyric. Poet Amy McCauley in conversation with Gareth Prior.

3.30-4.00 – Tea

4.00-5.30 – Session 3 (Chair: Henry Stead)

Where on earth did you get a story like that? Readings from a new play, Orpheus and Eurydice, presented by Sharon Jennings (playwright).

Subversive advents: exploring a Bacchic narrative in popular cinema. David Bullen (Royal Holloway)

Apotheon: redesigning myth for a video game. Maciej Paprocki (LMU Munich)

5.45-6.45 – Public event

Giving life to the Amazons via the modern female gaze. Theatre-makers Laura Martin-Simpson and Rachel Bagshaw (Blazon Theatre) in conversation, with readings from ICONS, a new play by Paula B. Stanic.

Exam tips: confessions of a professor

5 Replies

Helen King offers some advice on how to survive exam season with your sanity intact…

‘So you must be really good at exams, yes?’ That’s what everyone assumes when you get an academic job. Well, yes – and no. I recently tweeted my personal three rules of exam success, which go as follows:

Answer the question.

Answer the ****ing question.

A former student commented, ‘seriously I still find myself quoting this mantra. I remember in the Anc Med exam looking round & seeing people muttering this.’ But I can go further. I’ve picked up some techniques along the way and I’ll share some of those here. They worked for me, and maybe they’ll help you too.

1. Breathe. Don’t panic. I used to do my panicking a few weeks before the exam, so by the time I was sitting in that hideous gym or hall I was past all that. But even so the first five minutes were hideous, as those around me turned over the question paper and immediately started to write. Do you know what? These people are writing complete rubbish. They haven’t read the questions; they’ve just spotted a word and gone into overdrive. Don’t follow their example. Sit back. Read the questions. Circle or underline some words. If the questions aren’t what you hoped for, never mind – there will be something you can answer, and possibly you’ll produce a better argument simply because you are thinking rather than regurgitating. Look at the person next to you – wow, on to their second page now! – and feel sorry for them because they aren’t answering the question. After five minutes of thinking and breathing, start to write your plan.

2. Read the question carefully. Questions aren’t written to catch you out, but to help you think about the course material. No question will ever be ‘Tell me everything you know about…’ but some answers will be to that question, rather than to the one being asked. The more obvious questions aren’t always the ones to answer, because your words of wisdom are going to be compared with some very good answers as well as some rather iffy answers. But nor do you want to be the only one answering the question – an examiner is unlikely to give you a top mark without seeing from looking over the field that you really are the front runner. Ideally, you want to be one of a group of answers in which it’s clear that yours is the best. That may mean picking the question carefully. And, unless you read it, and think about it, and make a list of the main points to cover and the examples you could use in answering it, you’re not going to get that right.

3. Passing exams isn’t entirely about what you know, but how you present it. There’s a lot to be said for that boring old structure of an intro saying what you’re going to say, three or four paragraphs each focused on one example which contributes to answering the question, and then a conclusion which pulls the examples together to make that answer very clear. So that rough plan you wrote in the five minutes while those around you failed to address the question must address the key words in that question. By all means, leave some lines blank, then write the essay and go back to do your intro. But in many situations you can do the intro first, on the lines of ‘in order to answer this question I am going to do the following/examine these cases’.

4. Give the examiner something a little different. At university I made a conscious effort to include in each exam script at least one point from a course other than the one being examined. I reckoned this would liven things up for an examiner faced with their fifteenth – or fiftieth – answer to that question. It also showed I could make connections between subjects, and that has to be good. Avoid too much creativity here – a friend at university made up a whole tribe for an Anthropology exam – but a confident and accurate mention of something that wasn’t part of the syllabus looks good. If you have a really bad exam, don’t write a letter to the examiner apologising for your poor performance (yes, I’ve seen those). And don’t take a banknote out of your pocket and reproduce it on the answer book (yes, I’ve seen that, but only the once). There’s ‘different’, and there’s ‘no’.

5. Leave 10 minutes at the end to read through your answers. In exam conditions it’s very easy to write ‘Romans’ when you mean ‘Greeks’ or to miss out the word ‘not’. Reading through will also give you a chance to make your handwriting a bit clearer if you’ve been in a hurry. If you can’t read your own writing, the examiner hasn’t a chance.

6. Go home. There’s little point hanging around as people share what they wrote for each question. Thinking ‘Oh no, I totally misunderstood that one!’ or ‘Why did I forget that brilliant example?’ will only depress you. Onwards to the next exam, after a well-earned sleep!

Editor’s note: You can find Helen King on Twitter @fluff35

OU Classical Studies Postgraduate Work in Progress Day 2016

Leave a reply

Classical Studies PhD student Sophie Raudnitz reports on this year’s annual postgraduate work-in-progress event, which took place in Milton Keynes on 5th May 2016.

Some of the student speakers at the event

I am writing this as I bask in the aftermath of a fantastic Open University Postgraduate Work in Progress Day at Walton Hall last week. I took part in my first one of these last year, six months into my PhD. It was the first time that I had presented a conference paper and I was very grateful for the opportunity to do so in such a supportive and friendly environment. I also relished the fact that the day made me feel part of a wider community of OU classicists. The day was a real eye-opener in terms of the variety of work going on under the umbrella of Classical Studies at the university.

Because of this positive experience last year, when Emma Bridges said that the department was looking for a PhD student to help with the organisation this year and asked me if I might be interested, I was happy to get involved. You’ll be relieved to hear that I won’t say much about this process but a couple of things stood out. I was amazed by the number of responses to my initial ‘save the date’ email from MA students all over the world. Most of them, understandably, could not come to Milton Keynes for a one day conference but the level of interest and the strength of positive feeling towards the OU were particularly heart-warming. As it was, we had an MA speaker, Silvana Delatte, who came over from Switzerland and a PhD student, Dominic Solly, who joined us on Skype from New York. Many of those from the UK also travelled great distances to be there. My other ‘moment’ came as I was compiling speakers’ biographies for the panel I was chairing: I am in awe of the way in which the OU brings together people from such disparate backgrounds, leading such different lives.

PhD student Mair Lloyd presenting her work on Latin language pedagogy

Luckily, a good number of people offered papers without my having to coax at all. We decided to take a relatively formal approach to this year’s conference in asking speakers to submit abstracts, really for the practice that this affords rather than because of any competitive or exclusive element. Emma and I both felt strongly that everyone who wanted to speak should have the opportunity to do so but that the rigour of writing and submitting abstracts and of sticking to word and time limits was worth encouraging too. Again, this process was made very easy by the cooperation of all involved. The final programme consisted of one MA student and eight PhD students, at various points into their studies – from 4 months in to near completion. Taking various factors into account, like travel plans and East Coast Time, I tried to organise the programme in such a way that there was some kind of thematic connection within each of the three panels and I think the day showed the success of this. I certainly found that ideas from previous papers fed very naturally into the way I thought about subsequent ones.

PhD student Catherine Hoggarth speaking about ‘A multisensory exploration of movement across Rome’s urban bridges’

Like last year’s Work in Progress Day, this year’s was almost unadulteratedly great, aside from the inevitable IT stress at the start. Everyone listened, commented and questioned generously and positively and I think that we all appreciated the opportunity to take part. We heard papers on a wide variety of subjects and it was great to see the range of approaches used and to hear the genuine enthusiasm with which people discussed their work. Suffice it to say that Stuart McKie kicked off thinking about gestures of binding and unbinding and shared with us his experiments in sitting at his desk and holding his thumbs, while the day ended with Claire Greenhalgh inviting us to think about ideas of slavery and liberty in Starz’s Spartacus, with adventures in chicken catching and, frankly, many more votive penises than I was expecting, on the way. As a result of Stuart’s paper on body language and magic, I for one, found myself acutely conscious of the way I was crossing my legs or clasping my hands for the rest of the day. After listening to Catherine Hoggarth speaking about on the sensory experience associated with crossing Roman bridges, I became very contemplative about the bridge over the river into my town as I drove home that evening.

Several of us live tweeted furiously, fingers flying, under the hashtag #OUCSWiP – for a flavour of the topics discussed you can read a Storify of the event here. This was my first foray into live tweeting; I have previously held back as I’m not good at multi-tasking at the best of times. Actually it really added to the experience, allowing me to focus better, and seeing the bank of tweets mounting up from other tweeters was genuinely exciting!

I hope that everyone found the day as rewarding and enjoyable as I did and would really like to thank all those who came along. As you can tell, I’m still on a bit of a high. I’d also like to thank the department for laying on this day for us (and to so many staff members for giving up their time to come along). I hope that the PG WiP Day remains an institution and I’m already very much looking forward to next year’s!

Editor’s note: You can also find Sophie on Twitter @seraudnitz

Seventh Conference of Italian Archaeology

Leave a reply

Phil Perkins and Eleanor Betts represented the OU Classical Studies department at the Seventh Conference of Italian Archaeology, which was held at the National University of Ireland, Galway on 16th-19th April 2016. Scholars from 15 countries presented papers and posters on the archaeology and cultural history of Italy from prehistory to the modern period. Whilst the primary theme of the Conference was the archaeology of death, our papers considered some recent developments in Italian archaeology.

Phil Perkins presenting on the exciting recent finds from Poggio Colla

Phil Perkins presenting on exciting recent finds from Poggio Colla

Phil spoke about the final excavation seasons at Poggio Colla and their context in Northern Etruria, focusing in particular on the remarkable stele which was discovered in Summer 2015. The stele was built into the wall of the earliest temple and bears one of the longest inscriptions known in Etruria. Phil will be presenting on this, and more, in the Accordia Lecture Series on 3rd May.

You can also find out more about the stele and the initial reading of the inscription, he re (at 08:54 to 15:16 minutes in the Italian news programme).

Susanna Harris presenting her Etruscan cloak experiment

Eleanor organised and presented in the panel ‘Moving Bodies: Multisensory Approaches to the Ancient Mediterranean’, which was in many ways part of the homage to the work of Ruth Whitehouse which marked the conference. The papers were wide-ranging in their chronological spread, and what they had in common was their application of phenomenology to ancient sites and fieldwork methods in Italy and Malta. The five papers presented were by Sue Hamilton and Ruth Whitehouse, Reuben Grima, Claudia Lambrugo, Susanna Harris and Eleanor Betts. Robin Skeates wrapped up the session, drawing out the main themes of the presentations, and giving much food for thought for the future of sensory archaeologies. You can read more on these papers and the discussion at Sensory Studies in Antiquity.

A report from the Classical Association annual conference (#CA16)

Leave a reply

This year’s Classical Association (CA) conference, the largest annual gathering of classicists in the UK, was hosted earlier this month by the University of Edinburgh and was well-attended by members of the OU’s Classical Studies department. Several of us convened panels or gave papers, and still more of us went along to meet up with colleagues from other universities and to find out more about ongoing research in our field. Next year will see the CA conference co-hosted by the Open University in conjunction with the University of Kent, so this was also a great opportunity for us to take notes on some of the organisational aspects of running such a large-scale event!

Eleanor Betts presenting at the ‘Sensational Sanctuaries’ panel. Image credit Lewis Webb. Illustrations (projected) thanks to Jasmine Parker.

Eleanor Betts convened two separate panels, this first of which was ‘Sensational Sanctuaries’, at which both Eleanor and Emma-Jayne Graham presented aspects of their research on sensory experiences of ancient religious sites. The second panel, ‘Power Ranging: Processional Routes from Republican Rome to Napoleonic Paris’ included two of Eleanor’s current PhD students, CHASE student Catherine Hoggarth (University of Kent) and Lewis Webb (Umeå University, Sweden). Read more at Sensory Studies in Antiquity.

Meanwhile Associate Lecturer Tony Keen, as part of a panel on classical myth and science fiction, presented his research on Greek mythology in Iain Banks’ The Bridge. Elsewhere PhD student Mair Lloyd organised a panel on ‘Living Latin’ which brought together experts on the use of immersive spoken language classes as a means of learning the ancient language. You can read a summary of the panel and listen to recordings of the individual presentations on Mair’s blog, and see the Storify of the panel, which was incredibly well-received, here. Mair, along with James Robson, also presented a session on language pedagogy – ‘From zero to hero: managing the transition to university-level study at the OU’ – which showcased the OU’s new Latin module.

We asked some of our postgraduate students to share their thoughts on attending the conference. Here’s what they had to say:

Stuart McKie (PhD student) told us:

My favourite thing about the CA was the huge variety of panels on offer. Over the three days I was there I heard papers on Roman temples, rebel speeches in Tacitus, female suicide in Greek tragedy and Greek myths in modern sci-fi. For my own research interests, the experience of religious and magical practices, the panel on ‘sensational sanctuaries’ was the most applicable. The four papers presented, including those from the OU’s own E-J Graham and Eleanor Betts, gave me great insights into the work being done to understand how people in the ancient world experienced their religious spaces. For me the stand-out paper from the whole conference was from Terence Tunberg, who gave a demonstration of how he teaches Latin as a living language. The paper was delivered completely in Latin in an incredibly energetic style, and included audience participation to get us all involved. I came away with a completely different appreciation not only of teaching methods, but also of how Latin works as a lived, spoken language.

The social side of the conference was also great for me. I got to meet lots of new people, as well as reconnecting with people I only really see at these huge conferences. As this is the 21st century, a fair chunk of this networking was done online, with a very active group of people on Twitter using the hashtag #CA16. All in all it was a great few days, and I already can’t wait for next year!

Cheryl Barker (MA student) writes:

The 2016 conference was the biggest to date, and thus offered a wide variety of panels over 4 days. There were opportunities to discover new approaches to classics, hear a panel in spoken Latin or review papers on more familiar areas related to one’s own past or current studies. I was very happy to listen to PhD students presenting their ongoing research on the reception of Sappho and erotica or theological reflections on Cicero. Eminent professors from across the world debated Tacitus and the peripheries of Empire, ekphrastic mimesis and Persian women in the Greek arts.

The conference was an interesting, informative and convivial experience, and an opportunity for sharing ideas and socialising with likeminded people. It was great to meet up with old friends I first met through OU online fora or at past conferences as well as making new acquaintances over the delicious cakes and scones. There was opportunity to explore the cultural aspects of Edinburgh whether on a walking tour of the city or by a visit to Rosslyn Chapel. However for me, the highlight of the conference was Friday evening’s dinner with a traditional ambience – a ceilidh and Scottish dancing until the wee small hours.

My favourite panels, unsurprisingly, were those which reflected my interest in Greek tragedy and reception and the connection between science fiction and the classics. The panel entitled ‘Archaeology of Stardom’ made me wish my research was on the reception of classics in contemporary media. Antony Augoustakis compared the 1960 film ‘Spartacus’ with the 2010s swords-and-sandals television series whilst Monica Cyrino’s cleverly titled ‘Maximal Projections’ explained how audiences can read classical personas through actors’ previous works – or how Russell Crowe brought Maximus to Noah! Included in another great panel on gender and sexuality was ‘Nymphos and Nags’ about representations of women in British sitcoms based in the Roman world focusing upon ‘Up Pompeii’, ‘Chelmsford 123’ and ‘Plebs’. Stereotyped women’s roles are as present in modern comedies as in Aristophanes’ from Classical Athens. Later, I headed to the Body Adaptors panel and heard, in my opinion, the most intriguing paper of this year’s conference. Were glass and terracotta grave finds ancient baby bottles and breast pumps – or not? It took experimental archaeology to a whole new level!

Of her experience at the conference Claire Greenhalgh (PhD student) said:

This was my second CA and it was every bit as useful as my first (in Bristol) last year. These events are simply incomparable for making contacts, meeting up with fellow classicists, making friends, discussing your research, meeting all the luminaries in your field (in my case Monica Cyrino, the undisputed guru of television classical receptions) and getting a real feel for all the amazing research being done ‘out there’, particularly for distance-learning, part-time researchers like myself. Living in North Wales is also a bit of a barrier when it comes to attending conferences relevant to my field and without the luxury of being able to get to London, Oxford or any of the major university cities easily, attendance at the CA will surely become a fixture of my academic year.

Pacing yourself at such an event is very important as there is always so much going on! This year the Q&A with Ian Rankin and Lindsey Davis was a highlight for me, but the opportunities for networking and learning about new research fields from attending the sessions were invaluable. I am a classical receptions specialist and I’m always impressed by the expertise out there, especially from early research PhD students who give fascinating, erudite and extremely informative presentations. It makes me aware of how much I need to do, but it’s equally inspiring as well.

For me the classical receptions panel ‘The Archaeology of Stardom’ was the most fascinating and also the funniest! One paper in particular made me nostalgic for many a Sunday afternoon spent watching biblical epics like Ben Hur, El Cid (not technically ancient world, but certainly epic) and The Ten Commandments, as well as some of the dodgier B-movie stuff like the deliciously bad but gorgeously shot Samson and Delilah. The talk by Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones examined the role of off-screen star personas on the way Hollywood classical epics in the cinema were ‘read’ by audiences. He suggested that many star actors simply played themselves and viewers often confused historical figures with the actors who play them: after all, for many, Charlton Heston IS Moses. Llewellyn-Jones’ main case study was the notorious Taylor/Burton romance which dominated the filming of the disastrous Cleopatra (1963) and profoundly shaped the outcome and reception of the text; Taylor’s star image dominated the picture and the scandal of their liaison meant that the film was all about Antony and Cleopatra (Caesar’s contribution is largely forgotten today) – the film narrative had been envisaged differently but was changed to accommodate the star system. We were treated to some fabulous screen shots, stills, images of those gorgeous movie stars and some wonderful vignettes about the filming. It made me want to watch the film all over again…well, almost!

We hope that you’ll be able to join us next year for the jointly-hosted Open University/Kent conference in Canterbury. For more information, including a call for papers, see the ‘CA2017’ tab at the top of this page.

Teaching ancient myth through cinema, by Tony Keen

Leave a reply

Tony Keen is a long-time Associate Lecturer for the OU, and an Honorary Associate. This post is based on a talk he gave at the Classical Studies Associate Lecturer Training and Development Day in November 2015.

In the sixteen years I’ve taught for the Open University, I’ve often used movies and television as part of my teaching strategies, and this is just as true for the current module I teach, A330 Myth in the Greek and Roman Worlds. Some of these approaches are obvious – if one wants to talk, for instance, about the Gorgon Medusa, it makes sense to show how the cinema has represented her, in movies such as the 1981 and 2010 versions of Clash of the Titans. Such clips can show students that they actually know something about changing depictions of mythological characters. But it’s also possible to be a bit more imaginative.

In the collection of Fables attributed to the Greek slave Aesop, there is found an early version of the tale of the town mouse and the country mouse, probably most famous to classicists in the version found in Horace’s Satires 2.6, lines 79-117. The story is simple. A country mouse is invited to dine with his cousin in the town. The town mouse lays out a splendid table, full of gourmet delights that the country mouse simply can never experience at home. But then the party is disrupted by dogs, and the country mouse decides that, for all its simplicity, his home offers security not to be found in the town.

In 1945, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer produced the nineteenth cartoon in their cat-and-mouse series Tom and Jerry, ‘Mouse in Manhattan’, directed by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera. It’s an unusual entry in the run. Instead of the usual mayhem caused by Tom’s unsuccessful attempts to catch Jerry, the premise is that Jerry, bored with life in the country, sets off for the bright lights of Manhattan, leaving a note for Tom (who is otherwise barely present). The rest is taken up with Jerry’s adventures in New York, and the dangers he faces. There is no town mouse to equate with Jerry’s country mouse, and the existential threat that drives Jerry back to the country is feral cats, rather than dogs. But the fundamentals of the fable are here, and whilst I am not suggesting that Hanna or Barbera had necessarily read Horace or Aesop (they may have, or they may not), they almost certainly had encountered the story in some form. It has, after all, been much repeated through history; Beatrix Potter retold it in The Tale of Johnny Town-Mouse, and in 1936 Walt Disney had overseen a Silly Symphonies short called ‘The Country Cousin’, which adapted the fable more faithfully than ‘Mouse in Manhattan’. One effect of showing this to students is to put them in a good frame of mind – who doesn’t enjoy a good Tom and Jerry cartoon? But it also demonstrates how stories are transformed as they are repurposed, and also makes the original fable seem less remote to students.

Fable is not often dealt with in myth courses. What can using cinema bring to wider understanding of what is more traditionally understood as ‘mythology’? One issue that can confuse students is that various different versions of myths proliferate through antiquity and beyond. Does Hippolytus die at Troezen, or is he reborn as Virbius in Italy? Who kills Medea’s children, the Corinthians or their mother? I explain this through the modern phenomenon of rebooting screen franchises. There are several screen versions of the superhero Superman, with different versions of when and how Kal-El arrived on Earth from Krypton, and his early life. Similarly, the James Bond movies were rebooted in 2006 with Casino Royale, showing Bond’s first mission as a 00 agent. All previous movies were disregarded, and elements from those, such as the terrorist organization SPECTRE, could later be reintroduced. Cinema audiences cope with this perfectly well, so what is the problem with Euripides’ three incompatible versions of Helen of Troy?

My most unusual use of cinema to teach myth is when I show students two versions of the 1881 Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, in 1946’s My Darling Clementine, and 1957’s Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. I ask the students to note significant differences between the two (for instance, Doc Holliday dies in the gunfight in the former, and survives it in the latter). I then show how the two versions relate to what actually happened, and explain that while the later movie is a little more true to the events of 1881, nevertheless both fictionalize extensively. My point is to show how fictionalized and mythologized versions of historical events can depart from what actually happened, in different ways in different versions. So it’s almost impossible to use a fictionalized account to reconstruct a putative historical event when historical records don’t exist, and students should be suspicious when that is attempted, as it often is with Homer’s Iliad and the Trojan War.

Hopefully this will spark further ideas of how to use cinema in teaching. Let us know in the comments what you do.

by Tony Keen

Editor’s note: Tony has also produced various Open University learning resources which you can access for free via OpenLearn here.

A postcard from Rome (the RAC/TRAC conference 2016)

Leave a reply

The Open University was well represented at the combined Roman Archaeology Conference and Theoretical Roman Archaeology Conference (RAC/TRAC for short), held at La Sapienza University in Rome from March 16^th-20^th. A crowd of us went along to present papers, run sessions and/or listen to the latest research in Roman Archaeology – and of course we also took the opportunity to visit museums and sites across the Eternal City…

Papers

Stuart McKie giving his paper on curse tablets

Jessica Hughes and Stuart McKie both presented in a session on Thursday entitled Appropriating Traditions, Negotiating Forms: Material Culture and Roman Religion Between Categories and Variables. The session was organised by Katharina Rieger from the University of Erfurt, who had asked us to consider “how [we] might make use of standardisation, appropriation and transformation when dealing with the varieties from the world of things.”

Jessica considered these issues in relation to the votive offerings she works on, revisiting the ancient and modern terminology for dedications; she also explored how digital technologies such as data-tagging and cluster analysis might lead us towards new ways of dividing and classifying the millions of votive objects that survive from the ancient world.

Stuart then looked at how the categories developed by scholars in relation to Greco-Roman curse tablets might be applied or re-invented in relation to the North-Western curse tablets that he is studying in his PhD. His paper emphasised the role of social context and on-going personal relationships in the creation of the tablets, and drew parallels with anthropological case studies from traditional cultures in the modern world. (Visit Stuart’s blog to find out more about this topic!)

A distance shot of Eleanor Betts, talking about Ostia and the Senses

Eleanor Betts had organised a whole panel on Sensory Archaeology, and this took place on the Friday morning. Taking as its theme the multiple perspectives of sensory space, this session explored the role played by the senses in recognising, understanding and using Roman urban space, with a specific focus on movement within the cities of Rome, Ostia and Pompeii. Eleanor’s own paper (‘Multisensory Mapping of Ostia’s Regio I.IV’) demonstrated the extent to which reconstructing sensory data might alter our perceptions of ancient cityscapes. (You can read more about Eleanor’s work on the senses on the Sensory Studies in Antiquity blog).

Field trips

When the conference drew to a close on Saturday afternoon, many of the delegates made their way down to the Roman Forum. A number of us spent the afternoon exploring the church of Santa Maria Antiqua, which had re-opened with great ceremony earlier that week when the icon of the Madonna had been brought ‘home’ in a procession from the church of Santa Maria Nova. We were quite amazed by the museological techniques that the curators had used to bring the wall-paintings alive, such as the lasers projecting colours, details and explanatory text on top of the faded frescoes.

Individually, we managed to fit in several other research-related visits to Roman museums. On Wednesday Jess met the painter Umberto Passeretti at Trajan’s Markets to interview him about his exhibition ‘Un presente antichissimo’ for our OU e-journal Practitioners’ Voices in Classical Reception Studies. It was fantastic to walk around the temporary exhibition – arranged amidst the ancient sculptures – and to listen to the artist talk about his classically-inspired paintings of myths and bodies.

Jess and Emma-Jayne also went the Capitoline Museums to visit the exhibition Capitol. Myth, Memory and Archaeology, although we spent an equal amount of time gazing at the tiny gemstones from the collections of the Fondazione di Dino e Ernesta Santerelli.

Offerings left at the remains of the Temple of Julius Caesar in the Forum Romanum to mark the Ides of March.

Before the conference started on Tuesday, Stuart witnessed a fatal stabbing at Largo Argentina… well, the re-enactment of one anyway! It was the Ides of March, and a local historical re-enactment group put on a dramatization of the assassination of Julius Caesar – it was quite an experience! Also while in the city, Stuart had a look at the new display of the curse tablets from the Fountain of Anna Perenna in the Epigraphic Museum at the Baths of Diocletian. It’s a great display, and shows not only the curses themselves but the magic dolls and other ritual objects deposited in the fountain.

And finally…

Since at least one other OU Classicist is going to Rome this year, we thought it was only fair to share our best food-related discoveries too!

For lunches around the forum/Piazza Navona area we would recommend the Antica Birreria Peroni. It has a nice atmosphere (lovely frescoed walls), and a reasonably-priced menu; dishes include Roman classics like spaghetti cascio e pepe and is open throughout the afternoon (useful if, like us, you lose track of time in the museum!)

If you are after artichokes (carciofi) or just something a bit more traditional, try Trattoria da Giggetto located right next to the ancient Portico d’Ottavia.

La Sapienza University is in the area of San Lorenzo, which is a little way from the city centre. But if you find yourself there, we’d highly recommend a visit to Pinsa e Buoi.

Everyone has their favourite place for ice-cream in Rome so why not try them all?! Emma-Jayne’s favourite is San Crispino, just round the corner from the Trevi Fountain on Via della Panetteria (they also have a shop close to the Pantheon) and highly recommends their ginger and cinnamon or straciatella flavours. There’s also a San Crispino’s at Fiumicino airport!

Emma-Jayne (and Constantine) in the Capitoline Museums

Travels with a toga: Roman dress in the classroom

Leave a reply

OU Classical Studies Lecturer Ursula Rothe has been visiting school pupils to talk about her research on Roman dress.

On 2nd March I went to Redborne Upper School in Ampthill, Bedfordshire to give a talk to senior school pupils on the topic of Roman dress. It was the first time I had done something like this with props – I had spent a weekend sewing together Roman garments like male and female tunicae, an exomis, a palla and a toga complete with detachable purple stripe! In all, 65 students turned up to learn about how dress not only reflected but was actively used to enact specific roles in Roman society, such as

Gender: how men and women were meant to look and behave in public
Class: what social rank your occupation belonged to (clue: the less clothing you wore, the lower down the social scale you were!)
Age: the way elite Roman children wore the toga praetexta (toga with purple stripe) as symbolic protection from harm and inappropriate language and actions, and how clothing symbolised their coming-of-age: boys adopting a toga virilis (plain white toga) at a special ceremony and girls adopting matron’s dress on the day after their wedding
Religious observance: how both men and women covered their heads when performing religious ceremonies

The enthusiasm of the students was overwhelming and I was only sorry that not everyone got to dress up!

by Ursula Rothe

Call for papers: Married to the military – soldiers’ families in the ancient world and beyond

2 Replies

Offers of papers are invited for this two-day international conference to be held at The Open University in London (1-11 Hawley Crescent, Camden, London NW1 8NP) on 11th and 12th November 2016.

In societies where the threat of armed conflict was an ever-present element of the political and social experience, the impact of war was acutely felt by the immediate families of those whose role it was to train for and engage in combat. This conference aims to explore the roles and experiences of military families (defined here as the nuclear family of soldier, partner and children) in the ancient world and to situate these within the wider context of the history of such families. We therefore welcome offers of papers on any aspect of military families in the ancient world as well as comparative studies which consider more recent historical contexts.

The conference aims to commemorate Remembrance Day with a detailed discussion of a subject that is rarely broached in historical and cultural studies. It is true that there has been some headway made in understanding the role of women and children in Roman military forts, especially on the north-west frontier, but there has been very little joined-up thinking on the military family as a general phenomenon in antiquity and how it sits within the history of military families as a whole. The Greek model of standing armies who spent long periods of time away from home in combat – leaving behind wives and children – contrasts, for example, with the Roman practice of establishing permanent garrisons with ‘camp followers’ attached to military bases. The experiences of partners whose husbands were fighting a defensive war at home might differ considerably from those left behind or even joining their partners as they fought in territory far from home.

Possible themes for discussion might include:

social status and identity of soldiers’ partners and children
legal status and security for soldiers’ partners and children
raising children in a military household or with an ‘absent father’
experiences of separation, reunion and readjustment
relationships between military families and the army
dealing with bereavement and physical or psychological trauma
military education of children/the role of military children in recruitment

Confirmed speakers include:

Prof. Edith Hall (King’s College London)

Prof. Penelope Allison (University of Leicester)

Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words to Ursula Rothe (Ursula.Rothe@open.ac.uk) or Emma Bridges (E.E.Bridges@open.ac.uk) by Monday 23rd May.

Iambus and Elegy: New Approaches (A Q&A with Laura Swift)

Leave a reply

This week we chatted with OU Classicist Laura Swift about her newest publication – a volume co-edited with Chris Carey (UCL) entitled Iambus and Elegy: New Approaches (Oxford University Press, 2016).

Please can you define iambus and elegy for us?

LS: Iambus and elegy are two important types of early Greek poetry, and along with melic poetry, they’re often grouped under the category of ‘early Greek lyric’. They flourished in the seventh and sixth centuries BC (though they were almost certainly performed long before that), and in chronological terms our surviving examples come in the period between Homer and Athenian tragedy that often gets skipped over in undergraduate courses. The famous authors include Archilochus and Solon (who wrote both iambus and elegy), Tyrtaeus, Theognis and Simonides (who wrote elegy), and Semonides and Hipponax (who wrote iambus). Neither form is particularly easy to define, which was one reason that we wanted to compile an edited volume on them. Normally ancient scholars divided up poetic forms according to metre, but iambus and elegy both use metres that cross genres. Elegy is more straightforward in a way, as it can be defined as poetry that uses the elegiac couplet, but it’s very hard to pin down in terms of any core content or style, since we have narrative or mythological elegy, drinking songs, love poetry, and political philosophy. The one thing it doesn’t seem to contain is anything ‘elegiac’ (in the sense of the English word ‘elegy’, meaning a lament), and that’s often muddied the waters in trying to define it. Iambus is rather a hotch-potch of different metres, so people have often tried to define it in terms of content instead, and it’s usually thought of as abuse poetry. It’s true that there’s plenty of abuse, vitriol, and dirty language in iambus, but it’s not only blame-poetry: it can also be humorous, or even moralising and philosophical. So both are very wide-ranging and diverse forms, and are hard to pin down.

How have these subjects traditionally been studied?

A lot of scholarship has focused on definitional questions, and so one aim of the book was to move beyond this and study the poetry itself for what it is. Iambus and elegy have also been considered the poor cousin of melic poetry, and so they’ve had less attention than (say) the poetry of Pindar or Sappho. But they’re also a dynamic area, not least because new poems continue to turn up regularly. Over the course of the twentieth century, the amount of iambus and elegy that is available to scholars increased dramatically, and that has carried on in recent years. For example, a major new elegy by Archilochus was published in 2005, and some more fragmentary lines of his iambics were found in 2012. Because we’re dealing with quite a small corpus, new finds can really change what we think about a poet or a genre, and that makes it an exciting field to study.

How did you get the idea for the book?

The book was based on a conference that my co-editor Chris Carey and I organised in 2012, as part of a Leverhulme Fellowship that I had at that time. I had originally thought of having a conference just on Archilochus, the author I was working on, but then decided to broaden it out to iambus and elegy (the two forms Archilochus composed in), because I thought that would allow more variety and help us make connections between different poets. Lyric poetry is a vibrant sub-field in Classical Studies, with a very lively community, but most of the conferences in lyric are dominated by papers on the melic poets. Chris pointed out that there hadn’t ever been a conference focusing exclusively on iambus and elegy, and it was a great opportunity to put them centre-stage. We were really happy with how the conference went, and OUP was interested in publishing a volume inspired by it, and so we worked alongside some of the scholars who gave papers at the conference to put a collection together.

How long did it take to put the book together?

The conference took place in July 2012, and we started talking to contributors about a volume and putting together a draft proposal for OUP that autumn. The whole process of getting together the contributions, getting feedback to the contributors on their chapters, and then working with them to get revised versions took just over two years, and we submitted the completed manuscript to the Press in December 2014. After that, the copy-editing and typesetting process took about another year, and so the book appeared in print this February.

What was the hardest part of the process, for you as an editor?

There were two aspects that I found challenging. The first was keeping on top of all the contributions at the stage where we were dealing with revisions: for example, keeping track of which stage each paper was at, when we had last been in touch with each contributor, and whether there were outstanding queries we needed to resolve or we were waiting for them to respond to something we had raised. In any edited volume, some contributors are in a position to turn around their piece very quickly and others need more time to fit it in with their other commitments, and so there’s a certain amount of diplomacy needed in encouraging those who still needed to get papers in, while making sure that the people who had already done so didn’t feel we’d forgotten all about them or that the project had lost momentum.

The second thing was that I hadn’t realised how much work would be required from the editors after the final submission of the manuscript, during the copy-editing and typesetting process. Although I’ve been through that process with monographs, it’s much easier when you’re dealing with something that’s just your own work. Dealing with copy-editing queries on someone else’s article and checking consistency across chapters is much more challenging. Fortunately, Chris had done all of that before, and so it was fantastic to have an experienced co-editor.

Can you tell us about your own chapter on Archilochus’ erotic imagery?

My chapter is about how Archilochus uses imagery associated with the natural world in his erotic poems, particularly images of plants and fertility. This is a very common strand of imagery in Greek poetry, where a woman’s body is compared to the landscape (so a young girl is like a beautiful wild meadow, and a married woman is like fertile ploughland). But I argue that Archilochus plays with this imagery and turns it around. For example, rather than praising a young woman by comparing her to a beautiful landscape, he abuses a woman for being ‘past it’ by comparing her to a dried up wintry landscape, or to a fruit that’s starting to get flaccid and over-ripe. So Archilochus is reworking imagery from other poetic genres in a provocative and playful way, which showcases his creativity as a poet.

Iambus and Elegy: New Approaches is published by Oxford University Press.