CLASSICAL STUDIES SEMINAR SERIES | 2021

We are glad to inform that the (rescheduled) seminar
Queer Classics, queer loss: A. E. Housman, Sappho, and the ‘lost country’
that will be given by Dr Jennifer Ingleheart (Durham University) will be held on
February 2nd, Wed, at 3 pm (Brasília time) = 6 pm (London time).

Registration:
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZctc–upzIoH9fLxq9RNwGHWmxSFRcEh7P-

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This year the Center of Classical Studies (LEC – Laboratório de Estudos Clássicos, in Portuguese) of the Federal Fluminense University (UFF, Brazil) hosts its 1st International Seminar & Lecture Series.

The series will be held from July to December 2021 via Zoom. Seminars and lectures will take place every 3 weeks from July 7 to December 1, on Wednesdays, and normally will start at 3 pm (GMT-3).

We have invited 8 scholars from the USA, England, Scotland, New Zealand, Italy and Argentina, who will cover a great range of subjects in Classical Studies and show varied approaches to address the past.

It is free to attend and we welcome you all, but we ask that you please register in advance for each activity, or if you prefer you can register for the entire series (5 talks will be in English, 2 in Spanish, and 1 in Portuguese).

Certificates will be given to those who need them. The talks will be followed by a live Q&A session.

PROGRAM (See abstracts below)

– 7 July | 3 pm GMT-3 | English
Roman Comedy and the Final Dance
Timothy J. Moore
John and Penelope Biggs Distinguished Professor of Classics (Washington University in St. Louis, USA)

– 28 July | 3 pm GMT-3| Español
La antropología trinitaria de Gregorio de Nissa
Giulio Maspero
Professore ordinario di Teologia Dogmatica – Mistero di Dio (Pontificia Università della S. Croce, Italy)

– 18 August | 3 pm GMT-3 | English
Catullus and Jack Lindsay: poets of revolution
Henry Stead
Lecturer in Latin (University of St Andrews, Scotland)

– 8 September | 3 pm GMT-3 | Español
Tragedia, enfermedad y poética de las emociones en Eurípides
Lidia Gambon
Profesora de Literatura Griega (Universidad Nacional del Sur, Argentina)

CANCELLED – TO BE RESCHEDULED
– 29 September | 3 pm GMT-3 | Português/English
Pharmapolitics and the early Roman expansion: gender, slavery, and ecology in 331 BCE
Dan-el Padilla Peralta
Associate Professor of Classics (Princeton University, USA)

– 20 October | 7 pm GMT-3 | English
Trapped between Fidelity and Adaptation? On the Reception of Ancient Greek Tragedy in Modern Greece
Anastasia Bakogianni
Senior Lecturer in Classical Studies (Massey University, New Zealand)

– 10 November | 4 pm GMT-3 | English
Lyric and Tragedy in Horace Odes 2.1
Stephen Harrison
Senior Research Fellow in Classics (Corpus Christi College, University of Oxford, England)

CANCELLED – RESCHEDULED
– 1 December | 2 pm GMT-3 | English
Queer Classics, queer loss: A. E. Housman, Sappho, and the ‘lost country’
Jennifer Ingleheart
Professor of Latin (Durham University, England)

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FULL PROGRAM (with abstracts)

– 7 July | 3 pm GMT-3
Timothy J. Moore
John and Penelope Biggs Distinguished Professor of Classics (Washington University in St. Louis, USA)

Roman Comedy and the Final Dance
Although actors in Roman Comedy probably danced often, characters in Roman Comedy only refer explicitly to their own dancing three times, each time during the final scene of a Plautine play. These references combine with other evidence to suggest that lively dance at or near the ends of plays was a standard feature of the genre. Sometimes this dance took the form of a dance finale, immediately before the epilogue, or a near finale slightly earlier. More often the playwrights used their final dances to mark the moment in their plays where the climactic crisis of the plot occurs and/or is resolved.

– 28 July | 3 pm GMT-3
Giulio Maspero
Professore ordinario di Teologia Dogmatica – Mistero di Dio (Pontificia Università della S. Croce, Italy)

La antropología trinitaria de Gregorio de Nissa
La revelación cristiana introduce dos elementos radicalmente nuevos con respecto al pensamiento griego: (1) la identidad de naturaleza entre el Logos y Dios, distintos sólo como personas en su relacionalidad recíproca; (2) el hacerse carne de este Logos reconocido como Dios. Esto llevó a Gregorio de Nisa, en su enfrentamiento con Arrio y Apolinar, a revisar la antropología, redefiniendo el cuerpo del hombre. Esto condujo a resultados extremadamente modernos, que pueden apreciarse más allá de la fe de cada uno: la condena de la esclavitud y el reconocimiento de la libertad del hombre como el elemento más profundo de su ontología, la afirmación del valor del lenguaje y de la imagen, la transformación de la concepción del trabajo manual. Estos elementos se presentarán de forma sintética, para mostrar la actualidad y fecundidad del pensamiento patrístico.

– 18 August | 3 pm GMT-3
Henry Stead
Lecturer in Latin (University of St Andrews, Scotland)

Catullus and Jack Lindsay: poets of revolution
Jack Lindsay translated Catullus twice in his lifetime. The first was printed in Australia by Lindsay’s own Fanfrolico Press in 1929. The second was published by London’s Sylvan Press in 1948. If it is rare for a poet to translate a text twice in a lifetime, it is still rarer that these translations should occur either side of a dramatic ideological conversion. This is what makes Lindsay’s engagement with Catullus a good test case for the influence of ideologies on poetic translation. This paper is based on a comparative analysis of those translations, with a special focus on areas most susceptible to change under the pressure of the translator’s worldview. Between Lindsay’s two translations, two major events took place simultaneously. One, a thorough-going creative engagement with Catullus’ poetry via the medium of historical fiction; and two, Britain’s ‘red decade’. In the 1930s all ‘engaged’ writers were compelled by events, especially the Spanish Civil War, to ‘take sides’ in the battle between fascism and what was widely perceived to be its fittest opponent, Popular Front communism. These two events overlapped and informed one another. Lindsay spent the 1930s developing his political and theoretical literacy, and earning his bread by writing Marxist novels set in the dying Roman Republic. By comparing two countercultural translations of Catullus, we may detect how a radical poet’s ideology colours a classical translation. This paper asks to what extent we can from this basis begin to examine the influence of those less visible and arguably more insidious dominant ideologies that continue to shape the way we read the classical world.

– 8 September | 3 pm GMT-3
Lidia Gambon
Profesora de Literatura Griega (Universidad Nacional del Sur, Argentina)

Tragedia, enfermedad y poética de las emociones en Eurípides
Tal como hemos venido sosteniendo en investigaciones precedentes (cf. A quien Dioniso quiere destruir… La tragedia y la invención de la locura, 2016), la tragedia griega, y en particular la de Eurípides, se mostró obsesionada con las formas de la enfermedad y la locura (que solo es una de sus manifestaciones), y consecuentemente con la política del monstruo (Lisa, las Erinias), de la que se deriva su inteligibilidad. Fue, en efecto, la metáfora de la enfermedad una metáfora poderosa, que permitió al género reforzar un imaginario de fundamentos ideológicos, dando cuenta de la normalidad a través de la disfunción y el desorden, y exponiendo, a su vez, las emociones ligadas a la conciencia de lo humano, su vulnerabilidad y finitud. Sobre esa metáfora, pues, o en función de esa metáfora se arquitectura la poética de las emociones en varias de las obras de Eurípides. En efecto, junto a otros escenarios de la pólis, la tragedia confirmó a la Atenas clásica como una cultura patopoiética, capaz de articular en la representación del mito los aspectos viscerales y evaluativos de las emociones, de dar cuenta de su poder destructivo, y de su impacto en la esfera familiar, política y social. El sentido de estos axiomas se nos hace manifiesto al considerar algunas de las emociones dramáticas más emblemáticas (piedad, temor, éros, aidós) y su articulación en ejemplos paradigmáticos como el de la locura femenina de la esposa de Teseo en Hipólito, o la locura masculina del poderoso hijo de Zeus y Alcmena en Heracles

– 29 September | 3 pm GMT-3
Dan-el Padilla Peralta
Associate Professor of Classics (Princeton University, USA)

Pharmapolitics and the early Roman expansion: gender, slavery, and ecology in 331 BCE
This paper reinterprets an incident that Livy (8.18.4-11) and derivative later sources place in 331 BCE: a rash of poisonings whose perpetrators are brought to light after an enslaved woman approaches a Roman magistrate. I’ll attempt to show that the incident is best understood in connection with the transmission of novel – or perceived as novel – pharmacological knowledge, at a time of escalating enslavements that resulted from the early stages of the Roman Republic’s expansion; and that a key figure in the mythological encoding of this transmission is the legendary Circe.

– 20 October | 7 pm GMT-3
Anastasia Bakogianni
Senior Lecturer in Classical Studies (Massey University, New Zealand)

Trapped between Fidelity and Adaptation? On the Reception of Ancient Greek Tragedy in Modern Greece
Modern Greece offers us a distinctive example of the reception of ancient drama that testifies to the complications introduced by questions of national identity, vested ideological interests, and deep political divisions. On the modern Greek stage, the performance of ancient Greek drama has been characterised by an ongoing struggle between tradition and innovation. The traditional approach privileges ‘authenticity’, as part of a wider intellectual project that seeks to invest modern Greece with the glamour and cultural capital of ancient Greece. This paper investigates the tension between this inherently conservative approach to performing ancient drama and freer, more innovative responses, as exemplified by the work of one of the country’s premier theatrical companies, the National Theatre of Greece.

– 10 November | 4 pm GMT-3
Stephen Harrison
Senior Research Fellow in Classics (Corpus Christi College, University of Oxford, England)

Lyric and Tragedy in Horace Odes 2.1
Horace Odes 2.1, addressed to the politician, historian and tragic poet C.Asinius Pollio, has in recent years been much analysed. Most often, critics have followed the steer of Nisbet and Hubbard’s commentary (1978) in looking for traces of Pollio’s lost Histories and of Pollio’s own historical role (e.g. Henderson 1998, Woodman 2012), and it is indeed clear that the poem contains a number of allusions to historiographical topics and stilemes and may relate to the lost proem of Pollio’s work. This paper looks in another direction, following the intuition of Nisbet and Hubbard that in this poem ‘Horace is suggesting an affinity between Pollio’s tragedies and his histories’ (1978: 9). It argues that Horace’s ode alludes more extensively than has been realised to established topics in tragedy, and thus to the other part of Pollio’s literary career which Horace here prominently mentions (2.1.9 severae Musa tragoediae) as being suspended for the writing of history. Given the loss of just about all pre-Augustan Roman tragedy, it argues from the texts of Greek tragedy, which Pollio must have imitated to some degree, that Horace’s poem is just as suffused with tragic topics as with historiographical material: similar references to blood, fire, gambling and dust can be found in tragic texts. It also suggests that the strong emphasis on sound and spectacle in the poem, usually thought to be part of a particularly vivid style of historical writing, can be related to the stage-productions of tragedies in Pollio’s own time, which we know to have been particularly lavish and grand. In poetic terms, this bringing together of the two sides of Pollio’s writing perhaps supports earlier suggestions that his history was ‘tragic’ in tone (see e.g. Ullmann 1942), incorporating dramatic narrative and emotional colour. It also makes good sense of the poem’s final stanza, where, as in Odes 3.3, the poet is diverted from potential digression into a different poetic genre at the end of his work (in Odes 2.1 from the lamentation which features at the end of many a tragedy).

– 1 December | 2 pm GMT-3
Jennifer Ingleheart
Professor of Latin (Durham University, England)

Queer Classics, queer loss: A. E. Housman, Sappho, and the ‘lost country’
This talk interrogates the various ways in which Classics performs the function of enabling queer people to come to terms with loss. I approach this issue through the test case of A. E. Housman, who provides the ideal figure to think through this theme and its implications. Housman engaged with the Classics and loss both through his poetry and his scholarship, not least his work as a textual critic, in a field of scholarship which by its very nature forces its practitioners to confront the absences of antiquity. Housman has the reputation of being a divided man, who practised a particularly impersonal form of scholarship, and reserved his emotions for his poetry; this talk argues that Housman’s different personas and life were in fact far more integrated than such a stereotype allows, not least insofar as he takes similar approaches to queer loss in his verse and his academic work. In addition to exploring Housman’s approaches to loss through Classics in his own writings, this talk also explores the presentation of Housman’s relation to loss qua classicist in the fictionalised account of his life found in Tom Stoppard’s 1997 play The Invention of Love.

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Held by: Laboratório de Estudos Clássicos – LEC-UFF
With support of: Programa de Pós-Graduação em Estudos de Linguagem – POSLING/UFF
& Laboratório de Estudos da Tradução – LABESTRAD