Keynote Address by Peter Bing, University of Toronto, "Tombs of Poet's Minor Characters" from Friday, October 12-Saturday, October 13, 2018 in Eaton Humanities 250.
Schedule
There and Then, Here and Now (11:00 am)
鈥淭emporal Unevenness in Cicero鈥檚听De Finibus bonorum et malorum鈥� -听Andre Matlock, University of California Los Angeles
鈥淎 Time and a Place: Imagining Rome鈥檚 Legendary Past in Augustan听Poetry鈥� -听Samuel Kindick, University of Colorado Boulder
Infinity, Eternity, and Relativity (1:30 pm)
鈥淎naximander鈥檚 Conception of Time鈥� -听Andrew Hull, Northwestern University
鈥淭丑别听Timaeus听and the Elements of a Created Time鈥� -听Blythe Greene, University of California San Diego
鈥淭ime Doesn鈥檛 Matter: The Unreality and Irrelevance of Time in Lucretius鈥�听On the Nature of Things鈥� -听Amber Ace, University of Chicago
The Times They are A-Changin鈥� (3:30 pm)
鈥淭ime and Folklore in Aristotle鈥檚听History of Animals鈥� -听Kristofer Coffman, University of Minnesota Twin Cities
鈥淪easonal Time in Longus鈥� -听Elizabeth Deacon, University of Colorado Boulder
This event is sponsored by the Department of Classics, UGGS, CHA, GCAH, CWCTP, and the PFC.
Results
On Friday evening, Bing delivered a lecture titled "Tombs of Poets鈥� Minor Characters" to an audience of 35 in which he broadened his own earlier study of the memorializing impulse of Hellenistic poets by considering a set of epigrams that function as epitaphs of fictional characters. Focusing on Sappho鈥檚 Doricha, the children of Medea, and the daughters of Lykambes from Archilochus, Bing argued that the funerary epigrams of these minor characters are metafictions of the texts in which they appear. Each metafiction assumes a different memorializing form: Doricha is venerated with a real monument (i.e., the third pyramid of Giza), Medea's children are commemorated with a structure that was no longer standing but still preserved in the written and oral tradition, and the daughters of Lykambes are honored with a monument that only exists in literature. With these examples, Bing sought to reveal the different ways in which Hellenistic poets preserved and respected the poetic past.听
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