Department of Classics - UCLA

“Writing from the end of the Iliad”: the Scriptor Cyclicus in the Ars Poetica | Jennifer Weintritt
2020-11-09 12:00 - 13:00 (America/Los_Angeles)
Zoom Meeting ID: 3131 1616 94
OR
Zoom Link: https://ucla.zoom.us/my/alexpurves

Password: [REDACTED]

"A Future for Old Age in Cicero's de Senectute." | Andre Matlock
2020-10-19 12:00 - 13:00 | https://ucla.zoom.us/j/92259904483
Zoom Link: https://ucla.zoom.us/j/92259904483

UCLA SNF Center-Benaki Museum Lecture on Classical Greek Marriage Rituals
2020-06-11 10:00 - 12:00
Please join The UCLA SNF Center on Thursday, June 11th for a lecture on Classical Greek marriage rituals by Irini Papageorgiou. Irini is the Curator of the Department of Prehistoric, Ancient Greek, and Roman Collections at the Benaki Museum.
To receive a Zoom link for this lecture, please RSVP to hellenic@humnet.ucla.edu

Finding Atlantis | Kathryn Morgan
2020-04-26 15:00 - 17:00
This talk (offered on Zoom) by Professor Kathryn Morgan, Chair of the UCLA Department of Classics, explores the origins and some of the development of the myth of the lost island of Atlantis, from Plato to contemporary video games. This legend has fascinated its audiences since it first appeared in the works of the philosopher Plato, and like all good myths it reflects the concerns of the society that created it. It is a story about the kind of society that want to live in, about the effect upon civilizations of imperial ambition, about how we deal with the sea as a medium for economic and cultural exchange. In the hands of modern geographers, explorers, and other scholars, the myth has become something different: a symbol of the mysterious past that we can never quite control.
You must RSPV at hellenic@humnet.ucla.edu to be included in this event. We welcome attendance by students, community members, and your family members outside of Los Angeles.

Spring Events Cancelled
2020-03-19 - 2020-06-13
Due to university measures to restrict the spread of the COVID-19 virus, we must, regretfully, cancel all in-person spring events.

"On the Good King According to Vergil" | Alison Keith
2020-02-19 16:00 - 18:00

"The Cultural Catalogue in Attic Tragedy" | Joshua Billings
2020-02-10 17:00 - 19:00

Symposium: A Celebration of International Greek Language Day
2020-02-09 14:00 - 19:00 | Royce Hall 314, 10745 Dickson Plaza, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States
Symposium: International Greek Language Day | Sunday, February 9
Abstracts of talks
Brent Vine (UCLA). Greek in the Bronze Age: Linear B and Mycenaean Greek.
2:10-2:50pm
Almost unique among languages of the world, the Greek language provides continuous written documentation over a span of more than three millennia, and has retained its identity as “Greek” for most of that period. For Greek in the Bronze Age: the 1952 decipherment of the Linear B script was one of the most exciting developments in the 20th-century study of language and linguistics, as well as Classical studies. Yet there are some widespread misconceptions about the documents in Mycenaean Greek (the language of the Linear B texts): one often hears, for example, that these texts are so fragmentary and recorded in such dull formats (almost all of them are lists, and they are filled with personal names) that they preserve little of interest. In this presentation, we will take a close look at Linear B and some of the documents in Mycenaean Greek, so as to illustrate the remarkable interest of this early form of the Greek language and the information it offers us — not only about the history of the Greek language, but also about early Greek and Ancient Mediterranean culture.
Maria Mavroudi (UC Berkeley). Towards a New History of Byzantine Philosophy.
2:50-3:30pm
Almost thirty years ago, the historian of medieval philosophy Alain de Libera explained that Byzantine philosophy is “poorly understood, frequently scorned, little studied, and never translated”. Today, philosophy remains one of the least cultivated fields within Byzantine studies. Claims that it is, at best, an inferior by-product of ancient Greek philosophy, continue to be articulated. The lecture will explain how the modern study of the history of philosophy led to such a conclusion, and what place philosophy occupied within Byzantine literary culture.
Nikolaos Panou (Stony Brook University). Specters of Byzantium: Language and Ideology in Early Modern Greek Advice Literature.
3:40-4:20pm
This presentation will focus on the reception of Byzantine imperial ideology in the late seventeenth century and its textual uses as a key element for the representation and legitimization of sovereignty in the semi-independent Danubian Principalities at the northern periphery of the Ottoman Balkans. Produced by Greek-speaking authors under the auspices of increasingly powerful Orthodox rulers, the texts under consideration were designed to serve specific propagandistic agendas but in doing so they also contributed both to an intense process of interethnic contact and to a reconfiguration of fundamental moral and political concepts in the region at a crucial point in its history.
Katerina Stergiopoulou (Princeton University). ‘What These Ithacas Mean’: Reading Cavafy’s Greek.
4:20-5:00pm
Critics and translators have often noted the richness of diction in the work of modernist Greek poet C.P. Cavafy’s (1863-1933), as well as his frequent shifts between registers of Modern Greek; as David Ricks puts it, “Cavafy’s modernity resides so essentially in his refusal to reduce the incongruent or even competing idioms of Greek, in all its longevity, to a single idiom.” In my paper I will be thinking about this question of idiom through the often-neglected lens of Cavafy’s use of (sometimes lengthy) citations from classical and postclassical Greek texts. I will be arguing that the implications of these citations—which range from Aeschylus to Plutarch to Byzantine authors—go beyond his peculiar and masterful melding of registers. For Cavafy brings his carefully and idiosyncratically constructed Greek idiom face to face with older incarnations of the Greek language in the very poems in which he poses the question of Hellenism. While closely examining the linguistic texture of these poems and their importance for our understanding of Cavafy’s historical poetics and linguistic politics, I will also be placing Cavafy’s work in a broader context of twentieth-century poetic practice.

"Between πάθος and μάθος: Trauma and the Choral Subject in Aeschylus' Agamemnon" | Ella Haselswerdt
2020-02-03 17:00 - 19:00

"Lucian's Praise of the Fatherland and the Meaning of Samosata.” | Stephen Kidd
2020-01-30 17:00 - 18:30

"The Circulation of Medical Knowledge in Late Antiquity" | Jessica Wright
2020-01-23 17:00 - 18:30

"A Renaissance for Renaisaance Virgil Commentaries" | Craig Kallendorf
2020-01-16 16:15 - 18:00

“My Own Private Kastellorizo” | UCLA Regents’ Lecture by Fotini Baxevani
2020-01-12 15:00 - 18:00 | Royce Hall 314, 10745 Dickson Plaza, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States

Film Screening | "When Tomatoes Met Wagner"
2019-12-09 19:30 - 23:00 | James Bridges Theater, 235 Charles E Young Dr E, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States
Please join us for a special film screening hosted by the UCLA Stavros Niarchos Foundation Center for the Study of Hellenic Culture, led by Director and Professor Sharon Gerstel. This screening features When Tomatoes Met Wagner, the official Greek submission for Best International Feature Film at the 2020 Academy Awards.

Film Screening | "A Touch of Spice"
2019-11-20 17:30 - 20:30 | James Bridges Theater, 235 Charles E Young Dr E, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States
We are proud to offer a screening of A Touch of Spice by our distinguished professor and UCLA alumnus Tassos Boulmetis! Free and open to the public.

"The Power of Names in Republican Rome" | Jane Chaplin
2019-10-24 17:00 - 19:00
For readers of Livy and students of Roman republican history, the idea that names revealed character and foretold behavior is familiar: a Manlius Torquatus can be expected to treat his son severely, and a Publius Decius Mus to devote himself in a close battle. Names as destiny and gentilicial traits culminated in Mark Antony’s reference to Caesar’s heir as the boy who owed everything to his name, as well as to the later ban on Marcus as a praenomen for the Antonii. But just how was it that two men named Scipio Africanus took similarly erratic paths through the cursus honorum, raised armies without public funds, defeated Carthage, and even had a Gaius Laelius as a best friend? This talk puts the similarities between the elder and younger Scipios in the context of Roman beliefs about names and family traits and argues that Aemilianus built on and contributed to those ideas in constructing his political success.

Greek Book Club
2019-10-19
Those with interests in Modern Greek will want to check out the Greek Book Club this Fall, which is run by Dr. Simos Zenios at St Sophia Cathedral in LA.

Metamorphosis and the Environmental Imagination from Ovid to Shakespeare
2019-10-11 - 2019-10-12 | Royce Hall 314, 10745 Dickson Plaza, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States
Narratives of metamorphosis, from human into other living and mineral forms, have long provided an important tool for thinking through the complexities of our relationship with the world around us. From Ovid to David Cronenberg, thinkers and artists have used the trope of physical transformation to figure the ways in which human and non-human agencies have evolved from and adapted to one another in a relationship characterized by fluctuating perceptions of friction and symbiosis, distance and proximity. This conference seeks to locate the theme of metamorphosis in the early history of the western environmental imagination, from Classical antiquity to the Early Modern period; and to explore the ways in which the various cultural and historical manifestations of metamorphosis from this earlier period resonate with the environmental approaches and concerns of our present day.
Organized by Francesca Martelli (Associate Professor of Classics, UCLA) and Giulia Sissa (Distinguished Professor of Classics and Political Science, UCLA).
Click here to see the complete schedule and additional details.

“Respublica Rediviva: Plato and the Guaraní of Paraguay.” | Michael Brumbaugh
2019-10-07 17:00 - 19:00
Looking for Utopia around every corner of the “New World,” 17th and 18th century Europeans saw in the Jesuit-Guaraní Republic of Paraguay an ancient Greek polity nestled deep within the heart of Spanish America. This talk examines the evolution of that European narrative as well as the carefully crafted response that emerged from the Americas in the form of a treatise comparing the Guaraní way of life with Plato’s Republic and Laws. Penned by a professor of rhetoric who had lived among the Guaraní, this work offers a nuanced rebuke of philosophes by figuring them as dangerous ideologues whose misappropriation of the ancient and new worlds threatened to destroy Europe.
This talk is a part of the series “Classics | Receptions | Borders”. This series showcases some of the work being done by early-career scholars that explores how the ancient world negotiated cultural boundaries and conversely how classical antiquity has been received in colonial and post-colonial arenas.

Department of Classics & The Program in Indo-European Studies Welcome Reception
2019-10-04 16:30 - 18:30 | Shapiro Courtyard, 385 Charles E Young Drive West, Los Angeles, CA, 90024, United States

Department Open House
2019-09-25 16:00 - 17:15

Recitatio | Classics Department
2019-05-30 17:00 - 19:00 | Dodd 275
Please join us for our annual Recitatio on Thursday, May 30th at 5:00PM. All are welcome to listen/participate in reciting texts in Latin or Greek – feel free to prepare prose or poetry! Please do not hesitate to reach out if you have any questions. We hope to see many of you there!

The Joan Palevsky Lecture in Classics | Angelos Chaniotis
2019-05-16 16:00 - 18:30 | Fowler Museum Courtyard
The Department of Classics is pleased to present The Joan Palevsky Lecture in Classics. The lecture will be given by Angelos Chaniotis on “The Polis as a Stage: Theatricality and Illusion in the Long Hellenistic Age.” Chaniotis is a Professor of the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

“For I understand you have daughters”: Intertextuality and Female Agency in Xenophon’s Historiographical Works | Emily Baragwanath
2019-05-08 17:00 - 19:00

"Sacred Forgery. Armand Schwerner's Tablets." | Sean Gurd
2019-04-18 16:00 - 17:30

"Cleon's Rule and Fictions of Civic Privacy in Classical Athens" | Johanna Hanink
2019-04-08 16:00 - 17:30

"Classical Debt 'After' the Crisis: Greek Antiquity in the Era of Grecovery"
2019-04-07 15:00 - 17:00 | Royce Hall 314, 10745 Dickson Plaza, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States

"Forms of Friendship in the Phaedrus" | Dimitri El Murr
2019-03-07 17:10 - 19:00

"Theban Myth in the Roman Culture: From the Republic to the Empire" | Stefano Rebeggiani
2019-02-04 16:00 - 17:30

"Utopian Poverty in Hesiod's Works and Days" | Ben Radcliffe
2019-01-31 16:00 - 17:30
