The Joan Palevsky Chair of Classics Inaugural Lecture, Mon. Oct. 16
2023-10-16 17:00 - 20:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Royce Hall 314, 10745 Dickson Plaza, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States
The UCLA Department of Classics Presents The Joan Palevsky Chair of Classics Inaugural Lecture on Monday, October 16, 2023
Professor Kathryn Morgan will present her talk entitled Projecting the Past: Plato’s Historical Imagination in Royce 314 at 5:45 PM.
Please join us for a reception prior to the lecture in Royce 306 at 5 PM. All are welcome to attend.

Navied Mahdavian | A Careers After Classics Lecture Series Talk
2023-10-23 12:00 - 13:30 | Dodd 248
The UCLA Department of Classics presents A Careers After Classics Lecture Series featuring New Yorker Cartoonist Navied Mahdavian who will be speaking about his new book “This Country”

His talk will be at 12 PM on Monday, Oct. 23 in Dodd 248.

All are welcome!

Victoria Wohl | Autobiography of a Demon
2023-11-02 16:00 - 17:30 | Dodd 248
Victoria Wohl will give her talk entitled Autobiography of a Demon on Thursday, November 2 at 4 PM in Dodd 248.

Vinzenz Brinkmann and Ulrike Koch-Brinkmann | Filling The Gap: New Considerations of the East Pediment of the Athenian Parthenon
2023-11-07 17:00 - 18:30 | Dodd 247
Filling The Gap: New Considerations of the East Pediment of the Athenian Parthenon
From the ancient writer Pausanias, we learn that the east pediment of the Athenian Parthenon depicted the birth of Athena. However, the figures in the center of the pediment were probably destroyed as early as in early Christian times, and for more than two hundred years, archaeologists have discussed numerous reconstruction proposals for the missing figures and the names of the surviving sculptures without reaching a consensus. But perhaps researchers have overlooked the fact that certain reliefs on the lids of Roman sarcophagi copied the representations in the east pediment.
Is it conceivable that we may be able to reliably reconstruct this largest and most important image of ancient Greece? The preserved fragments of those lost figures from the central part of the pediment seem to support this thesis.

Andrew Laird | From Classical Rhetoric to Ethnohistory in Post-Conquest Mexico: Education of a Native Elite, and its Consequences
2023-11-09 16:00 - 17:30 | Dodd 248
From Classical Rhetoric to Ethnohistory in Post-Conquest Mexico: Education of a Native Elite, and its Consequences.

Emilio Capettini | "The Dolphine-Haunted Artifacts of Dimmed Atlantis": Evocations of Graeco-Roman Antiquity during the HIV/AIDS Crisis
2023-11-15 17:00 - 18:30 | Dodd 248
The UCLA Department of Classics and the UCLA Stavros Niarchos Foundation Center for the Study of Hellenic Culture present a Reception of Hellenic Culture Lecture Series featuring Emilio Capettini (Professor, UC Santa Barbara) on Wednesday, November 15 at 5 PM
The lecture entitled “The Dolphine-Haunted Artifacts of Dimmed Atlantis”: Evocations of Graeco-Roman Antiquity during the HIV/AIDS Crisis will be held in Dodd 248 followed by a reception.

Andreas Schachner | “A New Look at an Ancient City: An Outline of the Development of Hattusha during the 2nd Millennium BC”
2024-02-26 17:00 - 19:00 | Fowler Museum A222
Please join us on Monday, February 26 at 5 PM for Prof. Dr. Andreas Schachner (German Archaeological Institute, Istanbul, and University of Würzburg, Germany) for his talk entitled “A New Look at an Ancient City: An Outline of the Development of Hattusha during the 2nd Millennium BC” in Fowler Room A222. Reception to follow.
All are welcome!
Lecture description
In the 2nd millennium BC, despite geographical obstacles, the Hittites succeeded in establishing the only supra-regional empire with its center in Central Anatolia, which was one of the major political players in the competition of the great empires of the Late Bronze Age in the Eastern Mediterranean. Even though the urban settlement of Boğazköy is several centuries older than the foundation of the Hittite dynasty, its development reflects essential characteristics of the Hittite state. The lecture will present these events by means of a virtual tour of the city, thus demonstrating its unique position not only in Anatolia but also in comparison with other regions of western Asia.
Andreas Schachner biography
Andreas Schachner (born 1967) is a senior research associate at the German Archaeological Institute´s Istanbul Section and an adjunct Professor for Near Eastern Archaeology at the University of Würzburg, Germany. After having participated in various excavations in Turkey and Uzbekistan during his education (PhD in 1999) he conducted two independent research projects in Southeastern Turkey while working as an Assistant Professor at the Department of Near Eastern Archaeology of Munich University. Since 2006 he directs the German Archaeological Institute´s Boğazköy Excavations focusing not only on the Hittite remains but taking the settlement history as whole into account. The research in Hattushais characterized by an interdisciplinary approach that combines humanities and methods of various natural sciences and attaches particular importance to the application of archaeometric research. Beside his excavation responsibilities Andreas Schachner´s research interests cover a wide range of mainly Bronze and Iron Age topics reaching from the Anatolian Highlands to the Caucasus, Syria and Mesopotamia, but also the history of archaeology in the Near East as well as issues of heritage conservation and management. His numerous publications deal not only with his fieldwork but contribute to theoretical and methodological aspects of the Ancient Near Eastern art, archaeometric analysis of materials as well as various aspects of the relationship between humans and their geographical environment in Antiquity.

Richard Hunter | “Plutarch and the History of Greek Poetry”
2024-03-04 17:00 - 18:30 | Dodd 248
Please join us for a talk by Richard Hunter (University of Cambridge) entitled “Plutarch and the History of Greek Poetry” on Monday, March 4 at 5 PM in Dodd 248. Reception to follow.
All are welcome!

Rubina Raja | Urban Culture in the Syrian Desert: New research on Palmyra
2024-03-11 12:00 - 13:30 | Dodd 248

Anthony Kaldellis | Who Invented the “Modern Greeks,” and Why?
2024-03-12 17:00 - 18:30 | Dodd 248
The UCLA Department of Classics and the UCLA Stavros Niarchos Foundation Center for the Study of Hellenic Culture present a Reception of Hellenic Culture Lecture Series featuring Anthony Kaldellis (University of Chicago) on Tuesday, March 12 at 5 PM.
The lecture entitled “Who Invented the “Modern Greeks,” and Why?” will be held in Dodd 248 followed by a reception.

Alex Dressler | The Way and Its Poor: Bareness of Life in Roman Aesthetic Theory
2024-04-04 16:00 - 17:30 | Dodd 248
The UCLA Department of Classics presents a talk by Alex Dressler (University of Wisconsin-Madison) on Thursday, April 4 at 4:00 PM.
The lecture entitled “The Way and Its Poor: Bareness of Life in Roman Aesthetic Theory,” will be held in Dodd 248 followed by a reception.

Nandini Pandey | “The Colorblindness Gap: From Roman Diversity Beyond Affirmative Action?"
2024-04-25 17:00 - 19:00 | Fowler Museum
Annual UCLA Joan Palevsky Lecture
Professor Nandini Pandey, Johns Hopkins University
“The Colorblindness Gap: From Roman Diversity Beyond Affirmative Action?“

CANCELLED: International Conference on “Plato and Lyric Poetry” Change of venue: May 10 - May 11 Dodd Hall 248
2024-05-10 - 2024-05-11 | Dodd Hall 248
At the urging of the faculty of the UCLA Classics department, and in light of the situation on campus, the conference on Plato and Lyric has been cancelled.

Conference Schedule:

Friday May 10th, 2024:
9 am. Breakfast
9.25 am Opening remarks

Session 1
9.35 am-10.35 am. Glenn Most (University of Chicago): “Pindar’s nomos basileus (Fr. 169 Sn.-M.) in Plato”
Pindar’s Nomos basileus fragment (Fr. 169 Sn.-M.) is one of his most celebrated and controversial texts. Papyrus discoveries have extended our textual knowledge of Pindar’s poem but have not resolved its interpretative difficulties. The most celebrated and controversial ancient discussion of it is provided by Callicles’ citation and interpretation of it in Plato’s Gorgias. But even the text of this quotation is uncertain, to say nothing of the meaning attributed to it. I will discuss the extant remains of Pindar’s poem and this passage in the Gorgias, bringing to bear upon these other ancient testimonia, especially Herodotus 3.38 and Plato’s Laws 4 715a, in the hope of complicating and perhaps even revising the communis opinio.
10.45 am-11.45 am. John Tennant (Stanford University): “Speaking lyrically, speaking proverbially.”
Plato’s quotation of excerpts from lyric poetry in the dialogues highlights the status of those excerpts as detachable statements, removed from their original, textual context. This invites the question, what makes a statement detachable? What quality allows for a text’s quotability as a “stand-alone,” a “detachable?” I argue in this paper that an essential element of detachability consists in a statement’s capacity to function proverbially – as a stand-alone aphorism, maxim, proverb. Plato’s quotations from various lyric poets – among them Simonides, Theognis, Solon, Pindar, and Phocylides – illustrate how lyric poetry seems especially possessed of this capacity to generate detachable, proverbial statements. Readings from Plato’s quotation of lyric poets in Protagoras, Meno, and Republic reveal that within the context of the dialogic exchange, to speak lyrically is to speak proverbially – that is, to marshal lyric quotation as stand-alone proverb in the dialectic. In addition, lyric “proverbs” often seem to contradict one another, even when composed by the same poet and within the very same poem (e.g., Simonides’ “Ode to Scopas” in Protagoras, verses from Theognis in Meno). Aside from noting the connection with the sophistic educational practice of the antilogiae – itself consonant with the antilogical arrangement of ancient gnomic anthologies with their assorted proverbs gathered from different texts – I argue that the positioning of contradictory proverbs in the lyric poetry of Simonides and Theognis (“contradictory” at least, in Plato’s act of citation) enjoys a correspondence with modern counterparts, such as Robert Frost’s dueling proverbs in “Mending Wall.” Moreover, lyric detachables in both Plato and Frost highlight the Janus-faced nature of proverbial expression, revealing that contrary to popular belief, proverbs are hardly univocal but rife with paradox and ambiguity, qualities essential to lyric poetry.
12.00- 1.30 pm: Lunch break
Session 2
1.30 pm-2.30 pm. Eleonora Rocconi (University of Pavia): “The role of melopoiia in Plato’s taxonomy of lyric genres”
In a well-known passage of Republic Book 3 (399a–400c), Plato deals with the musical attributes of lyric poetry discussing which musical modes and rhythmical patterns should be allowed in Kallipolis for educating the guardians. While commenting on their mimetic (and consequently ethical) capacity, this passage also seems to describe which technical elements were perceived by the ancients as belonging to a specific poetic genre and gave it such a clearly recognisable character (thus anticipating what will be said in Laws 3, 700a–c, where a distinct μέλους εἶδος is advocated for each type of composition). Interestingly, these remarks are echoed in later Aristoxenian handbooks on music theory, such as Cleonides’ Isagoge (2nd cent. CE?) when discussing modulations in μελοποιΐα (a term used by Plato too to indicate the selection of rhythms and harmoniai in poetic compositions, cf. Symp. 187d and 205c). The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of melopoiia in Plato’s conception of poetry by bringing the technical interpretations (both musical and philosophical) of these passages into dialogue with those more focused on the question of poetic genres.
2.35 pm.-3.35 pm. David Blank (UCLA): “The presence of Plato in Diogenes of Babylon’s treatise On Music”
The first Herculaneum papyrus to be unrolled, so that its last 37 columns could be read (nearly) continuously contained the fourth book of Philodemus’ treatise On Music. This text, so disappointing to its first readers, who were dismayed not only because it was not Aeschylus or Sappho, but also because it contained an attack on the art of music, is an Epicurean demolition of a book by Chrysippus’ student, Diogenes of Babylon, and it does in fact have a great deal to contribute to our understanding of Stoic epistemology and ethics. Diogenes is clearly building on Platonic and, to a lesser extent, Peripatetic theories of the emotional and dispositional effects on behavior and moral character. My paper will not only examine Diogenes’ borrowings from and citations of Plato, which extend from individual phrases to a general conception of musical êthos; I shall also trace Diogenes’ tactics in connecting Stoic theory to the Academy and vindicating the claims of the Stoa to belong to the Socratic tradition. In this, he anticipated the later Academic, Antiochus of Ascalon.
3.35-3.50 pm: Coffee break
Session 3
3.50 pm-4.50pm. Julia Pfefferkorn (University of Trier): “The gods’ rewards: Plato, lyric poetry, and divine retribution”
The question what role lyric poetry plays in the Republic is an important one, for at least two reasons: first, it remains exempt from the formal critique of poetry in Book 3 which condemns epic and drama. And second, the entire argument of the Republic takes its start from references to Pindar, in the context of Cephalus’ worries about divine retribution in the afterlife, and to Simonides, whose poetry provides the first tentative definition of justice. In order to shed light on this question, I turn to a hitherto neglected passage in Book 2 (362d1–368b1) in which Adeimantus joins his brother Glaucon in exhorting Socrates to praise justice in itself. He adds, in particular, that although some poets do praise justice, they focus only on the honours and rewards that ensue from it, and concludes that this will be insufficient to convince anyone of its intrinsic value. While the first part of Adeimantus’ discourse is based mostly on Homer and Hesiod, at the end he conspicuously resorts to lyric poetry (with quotations from and implicit references to, again, Pindar and Simonides, a mention of Archilochus, and further probable references to Solon and/or Theognis). This occurs precisely when he switches to a first-person perspective, picturing himself as a young man who is confronted with ambivalent representations of the gods and the way they reward virtue or vice. I contend that Adeimantus’ way of introducing lyric poetry in this passage anticipates important aspects of the critique of poetry, with regard to both contents and form, and that it may help to explain why lyric poetry, while it is certainly included in the critique of poetic contents, is left untouched by the formal critique: it is through Pindar’s “whether … or” (πότερον … ἤ, 365b2) that Adeimantus presents the young man as a responsible first-person agent who makes a choice, in a way that foreshadows the Myth of Er. While the lyric recount of divine retribution, just as the Myth of Er, can only be an addition (612b6–c2) to the philosophical account of justice, establishing this perspective on one’s life is fundamental.
5.00 pm-6.00 pm. Kathryn Morgan (UCLA) “The great contest: exploring life choices through Pindar in Plato’s Republic”
This paper starts from a group of Pindar quotations and reminiscences early in Plato’s Republic and proceeds to explore the ways in which Pindaric lyric, particularly epinician, informs the dialogue. Concerns with ponos, with the correct objects of praise and blame, and with the accurate assessment of achievement are common to both, and Socrates’ frequent references to rewards, prizes, and contests reinforce the agonistic atmosphere. Yet the nature of the contest and prizes under consideration is different, and is reflected in a tension between the threnodic and epinician modes that is resolved in the closing pages of the dialogue.

Saturday May 11th, 2024
9 am. Breakfast
Session 1
9.30 am-10.30 am. Giulia Sissa (UCLA) “No hymns to Eros? Platonic rhythms and rhymes in the Symposium”
This paper will study the continuities and discontinuities between lyric/melic poetry and the Symposium, as a hybrid dialogue in which narrative, praise, banter, and refutation come together. I would like to start with the lamented lack of a hymn to Eros and go from there. The premise is that lyric poetry can be understood at large, including theatrical choruses. And the hypothesis I would like to test is that the polyphonic and multi-genre conversation at Agathon’s drinking party deploys the poetic function of language both in in the speech-act of extolling Eros, and in the verbal, musical composition of that kind of utterance. It may sound funny. But who has the last laugh?

10.45 am-11.45 am. André Rehbinder (University of Paris, Nanterre) “Plato’s encounter with lyric in the Phaedrus”
Lyric poetry’s influence on Plato in the Phaedrus has long been underestimated, so much so that Ch. Rowe, in his edition of the dialogue, treats Socrates’ praise of Sappho and Anacreon at 235c as ironic. In two major papers, both published in 2007 , E. Pender has shown the deepness and the extent of Platonic borrowings from lyric in the Phaedrus, not only in the central myth, but starting with the famous description of the locus amoenus in the Prologue. However, Pender’s conclusion was highly deceptive: in the image of the bad horse falling on its knees with its jaws full of blood, she saw an “ugly conclusion”, where the “the lightness of Anacreon’s verse is destroyed”. At this point, Pender says, Plato “parts company with the poets”, because his scope is fundamentally different: where poets were only describing desire and the abandonment of oneself to it, the philosopher wants to show how the “best inner-ruler” (takes control over the lower parts of the soul, in order to achieve the contemplation of Forms. The purpose of the present work is, while acknowledging the deep relationship shown by Pender between Plato and lyric poetry, to reevaluate it: Plato is not just quoting lyric poetry as a good description of the shock of love and using it for its own purpose; rather he valorizes lyric experience as a whole and reveals its philosophical meaning. He is not opposing lyric mania to the control of the reason-charioteer, as Lysias does when he boasts about “not being defeated by love, but controlling [him]self” (233c1-2, οὐχ ὑπ᾽ ἔρωτος ἠττώμενος ἀλλ᾽ ἐμαυτοῦ κρατῶν). On the contrary, for Plato, to be defeated by love and to lose every control on oneself is the very means for the charioteer to obtain the greatest good, the regrowth of the wings. In sum, my claim is that Sappho and Anacreon could be seen as platonic lovers according to the Phaedrus: they experience the real pathos of love, which manifests itself in the mania they described so vividly.
12.00- 1.00 pm: Lunch break
Session 2
1.15 pm-2.15 pm. Marcus Folch (Columbia University) “Lyric and the geographic imagination in Plato’s Laws”
What does Plato do with lyric and what does lyric do for Plato in his last and longest work, the Laws? To answer that question, this paper examines allusions to elegiac poetry in Books 1&2. Plato’s engagement with poetry in the Laws has been a topic of several fascinating publications in the past decade. Taken together, these works have advanced our understanding of Plato’s late thought on mimetic poetry, his engagement with ancient performance culture, and the indebtedness of fourth-century philosophy to the poetic tradition. In this paper I move away from the questions of mimetic poetry and performance culture, and consider instead how lyric poetry in Plato is deeply embedded within, and invites readers to reconsider, the history of space and geography. Plato’s lyric engagements will be shown to provide a provocative guide to the allusive and argumentative tactics employed in the formation of philosophy as a literary genre. It will also illuminate the position of lyric poetry in the fourth century as a site of shared memory, a discursive space in which diverse authors, poets, and presumably their audiences debated and sorted out their own collective identities, tensions between local history and Panhellenism, and the ethical underpinnings of legislation and colonization—the central preoccupations of the Laws as a whole.
2.25 pm.-3.25 pm. Michael Brumbaugh (Tulane University) “Between nature and culture: Platonic chorality in the Guaraní Republic of Paraguay”
Early modern Europeans were fascinated with the musical talents of the Guaraní, the indigenous peoples of greater Paraguay. Indeed, their travelogs, private correspondences, and official reports are full of testaments to their amazement. One European visitor among the Guaraní recorded in a letter that he had witnessed a twelve-year-old indigenous boy flawlessly reproduce the most challenging of Italian concertos during an impromptu cello recital. Another remarked that “[the Guaraní] were endowed with the ingenuity of birds, whom nature herself inspires to sing.” While this interest in Guaraní musicality was doubtless influenced by European tendencies to exoticize non-European cultures, its roots can be traced back to Plato’s interest in music as a phenomenon belonging both to the world of nature and the world of the polis. This paper investigates ways in which music – and choral music in particular – operated at the intersection of nature and culture in the early modern tradition and how some even saw it as central to the European colonial enterprise. These observations, in turn, offer new and provocative heuristics for interrogating Plato’s Laws, a text framed as a colonial venture that figures music as a powerful and enigmatic force necessary for animating and perpetuating the political experience.
3.30-3.50 pm: Coffee break
Session 3
3.50 pm-4.50pm. George Gazis (Durham University) “Dialectic lyricism: subjectivity and the search for true doxa”
Plato’s relationship with poetry is arguably one of the most intriguing and complicated topics relating not only to the philosopher’s oeuvre in general but also both to his epistemological and metaphysical approach to fundamental concepts such as truth, phenomenology and objective virtue, to name just a few. In this paper, I would like to argue that despite Plato’s and Socrates’ negative criticism of poetic composition as an uninformed and often dangerous product of human ignorance, there appears to be a subtly drawn distinction by the philosopher concerning different poetic genres and the source of inspiration that leads to their very conception.
More specifically, I argue that although Plato seriously discredits epic and dramatic poetry, he appears to be more sympathetic towards lyric, since the latter poets do not claim direct inspiration from a divine source, but rather present personal interpretations not only of divine narratives but also and more importantly of the ways in which human beings can achieve a (philosophically) good life. Through a reading of Socrates’ analysis of Simonides’ ode in the Protagoras, and Stesichorus’ Palinode in the Phaedrus, I aim to set the initial foundations for a further examination of the use of the lyric genre in Platonic dialogues as a subjective and self-examining process that is closely reminiscent of the philosophically motivated Socratic inquiry. I will argue that a holistic reading of the Platonic corpus shows that lyric poetry is indeed the only genre that retains its standing both in terms of entertainment and educational value, even after a strict and unforgiving Socratic elenchus (e.g. Phaedo 60a, Laws 7.799a, Republic 10.607a, etc.).
5.00 pm-6.00 pm. Pierre Destrée (Université catholique de Louvain) “Plato and iambic humor”

Athenaeus wrote: “The story goes that when Gorgias read the dialogue named after him, he said to his friends: ‘Plato’s quite talented at writing abuse-poetry (iambizein)’. Hermippus says in his On Gorgias: ‘When Gorgias visited Athens after dedicating the gold statue of himself in Delphi, and Plato saw him and said: ‘Our fine, gold Gorgias has arrived!’, Gorgias responded: ‘And this is a fine new Archilochus that Athens has produced!’” (505d-e, trans. Olson). In this paper, I unpack these assertions (allegedly) made by Gorgias, and I analyze a few samples of Platonic passages that echo Archilochus’ poetic devices

CANCELLED: Alex Walthall | A City in Transition: Reflections on Recent Investigations at Morgantina (Sicily)
2024-05-13 12:00 - 13:00 | Dodd 247
This lecture planned for Monday, May 13th has been cancelled.
A City in Transition: Reflections on Recent Investigations at Morgantina (Sicily)
This talk highlights the results of recent excavations carried out at the archaeological site of Morgantina in central Sicily, work which has focused on a modestly appointed house of Early Hellenistic date and a temenos-like complex belonging to the period of Roman rule on Sicily. Both monuments—one private, one public in nature—reveal much about life in the ancient city during moments of great political and social change. They also offer an opportunity to reflect on more recent historical biases in fieldwork practice at Morgantina as well as to set forth principles shaping the current generation of long-term research at the site.

Department of Classics and Indo-European Studies Program Welcome Reception
2024-10-04 16:00 - 17:30 | Coral Tree Walkway

Dan-el Padilla Peralta talk on Mon. Oct. 14
2024-10-14 16:00 - 18:00 | Bunche Hall Room 6275
Dan-el Padilla Peralta (Princeton University) will give a talk entitled On the Wings of Locusts: Ancient Rome and New Ecological Histories on Monday, October 14th at 4 PM in 6275 Bunche Hall.
All are welcome!

Plato and Lyric Poetry Conference Oct. 18-19
2024-10-18 - 2024-10-19 | Dodd 248
Conference Schedule:

Friday October 18th, 2024:
9 am. Breakfast
9.25 am Opening remarks

Session 1
9.35 am-10.35 am. Glenn Most (University of Chicago): “Pindar’s nomos basileus (Fr. 169 Sn.-M.) in Plato”
Pindar’s Nomos basileus fragment (Fr. 169 Sn.-M.) is one of his most celebrated and controversial texts. Papyrus discoveries have extended our textual knowledge of Pindar’s poem but have not resolved its interpretative difficulties. The most celebrated and controversial ancient discussion of it is provided by Callicles’ citation and interpretation of it in Plato’s Gorgias. But even the text of this quotation is uncertain, to say nothing of the meaning attributed to it. I will discuss the extant remains of Pindar’s poem and this passage in the Gorgias, bringing to bear upon these other ancient testimonia, especially Herodotus 3.38 and Plato’s Laws 4 715a, in the hope of complicating and perhaps even revising the communis opinio.
10.45 am-11.45 am. Paper 2. John Tennant (Stanford University): “Speaking lyrically, speaking proverbially.”
Plato’s quotation of excerpts from lyric poetry in the dialogues highlights the status of those excerpts as detachable statements, removed from their original, textual context. This invites the question, what makes a statement detachable? What quality allows for a text’s quotability as a “stand-alone,” a “detachable?” I argue in this paper that an essential element of detachability consists in a statement’s capacity to function proverbially – as a stand-alone aphorism, maxim, proverb. Plato’s quotations from various lyric poets – among them Simonides, Theognis, Solon, Pindar, and Phocylides – illustrate how lyric poetry seems especially possessed of this capacity to generate detachable, proverbial statements. Readings from Plato’s quotation of lyric poets in Protagoras, Meno, and Republic reveal that within the context of the dialogic exchange, to speak lyrically is to speak proverbially – that is, to marshal lyric quotation as stand-alone proverb in the dialectic. In addition, lyric “proverbs” often seem to contradict one another, even when composed by the same poet and within the very same poem (e.g., Simonides’ “Ode to Scopas” in Protagoras, verses from Theognis in Meno). Aside from noting the connection with the sophistic educational practice of the antilogiae – itself consonant with the antilogical arrangement of ancient gnomic anthologies with their assorted proverbs gathered from different texts – I argue that the positioning of contradictory proverbs in the lyric poetry of Simonides and Theognis (“contradictory” at least, in Plato’s act of citation) enjoys a correspondence with modern counterparts, such as Robert Frost’s dueling proverbs in “Mending Wall.” Moreover, lyric detachables in both Plato and Frost highlight the Janus-faced nature of proverbial expression, revealing that contrary to popular belief, proverbs are hardly univocal but rife with paradox and ambiguity, qualities essential to lyric poetry.
12.00- 1.40 pm: Lunch break
Session 2
1.45 pm-2.45 pm. Marcus Folch (Columbia University) “Lyric and the geographic imagination in Plato’s Laws”
What does Plato do with lyric and what does lyric do for Plato in his last and longest work, the Laws? To answer that question, this paper examines allusions to elegiac poetry in Books 1&2. Plato’s engagement with poetry in the Laws has been a topic of several fascinating publications in the past decade. Taken together, these works have advanced our understanding of Plato’s late thought on mimetic poetry, his engagement with ancient performance culture, and the indebtedness of fourth-century philosophy to the poetic tradition. In this paper I move away from the questions of mimetic poetry and performance culture, and consider instead how lyric poetry in Plato is deeply embedded within, and invites readers to reconsider, the history of space and geography. Plato’s lyric engagements will be shown to provide a provocative guide to the allusive and argumentative tactics employed in the formation of philosophy as a literary genre. It will also illuminate the position of lyric poetry in the fourth century as a site of shared memory, a discursive space in which diverse authors, poets, and presumably their audiences debated and sorted out their own collective identities, tensions between local history and Panhellenism, and the ethical underpinnings of legislation and colonization—the central preoccupations of the Laws as a whole.
2.50 pm.-3.50 pm. Michael Brumbaugh (Tulane University) “Plato, music, and the colonial project.”
Early modern Europeans were fascinated with the musical talents of the Guaraní, the indigenous peoples of greater Paraguay. Indeed, their travelogs, private correspondences, and official reports are full of testaments to their amazement. One European visitor among the Guaraní recorded in a letter that he had witnessed a twelve-year-old indigenous boy flawlessly reproduce the most challenging of Italian concertos during an impromptu cello recital. Another remarked that “[the Guaraní] were endowed with the ingenuity of birds, whom nature herself inspires to sing.” While this interest in Guaraní musicality was doubtless influenced by European tendencies to exoticize non-European cultures, its roots can be traced back to Plato’s interest in music as a phenomenon belonging both to the world of nature and the world of the polis. This paper investigates ways in which music – and choral music in particular – operated at the intersection of nature and culture in the early modern tradition and how some even saw it as central to the European colonial enterprise. These observations, in turn, offer new and provocative heuristics for interrogating Plato’s Laws, a text framed as a colonial venture that figures music as a powerful and enigmatic force necessary for animating and perpetuating the political experience.
3.50-4.10 pm: Coffee break
Session 3
4.10 pm-5.10pm. Pierre Destrée (Université catholique de Louvain) “Plato and iambic humor”
Athenaeus wrote: “The story goes that when Gorgias read the dialogue named after him, he said to his friends: ‘Plato’s quite talented at writing abuse-poetry (iambizein)’. Hermippus says in his On Gorgias: ‘When Gorgias visited Athens after dedicating the gold statue of himself in Delphi, and Plato saw him and said: ‘Our fine, gold Gorgias has arrived!’, Gorgias responded: ‘And this is a fine new Archilochus that Athens has produced!’” (505d-e, trans. Olson). In this paper, I unpack these assertions (allegedly) made by Gorgias, and I analyze a few samples of Platonic passages that echo Archilochus’ poetic devices.

Saturday October 19th, 2024
9 am. Breakfast
Session 1
9.30 am-10.30 am. Giulia Sissa (UCLA) “No hymns to Eros? Platonic rhythms and rhymes in the Symposium”
This paper will study the continuities and discontinuities between lyric/melic poetry and the Symposium, as a hybrid dialogue in which narrative, praise, banter, and refutation come together. I would like to start with the lamented lack of a hymn to Eros and go from there. The premise is that lyric poetry can be understood at large, including theatrical choruses. And the hypothesis I would like to test is that the polyphonic and multi-genre conversation at Agathon’s drinking party deploys the poetic function of language both in in the speech-act of extolling Eros, and in the verbal, musical composition of that kind of utterance. It may sound funny. But who has the last laugh?

10.45 am-11.45 am. André Rehbinder (University of Paris, Nanterre) “Plato’s encounter with lyric in the Phaedrus”
Lyric poetry’s influence on Plato in the Phaedrus has long been underestimated, so much so that Ch. Rowe, in his edition of the dialogue, treats Socrates’ praise of Sappho and Anacreon at 235c as ironic. In two major papers, both published in 2007 , E. Pender has shown the deepness and the extent of Platonic borrowings from lyric in the Phaedrus, not only in the central myth, but starting with the famous description of the locus amoenus in the Prologue. However, Pender’s conclusion was highly deceptive: in the image of the bad horse falling on its knees with its jaws full of blood, she saw an “ugly conclusion”, where the “the lightness of Anacreon’s verse is destroyed”. At this point, Pender says, Plato “parts company with the poets”, because his scope is fundamentally different: where poets were only describing desire and the abandonment of oneself to it, the philosopher wants to show how the “best inner-ruler” (takes control over the lower parts of the soul, in order to achieve the contemplation of Forms. The purpose of the present work is, while acknowledging the deep relationship shown by Pender between Plato and lyric poetry, to reevaluate it: Plato is not just quoting lyric poetry as a good description of the shock of love and using it for its own purpose; rather he valorizes lyric experience as a whole and reveals its philosophical meaning. He is not opposing lyric mania to the control of the reason-charioteer, as Lysias does when he boasts about “not being defeated by love, but controlling [him]self” (233c1-2, οὐχ ὑπ᾽ ἔρωτος ἠττώμενος ἀλλ᾽ ἐμαυτοῦ κρατῶν). On the contrary, for Plato, to be defeated by love and to lose every control on oneself is the very means for the charioteer to obtain the greatest good, the regrowth of the wings. In sum, my claim is that Sappho and Anacreon could be seen as platonic lovers according to the Phaedrus: they experience the real pathos of love, which manifests itself in the mania they described so vividly.
12.00- 1.10 pm: Lunch break
Session 2
1.15 pm-2.15 pm. Julia Pfefferkorn (University of Trier): “The gods’ rewards: Plato, lyric poetry, and divine retribution”
The question what role lyric poetry plays in the Republic is an important one, for at least two reasons: first, it remains exempt from the formal critique of poetry in Book 3 which condemns epic and drama. And second, the entire argument of the Republic takes its start from references to Pindar, in the context of Cephalus’ worries about divine retribution in the afterlife, and to Simonides, whose poetry provides the first tentative definition of justice. In order to shed light on this question, I turn to a hitherto neglected passage in Book 2 (362d1–368b1) in which Adeimantus joins his brother Glaucon in exhorting Socrates to praise justice in itself. He adds, in particular, that although some poets do praise justice, they focus only on the honours and rewards that ensue from it, and concludes that this will be insufficient to convince anyone of its intrinsic value. While the first part of Adeimantus’ discourse is based mostly on Homer and Hesiod, at the end he conspicuously resorts to lyric poetry (with quotations from and implicit references to, again, Pindar and Simonides, a mention of Archilochus, and further probable references to Solon and/or Theognis). This occurs precisely when he switches to a first-person perspective, picturing himself as a young man who is confronted with ambivalent representations of the gods and the way they reward virtue or vice. I contend that Adeimantus’ way of introducing lyric poetry in this passage anticipates important aspects of the critique of poetry, with regard to both contents and form, and that it may help to explain why lyric poetry, while it is certainly included in the critique of poetic contents, is left untouched by the formal critique: it is through Pindar’s “whether … or” (πότερον … ἤ, 365b2) that Adeimantus presents the young man as a responsible first-person agent who makes a choice, in a way that foreshadows the Myth of Er. While the lyric recount of divine retribution, just as the Myth of Er, can only be an addition (612b6–c2) to the philosophical account of justice, establishing this perspective on one’s life is fundamental.
2.25 pm.-3.25 pm. Kathryn Morgan (UCLA) “The great contest: exploring life choices through Pindar in Plato’s Republic”
This paper starts from a group of Pindar quotations and reminiscences early in Plato’s Republic and proceeds to explore the ways in which Pindaric lyric, particularly epinician, informs the dialogue. Concerns with ponos, with the correct objects of praise and blame, and with the accurate assessment of achievement are common to both, and Socrates’ frequent references to rewards, prizes, and contests reinforce the agonistic atmosphere. Yet the nature of the contest and prizes under consideration is different, and is reflected in a tension between the threnodic and epinician modes that is resolved in the closing pages of the dialogue.
3.30-3.50 pm: Coffee break
Session 3
3.50 pm-4.50pm. Eleonora Rocconi (University of Pavia): “The role of melopoiia in Plato’s taxonomy of lyric genres”
In a well-known passage of Republic Book 3 (399a–400c), Plato deals with the musical attributes of lyric poetry discussing which musical modes and rhythmical patterns should be allowed in Kallipolis for educating the guardians. While commenting on their mimetic (and consequently ethical) capacity, this passage also seems to describe which technical elements were perceived by the ancients as belonging to a specific poetic genre and gave it such a clearly recognisable character (thus anticipating what will be said in Laws 3, 700a–c, where a distinct μέλους εἶδος is advocated for each type of composition). Interestingly, these remarks are echoed in later Aristoxenian handbooks on music theory, such as Cleonides’ Isagoge (2nd cent. CE?) when discussing modulations in μελοποιΐα (a term used by Plato too to indicate the selection of rhythms and harmoniai in poetic compositions, cf. Symp. 187d and 205c). The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of melopoiia in Plato’s conception of poetry by bringing the technical interpretations (both musical and philosophical) of these passages into dialogue with those more focused on the question of poetic genres.
5.00 pm-6.00 pm. David Blank (UCLA): “The presence of Plato in Diogenes of Babylon’s treatise On Music”

The first Herculaneum papyrus to be unrolled, so that its last 37 columns could be read (nearly) continuously contained the fourth book of Philodemus’ treatise On Music. This text, so disappointing to its first readers, who were dismayed not only because it was not Aeschylus or Sappho, but also because it contained an attack on the art of music, is an Epicurean demolition of a book by Chrysippus’ student, Diogenes of Babylon, and it does in fact have a great deal to contribute to our understanding of Stoic epistemology and ethics. Diogenes is clearly building on Platonic and, to a lesser extent, Peripatetic theories of the emotional and dispositional effects on behavior and moral character. My paper will not only examine Diogenes’ borrowings from and citations of Plato, which extend from individual phrases to a general conception of musical êthos; I shall also trace Diogenes’ tactics in connecting Stoic theory to the Academy and vindicating the claims of the Stoa to belong to the Socratic tradition. In this, he anticipated the later Academic, Antiochus of Ascalon.

Giuseppe Pezzini | The Veil of the Name: Comedy in the Aeneid
2024-10-28 16:00 - 17:30 | Dodd 248
Please join us on Monday, October 28 at 4pm for Professor Giuseppe Pezzini (Corpus Christi College, University of Oxford) who will be speaking on “The Veil of the Name: Comedy in the Aeneid,” in Dodd 248.
All are welcome!
Description:
The lecture will explore an important yet neglected ingredient of Virgil’s recipe in the Aeneid, namely Roman comedy, preserved primarily through the works of Plautus and Terence. Readers of Roman comedy cannot help but recognize in Aeneid4 a web of comic motifs and situations that enrich its plot and characters, stirring and manipulating readers’ (and characters’) expectations. Some of these motifs are not exclusively comic and appear in other genres and texts, notably tragedy (as long recognized by Virgil scholars), yet their comic origin and implications should not be underestimated. After a brief but systematic overview of comic elements in Aeneid 4, I will focus on ‘liminal’ tragic-comic features, arguing that this process of genre hybridization evokes comic expectations only to ultimately subvert them.

Jonathan Prag | “Crossreads and I.Sicily: digital and interdisciplinary approaches to the epigraphy of ancient Sicily”
2024-11-22 12:00 - 13:00 | Dodd 248
The UCLA Department of Classics presents a talk by Jonathan Prag (Oxford University) on Friday, November 22 at 12:00 PM.
The lecture entitled “Crossreads and I.Sicily: digital and interdisciplinary approaches to the epigraphy of ancient Sicily,” will be held in Dodd 248.
Description:
“Crossreads and I.Sicily: digital and interdisciplinary approaches to the epigraphy of ancient Sicily”
This talk presents the ongoing work of the I.Sicily and Crossreads projects. I.Sicily is a multilingual digital corpus of the inscriptions of ancient Sicily based upon fresh autopsy (sicily.classics.ox.ac.uk); Crossreads is 5-year ERC project developing and applying linguistic, palaeographic and archaeometric analyses to this corpus (crossreads.web.ox.ac.uk). The ambition of both projects is to make the complex epigraphic heritage of Sicily more accessible and to cast new light upon the cultural history of Sicily through this rich corpus of evidence. The talk will explore some of the methodological challenges and present some of the results achieved so far.

Christopher Moore | "The Plurality of Virtue."
2025-01-27 17:00 - 18:30 | Dodd 248
The UCLA Department of Classics is pleased to present a lecture by Professor Christopher Moore, Pennsylvania State University entitled “The Plurality of Virtue.”

Jinyu Liu | "Labeling Ethnicities of Enslaved and Freed Individuals in the Early Roman Empire: Fluidity and Complexity"
2025-03-03 17:00 - 18:30 | Dodd 248
Please join us for a talk given by Professor Jinyu Liu (Emory University) entitled “Labeling Ethnicities of Enslaved and Freed Individuals in the Early Roman Empire: Fluidity and Complexity” on Monday, March 3, 2025 in Dodd 248, reception to follow.
All are welcome!

Naoíse Mac Sweeney | "The Birth of the Ancient Greek World: Migration, Urbanisation, and the Emergence of Greekness?"
2025-04-24 17:00 - 19:00 | Fowler Museum
Annual UCLA Joan Palevsky Lecture Professor
Naoíse Mac Sweeney, University of Vienna
“The Birth of the Ancient Greek World: Migration, Urbanisation, and the Emergence of Greekness?”
Lecture summary: By the start of the classical period, the Greek world stretched from Spain to Cyprus, and from Libya to the Crimea, and was comprised of over 1,000 autonomous polities. In this lecture, I will consider how this geographically dispersed and politically fragmented Greek world came into being over the course of the 11th to sixth centuries BCE, focusing in particular on new data from archaeological surveys designed to uncover processes of urbanisation and migration at varying scales. This new data suggests divergent pathways to Greekness in different parts of the Greek world, with the adoption of Greek lifestyles and cultural traits happening at radically different times and in response to different local contexts. If, as this evidence suggests, the Greek world was forged in a more piecemeal and uneven manner than previously thought, does this have implications for what we assume the Greek world fundamentally was?
About the speaker: Naoíse Mac Sweeney, professor of Greek archaeology at the University of Vienna, is the author of books including “Community Identity and Archaeology” (2011), “Foundation Myths and Politics in Ancient Ionia” (2013), “Troy: Myth, City, Icon” (2018) and, most recently, “The West: A New History of an Old Idea” (2023).
Kindly RSVP at collegeevents@support.ucla.edu.

Rebecca Benefiel to present "The Nature of Ancient Graffiti: Exploring Popular Writing in Pompeii" on May 22
2025-05-22 17:00 - 19:00 | Fowler Museum A222
The UCLA Department of Classics and Cotsen Institute for Archaeology proudly present a lecture by Professor Rebecca R. Benefiel (Washington and Lee University), entitled “The Nature of Ancient Graffiti: Exploring Popular Writing in Pompeii” on Thursday, May 22 in Fowler A222 at 5pm, followed by hands-on work to get us thinking about how to do research using graffiti in antiquity.

Cristina Pérez Díaz to present "From the Founding of the Country" on May 29
2025-05-29 17:00 - 19:00 | Dodd 248
The UCLA Departments of Classics, English, Spanish & Portuguese, Chicano/a & Central American Studies, as well as the Center for the Study of Women proudly present a reading of “From the Founding of the Country” by classicist, writer, and translator Cristina Pérez Díaz (University of Puerto Rico) followed by a conversation with UCLA Professor Patrícia Lino (Department of Spanish & Portuguese) on May 29 in Dodd 248 at 5pm.

Graduate Capstone Paper Symposium
2025-06-05 17:00 - 19:00 | Dodd 248
Please join us for the Department of Classics Graduate Capstone Paper Symposium on Thursday, June 5 at 5pm in Dodd 248.

The Department of Classics and The Indo-European Studies Program Welcome Reception
2025-10-03 16:00 - 17:30 | Dodd 275
The Department of Classics and the Program in Indo-European Studies will host their joint Welcome Reception on Friday, October 3, 2025.
All are welcome!

A Conversation with Author and Professor, Catherine Conybeare
2025-10-21 17:00 - 18:30 | Dodd 247
Please join us for a Book Event featuring author and professor Catherine Conybeare. Professor Michele Salzman (UC Riverside) will facilitate a conversation with the author regarding her new book.
All are welcome!

Between the Minoans and the Mycenaeans
2025-11-15 14:00 - 17:00 | Royce Hall 314, 10745 Dickson Plaza, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States

Professor Sarah P. Morris' lecture "Out of Anatolia: Hittites, Homer and the Trojan War"
2026-02-26 16:00 - 19:30 | UCLA Faculty Club, Morrison Room, 480 Charles E Young Dr E, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States
Please join us for a lecture followed by a reception featuring Professor Sarah Morris who will present her talk “Out of Anatolia: Hittites, Homer and the Trojan War”
This lecture will be held at the Faculty Club’s Morrison Room on Thursday, Feb. 26th at 4 PM. All are welcome!

Emily Greenwood | “Audre Lorde and Plato’s Menexenus: The Master’s House and the House of Difference”
2026-04-23 17:00 - 18:30 | Dodd 247
The UCLA Department of Classics is pleased to present a lecture by Professor Emily Greenwood, Harvard University entitled “Audre Lorde and Plato’s Menexenus: The Master’s House and the House of Difference”
