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)
“Temporal Unevenness in Cicero’s De Finibus bonorum et malorum” - Andre Matlock, University of California Los Angeles
“A Time and a Place: Imagining Rome’s Legendary Past in Augustan Poetry” - Samuel Kindick, University of Colorado Boulder
Infinity, Eternity, and Relativity (1:30 pm)
“Anaximander’s Conception of Time” - Andrew Hull, Northwestern University
“The Timaeus and the Elements of a Created Time” - Blythe Greene, University of California San Diego
“Time Doesn’t Matter: The Unreality and Irrelevance of Time in Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things” - Amber Ace, University of Chicago
The Times They are A-Changin’ (3:30 pm)
“Time and Folklore in Aristotle’s History of Animals” - Kristofer Coffman, University of Minnesota Twin Cities
“Seasonal Time in Longus” - 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’ 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’s 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.
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