Monday 27 October 2014 at 7:30 pm
Settling the West: Comparing Ancient Greek and New World Frontiers
Professor Franco De Angelis, UBC
Europe’s
exploration and settlement of (to them) the New World in the 16th to 20th
centuries of our era resulted in a significant expansion of human experiences
with which Europeans could understand their past and imagine their futures. Ancient Greece and Rome served as a major
source of inspiration in these respects because of their importance to European
education and identity. Thus a two-way
dialogue emerged, one in which Europeans regularly made parallels between their
exploration and settlement of the New World with understanding ancient Greek
and Roman history and, vice versa, the role ancient Greece and Rome played in
providing parallels with imagining how life in the New World might one day
become. This illustrated talk will
investigate both these kinds of parallels and the motivations for them,
especially those derived from ancient Greece, as well as assessing the
distortions and possibilities raised by such parallels.
Monday 24 November 2014
The Maidens of the Erechtheion
Dr. Alexandra Lesk
This lecture will
focus on the Porch of the Maidens - the most famous feature of the Temple of
Athena Polias - the Erechtheion. Each maiden’s unique story will be told
against the backdrop of the changes experienced by the Erechtheion as a whole
from the fifth century BC to the present. Each maiden has a different story to
tell, from the one Lord Elgin’s agents removed to London and replaced with a
brick pillar to the maiden who was smashed to smithereens by Venetian cannon
fire. These ladies took on different symbolic meanings throughout the ages:
submission under the Romans, purity under the Byzantines, ill-gotten booty
under the Ottomans, and soulful sisters featuring in ghost stories of the Grand
Tourists of the 19th C. Thanks to their constant visibility on the Acropolis,
and being featured in the copy-books of neoclassical architects, the maidens of
the Erechtheion have been a part of the psyche of the West for two and a half
millennia and continue to inspire artists and architects today
