The Center for Hellenic Studies
Prof. Leonard Muellner introduces learners to ancient Greek meter, with a focus on dactylic hexameter.
updated 9 years ago
The Center for Hellenic Studies is proud to sponsor and host this event, in collaboration with the APGRD (University of Oxford), the Bristol Poetry Institute (University of Bristol), the Michael Marks Trust, and New Directions Publishing.
Its primary purpose is to foster a new generation of classical scholars by offering them, at an early stage in their academic careers, an opportunity to test their ideas in an international environment. The program consists of graduate students, and early career scholars, who work on aspects of the corpus of the Greek Epic Cycle, including its interface with other genres and disciplines. Once every second year the Center for Hellenic Studies hosts an online conference, during which students / early career scholars are joined to present their work. The participation of established scholars in the discipline as discussants to each participant's paper creates a dynamic, intergenerational dialogue. Records of these dialogues have been published as biennial issues of Classics@21. https://classics-at.chs.harvard.edu/volume/classics-21-the-kyklos-project/
For the right to use her translation of The Battle Between the Frogs and the Mice, Out of Chaos, The CHS and Kosmos Society thank A. E. Stallings and Paul Dry Books, Inc.
Directed by:
Hannah Barrie
Featured cast:
Aysil Aksehirli
Hannah Barrie
Eoin Lynch
Natasha Magigi
René Thornton Jr
Sarah Finigan
For the right to use her translation of The Battle Between the Frogs and the Mice, Out of Chaos, The CHS and Kosmos Society thank A. E. Stallings and Paul Dry Books, Inc.
Directed by:
Hannah Barrie
Featured cast:
Aysil Aksehirli
Hannah Barrie
Eoin Lynch
Natasha Magigi
René Thornton Jr
Sarah Finigan
Special guest Angela Hurley
Translation by Elena Lu
Featured Cast
Fiona McFerrin-Clancy
Blake Lopez
Elena Lu
Lucy Nathwani
Mac Mertens
Olivia Ma
This discussion stems from the book Thucydides, In the Age of Extremes edited by current Spring Fellow Ivan Matijašić (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice) and Luca Iori (University of Parma). The book is open-access and published in the History of Classical Scholarship Journal (Supplementary Volume 5, 2022) and can be read here: hcsjournal.org/ojs/index.php/hcs/article/view/SV05
Talks by:
Christian Wendt, Ruhr-Universität Bochum
Rachel Bruzzone, Bilkent University/CHS
Sergio Brillante, Sorbonne Université
Luca Iori, University of Parma
Ivan Matijašić, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice/CHS
Journal Editors:
Federico Santangelo, Newcastle University
Lorenzo Calvelli, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice
For further material pertaining to this topic, visit our Research Guide: https://chs.harvard.edu/about/library/research-guides/thucydides/
In my talk I will examine how Hellenistic communities understood and applied contingency planning by conceptually pairing chance (tychē) with opportunity (kairos). Specifically, I will argue that while decision-makers recognized the inherently uncertain character of the future, they resorted to deliberative expertise to better “read” the circumstances of a crisis and identify the opportune moment to respond to violent threats (expressed as kairos). I will particularly focus on how ancient historians, philosophers, and medical writers understood the ability to perceive kairos as a technical skill that could be learned, refined, and exercised. I will also detail some of the strategies that ancient communities employed to formulate “known unknowns” and to develop crisis responses; some of these involved the building of collective resilience, appeals to the divine, and the promotion of technical manuals. The talk will highlight some of my work in progress, as I am currently in the process of restructuring and rewriting my book chapter on ancient contingency planning.
About the Speaker
Paul Vădan earned his Ph.D. in Classics from the University of Chicago. He also holds B.A. and M.A. degrees in Classical Studies from McGill University. His research interests examine ancient risk and migration, working at the interface of classics, behavioral economics, and decision theory. From 2018 to 2020 he worked as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Classics and Humanities at Reed College. Recently, he was Sapere Aude Postdoctoral Researcher at the Saxo Institute, University of Copenhagen. As part of the Migrants and Membership Regimes in the Ancient Greek World research project, Paul has published on state violence against migrants in the ancient Mediterranean space. At the CHS, Paul is completing his first book project entitled The Art of Risk in Ancient Greek Thought and Practice, exploring how ancient Greek decision-makers conceptualized the modern concept of “risk” and detailing the risk management and mitigation strategies they used to respond to violent threats. The book delves into questions about ancient Greek futurity and cognition, outlining how ancient Greek thinkers sought to render an uncertain future more predictable.
Translation by Toph Marshall
Directed by
Paul O'Mahony
Hosted by
Joel Christensen
Featured Actors
Jasmine Bracey
Paul O’Mahony
René Thornton Jr
Translated by Oliver Taplin, read the translation here: global.oup.com/academic/product/oedipus-the-king-and-other-tragedies-9780192806857
Directed by:
Paul O'Mahony
Hosted by:
Joel Christensen
Special Guest:
David van Schoor
Featured Actors:
René Thornton Jr
Jasmine Bracey
Amy Cohen
Paul O’Mahony
Paul O'Mahony
Hosted by:
Joel Christensen
Translation by:
Anne Carson
Featured Actors:
Electra – Melíza Gutierrez
Clytemnestra – Eunice Roberts
Chorus – Phoebe Golfinos and Julia Strug
Old Man – Paul O’Mahony
Orestes – Ernest Emmanuel Peeples
Aegisthus – André Teamer
Missing Persons and Recognition in the Greco-Roman World
What happens when missing persons, after a long time has passed, find their way back and how are they accepted back into their family and community? A person who returns home after a long period of time has possibly changed and must eventually be recognized as the same person who left. Recognizing a missing person in antiquity, I suggest, is a process that occurs in two steps. The first step refers to the identification of the person missing through their unique bodily features and/or symbola (which could refer to pieces of clothing, jewellery, letters). The second step is to be able to verify their identity and single them out “in the crowd”. The latter requires, in addition, the ability to retrieve related information from memory. There seems to be a difference between recognizing someone of whom you just heard of and recognizing someone who is already familiar to you. Although both modes of recognition lead to social respect and honour, the second type of recognition requires not just matching of the signs to a stored representation of a familiar figure but also subsequent access to experience-based information. I will discuss this phenomenon throughout classical antiquity, but the discussion will be anchored in Homer’s Odyssey.
About Maria -
Maria Gerolemou has published widely on a) ancient Greek drama, specifically on Gender and Madness b) on Wunderkultur and c) on ancient science and technology. Her first monograph, Bad Women, Mad Women: Gender und Wahnsinn in der Griechischen Tragödie (Classica Monacensia, 2011), investigates female deviant behavior in Greek tragedy and seeks to define the influence of social and ideological discourses on the presentation of normative female behavior. Her second monograph Technical Automation in Classical Antiquity (Bloomsbury, 2022) explores up to which point nature acts as an inspiration for technical automation, it discusses the consequences of technical automation in relation to human skills, and it examines its role in mechanical manufacturing processes. While at the CHS, she will be working on her new book project ‘Missing Persons in the Greco Roman world’ which explores how the condition of a person gone missing, that is, of a person who left and is ‘presumed’ missing by the left behind, is conceptualised in antiquity. This project continues her work on drama, science, technology and its social impact and focuses, inter alia, on emotions, recognition, human identification technologies and geography.
Join us Wednesday, 30 November at 3:00pm EDT for Aeschylus' Agamemnon!
With special guest Tabatha Gayle!
Mary Ebbott (College of the Holy Cross) will be joining as the special guest.
Featured Cast
Hadley Ball Mykael Cammorto
Kivarah De Luca
Phoebe Golfinos
Hope Mason
Lexi Minetree Jones
Julia Strug
After Utopia: The Birds is an art exhibition that combines modern glass birds—metonyms for refugees—with Aegean area art from the early Hittite through the Byzantine periods. The exhibit is on view from September 10, 2022 to February 28, 2023 at the Sadberk Hanım Museum in Istanbul, Türkiye.
In addition, they have created a modern multilingual play based on Aristophanes’s Birds and Homer’s Odyssey. The play has been filmed using an international cast.
This event presents a recording of the performance, a tour of the Sadberk Hanım Museum and a conversation with the curator and artist.
For more information on the exhibit, please visit the Sadberk Hanım Museum’s website.
https://www.sadberkhanimmuzesi.org.tr/en/exhibitions
Join us Wednesday, 2 November at 3:00pm EDT for Odysseus, a verse tragedy by Nikolas Kazantzakis!
On Wednesday, 19 October at 3:00pm EDT, Reading Greek Tragedy Online returns with Children of Herakles by Euripides! Translated by George Theodoridis, and directed by Paul O'Mahony.
With special guest Katherine Lu Hsu of Holy Cross University.
Cast
Demophon/Eurystheus: Tim Delap
Makaria: Tabatha Gayle
Kopreas: Paul O’Mahony
Iolaos: René Thornton Jr
Alcmene: Gabriella Weltman
Upcoming Season, announcements and contests!
https://chs.harvard.edu/coming-soon-reading-greek-tragedy-online-season-5/
out-of-chaos.co.uk/playingdionysus
out-of-chaos.co.uk/playingbacchaegreece
http://www.bada.org.uk/study/greek-theatre
Roel Konijnendijk (University of Edinburgh)
Herodotos explained the Spartan victory at Plataia as the triumph of heavy hoplite arms and armour over inadequate Persian equipment and the disorganised tactics of the men who used it. Modern scholarship has taken this as proof that (a) the Spartans formed and fought in a regular hoplite phalanx of the kind described by Thucydides and Xenophon, and (b) this made the Greek victory inevitable, since even the finest Persian infantry had no answer to the cohesion and sheer force of an advancing hoplite phalanx. But Herodotos never suggests the Spartans were so organised; he never uses the language of Classical hoplite tactics to describe their behaviour at Plataia. Instead, he offers glimpses of a very different kind of infantry action, in which light and heavy infantry mixed together, and hoplites took a much more passive stance.
Scholarship has usually dismissed these glimpses as irrelevant, impossible, or simply inconvenient to how we “know” the battle must have unfolded. But if we choose to take Herodotos seriously, his account of Plataia may offer precious evidence of an intermediate stage in the development of Greek infantry tactics – a “missing link” between the fluid fighting of the Archaic period and the regular rank-and-file formations of the Classical period.
David Yates (Millsaps College)
In popular imagination (both then and now), the victory over the Persians at Plataea marked the end of the Persian War. Its place as the final battle of the war can seem deceptively obvious. Plataea witnessed the defeat of a massive Persian army that halted the offensive launched by Xerxes the year before. But the conflict with Persia did not end at this point. Rather, it continued for at least a year under Sparta’s leadership and then for decades more under that of Athens. How then did a battle that manifestly did not end the Persian War come to be given that distinction in memory? I argue that Plataea became the most recognized endpoint of the war because it served to isolate the glorious defense of Greece from its messy aftermath. Our surviving evidence speaks to the particular role of Sparta and Athens in this process. Both had a vested interest in giving the Persian War the sharp break it lacked in reality. From the start, Sparta’s campaign against the now penitent Medizers demanded a moment at which the true test of loyalty – the real war – had ended. The subsequent failure of its hegemony in the Aegean only served to reinforce the need to isolate earlier heroics from what followed. The Athenians proudly continued to prosecute the war, but were wary of emphasizing the awkward transition from Spartan to Athenian leadership. In the battle of Plataea, both Sparta and Athens found a convenient way to obscure the inconvenient realities that followed.
Yannis Kalliontzis (Ionian University)
This talk will present the ways through which epigraphy preserved and propagated the memory of the battle of Plataia. I will focus in particular on the epigraphical attestations of the agōn of Eleutheria, the title aristos tōn Hellenōn, and the attitude of Roman emperors towards the memory of the battle of Plataia.
Christopher J. Tuplin (University of Liverpool)
The full version of my paper (which there will not be time to present in full in the online session) embraces four main sections. (1) Some Greek versions of Persian perspectives on Plataea. Aeschylus and Ctesias have nothing significant to offer. Herodotus constructs a version heavily focused on Mardonius: this makes IX chime in general and specific terms with the opening of VII and deals with defeat by shifting blame to the dead leader. Dio of Prusa sketches a version which deals with defeat by denying its existence, a proposition with precedents in Herodotus. (2) Documents we do not have and people we perhaps cannot find addresses some texts that ostensibly have nothing whatsoever to say about Plataea or Xerxes’ version. These include Xerxes’ daiva inscription (a novel description of imperial suppression of disorder), documentary texts from Persepolis (business as usual in the imperial heartland), and business documents from Babylonia (a tantalising sign of Mardonius?) The last item prompts a wider search for Plataea-actors in non-Greek documents and raises a methodological question about Herodotean silences. (3) Edges of Empire argues that imperial frontier ideology is inscribed in the army that fought at Plataea. (4) addresses Perso-centric depiction of conflict with Greeks in early gem- and seal-stone images and provides the first public discussion of a remarkable new addition to the catalogue of such items.
Fernando Echeverría Rey (Universidad Complutense de Madrid)
At the battle of Plataea, the Greek alliance faced the Persian forces under Mardonios with the largest army ever assembled on Greek soil. Never before (or after) the Greeks were able to congregate so many allies under the same banner and gather so many troops for a concerted effort. They had previous experience of multinational enterprises, but never on such scale, so the mobilization, organization, and deployment of such vast numbers of men from dozens of different communities proved to be a serious challenge for the Spartan leaders of the campaign. Then, as it is widely known, coordination failed at the battle and the Greek formation faced the Persians with a battlefront broken in multiple pieces and barely operative. This has been generally regarded as an example of poor leadership on Pausanias’ part and of the lack of discipline on the part of the Greeks, but that is not completely fair to the nature of military alliances and Greek military leadership at the beginning of the fifth century BC. Considering how the Greeks conceived and approached their collaboration with their allies is instrumental to understand why events unfolded the way they did at Plataea and why it was a pretty much expected (or at least a very likely) scenario, not only during the Persian Wars but also throughout the whole Classical period.
Paul Bardunias (Florida Atlantic University)
Our understanding of ancient Greek warfare has been hampered by irreconcilable visions of the mechanics of hoplite combat. I have made use of a combination of experimental archaeology, the physics of weapons use and movement in crowds, and the biology of group behaviors in humans, to present an evolution of hoplite warfare from the Archaic to the Classical period. This view attempts to satisfy as much as possible the disparate opinions of modern scholars on elements of combat such as the level of training and drill required, the spacing of men in battle, and the concerted push of othismos. My reading of Tyrtaios suggests that the Archaic Greeks fought in shield-walls, where hoplites opened battle by throwing spears, backed by a mass of missile troops akin to those seen in а late Roman shield-wall as well as in Saxon and Norse formations. The missile component of this blended formation failed to meet the challenge of the Achaemenid barricades of large shields backed by numerous and powerful archers. As a result of the experience of the Persian wars, hoplites changed their tactics, foregoing missile combat for a charge from long range and severing the mass of light troops from their formations. At the battle of Plataia, we see not only the clash of Greek and Achaemenid shield-walls, but the bloody birth of the classical phalanx.
Samuel Gartland (University of Leeds)
The co-ordination of forces before and during at the battle of Plataea marks a highpoint of effective co-operation between Persians and mainland Greeks. Most conspicuous was the relationship between Thebans and Persians: they eat together, fight together, and ultimately lose the battle together, but this last part should not obscure from view the brief flourishing of a remarkable relationship. In this paper I will consider this partnership as an impressive and productive achievement, borne of opportunism on both sides but which provided the Persians with an able and willing partner in southern-central Greece, and the battle with its distinctive form.
Sean Manning (independent scholar)
Herodotus’ account of the Persian wars is full of bumbling, indecision, and selfishness. Yet in modern discussions of the Persian Wars, the concept of professionalism comes up again and again. To some scholars, the Spartans are stand-ins for heroic Latin Christians facing down natives and orientals, while to another group of writers, the Persians are a mighty imperial war machine prepared to roll over the free cities of Greece. Recent research has showed that this picture of the Spartan army is hard to reconcile with the evidence, especially the evidence before Thucydides and Xenophon. There has been less discussion of why researchers compare the Persians to these later armies, and whether this analogy is useful.
In this talk, I will show that while Xerxes’ armies had an impressive range of capabilities, these capabilities did not come from anything like the European armies of the 19th and 20th centuries (or from something exactly the same as the army of the Roman emperors). The discourse about professionalism comes from the politics of the Atlantic world in the 19th and 20th centuries, and from the use of the Persian Wars in political rhetoric. If we see Achaemenid armies as part of the Achaemenid world, and not as stand-ins for our own armies or enemies, we can understand them better. But we can also understand armies better, and the many different ways in which societies build and maintain military capabilities.
John Hyland (Christopher Newport University)
Mardonius, the Persian commander at Plataea, serves as the principal villain in Herodotus’ narrative of Xerxes’ Greek expedition. This paper seeks to contextualize his place in the Histories by examining Mardonius’ family and career within the early Achaemenid context. It argues that his alleged responsibility for the origin of the Greek campaign is exaggerated due to the influence of a Persian tradition that sought to exculpate the king for military setbacks by blaming the general assigned to command in his place. This negative tradition about Mardonius arose in part because of the general’s death at Plataea, the historicity of which should be accepted despite a recent argument to the contrary involving ambiguous Babylonian evidence.
Hans Beck (University of Münster, University of Montreal)
Recent research on Archaic Thebes showcases the engagement of the city in the Asopos Valley and the direction of Plataia. Indeed, new epigraphic discoveries document the lively entanglement with the communities to the south and east of Thebes, towards the Saronic region and the Euboian Gulf respectively. In the decades prior to the arrival of Persian army, then, this region was shaped by the interactions between many settlements. The Thebans were clearly the most powerful stakeholder in these exchanges and they pursued their own agenda of aggrandizement. In my talk, I will place the Battle of Plataia in the context of the corresponding local and regional rivalries, violent and non-violent. I will argue, in a nutshell, that experiences in the second half of the 6th century were critical to how communities positioned themselves in the Persian War – and on a battlefield that was located in the very center of their former quarrels. In the aftermath of Plataia, their local motivations were of course buried under all-pervasive discourses of freedom of the Hellenes and allegations of betrayal of their cause.
Marcello Lupi (The University of Campania “Luigi Vanvitelli”)
According to Herodotus, five thousand Spartiates, that is the youth (neótes) of the city, took part in the battle of Plataea and his testimony is probably the main information we have on the number of Spartan citizens in the age of the Persian wars (Hdt. 9.10.1; cf. 7.234.2). At the same time – and although some recent studies have largely undermined the foundations of this theory – the idea is still widely held that the Spartiates fought at Plataea divided into five battalions (lóchoi), each representing one of the five villages (óbai) alleged to constitute the city of Sparta. As this paper aims to show, once the theory of this presumed obal army has been rejected, it is much easier to assume that the Spartan army in this period was still organized according to the three Dorian tribes and their subdivisions. The implications of some ancient sources (the New Simonides; Demetrios of Skepsis fr. 1 Gaede) as well as Herodotus’ figures on Spartan demography during those years appear to support this reconstruction.
Paul Christesen (Dartmouth College)
The Battle of Plataia brought the Spartiates en masse out of Lakonia and into the full view of large number of other Greeks for an extended period of time and involved them in an event that was remembered in some detail. As a result, Plataia gives us an invaluable glimpse of a fundamental dynamic in Sparta that is otherwise largely hidden. The dynamic in question is a tension between what I call a disciplinary Sparta, a place inhabited by a highly disciplined and highly unified group of Spartiates who put a special premium on obedience and subordinating personal interests to the well-being of the group as a whole, and an unruly Sparta, a place inhabited by a group Spartiates wont to dissolve into a mass of highly atomized, self-seeking individuals who were at best disobedient and at worst ungovernable. The unruly Sparta is particularly evident in Amompharetos’ behavior at Plataia, but it is also apparent in how Spartiates leaders, especially kings and regents, behaved and how they were treated. If our sources do not often show us the unruly Sparta, that is because Spartiates were adept at concealing it from the outside world, but that does not diminish its importance to our understanding of ancient Sparta.
Ian Oliver (Regis University)
Drawing on the theory that Herodotus’s composition of the Histories was greatly affected by his participation in a culture of oral performance, I will propose that the Plataea narrative’s disproportionately positive portrayal of not only Athens, but also Phocis and Macedon, can best be explained by the narrative’s origins in an early stage of the Histories’ pre-publication, possibly dating back as far as the mid-5th century BCE and the context of the First Peloponnesian War.
Taking place 2500 years after the battle of Plataea, this interdisciplinary conference on the battle brings together researchers to examine key problems connected to the battle, its multiple contexts, and its ancient and modern reverberations. The battle of Platea, remarkable for its scale at the time, was arguably the decisive event of the Greco-Persians wars. Its description forms a capstone of Herodotus’ Histories.
The battle’s stunning array of different people of the Achaemenid Empire, including troops from the Greek city-states who chose the Persian side; the outstandingly broad if unstable alliance of the Greek city-states that gathered in opposition; the complexity of the battle’s landscape; the battle’s events, impacted by chance and confusions; the outsized role of oracles and sacrifices; the variant traditions and their contestation of roles of different agents in the battle’s outcome; the rituals, monuments, and poetry that preserved and reshaped the memories of the battle through time: all this constitutes the battle of Plataea in its vivid difficulty.
Michael Charles (Southern Cross University)
The Serpent Column remains one of the most curious artefacts from classical antiquity. Not only does this artefact have a recorded literary history dating back to not long after the fabrication of the Column itself, but also it can be seen today in Istanbul, albeit without the three original serpent heads being intact, nor the golden cauldron dedicated to the god Apollo at the home of his oracle at Delphi. Ancient sources, including Herodotus, Thucydides and Pausanias, concur that the Column was fabricated, along with other valuable items, to thank the gods for the part they played in allowing the Greeks to defeat the remaining Persian forces under Mardonius at Plataea (479 bce). This paper proposes to re-visit the Column, together with similar votive artefacts that have not survived, to shed light on two issues relating to the battle, the first being the degree to which soldiers in the Persian army were without armour, as is alleged by Herodotus, and the second being the amount of precious metals that the Persians still had with them at this point in the campaign. Together, such information might allow to gain more insight into what sort of force the combined Greek army was facing at Plataea. Finally, we look at what the choice of three intertwined serpents signified, and what significance this has for our understanding of the battle of Plataea and its aftermath.
J. Z. van Rookhuijzen (Leiden University)
This paper revisits the topography of the battle of Plataea. After a short introduction on the traditional way of studying the topography, I give some theoretical considerations into topographical narratives, focusing on Jan Assmann’s concept of mnemotope (place of memory). I then discuss the stories and sites of three ‘landmarks’ at the battle of Plataea: the Gargaphia spring, the temple of Hera, and the temple of Demeter. With this exploration, I aim to show that the topography of Herodotus’ account of the battle of Plataea was densified into a series of mnemotopes around which stories crystallized. The several positions of the Greeks were ‘concatenated’ into a series of ‘points’ on the map. In addition, it reveals the belief that local divinities had influenced the outcome of the battle (as is also apparent from other Herodotean battle narratives).
The battle’s stunning array of different people of the Achaemenid Empire, including troops from the Greek city-states who chose the Persian side; the outstandingly broad if unstable alliance of the Greek city-states that gathered in opposition; the complexity of the battle’s landscape; the battle’s events, impacted by chance and confusions; the outsized role of oracles and sacrifices; the variant traditions and their contestation of roles of different agents in the battle’s outcome; the rituals, monuments, and poetry that preserved and reshaped the memories of the battle through time: all this constitutes the battle of Plataea in its vivid difficulty.
Reading Greek Tragedy Online is presented by the Center for Hellenic Studies (https://chs.harvard.edu/), the Kosmos Society (https://kosmossociety.chs.harvard.edu/), and Out of Chaos Theatre (out-of-chaos.co.uk/). For more information about outreach opportunities through the Reading Greek Tragedy Online project, contact outofchaosplays@gmail.com.
To support Out of Chaos Theatre, visit fundrazr.com/b1oWw3?ref=ab_6ACAcc_ab_4UFR0DCpq3P4UFR0DCpq3P
Featured performers include:
Hannah Barrie
Carlos Bellato
Paul O’Mahony
David Rubin
Directed by Paul O’Mahony, translation by Deborah Roberts.
More information about the cast and featured speakers can be found at https://chs.harvard.edu/programs/reading-greek-tragedy-online/#bios
Translated by Deborah Roberts with special guest Florence Yoon of The University of British Columbia.
Featured Performers:
Hannah Barrie
Paul O’Mahony
This episode deals with subjects that may be difficult to watch. For support for survivors of rape or sexual assault, see the following links:
nsvrc.org/find-help
nsvrc.org/find-help
Cast: Toree Alexandre, Tamieka Chavis, Zack Dictakis, Paul Hurley, James Jelkin, Lily Ling, Jessica Orelus
Directed, adapted and sound design done by: Tabatha Gayle
Cinematography: Zack Dictakis
Vocals: Jessica Orelus
Special guest: Charlotte Parkyn (Notre Dame)
About the Artist:
Ellen McLaughlin has worked extensively in regional, international and New York theater, both as an actor and as a playwright. Ellen’s acting work includes: originating the part of the Angel in Angels in America, playing the role in workshops and regional productions through its original Broadway run. Her plays have been produced off-Broadway, regionally and internationally. She is the recipient of the Writer’s Award from the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund as well as other honors, including the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, the Helen Merrill Award for Playwriting, and grants from the ENA. Plays and operas include, Tongue of a Bird, Iphigenia and Other daughters, The Persians, Penelope, Ajax in Iraq, Septimus and Clarissa, Blood Moon, and The Orestia. Producers include, The Public Theater, National Actors’ Theater, Classical Stage CO., New York Theater Workshop, The Guthrie, The Intiman, The Mark Taper Forum, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Actors’ Theater of Louisville, Shakespeare Theatre, DC, Prototype, and The Almeida Theater in London.
She has taught in several programs, including Yale School of Drama, Princeton and Bread Loaf School of English. She has taught playwriting at Barnard College since 1995.
As a CHS Visiting Artist, Tarasco has been engaging in a collaborative project with CHS Fellow and anthropologist Manuela Pellegrino, bringing together his expertise in theatre direction with her longstanding ethnographic research on Griko, a language of Greek origins used in Apulia, Southern Italy. The project stems from two “modern fairy-tales” written in Griko by Pellegrino – who builds on those collected at the end of the 19th century and purposely recovers the grammatical and performative specificities of Griko story-telling. In so doing, she continues to investigate the performative potential of this language in dealing with current concerns, and the potential impact of performance in Griko on language use and transmission. Initially conceived to be put on stage as I Rosalìa ce i fonì ti’ tàlassa (“Rosalia and the voice of the sea”) and I Rosalìa ce to gramma atto fengàri (“Rosalia and the letter from the moon”), they have now turned into two “work in progress” videoclips directed by Matteo Tarasco and shot by D.A.M.S. student Leonardo De Giorgi to be presented at the CHS Visiting Artist Series 2020-21.
Welcoming Remarks by the Ambassador of Greece to the U.S., Alexandra Papadopoulou
Featured Panelists:
Dr. Richard A. Cash - Senior Lecturer on Global Health, Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health
Dr. Natalia Linos - Acting Director FXB Center for Health & Human Rights
Dr. Nicolas Prevelakis - Assistant Director of Curricular Development, Center for Hellenic Studies
Dr. Mark Schiefsky - C. Lois P. Grove Professor of the Classics, Harvard University
Please note that the majority of this performance will be in modern Greek.
Cast:
Nikos Hatzopoulos - Kreon
Dimitra Vlagopoulou - Antigone
Asimina Anastasopoulou - Ismine, Chorus
Argyris Xafis - Aimon, Messenger(guard), Chorus
Director - Argyris Xafis
Host - Joel Christensen
Special guest - Angeliki Tzanetou
This event will be streamed to YouTube.
Reading Greek Tragedy Online is presented by the Center for Hellenic Studies (https://chs.harvard.edu/), the Kosmos Society (https://kosmossociety.chs.harvard.edu/), and Out of Chaos Theatre (out-of-chaos.co.uk/). For more information about outreach opportunities through the Reading Greek Tragedy Online project, contact outofchaosplays@gmail.com. To support Out of Chaos Theatre, visit https://fundrazr.com/b1oWw3?ref=ab_6A.... Learn more about the upcoming Playing Dionysos competition at https://www.out-of-chaos.co.uk/playin....
More information at
https://chs.harvard.edu/programs/read...
What does mythology express about our innermost nature? When 20th century artists of the Surrealist movement approached antiquity, they did so with this question in mind. While simultaneously rejecting the influence of prior notions of classical antiquity over contemporary European culture, artists and literary figures such as Salvador Dalí, Pablo Picasso, Andre Masson and others turned to classical mythology and, in many cases, the ancient artistic traditions in which these myths were represented, to create startling new and multi-layered visions of myth that highlighted the deep psychological truths they found within.
This workshop for high school and college students will examine the representation of classical myths in both ancient and modern contexts, with a focus on the myth of Narcissus in both Roman wall painting and the surrealist art of Salvador Dalí. Through a participatory discussion with Harvard Classics graduate students Sarah Eisen and Nate Herter, moderated by Professor Caroline Stark of Howard University, students will learn the basics of “reading” a mythological image, will consider the function of mythological painting in Roman culture, and will discuss the influence of both classical art and later renditions of the Narcissus myth on Dalí’s own representation. Students will then have the opportunity to put their new skills and perspectives to the test in analyzing other representations of the Narcissus myth in facilitated break-out room discussions.
Cast:
Eunice Roberts
Damian Jermaine Thompson
René Thornton Jr
Sara Valentine
Director - Paul O’Mahony
Host - Joel Christensen
Special guests - David Elmer and Naomi Weiss
Translator - Ian Johnston
This event will be streamed to YouTube and broadcast live from Hilles Cinema at Harvard University. If you are on campus, join us!
Reading Greek Tragedy Online is presented by the Center for Hellenic Studies (https://chs.harvard.edu/), the Kosmos Society (https://kosmossociety.chs.harvard.edu/), and Out of Chaos Theatre (out-of-chaos.co.uk/). For more information about outreach opportunities through the Reading Greek Tragedy Online project, contact outofchaosplays@gmail.com. To support Out of Chaos Theatre, visit https://fundrazr.com/b1oWw3?ref=ab_6A.... Learn more about the upcoming Playing Dionysos competition at https://www.out-of-chaos.co.uk/playin....
More information at
https://chs.harvard.edu/programs/read...
A discussion of Michelle Zerba's book Modern Odysseys: Cavafy, Woolf, Césaire and a Poetics of Indirection (OSUP, 2021), moderated by Richard Armstrong and Michelle Zerba.
This symposium gathers a range of classicists with wide comparative literary interests who have explored the resources but also the limits of reception studies. Organized around the publication of Michelle Zerba’s Modern Odysseys: Cavafy, Woolf, Césaire, and a Poetics of Indirection, the discussion seeks to create a horizon for reading beyond the usual unilinear organization of “classical influences” and “modern adaptations” that dominate the field of classical reception. Since the book examines the emergence of counter subjectivities within international modernism that have shaped what we now call homoeroticism, transsexuality, and racial consciousness, it provides a powerful example of how broadly classical reception studies can engage with other literary fields. But it will also open a discussion of how paradigms of reception are changing from those of “classical presences” to more oblique and subtle relations that investigate what it means to "tell it slant," in the words of Emily Dickinson.
For more information, visit https://chs.harvard.edu/event/modern-odysseys/
Within the pan-European phenomenon called Philhellenism, Italy, due to its history, geographical location, and political status, was prominent in a different way – it appears that the Greek phenomenon was perhaps more deeply felt and rooted. With the conclusion of the Greek Revolution, Italian interest in Greece did not come to an end. Ripened in the light of the two countries' mutual expectations of national unification, Italian philhellenism characterized the political and cultural relations between the two Countries, feeding, throughout the long 19th century, a particular political friendship between the people of the two Mediterranean Countries.
- Three-minute Iliad by Paul O'Mahony
- "Who is this boy?" from Aristos, the Musical; book, music, and lyrics by Muse Lee
- Iliad 23 by Bettina Joy de Guzman
- Music School of Argolida entry for Playing Medea
- "Akairos" (P.Oxy. LXXIX 5189 - http://www.didaskalia.net/issues/16/4) performed by Hannah Barrie, Paul Hurley, Evelyn Miller, Paul O'Mahony, David Rubin, and Sara Valentine; directed by Paul O'Mahony; translated by Melissa Funke and C. W. Marshall
- "Someone Who Isn’t Dead" from Delphi the Musical; music and lyrics by Rob Castell and Paul O'Mahony
- "Frog Chorus" by Rob Castell
- "Pentheus vs. Dionysus" from The Bacchae, a musical adaptation by J. Landon Marcus and Johanna Warren
- Ode to Man and 5th Stasimon from Antigone performed by James Collins, Helene Emeriaud, Lanah Koelle, Astrid Melhado, Paul O'Mahony, and Sarah Scott
Note: The performance of the ancient script (P.Oxy. LXXIX 5189) include adult language.
Reading Greek Tragedy Online is presented by the Center for Hellenic Studies (https://chs.harvard.edu/), the Kosmos Society (https://kosmossociety.chs.harvard.edu/), and Out of Chaos Theatre (out-of-chaos.co.uk/). For more information about outreach opportunities through the Reading Greek Tragedy Online project, contact outofchaosplays@gmail.com. To support Out of Chaos Theatre, visit fundrazr.com/b1oWw3?ref=ab_6ACAcc. Learn more about the upcoming Playing Dionysos competition at out-of-chaos.co.uk/playingdionysus.
More information at
https://chs.harvard.edu/programs/reading-greek-tragedy-online/
Speakers
Nana Mouskouri
Internationally acclaimed singer, Gatsos’s close friend and collaborator
Panagiotis Roilos
George Seferis Professor of Modern Greek Studies and Professor of Comparative Literature,
Faculty Associate, The Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, and
Faculty Associate, Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies,
Harvard University
Founder and Director, Delphi Academy of European Studies
Agathi Dimitrouka
Lyricist, translator, author, and executor of Gatsos’s literary estate
Johanna Hanink
Professor of Classics, Brown University
Co-editor of the Journal of Modern Greek Studies
Nicolas Prevelakis
Assistant Director of Curricular Development, Center for Hellenic Studies
Associate Senior Lecturer on Social Studies, Harvard University
This production was supported by an Ancient Worlds, Modern Communities grant from the Society of Classical Studies.
Reading Greek Tragedy Online is presented by the Center for Hellenic Studies (https://chs.harvard.edu/), the Kosmos Society (https://kosmossociety.chs.harvard.edu/), and Out of Chaos Theatre (out-of-chaos.co.uk/). For more information about outreach opportunities through the Reading Greek Tragedy Online project, contact outofchaosplays@gmail.com. To support Out of Chaos Theatre, visit fundrazr.com/b1oWw3?ref=ab_6ACAcc. Learn more about the upcoming Playing Dionysos competition at out-of-chaos.co.uk/playingdionysus.
Credits:
Jessie Cannizzaro
Tamieka Chavis
Damian Jermaine Thompson
René Thornton Jr.
Director - Hunter Bird
Composer - Kim Sherman
Cello - Kajsa William-Olsson
Harp - Bettina Joy de Guzman
More information about the cast and featured speakers can be found at
https://chs.harvard.edu/programs/reading-greek-tragedy-online/#bios
Selected source texts for this episode include:
Aeschylus' Agamemnon (trans. A. Swanwick)
Sencea's Agamemnon (trans. F. J. Miller)
Euripides' Hecuba (trans. S. D. Milman)
Jean Racine's Iphigenie (trans. R. B. Boswell)
Homeric Hymn to Demeter (trans. G. Nagy)
Euripides' Hippolytus (trans. S. D. Milman)
Sophocles' Ajax (trans. G. Young)
Aristophanes' Lysistrata (trans. J. Lindsay)
Reading Greek Tragedy Online is presented by the Center for Hellenic Studies (https://chs.harvard.edu/), the Kosmos Society (https://kosmossociety.chs.harvard.edu/), and Out of Chaos Theatre (out-of-chaos.co.uk/). For more information about outreach opportunities through the Reading Greek Tragedy Online project, contact outofchaosplays@gmail.com. To support Out of Chaos Theatre, visit fundrazr.com/b1oWw3?ref=ab_6ACAcc. Learn more about the upcoming Playing Dionysos competition at out-of-chaos.co.uk/playingdionysus.
Credits in order of appearance:
Clytemnestra (Agamemnon) - Colleen Longshaw
Cassandra - Ayanda Nhlangothi KaNokwe
Hecuba - Tamieka Chavis
Clytemnestra (Iphigenia) - Kim James Bey
Homeric Hymn to Demeter - Rad Pereira
Nurse (Hippolytus) - Evelyn Miller
Tecmessa - Noree Victoria
Lysistrata - Nikaury Rodriguez
Director - LeeAnet Noble
More information about the cast and featured speakers can be found at
https://chs.harvard.edu/programs/reading-greek-tragedy-online/#bios
Further reading:
1) Hall, Edith, 2006. The theatrical cast of Athens : interactions between ancient Greek drama and society. New York: Oxford University Press.
2) Schmitt Pantel, P. ed. 1992. A History of Women in the West Vol. I (A. Goldhammer, trans.), Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
3) Davidson, J., 1998. Courtesans and Fishcakes: the Consuming Passions of Classical Athens. London: Fontana Press.
On the bicentennial of the Greek Revolution, this panel brings together a range of scholars from History, Political Science, and Classics, to explore the significance of this book, as well as the Greek Revolution and its legacy.
This event is Presented and co-sponsored by the Embassy of Greece in the US and the Harvard Center for Hellenic Studies.
Welcome Address
HE Alexandra Papadopoulou, Ambassador of Greece in the United States
Opening Remarks
Mark Schiefsky, C. Lois P. Grove Professor of the Classics, Department of the Classics and Director, Center for Hellenic Studies, Harvard University
Speakers
Paschalis Kitromilides, Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Member of the Academy of Athens, CHS Associate in Hellenic Studies
Eleni Angelomatis-Tsougarakis, Professor Emerita of History, Ionian University
Johanna Hanink, Professor of Classics, Brown University
David Armitage, Lloyd C. Blankfein Professor of History; Interim Chair, Committee on Degrees in Social Studies, Harvard University; Senior Scholar, Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies, Harvard University
Mark Mazower, Ira D. Wallach Professor of History and Director Heyman Center for the Humanities, Columbia University
Moderator and Chair
Nicolas Prevelakis, Associate Senior Lecturer on Social Studies and Assistant Director of Curricular Development, Center for Hellenic Studies, Harvard University