Seen on the Classicists list (please direct any queries to the folks mentioned in the item and not to rogueclassicism):

The Hellenistic Court

Hosted by The Centre for the Study of the Hellenistic World (CSHW), School
of History, Classics & Archaeology, The University of Edinburgh, 25th-27th
February 2011.

This conference aims to demonstrate the centrality of palace institutions
in the cultural and political milieu of the disparate societies that made
up the Hellenistic world, and will re-establish the importance of
recognizing the royal court as a major component in the culture of the
Greek-speaking world in the period c 323-31 BCE.

Speakers:
Eran Almagor (Jerusalem) ‘Plutarch’s Hellenistic Courts’
Kostas Buraselis (Athens), ‘Beyond and inside the polis. Aspects of
recruitment and synthesis of Hellenistic court and society’
Laurent Capdetrey (Poitiers), ‘The Seleucid Court, the King and the
Territory: integration and disintegration’
Livia Capponi (Newcastle), ‘Court Jews’
Paola Ceccarelli (Durham), ‘Protocols of communication in the Seleucid
kingdom’
David Engels (Université libre de Bruxelles) ‘The Achaemenid and the
Seleucid Courts – Structural Continuities, Personal Changes’
Danielle Fatkin (Knox), ‘Purity, Power, and the Invention of the Hasmonean
Bathing Tradition’
Oleg Gabelko (Kazan State University), ‘The Court Society, Die Herrschende
Gesellsсhaft, Ethno-Сlasse Dominante: the Example of Bithynia and
Cappadocia’
Erich Gruen (UC Berkeley), ‘Hellenistic Court Patronage and the Non-Greek
World’
Craig Hardiman (Waterloo), ‘Court-ing the Public: The Attalid Court and
Domestic Display’
Maria Kopsacheili (Oxford), ‘The Hellenistic Palace and the Ideology of
the Court’
Silvia Milanezi (Nantes) ‘Flatterers and Parasites at Court’
Peter Franz Mittag (Köln), ‘Seleucid Kings and their Courtiers’
Janett Morgan (Royal Holloway London), ‘At Home with Royalty: Constructing
the Hellenistic Palace’
Kevin Osterloh (Miami), ‘From Common Benefactor to Protector of the Human
Race:
Rome in the Eyes of the Judean Court’
Olga Palagia (Athens), ‘The royal court in ancient Macedonia: evidence
from art and archaeology’
Ivana Petrovic (Durham), ‘Callimachus’ gods and the Ptolemaic royal
family: models and echoes’
Ivana Savalli-Lestrade (Paris), ‘Bios aulikos. The Multiple Ways of Life
of Courtiers in the Hellenistic Age’
Daniel Selden (UC Santa Cruz), ‘Reading the Rosetta Stone: Language,
Literacy, and Power at the Ptolemaic Court’
Rolf Strootman (Utrecht), ‘Eunuchs, Renegades and Outsiders: The Favorite
at the Hellenistic Royal Courts’
Dorothy Thompson (Cambridge), ‘Outside the capital: the Ptolemaic court
and Courtiers’
Shane Wallace (Edinburgh), ‘Remembering the Past at the Hellenistic Courts’

Full details and registration at:
http://www.shc.ed.ac.uk/classics/conferences/HellenisticCourt.htm

Seen on the Classicists list (please direct any queries to the folks mentioned in the item and not to rogueclassicism):

Postcolonial Latin American Adaptations of Greek and Roman Drama

143rd Annual Meeting of the American Philological Association

January 5-8, 2012, Philadelphia, PA

Organized by Konstantinos P. Nikoloutsos (Saint Joseph’s University)

Research on the reception of classical drama has focused on Europe, Northern America, Africa, and
Australasia, but has ignored, for no justifiable reason, Latin America. Greek and Roman tragedies
regarded as canonical in the West migrated to this region since the early colonial years and have
been rewritten, especially in recent decades, to suit modern social and political concerns. For
example, Griselda Gambaro’s Furious Antigone (1986) and Jose Watanabe’s Antigone (1999), two of
the many Latin American adaptations of Sophocles’ play, appropriate a seminal story of protest
against state oppression to discuss the issue of the desaparecidos, the thousands of "missing"
civilians who were abducted, tortured, and murdered in secret by military and paramilitary forces
during the Dirty War in Argentina and Peru respectively. Similarly, in Medea in the Mirror (1960)
Jose Triana blends motifs from Euripides and Seneca to comment on the social and racial
inequalities in pre-Revolution Cuba, whereas Jorge Ali Triana revisits Sophocles in his film Oedipus
Mayor (1996) to document aspects of the Colombian Civil War waged between the army and
peasant guerillas.

The attention that Latin American adaptations of Greek and Roman drama have so far received
from Anglophone classicists (Nelli 2009, 2010; Nikoloutsos 2010, 2011; Torrance 2007) is
disproportionate to their number and geographical spread. Seeking to raise awareness about this
important area of research, this panel–the first of its kind to be organized at a national level–
solicits papers that examine case studies and approach the topic from a variety of theoretical and
interdisciplinary perspectives. Questions to be discussed include, but are not limited to, the
following:

1. What is the artistic and sociohistorical context for these adaptations?
2. Are they direct derivates of the Greek or Roman original, or are there other texts or traditions
involved in this hybridization?
3. Are these rewritings dominated by or emancipated from the ancient prototype in terms of
narrative structure, character development, and ideology?
4. Does this blending of classical themes with postcolonial experiences leave room for indigenous,
mestizo, mulatto, or other mixed-race identities to be expressed?
5. What conclusions about the migration of ideological topoi and stylistic features across Latin
America can we draw from these adaptations?

Abstracts must be received in the APA office by February 1, 2011. Please send an anonymous
abstract as a PDF attachment to apameetings AT sas.upenn.edu. Be sure to mention the title of the
panel and provide complete contact information and any AV requests in the body of your email. In
preparing the abstract, please follow the APA’s formatting guidelines for individual abstracts. All
submissions will be reviewed anonymously. Inquiries can be addressed to
Konstantinos.Nikoloutsos AT sju.edu.

ante diem xv kalendas februarias

• Ludi Palatini (day 2) — the theatrefest continues
• 52 B.C. — murder of Publius Clodius Pulcher near Bovillae
• 250 A.D. — martyrdom of Moseus
• 1898 — death of H.G. Liddell (Greek lexicographer and father of Alice-in-wonderland)

Since this is apparently the most depressing day of the year, we’ll give you something to smile about (courtesy of Keely):

[Free Range via comics.com]

… which, of course, makes one think of this famous teichoskopia scene:

Adrian Murdoch continues his weekly look at the guys who ran Rome:

• Emperors of Rome: Caligula