Alyssa Lynn Elliot, Emory University

The religious practices of the people of Rome were a necessary part of maintaining pax deorum (the peace of the gods), which in turn maintained order, peace, and prosperity in the empire. In the wake of the crises of the third and fourth centuries CE, emperors issued edicts and instituted religious reforms requiring citizens to make sacrifices to the gods. This lecture explores the Christian responses to these required sacrifices, particularly the confessors and lapsi, and the disposition of other Christians toward them after the time of crisis had ended.

Zoom link:  https://utoronto.zoom.us/j/84589472510

Organized by Archaeological Institute of America-Ottawa. Co-sponsored by CIMS-Ottawa.

303 Paterson Hall

One of the most popular stories from ancient Greek and Roman mythology is the story of Narcissus in love with his own watery image. In the Metamorphoses, the Roman poet Ovid also includes the story of the nymph Echo’s unrequited love for Narcissus. Rejected by him, she begins to fade away until she exists only as a disembodied voice. The myth was also a popular subject of wall paintings in and around Pompeii. In this paper, I discuss the relationship between the textual and figurative representations of Echo’s voice, and I explore the aesthetic problem of painting a voice.

Zoom link: https://utoronto.zoom.us/j/86786144716

Co-sponsored by the Istituto Italiano di Cultura and the University of Toronto Department of Art History.

In the early second century CE the Roman Empire annexed the Nabataean Kingdom and transformed it into their new Province of Arabia. Immediately thereafter the Romans built a major fort on the desert trade routes next to the Nabataean town of Hawara (modern Humamya). This lecture will present archaeological evidence for the nature of the evolving relations between soldiers and civilians at this site over the next four centuries.

Barbara Reeves is an Associate Professor in Classics and Cultural Studies at Queen’s University. Her research focuses on the Roman and Nabataean Near East and particularly on the relations between soldiers and civilians. She has been excavating in Jordan since 1995 and has directed archaeological projects at Humayma and Wadi Ramm.

In person at Carleton University (Paterson 303) and online with Zoom.

Zoom link: https://carleton-ca.zoom.us/j/95800258329

The antiquities collection of the del Bufalo family was one of the largest and most influential in Rome, c. 1450-1600. Unfortunately, unlike richer contemporary collections (e.g., of the Medici or d’ Este), neither the Bufali artifacts nor their home exist today. This talk explores both the bookish and globetrotting methodologies used to reconstruct Renaissance antiquities collections which have been lost to time, in an effort to restore their extraordinary cultural legacies for future study.

Zoom link: https://utoronto.zoom.us/j/86310345964

Co-sponsored by the Istituto Italiano di Cultura Toronto, the University of Toronto Department of Italian Studies, the University of Toronto Department of Classics, the University of Toronto Department of Art History, and the University of Toronto Archaeology Centre.

The Roman Forum stood at the heart of the ancient city, replete with temples, basilicas, and numerous other buildings, both public and private. But visitors to the city in the 19th century describe it as a cow pasture, devoid of habitation. This talk will explore what happened to the Roman Forum in the centuries after the emperors moved to Constantinople, and responsibility for the upkeep of the city slowly devolved from the state to the Christian church, in the person of Rome’s bishop, the pope. What was the effect of this transformation on the physical space at the centre of the city? And how long did the Roman Forum remain in use before it fell into decay?

John Osborne is a medievalist and cultural historian, with a special focus on the art and archaeology of the cities of Rome and Venice in the period between the sixth and thirteenth centuries. His numerous publications cover topics as varied as the Roman catacombs, the fragmentary mural paintings from excavated churches such as San Clemente and S. Maria
Antiqua, the decorative program of the church of San Marco in Venice, 17th-century antiquarian drawings of medieval monuments, and the medieval understanding and use of Rome’s heritage of ancient buildings and statuary. He is also interested in problems of cultural transmission between Western Europe and Byzantium. A graduate of Carleton University, the University of Toronto, and the University of London, he has held faculty and administrative positions at the
University of Victoria (1979-2001) and Queen’s University (2001-2005), and is currently Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Carleton. Promoted to the rank of full professor in 1989, he has held visiting fellowships at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge; the Istituto Ellenico di Studi Bizantini, Venice; and the Dumbarton Oaks Center for Byzantine Studies, Washington. In 2006 he was elected as an Honorary Fellow of the British School at Rome.

The tradition of the Roman kings is firmly fixed in the canonical accounts of the early history of Rome. Although we know that much of the tradition must be invented, the processes by which this invention took place have seldom been analyzed in detail. Profesor Smith will look at what modern scholars have done with the tradition of the kings, and also will discuss how and when the tradition of Roman kingship came to be formed.

Christopher Smith was educated at Oxford University, and is Professor of Ancient History at the University of St Andrews. He is currently Director of the British School at Rome, a leading research centre for archaeology, art history, history and the fine arts, which has also been a centre for Canadian scholarship. His work embraces the archaeology of early Rome, and the traditions about the early city, and he is also the editor of a major new edition of the fragmentary Roman historians.

Organized by the Greek and Roman Studies, Department at Carleton University, in partnership with CIMS and the Archaeological Institute of America.

It is commonly accepted that the city of Florence, the cultural heart and first capital of unified Italy, was founded by Julius Caesar in the 40s B.C.E. and settled as a colony shortly afterward by Rome’s first emperor Augustus. This orthodox view of the city’s foundation by a strong imperial Rome, drawn from a fourth century Latin text, took on ideological importance in the 1940s and 1950s. However, a much earlier date for the birth of Florence is now possible to be shown. In this provocative talk drawn from his Distinguished Dissertation Award research, Dr. McKenzie Lewis draws together a variety of evidence, ranging from ancient inscriptions and Latin manuscripts to rescue excavations in Florence’s city center, to re-date Florence’s foundation.

Lecturer, Department of Classics, University of Toronto

Understanding patterns of migration and geographical mobility is as essential for the study of ancient societies as it is for contemporary ones. An awareness of such demographic patterns in the history of the Roman empire illuminates a broad spectrum of social issues, including the character of regional labor markets and economies and decisions by individual families about how best to pursue social and economic advancement. Scholarly interest in this area of Roman social history has increased in recent years, though the research needs new data-sets that allow for the systematic study of fundamental questions.

Tourists are attracted to Crete for the splendours of Minoan Knossos and other Bronze Age sites. The architecture of Roma Crete is as substantial as the earlier periods and the importance of Crete to the Roman Empire rivals the earlier periods. Dr. Harrison looks at the key sites but also presents material from sites tourists rarely see. The paper balances information with interpretation of the data and limitations of the evidence, particularly as applied to Romanization. Comparisons with Ottoman Crete/Crete during enosis with Greece are made especially in two areas: the micro-economies of thrift and the crucial influence of new technologies on culture.

Dr. Harrison first started working on Crete in 1980 as a graduate student and in 2008 was elected to the Société internationale des amis de Nikos Kazantzakis.