Classics Newsletter 2018

CLASSICS Department of Classics Newsletter SUMMER 2018 | Volume XXV

IN THIS ISSUE

Summer 2018 Volume XXV Editor Seth Bernard Assistant Professor

1. EX CATHEDRA | MESSAGE FROM THE CHAIR

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2. FACULTY NEWS

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Faculty in the Field: Seth Bernard, Carrie Fulton, Sarah Murray

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From The Faculty Bookshelf

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Faculty Focus: Ben Akrigg and Regina Höschele

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Managing Editor Warrena Wilkinson Special Thanks Emelen Leonard Front Cover Image Ettore Ferrari’s statue (1887) commemorating Ovid's exile in Tomis (present-day Constanța, Romania) Correspondence Department of Classics University of Toronto chair.classics@utoronto.ca

3. GRADUATE STUDENT NEWS Graduate Student Focus: Jesse Hill, Caitlin Hines, and Naomi Neufeld

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Classical-Themed Double Dactyl Poems

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Graduate Student Conference: Fidelity of Fides

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Graduate Student Workshop: Digital Classics

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Past Issues Available online at: classics.utoronto.ca/news/newsletter/

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CLASSU

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5. ALUMNI NOTES

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Alumni Profiles: Emilia A. Barbiero and Cillian O’Hogan

Department of Classics Newsletter is published once a year by the Department of Classics and is circulated to alumni and friends of the Department of Classics, University of Toronto.

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Graduate News

4. UNDERGRADUATE STUDENT NEWS Publisher Department of Classics University of Toronto 125 Queen’s Park Toronto, ON M5S 2C7 classics.utoronto.ca

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6. CONFERENCES & WORKSHOPS

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Doing Classics: A Workshop on Historical Methods

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Orientalism, the Classics, and Egypt

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7. UPCOMING EVENTS & NEWS

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AIA/SCS | San Diego, CA, January 3-6, 2019

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Graduate Student Conference | Toronto, ON, Spring 2019

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Assembly of the Plebs | Toronto, ON, Spring 2019

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CAC | McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, May 7-9, 2019

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EX CATHEDRA: MESSAGE FROM THE CHAIR Two new Doctors of Philosophy in Classics stepped up to the stage in Convocation Hall on June 7th: congratulations to John Abad (history) and Caitlin Hines (literature)! Back in the fall MA degrees were awarded to Abigail Ferstman, Chris Stait, and David Sutton, while during the intense convocation period in June, our undergraduates receive their BA in Classics or in Classical Civilization. Well done everyone!

Classics continues to inspire students at the U of T, and I am proud of the many courses my over twenty colleagues, our sessional lecturers, and our graduate course instructors continue to teach to very flattering course evaluations! To take an example, not completely at random, there was CLA 203 Ancient Science, taught very successfully for the second year in a row by Marion Durand, who defends her PhD on a topic in Greek philosophy at the end of June and just missed stepping onto the Convocation Hall stage this time.

Our three new PhDs specializing in literature, history, and ancient philosophy perfectly capture the profile of our graduate program as it has been reformed and developed over these past four years. We talk about three formal “areas of emphasis” that MA and PhD students can choose between. The newest development, which kept many faculty members busy this year, is the creation of a further option for our ancient historians within the brand new Mediterranean Archaeology Collaborative Specialization (MACS). MACS is run jointly with Art History, Near and Middle Eastern Studies, Anthropology, and the Archaeology Centre. As a result, it is fair to say that Classical Archaeology has arrived at the U of T and in our department!

(It’s about time, some will add.) Several colleagues will contribute to the teaching of MACS courses, primarily Sarah Murray, our most recent colleague (introduced in last year’s Newsletter), and Carrie Fulton (the winner of a prestigious SSHRC Insight Development grant last summer).

Undergraduate teaching benefit from this emphasis on archaeology. Our spring Departmental meeting approved several new courses, including a 200-level course called “Greek and Roman Archaeology”. Perhaps even more excitingly, U of T Classics professors will excavate on three sites in the Mediterranean this summer; a record! Already this summer some of our undergraduates will get their first experience in our own trenches, and there is more to come. The work of Sarah Murray, Carrie Fulton, and Seth Bernard is detailed in a new section in the newsletter on our faculty in the field.

My survey would not be complete without emphasizing the great work our specialists in Latin and Greek literature do. Indeed, we all both teach and cherish the ancient languages, the foundation of our vast discipline. A measure of our success are the several prizes our undergraduates won in the national Sight Translation competition organized by the Classical Association of Canada. Congratulations to Sophia Akhoury (incoming MA student) and Laura Harris (incoming President of CLASSU, our exemplary undergraduate student association)!

On a different level, the contribution by some of my senior colleagues to the leadership of the Faculty of Arts & Science is remarkable: John Magee continues as one of the five Vice-Deans in a faculty of 27,000 undergraduates, while Alison Keith took over as Director of the prestigious Jackman Humanities Institute last July. Classics is doing well, and as a sign of the trust the Faculty places in all of us and in our mission, I am happy to report that the Department will conduct two tenuretrack searches on the St. George campus in 2018-19, one in Ancient Philosophy and one in Classical Literature.

Our graduates remain successful finding jobs in academia and in other fields. It seems fitting to conclude by congratulating three alumni hired into tenure-track positions in the past months: Emilia Barbiero, Cillian O’Hogan, and Mariapia Pietropaolo.

Two-year postdoctoral awards were won by Jody Cundy and Caitlin Hines (more details below). It has been a good year, and for me personally not least because of the great support I have enjoyed from our Associate Chairs Erik Gunderson and Eph Lytle, and I cannot forget to thank Ann-Marie and Coral in the departmental office.

- Christer Bruun

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FACULTY NEWS

FACULTY IN THE FIELD Seth Bernard The summer of 2018 will see me starting a program of excavation at Populonia, an ancient city near modern Piombino on the coast of Tuscany. This is the first season of a multi-year project in collaboration with colleagues at the University of Siena and the Archaeological Superintendency of Tuscany. The site was the only major Etruscan city located directly on the sea, and this privileged position helped Populonia to establish control over important mining activity on the nearby island of Elba, and over the trade in metals passing down the coast of Italy. Several substantial necropoleis show the city’s wealth from this metal trade dating back to the early Iron Age, while we are focusing on the urban centre of the Hellenistic settlement, when the city had been absorbed into Republican Rome’s expanding Italian empire. In particular, we will be excavating at the foot of a monumental terrace-complex named “Le Logge” by early modern travelers to the area and shown in the photo above.

Coming along with me this year will be two graduate students, Sophia Alkhoury and Drew Davis, and two undergraduate students, Laura Harris and Zoi Samonas.

Carrie Fulton In June 2017, I conducted an underwater survey of a Late Bronze Age Anchorage off of MaroniTsaroukkas, Cyprus along with graduate student, Naomi Neufeld and researchers from Cornell University, Flinders University, and the University of Cyprus. The project utilized recent technological advances and developed new digital survey techniques in order to fully map and document the visible material remains over the eastern portion of the anchorage.

A team is returning to the site in May and June of 2018 to document the western portion of the anchorage as well as undertake a survey of several costal sites in danger of erosion.

The project is generously funded by a SSHRC Insight Development Grant and the National Geographic Society.

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FROM THE FACULTY BOOKSHELF

Boris Chrubasik: Hellenism and the Local Communities of the Eastern Mediterranean. Why would a community in Lykaonia, and Babylonia decide it wanted to be a Greek polis, why did people of Judaea give themselves Greek names, and why would Judaean authors write narrative accounts incorporating elements from the Greek world and the Ancient Near East and compose in the Greek language? These are some of the core questions of this volume. While scholarship has focussed rightly on the continuation of local cultures of the Eastern Mediterranean after the conquest of Alexander the Great, this volume seeks to address why Greek cultural elements were important for these people in certain periods.

FACULTY IN THE FIELD (CONTINUED) Sarah Murray

FROM THE FACULTY BOOKSHELF (CONTINUED)

In the summer of 2018, I’ll be participating in the final study season of the Mazi Archaeological Project (a regional survey in the borderlands of northwestern Attica, field seasons 2014–2016) where the team will be finalizing a draft of the final project publication.

In addition, I’ll be conducting a week of survey and architectural recording at the site of ancient Hippola, a Laconian town in the Mani peninsula of the southern Peloponnese, in collaboration with Philip Sapirstein (University of Nebraska), and two weeks of reconnaissance and planning for a new archaeological project in the area of Porto Raphti (East Attica) in collaboration with Catherine Pratt (Western University).

Pictured (from top left): counting sherds at a Mycenaean site above the Mazi Plain on a sunny day; Eleutherai and the Mazi Plain.

Martin Revermann: A Cultural History of Theatre in Antiquity forms part of an authoritative survey from ancient times to the present. Part of a set of six volumes covering performance history over a span of 2,500 years, this volume traces the complexity of interactions between theatre and culture in Greco-Roman antiquity (500 BC – 1000 AD) through a collection of essays on a range of topics such as theatrical genres, the social function of theatre, and the technologies of stagecraft.

FACULTY NEWS Christer Bruun was elected Canadian representative on the Comité (the Governing Council) of AIEGL.

FIND US ON FACEBOOK In case you haven’t heard, the Department of Classics has embraced social media.

Keep up to date with the latest posts including announcements, public lectures, and photos. Follow us at: https://www.facebook.com/UofTClassics

At the annual CAC meeting in Calgary, Katherine Blouin was elected Council Member for 201821.

Regina Höschele won a Six-Month Research Fellowship at the Jackman Humanities Institute for Fall 2018.

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FACULTY FOCUS In every newsletter, members of our faculty are asked to chat about their current research. This year, Emelen Leonard and Giulio Leghissa interviewed Ben Akrigg and Regina Höschele.

EL: In 2013, you co-edited a volume called Slaves and Slavery in Ancient Greek Comic Drama. Could you tell us a bit about your experience working on a project that combined literary and historical inquiry?

Ben Akrigg EL: What have you been working on the last year?

BA: I’m continuing to work on issues of economy and demography, although with a wider focus than classical Athens. I’ve been writing chapters on population and migration for the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to the Greek Economy, and I’m also increasingly interested in looking at energy capture and consumption, both as proxies for past economic development and performance and for their intrinsic interest. I was challenged to think more clearly about some of these issues while I was teaching a course on energy transitions in the School of the Environment in the spring semester.

In May last year I took over from Michele George (McMaster University) as the editor of Phoenix, one of the journals of the Classical Association of Canada. I’ve had lots of help and support from Michele and the other members of the editorial committee and board, but I have to say that the learning curve has still been steep and it has taken up a lot of my time, but mostly in a good way.

Editing the journal has been a lot of fun, and it provides great insight into what research people are doing, especially in the areas that I wouldn’t otherwise be able to pay so much attention to.

EL: According to your bio, your main area of research is the economic and social history of classical Greece. This year, however, you led a graduate seminar on archaic Greek history. What draws you to this period? Are you planning any further work on archaic Greece?

BA: There are no hard chronological boundaries for the subjects I work on. Separating the archaic from the classical really only makes sense in a political and military narrative that privileges Athens.

That narrative is important, but when we look at social, economic or other kinds of history, or when we look at other parts of the Greek world, then different periodizations will suggest themselves. Most of the phenomena that we think of as typical of the Classical period (whether those are institutions or art forms or whatever) are really products of the 7th and 6th centuries, or at least have their origins then. For a historical demographer and economic historian the signs of increasing population size from at least the 8th century onwards look vitally important. And perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising anyway that a historian would be interested in looking further back in time – we are always looking to understand how we got here. There is still a lot I feel I don’t understand about archaic Greece so I expect I’ll be continuing to work on the period for a while yet.

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BA: Again, there are no hard boundaries here: it’s all Classics. The volume came about really just because both Rob Tordoff (York University) and I had some ideas about slaves in comedy. This was something we had talked about originally when we were PhD students at Cambridge. We both worked on Athens: Rob is more literary and I’m more historical but our interests overlap considerably. When we both found ourselves in Toronto a few years later we talked about it again, and it turned out there were enough other people who had their own ideas that we could have an interesting conference and some good conversations on the subject.

The volume has a mixture of different approaches, including material culture as well as literature and history, and those approaches illuminate and complement each other. I was pleased with the way it turned out, but can’t take much of the credit: the contributors were great and were all committed to the project, and in the end I think Rob did the hard parts of the editing.

GL: You got your BA from Oxford, your MA from Birbeck College, London, and your PhD from Cambridge; afterwards, you were a lecturer at King’s College, London. What do you think are the similarities and differences between these four British universities and the University of Toronto, in terms of the study of Classics and Ancient History? How did your education in the UK help you to develop your interests as an ancient historian?

BA: At all those institutions I was fortunate to have brilliant and congenial teachers and colleagues, and to have access to first-rate specialist libraries and librarians: without them I couldn’t have had serious interests as an ancient historian. Although each university and every Classics department has its unique features and peculiarities, in some ways the differences are quite small. The classicists in all the places I have studied and worked work with similar kinds of material in broadly similar Anglophone traditions.

It’s also a bit difficult for me to pinpoint the differences accurately because one sees an institution quite differently as an undergrad, as a graduate student and as contract and tenure-stream faculty.

One thing that I have found to vary quite a lot is what counts as Classics. This is particularly obvious with philosophy and archaeology, which in some places are seen as central to the discipline, while in others they can seem quite peripheral. Classical archaeology in particular often finds itself in a complicated institutional position; nowhere has that been more true than in Toronto, which is why the new MACS program is such an important and exciting development.

GL: Given that classical Athens is one of the most popular topics in ancient history, what is left for researchers today who want to study Athenian society in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE? BA: We shall never run out of things to say about classical Athens.

Even if you think there is a danger of people failing to come up with new things to say about tragedy or oratory or comedy (which doesn’t seem very likely to me), there is lots of work still to be done on the vast quantities of Athenian coinage and epigraphic material that haven’t been studied fully. After two centuries of serious

FACULTY FOCUS (CONTINUED) scholarship there are many questions about the economy alone to which we still don’t know the answers. A small one that nags at me is that it isn’t clear where the ships of the Athenian navy were built – which matters because wherever it was, there must have been a large-scale industrial enterprise. Questions of more general significance about the performance of the Athenian economy and the distribution of wealth in Athens remain lively areas of controversy. We are still very under-informed about most of the Athenian countryside. Environmental archaeology will have an increasingly important role to play in the future.

GL: The ancient Greek world was a multipolar system in which some city-states like Sparta, Athens and Thebes achieved temporary supremacy over the rest of the Greek world for a certain amount of time. Do you think this situation bears any resemblances to the contemporary world system?

BA: I don’t think anyone has ever read Thucydides seriously and not been tempted to draw parallels with their own times, or failed to recognize what Herodotus says about the mutability of states’ fortunes; so there are obvious ways in which the answer to this question has to be yes. This is also the kind of thing Greek historians can be tempted to play up when they are challenged to show how their subject continues to be relevant. On the other hand it is worth remembering that there are profound differences between the world of the classical city-state culture and modern international systems. A couple of those differences spring immediately to my mind. One is the existence in the modern world of nuclear weapons, with all their implications for international relations and strategy. Another is that a focus on the Greek citystates ignores the wider context of the world in which they pursued their rivalries. So for example Graham Allison’s idea of ‘Thucydides’ Trap’ has got a lot of attention. He has the present-day US in the role of fifth-century Sparta (the established power) and China in the role of Athens (the upstart). That clearly has some intuitive appeal, but it elides the importance of Persia as both an external threat and a potential source of support in Spartan-Athenian relations.

Regina Höschele EL: Could you tell us a bit about your current projects?

RH: At the moment, I am hard at work finishing a monograph on the Garland of Philip, an epigram anthology from the mid-first century AD. Philip has typically been regarded as a poor imitator of Meleager, “a second-rate dealer in second-rate materials”, as Gow & Page so charmingly put it. Since he organized his collection alphabetically (by the poems’ initial letters), scholars have dismissed its arrangement as purely mechanical. But this is not at all the case. To my mind, Philip imposed this technical constraint on himself so as to outdo Meleager: even within the framework of an alphabetical order, he managed to group poems thematically,

and his anthology was as artfully designed as that of his predecessor – at least, this is what I aim to show in my analysis of the Garland’s remains, in the hope of convincing others of its artistry (a mad undertaking, perhaps, but we’ll see...) In addition, I am particularly intrigued by the bicultural dynamics of its poems, many of which were written by Greeks in close contact with Roman patrons and the imperial household. The world of the Garland offers a fascinating glimpse into Greek attitudes towards Rome during the first centuries BC and AD. So far hardly any of its epigrams have been examined as literary artifacts in their own right (if considered at all, they have mainly been scoured for historical data). I hope that my study will help to put this all but forgotten poetic collection back on the map.

This may not be the last thing I ever write about epigrams, but after spending a good 15 years with this genre, I yearn to move on, and already have two new book projects in mind. First of all, I plan to write a monograph on ancient agalmatophilia, examining the phenomenon of statue love from a literary-cultural point of view against the backdrop of ancient ekphrastic and erotic literature.

How does sexual desire for an inanimate object relate to and differ from the usual impact that artworks, commonly praised by ancient writers for their lifelikeness, are supposed to have on their viewers?

When does the beauty of an image lead to sexual arousal, and in whom? To what extent does the ultimate unresponsiveness of the image fuel the lover's passion in a way similar to the indifference of poetic mistresses? What fascinates modern and ancient readers alike about the idea of an artist spellbound by his own creation? I really look forward to investigating this nexus between images and desire and immersing myself in the discourse surrounding statues in Antiquity and beyond. At the same time, I am toying with the idea of expanding a recent article on the obscene reception of Vergil into a book-length study.

EL: Next year you are teaching a graduate seminar on the “dirty” reception of Vergil. How did you come across this strand of reception history?

RH: Ironically, it all began with a curious instance of censorship: I had written an article on Vergil’s Eclogues and mime, in whose conclusion I referred to an epigram by Martial on a man named Maro receiving applause for his spectacularly large mentula. The editor of Vergilius deemed this highly inappropriate and urged me to cut my ending with the explanation (I quote verbatim): “Reference to Vergil’s dick would be an uncomfortable first for Vergilius”. Only after a committee of Vergilian experts had been consulted and I declared myself willing to quote the poem only in a footnote, rather than in the body of the text, and to leave the word mentula untranslated could the text be printed. This astonishing form of prudishness in connection with Vergil on the part of an academic journal of the 21st century made me think that this might be a topic well worth pursuing further (what can I say – there’s something quite tempting about the idea of shocking Vergil scholars...) When I was invited to speak at a conference in honor of my teacher and mentor Niklas Holzberg, who is not just a leading scholar of Augustan poetry but has also caused a good bit of stir in German academia by speaking frankly about ancient obscenities, I decided to look at more manifestations of “Dirty Vergil”, and discovered that there is much more material than I had imagined.

There seems to be a whole tradition of eroticizing and obscenifying Rome’s national poet, from Latin elegy and epigram, the PseudoVergilian Catalepton and Pompeian graffiti to Ausonius’ Cento Nuptialis. I really look forward to exploring these texts together with students next year.

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FACULTY FOCUS (CONTINUED) EL: You translated Aristaenetus’ Erotic Letters into English (with Peter Bing) in 2014, and Theocritus’ Idylls into German in 2016. Can you tell us about your experience translating? How does translating Greek into English differ from translating Greek into German? Are there other texts you would like to translate in the future?

RH: Translation is something that truly fascinates me, as it is not a merely a scholarly but also a literary endeavor. I deeply care about language, and have always dreamed of being a writer myself.

Honestly, I don’t know whether I’d be any good at it (I fear there might be too much critic and too little poet within me), but for the time being I find that translation is a wonderful way of engaging with language creatively. Trying to render an ancient text into a modern language, creating a version that is both faithful to the original and enjoyable to read, is a true challenge that forces you to dig deeply into a text and to reflect on the semantic nuances of your own language. When I was translating Theocritus, the meaning of a passage often seemed fairly clear to me on a first reading, but became increasingly blurry as I looked more closely at it only to find out that there is a big dispute about those lines and nobody seems to agree on what exactly they signify. So you end up poring over commentaries and hunting down articles discussing various textual difficulties so as to be able to render a verse or two somewhat more accurately – and you might still be left with the feeling that you haven’t quite grasped it. This elusiveness is frustrating and exciting at the same time. The beauty of spending so much time with a text is that it really stays with you – I don’t think there are any poems I know as intimately as I know those of Theocritus, at least for now.

You ask how German differs from English as a medium of translation. This is a really good question! I would say that both languages have distinct advantages and disadvantages vis-à-vis each other. With its free syntax and its ability to create compound words German allows you to mimic Greek much more closely.

English, on the other hand, has this incredible wealth of vocabulary, and it is wonderfully pithy. On any number of occasions I found myself using an English-German dictionary as an intermediary because all I could think of was an English expression for which no good German equivalent would come to my mind. In fact, I am translating one of my own papers into German at the moment, and have the same problem – it is funny how one seems to think differently in different languages! Of course, translating into one’s native tongue is hardly the same as translating into another foreign language, and the experience of rendering Theocritus on my own was quite different from co-authoring the Aristaenetus translation with Peter. Doing this together was exhilarating, as we would throw words and expressions back and forth between each other until we both had the feeling that we finally got it. With Aristaenetus, we also had the additional challenge (or advantage) of not having any Anglophone model, as ours is the first modern English translation.

We had a pile of other translations (into German, French, Italian and Catalan) in front of us, but were entirely free in creating our English version. With Theocritus, I did consult previous renderings into German, and when I found somebody else had struck just the right note in rendering a certain expression, it was not always easy to free myself from that in coming up with a different rendition.

Altogether I find it very important (and fun) to make ancient literature accessible to a larger audience through the medium of translation – whether it is a hitherto untranslated text or one in need of a more contemporary version (Classical texts may not age, but translations certainly do). I very much hope to translate further texts in the future. As a matter of fact, Peter and I have just been talking

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about trying our hand at Philostratus’ Imagines (last rendered into English in 1931) – stay tuned…

EL: Many of the texts you’ve written about – from the Garland of Philip, to Pankrates’ poem on Hadrian’s royal hunt, to Aristaenetus’ Erotic Letters – remain somewhat obscure, even among classicists.

What draws you to these underappreciated works?

RH: As much as I adore the canonical texts of Greco-Roman Antiquity, I’ve always been drawn to the “underdogs” of Classical literature, neglected and discredited authors, whose voices deserve to be heard. Altogether, I much prefer the subversive and irreverent to the serious, awe-inspiring and sublime (and not just when it comes to texts…). A lot has changed in our discipline over the past few decades, but it used to be very common that scholars would turn up their noses at the texts they examined out of some odd sense of scholarly duty, I imagine, not because they actually enjoyed this kind of work. When I read such sneering judgments condemning a text as trivial, derivative or in bad taste, I inevitably think to myself: Why would anybody waste their life working on something they so obviously detest? And: let’s check whether there isn’t more to this text than people have been willing to see. It’s the kind of challenge I enjoy. The corpus of texts I have worked on includes a good amount of rather obscene material, from which many scholars seem to have refrained due to sheer prudishness. I am happy to admit that I personally like dirty jokes and find the combination of obscenity with erudite allusions that one encounters in many ancient poems truly exciting. Once, when I gave a paper at Yale on the Carmina Priapea, someone in the audience remarked: “If this talk had been given in this room in the 1960s, the police would have come!” To this day, I am not sure exactly how this comment was meant, but I took it as a compliment.

What I also enjoy in investigating relatively obscure authors is the fact that one is not encumbered by an infinite amount of secondary literature. I share Callimachus’ penchant for untrodden paths, especially when it comes to scholarship (even as I almost obsessively try to read everything there is to read). It is much easier to say something novel about a text that has been widely neglected.

Of course, this liberty also comes with its own challenges, as one is rather left to one’s own devices and cannot easily find inspiration in previous studies. Even as dozens of books and hundreds of articles are written every year on a relatively small canon, there are so many texts out there waiting to be discovered. I find the idea of trying to lead some of them out of their obscurity truly exciting.

EL: Have you been reading anything for pleasure?

RH: Oh yes, it’s a rare day when I don’t read for pure pleasure. At the moment, I am working my way through a historical detective novel by Boris Akunin – reading is not quite the right word, though, as I have to look up about every other word in Russian. I am trying to teach myself the language, since it is my greatest ambition to read Dostoyevsky and other Russian novelists in the original. In the meantime, I have started on some smaller works. One of the things I love most in literature are large-scale narratives (this may be my way of compensating for thinking so much about the briefest of all genres). Last year, I finally took up Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan saga and was completely enthralled. I hadn’t read something as smart, riveting, and brilliant in a long time, and I haven’t since.

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GRADUATE STUDENT NEWS

GRADUATE STUDENT FOCUS Jesse Hill 2017-18 has been a busy, transitional year for me at the U of T and, in many ways, the most enjoyable one yet. In the past 12 months – my third year of the PhD – I’ve completed my last language exams (Italian and German), finished my coursework, and, under the supervision of Prof. Michael Dewar, begun working away at my Major Field (The Personal Voice in Late Republican Poetry). The last year has also seen me start teaching on a regular basis, something which I’ve been really enjoying.

stand-in for reproductive bodies – wombs and children – originates in our extant record with Ovid, and I demonstrate that he deploys these metaphors exclusively under conditions of intrafamilial violence and civil war. Against the backdrop of a nascent dynasty that promotes fertility among its citizens as a certain path to peace and prosperity, Ovidian viscera connect reproduction to the dissolution of civic and domestic bonds. I successfully defended my dissertation in April, and plan to expand the project into a monograph on Roman viscera.

Beyond my curricular and teaching duties, I’ve been fortunate this year to work alongside Prof. Jarret Welsh on a side project. I started off as his RA in the fall, collating 15th century manuscripts of Paulus’ epitome of Festus in connection with a larger, SSHRCfunded project. (To the uninitiated: collating is the process whereby one reads a bunch of different manuscripts of the same text, noting differences between them, with the hope of being able to establish a manuscript family tree.) We realised, though, that there was a lot more that could be said about the 15th century transmission of this text than was initially thought, and so our work on Paulus soon developed into a project in its own right. Together, we’ve written a paper arguing, contrary to received opinion, that the humanists didn’t have access to Paulus’ epitome until the 15th century, when two different versions of the text were discovered on two different occasions; all of our 15th century manuscripts of the text seem to derive from these two discoveries.

We’ve already presented this research at the most recent CAC in Calgary and I’m excited to be heading to Scotland with Prof. Welsh to speak at the Celtic Conference in Classics at St Andrews come July. This has been a really welcome project for me (and not just because of the opportunities for travel…). Although my interests are, in the first instance, the literary criticism and history of Latin poetry rather than the textual transmission of Latin grammarians, working on the latter – spending days and days reading manuscripts, seeing what kinds of error scribes make, understanding the processes of transmission that our classical texts have undergone – has definitely influenced my ideas about the former: a sense of how necessarily entangled literary and textual criticism are has been interminably and irreversibly fixed in my scholarly brain.

Caitlin Hines My research concerns the fertility politics of Augustan poetry, with current focus on violence and the female body in Ovidian mythography. My dissertation, directed by Prof. Alison Keith and titled “Ovid’s Visceral Reactions: Reproduction, Domestic Violence, and Civil War,” is a philological study of the word viscera as it operates in the Ovidian corpus. The appearance of this word as a

I was fortunate this spring to participate in the Advanced Seminar in the Humanities in Venice, a two-week program of lectures and seminars led by scholars of Classics and Assyriology. Alongside other doctoral students from across Europe and North America, I learned from Dirk Obbink about the process of editing Sappho, David Sider on extracting Homeric ethics from bardic episodes, Alessandro Schiesaro on Lucretius and apocalyptic literature, and Alessandro Barchiesi on the imperial politics of civil war poetry, among others. The program continues in the spring of 2019 with a week of presentations from the student participants, each developing a research idea with one of the faculty advisors. I will present on gendered landscapes in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, with the mentorship of Alessandro Barchiesi.

I was also lucky this year to teach Classical Literature in Translation, a 3rd year seminar for Classics students without the prerequisite of language training. I designed the course around the theme of Censorship and Exile in Ancient Rome, with an extended case study of Ovid and Augustus. We read Ovid’s Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto alongside the Ars Amatoria, examining the literary and legal circumstances that apparently led to the poet’s relegation and analyzing his poetic representations of exile. Our discussions

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GRADUATE STUDENT FOCUS (CONTINUED) explored the thorny issues of reader subjectivity, government intervention in artistic production, the legislation of morality, the difficulties of extracting truth from autobiography, and the importance of place and space to identity. This was among the most rewarding teaching experiences of my career so far – my students were careful readers, thoughtful, engaged, and willing to work through disagreements in open and respectful dialogue. We found that our discussions often resonated in productive (and sometimes painful) ways with the political and social anxieties of our modern world, and we were able to celebrate together when the City Council of Rome formally revoked Ovid’s relegation.

It is time for me to bid a bittersweet farewell to the Classics Department at the University of Toronto. I will be moving on in the fall to begin a Teacher-Scholar Postdoctoral Fellowship at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

Avete atque valete!

Naomi Neufeld Underwater Archaeology at the Anchorage of Maroni-Tsaroukkas, Cyprus

Off the south-central coastline of Cyprus lies a submerged anchorage where large stone anchors, likely dating to the Late Bronze Age, are scattered over the sea-floor.

Here I work together with Prof. Carrie Fulton and a small team of divers as we conduct an archaeological survey of the anchorage, locating and recording the anchors, blocks, and pottery sherds found on the seabed. The survey is being conducted both as a traditional diver survey, where divers swim transects and record the archaeological material using measuring tapes and photogrammetry, and as a scooter-survey, where a custom-built, computerized camera system is mounted atop a dive scooter in order to enable photogrammetry to be used continuously over large areas of the seafloor. By using these two different survey methodologies, we not only achieve better coverage of the anchorage, but examination of the data will allow for comparison between the two methods, helping us to pioneer new systems for recording archaeological material underwater using digital technologies. Moreover, our work at Maroni-Tsaroukkas will help elucidate the history of trade and coastal interactions in this area of Cyprus, which already from the Bronze Age was an important node in the trade networks of the Eastern Mediterranean, connecting Egypt, the Levant, and Anatolia.

Our day at the site begins early, as we wake up before sunrise in order to make the best of the calmer water conditions in the morning. We load our SCUBA gear into the truck and drive the short distance from the village of Kalavasos, where we are staying, to our site of Maroni-Tsaroukkas on the coast. Here we gear-up in our wetsuits, masks, and fins, strap on our SCUBA tanks, and plunge into the clear water. We spend the morning conducting the underwater survey by setting up the grid system, swimming transects, and recording the finds on the sea-floor. The wind and waves pick up on the coast by noon, making work in shallow areas difficult, so we usually wrap up our dives at this time, and head for lunch at a little restaurant in the town. We devote our afternoons to data management, uploading all our recordings to the computer, as well as refilling our air-tanks and prepping our equipment for the next day’s dives. Then we enjoy dinner in the village square, dining together with the professors and students from other institutions who are also working on archaeological sites in the area. As the sun sets, with our bellies full of delicious Cypriot food, we head to our beds early to get a full night’s sleep for the day to come.

This summer we are returning to Cyprus to complete the survey of the anchorage, as well as to determine the extent of coastal change occurring at the site from year to year. We are also introducing a third survey methodology to the project, consisting of a remotely operated vehicle with a similar camera system attached, which will further help us to develop new methods of conducting underwater archaeological surveys.

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GRADUATE NEWS Congratulations to our three MA graduates this year, Abigail Ferstman, Chris Stait, and David Sutton.

Chiara Graf and Caitlin Hines both started undergraduate reading groups this past year, one on critical theory and the Classics, and the other on Latin meter.

Fall 2017: Our graduate students enrolled in Prof. Katherine Blouin's CLA5029F seminar in Papyrology had the opportunity to see some of the ROM's papyrological collection of ostraca, papyri, and papyrus sealings. With special thanks to the ROM, Kay Sunahara and Kate Cooper.

John Fabiano was awarded a Jacoby Fellowship at the Komission für Alte Geschichte und Epigraphik in Munich for Summer 2018. In 2018-19, he will be a Crake Fellow at Mount Allison University in New Brunswick.

David Wallace-Hare has been awarded an Archaeology of Portugal Fellowship through the Archaeological Institute of America for summer research travel in 2018.

Brad Hald will be a Chancellor Jackman Graduate Fellow in the Humanities in 2018-19 at the Jackman Humanities Institute.

Spring 2018: “Ancient Drinks Cocktail Hour” at the CAC: Rachel, Chiara Graf, Drew Davis, Matt Watton, and Jesse Hill trying some ancient Graeco-Roman beer by Matt Gibbs (University of Winnipeg) brewed in collaboration with Barn Hammer Brewing Company.

On March 23, 2018, as part of the Festival Latin Grec, nearly 140 groups of readers in 25 countries gathered to read excerpts of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Organized

by Marion Durand, our own Department hosted an event to take part. Volunteer readers included undergraduate, Laura Harris.

Drew Davis won the prize for Best Graduate Paper at this year's CAC/SCEC conference, for "For Here We Have No Gentlemen: Reinterpreting the Classics at the University of Toronto (18421947)".

Congratulations to our two PhD graduates this year, John Abad and Caitlin Hines.

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CLASSICAL-THEMED DOUBLE DACTYL POEMS

THE FIDELITY OF FIDES: AUTHENTICITY IN THE CLASSICAL WORLD

by Matt Watton The double dactyl consists of two quatrains, each with three doubledactyl lines followed by a shorter dactyl-spondee pair. The two spondees rhyme. Additionally, the first line must be a nonsense phrase, the second line a proper or place name, and one other line, usually the sixth, a single doubledactylic word that has never been used before in any other double dactyl.

Higglidy Pigglidy Old Anaxagoras Placed Nous as the Helmsman to act as he would All parts and all wholes set homeomerously Made Socrates wonder But what of the good?

The Graduate Student Conference entitled "The Fidelity of Fides: Authenticity in the Classical World” took place in October 2017 and was organized by Jesse Hill, Chiara Graf, Drew Davis, and Emelen Leonard. More photos available at https://www.facebook.com/UofTClassics.

DIGITAL CLASSICS: ENCODING LATIN AND GREEK TEXTS by John Fabiano Higglidy Pigglidy Sophist Protagoras Made weaker case stronger and denied the gods Set man as the measure unphilosophic’lly no wonder dear Plato and you were at odds!

Higglidy Pigglidy U.V. Willamowitz Model for classics do you still remain Our greatest master of altertumswissenschaft But folks don’t read German so it’s all in vain

Higglidy Pigglidy Good ol’ Herodotus Egyptians and Scythians And Persians and more!

First true historian, Halicarnasian, But lied through his teeth In books 1 through 4

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In October 2017, I was given the opportunity, with the generous support of Christer Bruun and the Department of Classics, to attend a three-day EpiDoc workshop at Brown University. The workshop introduced participants to encoding inscriptions and provided the necessary tools to begin to produce digital texts and editions. Through the efforts of Boris Chrubasik and the Department of Historical Studies at UTM, I recently led a day-long workshop to share all I learned about EpiDoc with our own University of Toronto community. The workshop, entitled "Digital Classics: encoding Latin and Greek texts," took place in April 2018 and, by any measure, was a great success. It was hosted in one of UTM's active learning classrooms and all in attendance were treated to a delicious lunch. In all, the workshop brought together nearly twenty participants, representing graduate students from our own department and from the Department for the Study of Religion, post-doctoral fellows, and faculty. All were introduced to the basics of EpiDoc, including a crash course on TEI (text encoding initiative) and XML, and were given the opportunity to encode their own inscriptions.

Hopefully the workshop inspired a few to join the growing EpiDoc community and to think more about the application and use of digital texts. If not, at least no one left hungry!

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UNDERGRADUATE STUDENT NEWS

CLASSU SNAPSHOTS

Plebian IV fresh off the press.

Threatening cake cutting at CLASSU end-of-year social.

2017-2018 CLASSU Senate.

CLASSU Over this past year CLASSU has seen tremendously increased engagement and interest among students. This includes high turn-out to the two academic seminars held on the general theme of classics beyond the classics, at which our speakers were Professors Katherine Blouin and Boris Chrubasik as well as Caitlin Hines, Drew Davis, and David Wallace-Hare. Particularly exciting were two reading groups in collaboration with graduate students, a Latin metre-reading group and critical theory reading group led by Caitlin Hines and Chiara Graf respectively. Continuing on an academic vein, Volume IV of the undergraduate journal Plebeian was published, accompanied by its annual conference. Copies can be found in the department office as well as at EJ Pratt Library, where the journal is now officially catalogued in the collection. In the spring a graduate school information session took place with contribution from faculty and the GCCU. CLASSU continued to run our peer mentorship program which included a welcome tour, a couple lunches through the year, and a program information session with Prof. Eph Lytle. CLASSU also operated other academic support programs including an Anti-Calendar, syllabus and midterm banks, and a mini-library in the lounge.

A wide variety of social events also took place. We would like to thank the department for their support, especially towards the costs of publishing Plebeian, as well as all contributing faculty and graduate students. We have high hopes for the coming year and look forward to running a wide variety of engaging events and programs!

Spring 2018: Hannah Lank speaking at The Assembly of the Plebs.

Altar of CLASSU Victory cake at annual spring social.

Graduand celebration at the Departmental end-of-semester party.

2018 CLASSU Summer Senate.

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ALUMNI NOTES CONGRATULATIONS TO EMILIA A. BARBIERO After holding temporary positions at the University of Toronto, New York University and, most recently, Dartmouth College, Emilia is headed to Cincinnati in the fall to take up a tenure-track position as Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of Cincinnati. She's very excited to join UC's Department of Classics, and looks especially forward to using the Blegen Library to finish up her book, Letters in Plautus: Reading Between the Lines, and to begin a new project on the materiality of text in the Catullan corpus.

CONGRATULATIONS TO CILLIAN O’HOGAN Since graduating with a PhD in Classics in June 2012, Cillian O’Hogan has been a post-doc at the University of Waterloo, a curator at the British Library, and most recently, a visiting assistant professor at the University of British Columbia. In July 2018 he returns to the Lilian Massey Building to take up a tenure-track appointment in Medieval Latin at the Centre for Medieval Studies.

Cillian’s revised doctoral dissertation was published as Prudentius and the Landscapes of Late Antiquity (Oxford 2016), and he has published articles on a range of late antique and medieval topics. He is now working on his next monograph, a history of the book in late antiquity, funded by a SSHRC Insight Development Grant. Other ongoing projects include articles on Aldhelm and Prudentius, co-edited volumes taking cross-cultural approaches to late antiquity and the middle ages, and a translation of the poems of Dracontius (partly co-authored with A. J. Podlecki, another Toronto PhD).

Cillian and his family are delighted to be moving back to Toronto.

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CONFERENCES & WORKSHOPS

DOING CLASSICS 2: A WORKSHOP IN HISTORICAL METHODS by Boris Chrubasik

Following a public lecture at UTM on March 15, 2018, attended by close to 200 people, on the continued relevance of the Athenian historian Thucydides for 21st century audiences, Neville Morley gave a one-day graduate workshop on March 16th at UTM to over 20 students from the tri-campus departments of Classics and Study of Religion that raised bold questions concerning economic aspects of the Roman world. The two sessions combined a close reading of ancient literary sources with a discussion on if and how literary and quantitative theory is useful for the modern historian of the ancient world. After a day of lively debate, the whole workshop moved to a more convivial setting where the discussion continued. The events are part of the UTM Classics and the World Today initiative and were generously funded by the Vice-Dean Graduate, UTM.

Workshop attendees at the Cairo branch of the Egypt Exploration Society.

Daytrip to the Wadi Natrun.

ORIENTALISM, THE CLASSICS, AND EGYPT

by Katherine Blouin The UofT Classics field trip to Egypt, under the theme "Orientalism, the Classics, and Egypt", was led for the second year in a row in April 2018 by Prof. Katherine Blouin.

This time, the group was made of graduate students Willem Crispen-Frei, Giulio Leghissa, and Sean Stewart. In addition to visiting several, Pharaonic-to-Medieval sites in Cairo, the group had the opportunity to spend a day in the Wadi Natrun, where they benefitted from the hospitality, kindness, and expertise of local monks. They were also introduced to the Egyptian Museum numismatics collection by French numismatist, Thomas Faucher and spent an entire day walking through Islamic Cairo with local heritage expert Karim Badr.

The trip also coincided with the international workshop Orientalism, the Classics and Egypt II (which was co-organized by Katherine Blouin, Usama Ali Gad, and Rachel Mairs and took place on April 10, 2018 at the Cairo branch of the Egypt Exploration Society), as well as with a special event hosted by Ain Shams University the next day. More details about the workshop can be found online at https://everydayorientalism.wordpress.com/2018/03/26/orientalism-the-classics-andegypt-ii-workshop-program-and-abstracts/.

Reading an ancient papyrus of Callimachus at the Egyptian Museum.

Willem Crispen-Frei, Giulio Leghissa, and Sean Stewart at the Sphinx.

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UPCOMING EVENTS & NEWS *********************

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Graduate Student Conference, (Title TBA), will be held Spring 2019 at the Department of Classics, University of Toronto.

Details TBA on the Departmental website and Facebook page. *********************

The annual Undergraduate Student Conference, “The Assembly of the Plebs V” will be held Spring 2019 at the Department of Classics, University of Toronto.

The next Annual Meeting of the Classical Association of Canada (CAC) will be hosted by McMaster University in Hamilton, ON from May 7-9, 2019. *********************

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Archaeological Institute of America (AIA) and Society of Classical Studies (SCS) Joint Annual Meeting will be held in San Diego, CA from January 3-6, 2019.

It will be a memorable meeting with special programs in celebration of the Sesquicentennial of the SCS.

MAKE A DONATION Please consider supporting the Department of Classics and its students through the University’s online donation portal: https://donate.utoronto.ca/give/show/70 All donations of $25 or more will receive a tax receipt from the University of Toronto.

KEEP IN TOUCH Classics Alumni & Friends, be sure to get our latest news and event invitations by ensuring we have your current address and email on file. Please update your information here: http://alumni.artsci.utoronto.ca/update-your-contact-information

QUESTIONS? For more information regarding the content of this volume of CLASSICS, the Department of Classics newsletter, please contact: Seth Bernard Assistant Professor 125 Queen’s Park Toronto, ON M5S 2C7 seth.bernard@utoronto.ca (416) 978-5477 Suggestions or news to report for future issues?

Please contact us by e-mail at: chair.classics@utoronto.ca

CLASSICS | Department of Classics Newsletter SUMMER 2018 | Volume XXV