November 2017
CLASSICAL ASSOCIATION OF IRELAND
Next up was Mr John Barry (right), who was ‘Spinning a Yarn’. Odysseus made an appearance again here, in a different capacity though equally unsavoury. The whole thrust of the lecture was deception. Odysseus was a master of it, a good liar in layman’s terms, and he was ably assisted by his mentor, the goddess Athena. The talk broadened to cover the use of storytelling to organise one’s thoughts and analyse oneself. Being happy in fortune is the message of the Odyssey. Stories are plausible to listeners and Odysseus provides a model whereby a man faced with superior strength will survive. In the Iliad, such a character just dies. The penultimate speaker of the conference was Dr Raoul McLaughlin (right, centre) whose illustrated talk ventured to the ‘Seaboard of the Ancient Steppe: Greek and Roman Voyages in the Black Sea’. We heard that the Crimea was the leading provider of grain for the Greeks. Strabo left an account that some eighty-four thousand tonnes of grain were shipped every year to Athens about seven hundred miles away. The best account of Greek and Crimean trade comes during the time of Hadrian and in the city of Sebastopolis where many Roman remains are found. It is thought that there was a Roman port there.
Prof. Martin Millett and Dr Philip De Souza (Photos: Selga Medenieks)
The ultimate speaker of the day was Br Colmán Ó Clabaigh O.S.B. of Glenstal Abbey (above). Though no stranger to presentations, Colmán is more a medievalist than a classicist, which is not something that could be held against him for his superb presentation on the pastoral rule of Gregory The Great. We were introduced to how thirteenth to sixteenth-century priests operated within their communities. Priests were either of three orders, those who fought, laboured or prayed. The first category ultimately gives us military law and the third gives us canon law. As always, those who laboured were quietly forgotten about. As Colmán remarked, priests 5