New Technologies and Architectural Insights on a 6th-century BCE Temple in Sicily

Professor Philip Sapirstein

Wednesday, November 30 at 7:00pm
Paleontology Hall (CU Museum of Natural History) or via Zoom
Free and Open to Public

ABSTRACT

This talk presents a recent digital and architectural restudy of the temple of Apollo at Syracuse. Built in ca. 590 BCE, it was the first major Greek temple to be built entirely from stone, and thus it is fundamental to our understanding of the origins of Doric architecture. In addition to its architectural significance, the building has a monumental inscription, whose reading has been controversial since its 1864 discovery. In 2018, Sapirstein created a 3D model, enhanced using new computational methods, which supports a new interpretation of this enigmatic inscription: as a celebration of an ancient technological breakthrough that transforms our understanding of this structure.

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Spartans on the Capitol: Recent Far-Right Appropriations of Spartan Militarism and Their Historical Roots
Professor Stephen Hodskinson (University of Nottingham)

Wednesday, October 26, 2022  |  6:00 p.m.  |  Eaton Humanities 250

Professor Hodkinson examines far-right appropriations of Sparta since Zack Snyder's 300 (2006), looking at their political and intellectual roots since the American and French revolutions. He then briefly argues against militaristic interpretations of Spartan society and concludes by asking how we can best challenge these popular misconceptions.

  View the PDF poster here

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Friday, October 21 at 5:00pm
Eaton Humanities 135 or via Zoom
Free and Open to Public

This event will highlight and celebrate the many critical interventions that Professor Joy King made over the course of her illustrious career to the Department, the University of Colorado Boulder, and the discipline of Classics. Speakers will include:

• Mary De Forest (CU Denver)
• Elspeth Dusinberre (CU Boulder)
• Barbara Hill (CU Boulder)
• Judith P. Hallett (University of Maryland)
• Georgia Irby (William & Mary)
• Tyler Lansford (CU Boulder)
• Sherwin Little (American Classical League)
• Noel Lenski (Yale University)
• Alison Orlebeke
• Paul King

The event will be held simultaneously in-person and on Zoom. To register to attend the event on Zoom, click here () or e-mail Dimitri Nakassis (dimitri.nakassis@colorado.edu). 

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King Midas of the Golden Touch in Context: Death, Belief, Behavior, and Society in Ancient Phrygia

Professor Beth Dusinberre

Wednesday, October 12 at 7:00pm
Paleontology Hall (CU Museum of Natural History) or via Zoom
Free and Open to Public

ABSTRACT

The spectacular burial tumuli at Gordion (Turkey), the capital of ancient Phrygia and seat of the legendary (but historical) King Midas of the Golden Touch, are presented in this lecture by CU's Elspeth Dusinberre. Its focus will be on the tombs dating from ca. 850-525 BCE, beginning with Gordion’s oldest burial tumuli and then look at the largest, the so-called Midas Monument, before exploring the last century or so of tumulus construction. The later tombs display radical changes that reflect Gordion’s complex and shifting society and illuminate issues of power structures and display, gender, burial customs, afterlife beliefs in ancient Phrygia.

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The Celia M. Fountain 2022 Webinar

Eurydice, Mother of Philip II of Macedon, and the Power of Memory

Professor Elizabeth Carney

Thursday, September 15, 7:00 p.m. on Zoom
Free and Open to Public

ABSTRACT

Study of ancient Argead Macedonia used to focus nearly exclusively on Philip II and his son Alexander III the Great. Daily life, social and religious practices, and material culture got little attention, especially in connection to the political world. Royal women appeared not as participants in monarchy but as its colorful window dressing.  Heavy dependence on literary sources generated narrow readings of the Macedonian past.  What little that was known about Eurydice, mother of Philip II and grandmother of Alexander the Great, depended on works created and perpetuated by the tiny literate class of the ancient world, works largely written about five centuries after Eurydice’s death, providing Roman, only indirectly Macedonian, memory of Eurydice.  

This literary tradition portrays Eurydice as a powerful woman, who as a royal mother, led a court faction and engaged in Macedonian power politics, but It permits her no middle ground; she is either a heroic mother or a murderous one who puts her lover’s interests in place of those of her sons.  A Plutarchian essay, however, does preserve an inscription, once associated with a dedication, that demonstrates that Eurydice worked to shape public memory about herself.

That is all we knew about Eurydice until, at Vergina (a modern village, almost certainly the site of ancient Aegae, the older Macedonian capital and burial place of the Argead kings), the first archaeological information about Eurydice emerged in 1982 when Chrysoula Saatsoglou-Paliadeli and her team began to excavate an area now known as the sanctuary of Eucleia.  They found dedications by Eurydice to the goddess Eucleia and, nearby, other evidence of Eurydice’s presence in Aegae. Gradually, they uncovered indications of the enduring veneration of Eurydice’s dedications and of the sanctuary, veneration that continued into the first century CE, nearly four centuries after it began. This archaeological evidence derives, primarily, from the actions of Eurydice herself and from the practices (architectural, religious) of centuries of Macedonians. These two bodies of evidence about Eurydice—literary and archaeological-- offer different pictures of Eurydice’s past and that of Macedonia. This physical evidence indicates how memory of Eurydice, her family, the Argead dynasty, and the Macedonian kingdom, evolved: It gives us a more Macedonian Eurydice. Over time, however, the sanctuary acquired other layers of meaning; it encompassed memory and veneration of a lost and grander past and of the family that helped to bring about that grandness and yet it also linked that past grandeur to a less grand present. Relatively soon after Eurydice’s death, the sanctuary may have become a place for the secret burial of the very last Argeads. The structures of the sanctuary doubled in size under the new Antigonid dynasty, in a way that highlighted Eurydice’s dedication. After the Roman conquest the sanctuary endured as other cults at Vergina faded away. When whatever event in the early first century CE caused the city to be abandoned, those still possessing some wealth and power, as well as nostalgia, organized an elaborate burial and funeral feast for the remains of the Eucleia cult and the dedications of its most famous patron. 

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It is with great sadness that the Department announces the passing of Professor Emerita Joy K. King, an extremely distinguished Classicist, an inspirational teacher, a visionary leader, and a critical contributor to the department and the University. 

Professor King - Joy - received her degrees from Knox College (BA 1947), the University of Wisconsin-Madison (MA 1952), and the University of Colorado Boulder (PhD 1969). She taught at the University of Colorado Boulder from 1968 to 1994, serving as Chair of the Classics Department from 1982 to 1986. She published widely on Roman poetry, focusing especially on Propertius, Catullus, and Lucretius. At CU she coordinated the beginning and intermediate Latin programs and supervised graduate instructors, taught Latin Teaching Methods, and helped prepare Classics majors who were planning to dedicate themselves to secondary Latin teaching. Beyond CU, she was the preeminent voice of Colorado Latin, devoting herself to supporting all Colorado Latin teachers with advice, training, and a frequent newsletter. She served as co-chair of the (1983-1984) and president of the (1991-1992). 

A volume in her honor, , edited by Mary DeForest, was published in 1993 by Bolchazy Carducci Publishers. The title captures a salient feature of her career, for she navigated the academy and the field of Classics in a period when it was largely closed to female faculty, and she did so in a way that commanded respect and authority even while pushing the rules of the game in the direction of civility and warmth. Joy remained an active presence in Classics and at CU deep into her retirement. On her birthday in 2012, the department held a symposium to recognize and pay tribute to her many contributions. The Department established an award to commemorate the work of Joy alongside her longtime friend and fellow department member Barbara Hill. The Joy King-Barbara Hill fellowship in the Teaching of Latin, first awarded in 2015, continues to play a role in fostering the love of Latin among emerging generations at CU that Joy herself kindled and fostered for 26 years. Her many contributions to the field were recognized by the Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award in 2019.

The family would prefer memorial contributions in support of the  in lieu of flowers.

You can watch Professor King talk about her life and career to and  in 2019.

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Jackie Elliott explores early Latin poetry in a new book!

This new publication by Jackie Elliott discusses the earliest Roman poetry we can trace, which dates to the late third and second centuries B.C.E. With the exception of Roman comedy, all poetry written at Rome during this period is today fragmentary and available to us only via quotations or references in later ancient authors. Early Latin Poetry describes the surviving record of third and second-century Roman epic, 'serious' drama, and satire, and addresses the methodological problems of engaging with these remains.

Jackie Elliott (Ph.D. Columbia 2005) studies the history of Roman literature from its inception, specializing in the epic and historiographical traditions of republican Rome. Her first monograph,  (Cambridge, 2013) retraces what we think we know of Rome’s first and massively influential but now fragmentary hexametric epic to its ancient sources. This study was reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement (4 June, 2014) and won several awards, including the Society for Classical Studies’ . She is also the author of  (Leiden, 2022), an introduction to the fragmentary record of Roman poetry from its origins through roughly the first hundred and twenty years of its existence. She has received fellowships from the Humboldt Foundation, the American Academy at Rome, the Loeb Foundation, and has contributed articles to the Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, the Classical Quarterly, Histos, and the American Journal of Philology. Currently, she is working on a project on Cato’s Origines informed by exploration of the work’s early reception and transmission history; a commentary on the Annales with a literary bias and a focus on the text's ancient reception in later works of literature; and a project on the transmission and early reception of Lucilius.

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The Past in Fragments: Ennius’ Annals, Cato’s Origins, and the history of Rome

Professor Jackie Elliott

Wednesday, April 20, 7:00 p.m.
Hale Science Building Room 230

^{Free and Open to Public
Download Poster}

ABSTRACT

The early Roman poet Ennius (239 – 169 BCE) and his contemporary, the statesman and censor Cato (234 – 149 BCE), each wrote groundbreaking accounts of the Roman past: Ennius by adapting the Greek hexameter— the meter in which Lucretius’ On the Constitution of the Universe, Vergil’s Aeneid, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and much else was subsequently to be written—and fitting to it an account of Roman history from its beginnings to his own present day. Cato’s narrative of the Roman past, the Origines (“Origins”), was the first prose history of Rome to be written in the Latin language. Each of these works had a profound influence on how Romans thought about the past in relation to their contemporary identity and on how that past was subsequently imagined in the genres of epic and historiography. Today, however, they each survive only in fragments: that is, as quotations or vaguer references relayed by later ancient authors, whose own dates stretch from the first century BCE to the ninth CE and even later. This talk describes some of the challenges and rewards of getting to grips with early Roman fragmentary material. 

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Street Theater: A Pompeian Neighborhood in Five Acts

Dr. Jeremy Hartnett (Wabash College)

Thurs. Apr. 14, 2022 at 7pm
Eaton Humanities 1B80 [New Location]

When we think of Roman cities, it is tempting to conjure images of temples, baths, and amphitheaters.  This talk storms into the narrow streets of Pompeii to make the case that, for most Romans, the real action happened on the neighborhood level.  By examining five stories at just one intersection far from the monumental center of this city, we will learn about (a) streetside religion, the former slaves who presided over it, and the suspicions that they sought to tamp down; (b) eating and drinking by regular folk, as well as the key connective roles played by barmaids in Pompeian society; (c) small-scale industry and the way that shopkeepers deployed deities to push product; (d) neighborhood rivalries across competing businesspeople and their efforts to outdo one another via street signs; (e) and the retorts that elite Pompeians used to undercut upstarts.  All told, we will see how ancient historians repopulate “empty” ancient spaces with a raucous cast of upper-class politicians, slaves, hucksters, donkeys, and so many more – all trying to scratch out a living, make their mark, and upstage competitors in the street.

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Archaeology, Museums, and War in the 21st Century 

Brian Rose

James B. Pritchard Professor of Archaeology
University of Pennsylvania

Monday, April 18th, 2022  |  5:30 p.m.  |  HUMN 1B90

^{FREE AND OPEN TO PUBLIC}

The wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria during the last 16 years have profoundly influenced who we are and what we do as scholars dealing with the art and material culture of antiquity. This talk draws heavily on my own experiences with museums, foreign wars, and archaeology, beginning with a discussion of the ways in which the past now dominates the present, and followed by an overview of cultural heritage destruction and preservation programs in conflict zones. This leads to the subject of museums and repatriation requests in an age of increasing nationalism.

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