OIKOS – FAMILIA:

THE FAMILY IN THE ANCIENT GRECO-ROMAN WORLD.
Framing the discipline in the 21st century

5-7 November 2009
University of Gothenburg & University of Birmingham

The fifth ARACHNE conference is organised collaboratively by the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, and the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom. The conference will take place at the University of Gothenburg 5-7 November 2009. The conference aims to bridge some of the gaps in the study of the family in antiquity: from Archaic Greece to the later Roman world.

The conference will focus on :

· Family structures and relationships 500 BCE to 500 CE (betrothal, marriage, divorce, parents and children, step-families, dynastic families, grandparents, gender roles within the family, family economy etc)

· New directions in the study of the family in antiquity

Sessions will run on thematic and chronological lines and we welcome papers from all disciplines: classics, ancient and early medieval history, archaeology, art history.

An abstract of a maximum of 300 words should be submitted preferably by email attachment to the conference address arachne At class.gu.se or to:

Arachne, University of Gothenburg, Department of Historical Studies, Box 200, SE 405 30 Gotheburg, Sweden.

The deadline for abstracts is 15 June 2009. Papers should be limited to a maximum of 20 minutes and decisions of acceptance will be made in July.

The official language of the conference is English.

Registration fee is 70 euros for non-speakers, 60 euros for speakers, and 30 euros for students. The fee includes coffee Thursday-Saturday and dinner on Saturday night.

Organizing committee:
University of Birmingham: Mary Harlow, Ray Laurence
University of Gothenburg: Lena Larsson Lovén, Agneta Strömberg

The Classics department at Leeds is pleased to announce the Leeds International Classical Seminar for 2009. The theme for the conference this year is ‘Public images in Augustan Rome’, and our programme of papers will explore the negotiation, display and maintenance of public images both of and within the city of Rome.

The conference will take place on Friday May 15th between venues in the department of Classics and the Leeds Humanities Research Institute (see programme for details). Directions to the University of Leeds and campus maps may be found at the following address: http://www.leeds.ac.uk/visitors/getting_here.htm.

The meeting is open to all academic participants; postgraduate and undergraduate students are especially welcome. The conference fee, which includes tea / coffee and a buffet lunch, is £15 (or £10 for students and unwaged), payable on the day. Participants are requested to notify Penny Goodman (p.j.goodman AT leeds.ac.uk) of their intention to attend at least a week in advance in order to secure lunch.

A full programme of papers follows. Do please circulate it to interested parties who may not see it here.

Programme for LICS 2009 – ‘Public images in Augustan Rome’:

10.30 – 11.30: Registration in the Department of Classics
(1st Floor, Parkinson Building, University of Leeds)

11.30 onwards: Papers in Seminar Rooms 3 and 4 of the Leeds Humanities Research Institute (LHRI)
(29-31 Clarendon Place)

11.30 – 12.15: Diana Spencer (University of Birmingham)
Towards a new (space) syntax: Varro’s de Lingua Latina
12.15 – 13.00: Stephen Harrison (Corpus Christi, Oxford)
Horace and Augustan monuments

13.00 – 14.00: Lunch
(Room 119, Dept. of Classics, 1st Floor Parkinson Building)

14.00 – 14.45: Stratis Kyriakidis (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki)
Rome and the fata Asiae, (Manilius, 1.512)
14.45 – 15.30: Andrew Zissos (University of California, Irvine)
Terra sub Augusto est: Augustan Rome and Ovid’s Metamorphoses

15.30 – 16.00: Coffee (in LHRI)

16.00 – 16.45: Amanda Claridge (Royal Holloway, University of London)
Augustus’ house on the Palatine
16.45 – 17.30: Alison Cooley (University of Warwick)
Contextualising Augustus’ Res Gestae

After Demosthenes: Continuity and Change in Hellenistic Oratory
2nd – 3rd July 2009, London.

Organisers: Christos Kremmydas (Royal Holloway) and Kathryn Tempest
(Roehampton).

The conference will take the form of an international, inter-disciplinary
forum that proposes to bring together scholars with different
specializations in order to stimulate discussion on the development of
oratory in the Hellenistic period. By looking for common elements of
performative speech in literary as well as documentary and epigraphical
evidence, it is hoped that this two-day conference will lead to a broader
understanding of Hellenistic oratory, assess its debt to the Classical
oratorical paradigms and examine its impact and influence upon the emerging
rhetorical culture at Rome

Thursday 2nd July

Mike Edwards (ICS) ‘Dionysius and Isaeus’
Laszlo Horvath (Budapest) ‘Hyperides and Hellenistic Oratory’
Thanasis Efstathiou (Corfu) ‘The virtue of clarity (σαφήνεια) in
hellenistic oratory and rhetoric: the case of [Demetrius] On Style.’
Christos Kremmydas (Royal Holloway) ‘The evidence of early Hellenistic
rhetorical exercises’
Lene Rubinstein (Royal Holloway) ‘The use of written documentation in real-
life orations, delivered in connection with embassies.’
Angelos Chaniotis (Oxford) ‘Theatricality and emotion in Hellenistic
decrees: rhetorical strategies in the popular assembly’
Efrem Zambon (Venice): ‘Tyrants and Pirates: two topics for the Hellenistic
orator’
Gunther Martin (Oxford): ‘Praise and persuasion: rhetorical technique in
Theocritus’ poetry’
Eleni Volonaki (University of Peloponnese, Kalamata) ‘The art of persuasion
in Jason’s speeches: Apollonius of Rhodes, Argonautica’

Friday 3rd July

Edith Hall (Royal Holloway) ‘Hellenistic oratory and the Hellenistic
tragōidos’
Christopher Carey (UCL)‘The evidence for oratory in Hellenistic Drama’
Gesine Manuwald (UCL) ‘Oratory on the stage in Republican Rome’
Jonathan Powell (Royal Holloway) ‘The embassy of the three philosophers to
Rome in 155 BC’
Kathryn Tempest (Roehampton) ‘Hellenistic oratory at Rome: Cicero’s Pro
Marcello’
Jula Wildberger (Paris) ‘Stertinian Rhetoric’
Stanley Porter (McMaster Divinity College, Canada) ‘Paul and the
Rhetoricians.’

Full Conference fee: £20
Day rate: £10.

The deadline for registration is Monday 15 June 2009

Thanks to a limited amount of funding from the Classical Association, we
are pleased to be able to offer some bursaries for postgraduate students.
Please contact Dr Kathryn Tempest(k.tempest AT roehampton.ac.uk) explaining
how attendance at the conference will advance your research plans.

The full programme, abstracts and a booking form are available at the
following webpage:

http://www.rhul.ac.uk/classics/news-and-events/HellenisticOratoryConference/index.html

LUCRETIUS: POETRY, PHILOSOPHY, AND SCIENCE

An international conference at the University of Manchester (6-7 July 2009)

The De rerum natura is at once one of the most brilliant and powerful poems
in the Latin language, a passionate attempt at dispelling humanity’s fear of
death and its enslavement by empty religio, and a detailed exposition of
Epicurean atomist physics. There is perhaps no other Latin poem which so
requires and rewards approaches which combine the critical perspectives of
literary analysis, philosophy and the history of science. This conference
aims to bring together a group of scholars from a wide range of relevant
disciplines to examine such issues as the ways in which its poetic form
affects the presentation of the philosophical and scientific content of the
poem, the relationship between physics and ethics in the poem, the tensions
in the poem between the philosophical position being urged and the affective
impact of some striking passages, its generic self-positioning with regard
to earlier Greek didactic poetry, its key role in the dissemination and
transformation of Epicureanism at Rome, and its place in the history of
ancient science.

The recent Cambridge Companion to Lucretius edited by Stuart Gillespie and
Philip Hardie represents a landmark in bringing together cross-disciplinary
approaches to the DRN. This conference aims to build on this important
combination of different scholarly methodologies, but also to focus
attention more directly on the poem itself and its multifaceted nature,
particularly with regard to the interaction between its poetic form and its
scientific and ethical content, and its focus on physics. This is also an
ideal opportunity to re-evaluate whether existing approaches (across a range
of disciplines) are sufficient for understanding as difficult and important
a text as the DRN, and which new questions it might be most productive to
ask about the poem.

Confirmed speakers include:
Monica Gale, ‘Lucretius and Hesiod’
James Hankinson
Brooke Holmes, ‘Lucretius and the Poetics of Cosmic Indifference’
Monte Johnson,‘Lucretius and the cause of spontaneity’
Duncan Kennedy, ‘Lucretius, Virgil and the Instauratio Magna: Knowledge as a
Project of Universal Empire’
David Konstan, ‘Lucretius and the Epicurean Attitude toward Grief’
Daryn Lehoux, ‘Soul in a World without Spirit: The Ethics of Sensation in an
Inanimate Universe’
Andrew Morrison, ‘Nil igitur mors est ad nos? Iphianassa, the Athenian
plague, and Epicurean views of death’

Those interested in the conference should email Andrew Morrison in the first
instance (andrew.morrison@manchester.ac.uk). The full programme and a
booking form will appear shortly at the following webpage:

http://www.arts.manchester.ac.uk/subjectareas/classicsancienthistory/eventsnews/lucretius/

IRONY AND THE IRONIC IN CLASSICAL LITERATURE

A conference at the University of Exeter, 1st-4th September 2009

Call for Papers

What precisely do we mean when we talk about ‘irony’?

The term ‘irony’ is often bandied about – as a glance at the Index of any commentary or literary-critical monograph will attest. Both ‘irony’ and the adjective ‘ironic’ are frequently (perhaps too frequently?) used as catch-all terms to describe a variety of effects within literary works, including unusual shifts of tone, slippage between overt and implied meanings, transparently deceptive or disingenuous narrative strategies and other self-conscious collusions with an implied reader or audience. But what sort of a phenomenon are we actually dealing with? Is irony (as many have thought) by its very nature too subtle, subjective or elusive a concept to be theorized? And what are its broader implications, once it has been identified?

These questions stimulate cross-cultural analysis, as irony may be understood differently in ancient and modern cultures. Although ironical effects, such as those outlined above, are found in abundance in ancient Greek and Roman literature, they were not theorized as such in antiquity. Instead, eirōneia and related words were used to denote a more specific and limited mode of behaviour than we associate with irony in modern thought. Indeed, given that it has been thought that an ‘ironical’ outlook is a peculiarly modern concept, is our application of this outlook to ancient texts fundamentally anachronistic? What is the value of the concepts of irony and the ironic from the historicist perspective?

This conference is designed to open up the debate about this challenging concept, and to stimulate discussion from a diversity of perspectives. It is anticipated that proceedings of the conference will be published in book form. We invite papers dealing with irony in Greek and Latin literature, and we welcome also theoretical and comparative approaches to the concepts of irony and the ironic. Topics for consideration may include:

* frameworks for understanding ‘the ironic’, especially ancient conceptualizations of ‘the ironic’
* patterns of irony and the ironic
* irony and other strategies of collusion (e.g. parody, allusion, innuendo)
* the dynamics of irony – how is it effected?
* irony and intentionality – embedded or imported meanings?
* irony and the reader/reading-cultures in antiquity
* irony as a political, rhetorical or pedagogical strategy
* the politics of irony: exclusivity and esotericism – who’s ‘in’, who’s ‘out’?

Please send abstracts of ca. 300 words to one of the conference-organisers (below) by 28th February.

Matthew Wright (M.Wright AT exeter.ac.uk)

Karen Ní Mheallaigh (K.Ni-Mheallaigh AT exeter.ac.uk)