Department of Classics

Abstract

The recent destruction of Palmyra sent shockwaves across the globe, as the days of religious fanaticism and outbursts of iconoclasm had largely been forgotten by the collective memory. Yet, such acts of destruction have long been a point of discussion (and contention) among scholars. In the centuries following the conversion from paganism to Christianity the fate of the pagan statuary was left in the hands of a newly Christian society, and to the processes of Christianization. Processes which acted either to assimilate the statue into the newly Christian cultural milieu or destroy the statue for its pagan nature. This paper will present an overview of the various attitudes, and responses, towards pagan statuary in late antiquity, and the ways in which recent scholarship has interpreted the processes of Christianization with renewed enthusiasm. Using the Hearst Herakles as a case study for the practice of Christianization, this paper will first examine the processes of Christianization as a means of assimilation, in which the pagan statue was deliberately altered in order to remove its pagan character and make certain of its ability to function in Christian society; then examine the processes of Christianization in which the statue was destroyed for its pagan nature.

Fossils of large animals have long influenced social practices and ideologies in human societies, including the fantastic myths of giants, heroes, and gods in ancient Greece. It has been estimated that purposeful fossil collecting in Greece began in the Late Bronze Age. However, previous archaeological finds of fossils from mainland Greece were not well documented in secure contexts that dated this far back in time. Herein, we present a newly recognized fossilized astragalus bone recently found in the legacy collections of the archaeological site of Mycenae. It was originally recovered by excavations in the 1970s and recently reanalyzed at the Mycenae Museum. Our analysis explored the available evidence of the find location, the state of fossil preservation, and the species represented. The results suggest that a fossilized rhinoceros (Stephanorhinus) astragalus was collected in the past, possibly from afar. Evidence indicates it was brought to Mycenae, where it was deposited near an interesting array of artifacts in a basement storage area of the Southwest Quarter, sometime in the thirteenth century BCE. This find represents the earliest secure evidence of large animal fossil use by people in mainland Greece, dating to the Late Bronze Age.

This is a study whose main sources are archival, principally Edgar J. Goodspeed’s “Student Travel Letters” from 1899–1900. These letters home recount Goodspeed’s daily and sometimes hourly activities during nearly two years abroad, in continental Europe, England, Egypt, and the Holy Land, in pursuit of scholarly seasoning. The book’s focus is on his engagement with the newly emergent field of papyrology—the decipherment and study of the ancient Greek manuscripts then being discovered in Egypt. The letters allow for a tracking of this engagement in far greater depth than that allotted in his 1953 autobiography, As I Remember, or in his 90-page unpublished memoir, “Abroad in the Nineties,” filling in some apparently intentional gaps, casting doubt on some of his later self-assessments but putting much additional substance to the claim that he was indeed “America’s First Papyrologist.” The result, part biography, part travelogue, part diary, part academic history, is a description of Goodspeed’s progress, beginning with his enthusiastic commitment to the fledgling field in the late 1890s, ending with his abandonment of it in the early 1900s, possibly a result of his complicated dealings with Oxford papyrologist Bernard P. Grenfell in the fateful summer of 1900. Along the way the book introduces the reader to the world of papyrology in its early days, but it is mainly an account of one budding scholar’s experiences in pursuit of recognition in that subject, a story that has its own complications, narrative arc, and human interest.

This article presents three unpublished Hellenistic inscriptions from the sanctuary of Poseidon in Kalaureia (modern Poros): two found during archaeological excavations on the site and one recorded in a letter that was once part of Ioannis Kapodistrias’ official correspondence. All three inscriptions were dedicatory and carved on bases supporting portrait statues. Interestingly, they were offered to Poseidon by members of a single family already known from other documents in the Kalaureian epigraphic corpus. Remarkably, eight out of the 18 inscriptions discovered in Kalaureia make repeated references to men and women of this very family, which appears to have materially dominated Poseidon’s temenos and its environs during the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC through the careful placement of portraits of its members. Most of these statues were conspicuously placed by the entrance to the sanctuary, though at least one of them was erected inside of the god’s temple. In our article, we present in detail the three new inscriptions, one of them an epigram, and attempt an analysis of the religious behaviour of this prominent local family against the background of contemporary sociopolitical developments