Wining and Dining: Parallels in the Depiction of Food in Greek Symposia and Etruscan Banquets during the Archaic and Early Classical Periods
By Christopher R Ell (Brown University)
During the Archaic and Classical periods, Greek and Etruscan elites practiced similar traditions of conviviality: they reclined, wore garlands, and drank wine while enjoying music and being tended by servants. Rich bodies of scholarship have analyzed these traditions, discussing their chronological development, social functions, and culturally-distinctive aspects (e.g. Cristofani 1987, 1991; Torelli 1989; Murray, ed.
Sparta’s Persian War Epigrams
By Matthew A Sears (University of New Brunswick)
Persian War epigrams have long been a source for scholars investigating the origins of important Classical ideas such as the Persian Wars being a struggle of freedom against tyranny, and Greece representing a coherent entity (Raaflaub 2004; Higbie 2010).
Of Good and Evil: Contested Value Terminology in the Theognidea
By Alexander Edward Karsten (Duke University)
Broad latitude in the use of value terminology in the Theognidea is not a sign of carelessness or imprecision. It is a deliberate feature of the poetry, suited to the needs of sympotic reperformance. Five value terms dominate the diction of the corpus: agathos, esthlos, kalos, kakos, and deilos. A third of all couplets contain at least one of these words in some form. The frequency of their use, both in an absolute sense and relative to other contemporary poetry, has made them an important subject of study.
Here and Now and Then and There: The Construction of Imagined Space in Sappho Fr. 16
By Sarah Elizabeth Needham (The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
In this paper I examine the ways in which Sappho constructs space in fr. 16 in order to provide a better understanding of how we engage with and are affected by the imagined spaces of Sappho’s poetry. Although space as it relates to performance context has been a common focus of scholarship, Heirman (2012: 14) rightly points out that “the role of space within the poems has largely been neglected”; few aside from Stehle (2009) and D’Alessio (2018) give much attention to the space within Sappho’s poetry.