Meggie Macdonald

Of the two conferences I attended this year during my Masters degree – the “After the Fall” Graduate History Symposium at the University of Toronto, and the New Frontiers Graduate History Conference at York University – I believe, in retrospect, that I enjoyed the UofT Conference much more. However, this is only because New Frontiers fell on the last weekend of York’s Reading Week and I had several assignments that had deadlines coming up quickly.

The two conferences were almost perfectly juxtaposed to one another: structure versus flexibility. UofT’s conference organizers were incredibly astute, planning in advance for every contigency that came up. York, again partly because as a volunteer at the registration desk I saw more of the behind-the-scenes panic, seemed more haphazard.

And yet, at York I found myself listening for euphony in the presenters’ scholarly vocabulary but not actually listening to what they were saying, at least not without effort. I think the fact that both conferences were based in History departments and not in Classics made the subject matter less accessible for me. York also demonstrated a general and undirected enthusiasm for history.

UofT was clearly much more a case of a recognized need for social networking and elements of career ambitions. UofT was also much more eclectic – there were not as many participants and so the sessions had to accomodate people over subject matter. York’s conference planners seemed to have no problem with the eclectic nature of their conference and was able to avoid resistence to it, for example by having a moderator instead of a discussant.

And yet, I was much more impressed with UofT’s conference. There was a degree of professionalism there that I was expecting and was not disappointed by. It was what I was expecting a conference would be like, even though I had hoped it would be more scholarly than it was (due to the varied subject matter). Because the surprise was not in the structure of the conference but in the lack of serious scholarly discussion, I have something to look forward to when planning my next conference application.

It was a very obvious stepping stone at UofT, whereas York felt more like required participation because of my affiliation there. Perhaps that can sum up, to a very basic extent, how my Masters degree will measure up to the BA (honours) that I received from the University of Toronto.

This afternoon I attended a lecture by Stephen Dyson on archaeology and Italian national identity at York University, sponsored through the History, Humanities, and Classics Departments. I was almost entirely unfamiliar with Dyson’s work before today and was surprised that none of his books had ever presented themselves in my research before. There was an element of archaeological study (and historical inquiry) that I had not been aware of, and hope to have the chance in the near future to read some of his major publications.

This particular lecture dealt with the history of Classical archaeology in Rome from the fall of the western empire to the present day and how that reflected or was made to reflect current nationalistic ideology in Italy. Truly archaeology was a political weapon.

He began with the Ara Pacis in its new building, designed by California architect Richard Meyer, and opened in the recent past. Professor Dyson’s dislike for the building was not an unusual sentiment among the men and women present at the lecture, but he was careful to give reasons for his dislike, however personal they might be. He continued from there back to the Middle Ages and the early Renaissance and outline what the city looked like in these eras – basically a papal village surrounded by farmland and villa estates, which came close enough to the heart of the old city that they were built on several of the Seven Hills.

It was not until the unification of Italy in 1870 that excavations within the city itself really started to take off. Rome was now the centre of a bureaucratic state and new urban expansion began for the first time since the age of Empire. The city itself was overwhelmingly papal, but the newly formed Italian nation was decidedly secular. It was not until Mussolini that some kind of reconciliation would occur between the Vatican and the rest of the country.

Jumping ahead to Mussolini in the 1920s, I was incredibly surprised that much of the city that I recognized from pictures and topographical maps as the city of Rome was actually developed by the fascist leader in the 1920s and 1930s. Particularly, there are three major monuments of the city that bear the sometimes irreconcilable stamp of Italian fascism.

To accomodate a very visible urban parade route, a swath of road was cut out of the middle of the city between the Colosseum and the Piazza and Palatia Venetia, drawing crowds from the ancient world to the monument of Victor Emmanuel to hear Mussolini shout from his balcony. With the Roman Forum to the right and the Fora of the Caesars to the left, the route was unabashedly symbolic.

Secondly, the Mausoleum of Augustus, that had served as a bull-fighting ring and a lavish concert hall, was restored to its original brick and had a piazza built around it, again cut right out of residential sections of the city. This site has been left to itself since then, and much needs to be done to make it a safer part of the city as well as a historical attraction. Mussolini drew links between his identity and purpose within Italian nationalism and that of Augustus, the peace-maker and protector of law and order.

The third major monument is, of course, the Ara Pacis itself. Reassembled from pieces strewn across the urban landscape, the Ara Pacis has been housed in two different buildings in the twentieth century, with the Res Gestae available for perusal close by. Not surprisingly, at the time Mussolini was using archaeology for political and ideological ends, there was great support for what he was doing within Italy. Outcries about the nature of fascist archaeology of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries did not arise until the 1970s and 1980s when popular politics shifted to the left. The search for great buildings and inscriptions was considered buffoonery and the need for closer attention paid to the Roman proletariate and to daily life began to take hold in the city. There was also a desire to research artifacts OTHER than early imperial Roman pieces, and consideration for Late Antique and Medieval excavations also developed.

When the newest architect in Rome, Richard Meyer, constructed a new building to house the Ara Pacis, he wanted to restore Rome as a “centre of active culture” once again. Professor Dyson mentioned quite plainly that, besides Meyer’s design, there is remarkably little modern architecture in the city of Rome. There has continued to be strong debate about the aesthetic value of Meyer’s product, and there was no irony lost when the building opened shortly after the Iraq War got under way. Such “neo-imperialist architecture” is no longer appreciated in contemporary Italy.

I really enjoyed Professor Dyson’s lecture. It was informal but not uninformed, relaxed but
wonderfully detailed. His style was blunt, light-hearted, and sophisticated, something I always appreciate being in the presence of. Many thanks to JS Perry, Matthew Clark, Steve Mason (PACE project), and the head of the York Department of History for allowing us to learn from Professor Dyson!

The first weekend in November, I had the pleasure to attend the Fifth Annual Leventis conference at the University of Edinburgh where the chosen topic for discussion were the Gods of Ancient Greece. Due to scheduling conflicts, I was only able to attend the Saturday lectures; and yet, I found myself deliciously engaged.

The first presentation by Ohio State’s Sarah Johnston on Signs of the Gods investigated divination in Ancient Greece using three sources: the Magical Papyri (PGM and PDM), the Chaldean Oracles, and the Egyptian Mysteries. Using each of these, Dr. Johnston discussed the power held by the god and by the magician where, although the god was seemingly calling the shots, it was the magician who could predict, expect, and control the ways in which the deities manifested themselves. What I found stunningly implicit in her presentation was the ways in which ancient Greek divination and its purposes so closely resembles Christian spiritualism. That the presence of a god purified the soul, that during “photogogia” the god manifested as light – in a bowl of water, in a lamp, etc. – that magicians were always wary of “false prophets” and devised methods of identifying true gods; all these encounters were intended to bring the god itself into the physical presence of the magician. Such an ecstatic event was something often yearned for by Christian saints and religious officials, but also by everyday people: nuns, monks, and peasants.

Dr. Johnston also talked about a crisis of truth at one point in the history of Greek divination (although she did not give a precise date for this crisis). When not only gods but othere diviners could deceive the magician doing the spell, there developed a need and a desire for expected forms of divine manifestation. This was the result of an increased interest in and fear of “daemones”, representing the existence of different levels of divinity, and thus of different levels of deception. Dr. Johnston asks a valid question: who did these magicians think they were that they could discern thruth from deception?Most by this point had been initiated into the various mysteries that were active in Greece and helpd privileged positions wherein they had access to inner sanctuaries and temples that were heavily invested with spiritual significance.

This gradual transition into a semi-elite divinatory caste, a priestly caste if you will, acknowledges both the evolutionary nature of human spiritualism and one possible route by which Christianity developed into the powerhouse of the Middle Ages as it did.

I was incredibly impressed with Dr. Johnston’s presentation style. She was both subtle and accessible with a topic that I was entirely unfamiliar with, outside of generic textbook identifications, and it made me consider a great deal more in regards to the rituals of religions I was familiar with in an attempt to understand their origins.

The second speaker of the morning was Stella Georgoudi from l’Universite de Paris, a tiny lady with the rare and cherished ability to get right to the point. Her presentation on “Sacrificing to the Gods: Ancient Evidence and Modern Interpretations” drew attention to the assertion in scholarship of guilt involved in animal sacrifice. References to the need for the animal to nod its head in ascent was interpreted as permission for the sacrifice to be held and vindication by the sacrificers that the animal had died willingly. Dr. Georgoudi immediately brushes this notion aside with some well-aimed comments about the lack of any concrete evidence that guilt over the murder of the sacrificial victim existed at all. Instead, she offers the interpretation that sacrificial ritual was about the willingness of the god to the accept the offering and not about guilt over killing a living thing. She believes that the “free will” of the animal, acknowledged through the nodding of the head, was directed at the gods, and is not an issue related to the human sacrificers.

Her very direct observation that guilt over sacrifice is a modern anachronism and not grounded in the available evidence is quite valid. I have come up against such overly moralizing scholarship in my own research on gladiators and have often found myself irritated at such modern western enlightenment ethics. And yet, Dr. Georgoudi was neither scathing nor condemning of the work of these other scholars; she merely offered what in her opinion was a much more feasible option. This munificence and scholarly professionalism are things I still need to learn.

The third speaker, Anja Klochner from Giessen, took archaeological depictions of epiphany and examined them through the interpretation of symbolic and iconographic elements on vases and reliefs. Here the morning’s associations with Christian spiritualism turned sharply away from the comparative as Dr. Klochner first noted that Greeks felt neither love nor joy for their gods but fear. This fear is shown from the leaning back of the upper body in the presence of a god. She also noted that it is usually women who show an overt emotional reaction and that, as a result, thsi can be identified as a potential iconographic element.

This raised the issue of gender reactions versus human reactions to epiphany. The manner of veneration depends on gender, age, social status, and so on. Dr. Klochner also asks if men, who stand upright and show dignified respect for the god, are in fear of him/her or feel an emotional intimacy with the god.

She went on to describe several other unique iconographic elements in archaeological remains, including divine care represented when a god touches a man, the frequent examples of Aesclepius depicted in the presence of his family and wearing Athenian clothes (something particularly unusual outside of healing cults), and images of the heroic couple banqueting. In all instances, however, the god is depicted as separate and distinct from the humans in the scene, either by their relative size or by the use of dividing architectural elements.

Dr. Klochner’s presentation was thought-provoking, not least because her perspective was refreshingly non-literary. Archaeology has always held that fascination for me because it takes its practitioners right to what the creator of an object thought; it is intentions they are interpreting rather than text. I am sure that other archaeologists and scholars will disagree with Dr. Klochner’s conclusions, and that is of course their prerogative, but her interpretations can stand quite comfortably on their own, in the humble opinion of this amateur.

In the second half of the morning, after a short coffee break and chat with Andrew Erskine (the conference organizer and my potential doctoral supervisor) and Calum MacIver (one of the most pleasant senior PhD students I have ever met), the schedule began again with Ken Lapatin from the J.Paul Getty Museum. Admittedly, I found his presentation fascinating for all the reasons he declined to go into. One of his life-long curiosities is apparently krys-elephantine statuary, and I should look for a book of his on the topic, and he spoke for a short time on the competition between city states in the creation of these mighty gold and ivory statues. Again, for someone who is not intimately familiar with the entire corpus of ancient Greek textual fragments, the existence of more than two of these statues (being the Athena Parthenos in Athens and the Zeus at Olympia) came as a wonderful shock. Dr. Lapatin’s reference to a statues of Athena, begun at Megara but never completed, standing half finished for hundreds of years, was enthralling. I was especially overjoyed to learn that this statue, existing well into the Roman occupation of Greece, garnered acknowledgement on the obverse side of a Roman coin of approximately the second century.

I simply must find a text that describes in detail the histories of these several statues, and see also about identifying the coin Dr. Lapatin spoke of with the Megarian Athena. This is a topic I was happy to have introduced to me by an enthusiastic expert and I will enjoy pursuing it further.

The final speaker of the morning was Tom Carpenter, also from Ohio State, who discussed Greek Gods in Apulian imagery. I found this an interesting geographical choice, particularly when Dr. Carpenter mentioned the sophisticated intellectual knowledge of Greek myths necessary for the highly symbolic representations on Apulian red-figure wares.

He also identifies a regularly occuring divine group, consisting of (from left to right), Apollo, Artemis, Athena in the centre, Aphrodite, and Eros. I have included an example of this group that I photographed at the British Museum after the conference. Occasionally, Poseidon is on the far right, and there are also instances of Nike. He also notes that the krater, upon which much of these representations exist, was a vessel favoured in Apulia not Greece and so this sophisticated mythological knowledge was intended for the people on the Italian peninsula and not for export.

Dionysus is a frequent figure, despite the use of these vases as funerary pieces, alluding to a possible Apulian understanding of the god in a funerary context, separate from the god of wine and theatre recognized in mainland Greece. There are often depictions of Dionysus as a nude male youth, identifiable only by the northex (a flowering fennel stalk) and the presence of a satyr. Dr. Carpenter suggests that this may simultaneously represent the god and the deceased youth for whom the funerary vessel was made.

I was well aware of the extensive interest in Apulia for the study of Greek culture and of the 1939 study of Taranto that is constantly being explored. And yet, this one particular example of Dionysus brought to light a good deal of what must undoubtedly appeal to scholars of the subject: a unique perspective for interpretation, a probe into the depths of Greek culture, and an example of the incredible creativity of a people when examining their own cultural traditions.

I was incredibly impressed with the intellectualism and topical variety of the conference and wish to express my thanks to Andrew Erskine for inviting me to attend. Such a production as this has made me all the more impressed with the University of Edinburgh and has further heightened my desire to one day be a doctoral student there. Kudos!