quidquid bene dictum est ab ullo, meum est
Mark June 20 in your pda … that’s the date officially announced t’other day about the official opening date of the new Acropolis Museum …
Well now that we’re past that Lupercalia unpleasantness, we can concentrate on other aspects of this Valentine’s Day (or Valentines Day, if you prefer) … seems that amicus noster Don Lateiner was amongst a pile of folks from various disciplines holding press conferences/having interviews about the origins of kissing. Most of the coverage seems to focus on the ‘scientific side’, but we’ll privilege Classics as we begin with the National Geographic excerpts:
In fact, most kissing in that period was to express deference and not romance, Donald Lateiner, a humanities-classics professor at Ohio Wesleyan University, said today during a press conference in Chicago.
Men kissed men on the cheek as a social greeting, while subjects of a king “abased” themselves by kissing the ground in front of him.
And people who wanted to curry favor with someone of higher status would “kiss up” the person’s hands, shoulders, and head—in that order.
The Art of Kissing
Poems, novels, and all kinds of art helped Lateiner parse out the history of the kiss. (Read more about Valentine’s Day history.)
For instance, many Tuscan and Roman ladies’ mirror cases sported erotic scenes “from the world of myth, [or] sometimes from the world of daily life,” Lateiner said.
But on Athenian vases and Pompeian frescoes, romantic smooching is quite rare, he noted.
Instead “there’s a whole lot of sex.”
This may be because artists of the era preferred to depict full bodies, and a “Hollywood close-up” of people kissing would be too small a detail to feature.
Elsewhere … in the Chicago Tribune:
“There’s also political, power and social kissing all throughout antiquity … The Greeks seem to have kissed less than the Romans, not that I have the videotape or Kinsey Institute of Rome to reference … We see the escalation of osculation through the art we find.”
… and at Wired:
“Many kisses, particularly in the Roman novels, are slobbery … Every time that the past is excavated at Pompeii, there is good a chance there will be some additional data on sexual customs, if not kissing.”
… at Live Science:
“I have also found that there was an ‘escalation of osculation’ in the first century C.E. (A.D.) … There was also a kissing disease outbreak, what seems to be Mentagra [a pimply inflammation of the hair follicles, usually in the beard].”
cf. Ohio Wesleyan’s press release:
Wow … what bills itself as “Canada’s National Newspaper” (we Westerners were always skeptical of such) incipits a piece thusly:
Word play occurs in unexpected places. Diane Lane, while promoting her recent movie Nights in Rodanthe, branched into a brief discussion of “cide.” “To decide is a great word,” she said, “because it’s like fratricide, matricide, suicide. It means to kill one idea so another idea can live. You de-cide.”
That might seem an odd parallel, but Lane is right about the common origin. The Latin verb was decidere, combining the prefix de (off or down) and caedere (to cut or strike). In making a decision, a person figuratively slices through the alternatives, lopping off the unwanted ones. A split decision – in which some people decide that one person won, and others insist that another won – is particularly nasty, since there’s a splitting of a cutting.
It continues …
COMIC INTERACTIONS: COMEDY ACROSS GENRES AND GENRES IN COMEDY
Friday 17 – Saturday 18 July 2009
Department of Greek and Latin, UCL, and the Institute of Classical Studies
A conference sponsored by the British Academy, the Institute of Classical
Studies, and the Department of Greek and Latin.
Speakers: Eric Csapo, Chris Carey, Edith Hall, Stephen Halliwell, Nick Lowe,
Regine May, Lucia Prauscello, Richard Rawles, Martin Revermann, Ralph Rosen,
Alan Sommerstein, Michael Silk, Mario Telò, Emmanuela Bakola
One of the defining features of ancient comedy is its self-conscious
dialogue with other literary genres. Greek comedy constantly negotiates its
position among other genres and through its literary affiliations with them
absorbs and reflects popular ideas, ethical values, and socio-political
practices. Scholarly attention has so far been limited to comedy’s
indebtedness to single literary genres conceived as isolated tesserae of a
lost mosaic (tragedy, iambos, lyric, satyr drama) and to isolated influences
of comedy on other genres, especially tragedy.
The intention of the international conference ‘Comic Interactions: Comedy
across Genres and Genres in Comedy’ is to explore new perspectives in the
working of such influence in both directions. Papers will focus both on how
the generic microcosms were re-staged and showcased by comedy as it evolved
during the fifth and fourth centuries BC, and on how comedy was
conceptualized and received at the other end by these other genres during
antiquity. This will allow us to chart the perceived literary and social
changes in the concept of comedy as a ‘genre’ and at the same time to gauge
the extent to which comedy itself reflects and handles these changes.
Papers will engage with comedy’s dialogue with early iambic poetry, choral
lyric, epic, the fable tradition, tragedy; they will also explore its
reception in Roman satire and the novel.
The conference is open to the public. Location: Gordon House 106, 29 Gordon
Square, London WC1H 0PP.
For enquiries, please contact the organisers: Emmanuela Bakola
(e.bakola AT ucl.ac.uk), Lucia Prauscello (lp306 AT cam.ac.uk), Mario Telò
(mtelo AT humnet.ucla.edu).
INSCRIPTIONS AND THEIR USES IN ANCIENT LITERATURE: A CONFERENCE
DEPARTMENT OF CLASSICS AND ANCIENT HISTORY
UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER
25-26TH JUNE 2009
Booking is now open for this conference, which aims to explore the possibilities which the literary record of ancient inscriptions offer both to those interested in understanding ancient attitudes towards inscriptions and to those interested in exploring the broader relationship (and overlaps) between epigraphical and non-epigraphical modes of expression from a range of literary, historical and epigraphical angles.
Full details, including the conference programme and booking form, are available here: http://www.manchester.ac.uk/classics/eventsnews/inscriptions/
There is a conference fee of £30, to cover tea, coffee and lunch on both days. The deadline for registration is 31st May 2009.
Thanks to the generous support of the Classical Association and the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies we are able to offer four bursaries to postgraduate students wishing to attend the conference. Bursaries will cover the conference fee and up to two nights’ accommodation in Manchester. Those interested in applying should send to polly.low AT manchester.ac.uk a brief (c.250 word) statement explaining how attendance at the conference would contribute to their research, and should also ask their supervisor (or other appropriate referee) to send a short statement of support to the same address. The deadline for applications for these bursaries is 30th April 2009.
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