Blegen Visitor
Every year the department appoints a Blegen Distinguished Visiting Research Professor or the Blegen Research Fellow in Classics. The Blegen scholar spends his/her year pursuing research and lecturing on his or her scholarly concerns in classical antiquity. Each Blegen Lecture Course is a unique offering that allows students to study aspects of the Classical World that are not taught by standing members of the department.
The 2005/2006 Blegen Visitor and Course
Bruce M. King (Center for Hellenic Studies, Washington, D.C.): Seers, Sages, Philosophers: Figures of Wisdom in Archaic and Classical GreeceThis course focuses upon the earliest exemplars of wisdom in Archaic Greece (and south Italy) and places them in a context in which religious thought was not yet sharply distinguished from philosophical thought, and in which mystical experience was not yet separable from the idea of the philosophical life. We begin by considering the “way of life” of Pythagoras, as we are able to reconstruct it from the disparate sources; special attention is paid to Pythagoras’ legendary role as a law-giver and as the founder of a philosophical community; comparison of Pythagoras and his community to the legends and cosmogonies of Orpheus and his celebrants is also central to our study. Following the break-up of the South-Italian Pythagorean communities, we follow the itinerant tracks of those wisdom figures especially associated with Pythagoras: close study of the fragments of Empedokles, Parmenides, Xenophanes, and Philolaos. Finally, we consider the figure of Sokrates, both as an heir to and contestant of the Pythagorean tradition: close reading of the Phaedo and the Timaeus. Throughout our study, we give sustained attention to comparative traditions of metempsychosis, shamanism, and theories of astral and cosmic immortality.
Past Blegen visitors and courses
Romans, Greeks, and Jews
Claude Eilers 2004/2005Toleration and its Alternatives in the late Republic and early Empire. The Jews of the Graeco-Roman world occasionally enjoyed self-rule of various degrees, but more typically they found themselves ruled by others; for Jews of the Diaspora, the communities in which they lived exhibited attitudes that range from tolerance to active oppression. How is this to be understood politically? religiously: culturally? And how did their experience compare to other minorities? These questions are explored through documents preserved in literary, epigraphical, and papyrological contexts.
Biography and Scandal
Jaqueline Long 2003/2004This cross-cultural seminar explores the pleasures of biography, focusing especially on the late-antique collection of imperial biographies known as the Historia Augusta. How do the Lives of state leaders draw our, readers', interest? How do rulers' lives inform ours, so that their biographies map a heritage we share? How do researched fact and imagined re(-)creation intersect when Lives are told? The Historia Augusta combines sober truths with unbridled fancies in various ways concerning emperors ranging in time from Hadrian to Cams and his sons and in character from Marcus Aurelius to Elagabalus. Scandal and humor periodically spice both the facts and the inventions. We endeavor to recover a sense of what these Lives meant to late antique Roman readers, concerned with their Roman heritage in a changing world, by studying them in conjunction with selections from important Classical models of biography.
On Nature: Ideas of the Natural in Ancient Rome
Garth Tissol, 2002/2003What is nature and what does it mean to call something "natural"? People today who write about environment often use these terms intuitively, without reflecting on their origins and deeper significance. But in fact the concept of the natural has had a long history, with many paths and byways this history has shaped current understandings of nature and of the place of human beings in it. This course has two related aims: first, to study the evolution of conceptions of nature in the western tradition, beginning with the ancient Greek philosophy, and moving through Roman philosophy and literature second, to examine the imaginative and poetic responses to the natural world that distinguish Roman literature. The major texts of the course are Lucretius' On the Nature of Things, Vergil's Eclogues, and Ovid's Metamorphoses. We also read selections from earlier writings - the presocratic philosophers and Aristotle - and from later ones, including Pliny's Natural History and Seneca's Natural Questions.
East and West
Carolyn Dewald, 2001/2002This course reads epics from the ancient Eastern andWestern traditions: the Bhavagad Gita and portions of the Mahabharata from the Indian subcontinent, and the Iliad from archaic Greece. We explore some of the different ways that war and the nature of the personal achievement of the warrior are problematized in the two ancient epic traditions, and then consider the larger issues underlying the meeting of east and west as Herodotus, the fifth century Greek historian, defined them. Is Herodotus an unequivocal supporter of Greek individual initiative and the warrior culture of the Greek polis, or is he tacitly seeing some of the merits in the (unsuccessful) Persian way of organizaing ad thinking aobut things? As background, we also read a modern dialogue between a contemporary French philosopher and Buddhist monk (who happen to be father and son).
Sport, Society, and Politics in the Roman World
Geoff Sumi, 2000/2001This course examines the complex phenomenon of public entertainment in Roman society against a backdrop of social and political history. We begin with a discussion of political and social institutions in Rome, including the Roman family, the roles of men and women in roman society, slavery and manumission, and life in the city. The core component of the course is a discussion of spectacles in Roman society, not only as entertainment but also as a form of social control and a forum for the dissemination of propaganda and political symbols. Among the spectacles we consider are the gladiatorial combats and wild beast shows that took place in the Colosseum and the chariot races of the Circus Maximus. In connection with these we study the evidence for the careers of individual entertainers (gladiators, charioteers, and actors), who, though they were mostly slaves or otherwise d class (e.g. literary texts, inscriptions, and papyri) as well as works of modern scholarship.
Representations of Women in Late Antiquity
Kathryn Chew, 1999/2000This course investigates the lives and representations of women during the mid to late Roman empire, an often neglected period, but one significant for the transition of women from classical to medieval times. We explore literary and legal sources and examine the evidence from material culture for issues relevant to women, both socially, such as marriage, literacy, health and employment, and personally, such as religion, Christian asceticism, chastity, sexuality and suffering. Also of interest are women's roles as physician, merchant, prostitute, priestess, empress, holy woman, wife. We consider how women participated in the social and historical movements of the time and how these movements both shaped women's lives and opened up opportunities for changes in their lives. The readings include a selection of primary texts (historians, novels, saints' lives) and scholarly books and articles.