Afternoon of Postgraduate Seminars in Classics

Please note room change for this week's session. 

3-3.30 pm   Chloe Thomas ‘Fourth-Century Athens at War: The Reform of the Conscription of Hoplites for Campaigns’

The fourth century BC saw Athens engage in wide-ranging reforms of its armed forces. One of the first of these reforms concerned the method of conscripting hoplites for campaigns. The old system, which dated back to the 480s, used conscription-lists, which were drawn up for each campaign on the basis of information held in the villages and city-suburbs of classical Attica. However, sometime in the 370s, the Athenians introduced a new system of conscription. Now, once they turned 18 years of age, hoplites were placed on a roster with those who were of the same age. Conscription for campaigns now consisted of different age-groups being called up for service. The purpose of this paper will be to analyse the direct changes made to the hoplite conscription process in fourth century. It will explore the major reasons why there was a pressing need for this reform. The paper will draw directly on Lysias’s For the Soldier (9) as well as Aristophanes’s Peace.

3.30-4 pm   Vasilios Comino ‘King Pyrrhus’s Coinage in the Greek West’

This seminar is focussed on the numismatic evidence, specifically on the coins minted in Southern Italy and Sicily during Pyrrhus’s expedition, between 280 and 275 BC. The seminar makes the case that the coins minted in the West indicate that Pyrrhus’s coins were intended to strengthen his political position in the eyes of the Greeks of the region. The numismatic evidence makes it clear Pyrrhus’s political intent was to further his legitimacy by enhancing his public image through highlighting his own supposed divine ancestry and using iconography that subtly reflected his achievements in the region. This is of particular interest because of the consensus of the ancient literary evidence which suggests Pyrrhus’s singular focus was warfare and that he had an aversion to most other matters of governance. Therefore, to situate accurately Pyrrhus’s kingship in its contemporary period, it is crucial to discuss what the numismatic evidence suggests about his rule and what actions Pyrrhus took to enhance his position, which is not presented in the ancient literary evidence.   

4.10-40 pm Matthew Walmsley ‘Breathing Stones: Representation and Reality in Hellenistic Statue Epigrams’

The Greek custom of carving verse inscriptions on objects has been a practice since at least the archaic age. However, by the beginning of the hellenistic period, poets were composing similar epigrams but not for inscription but to be circulated in ‘book’ form written on papyrus scrolls. While dedicatory and sepulchral objects such as statues still featured heavily in this new literary form of epigram, the epigrams themselves were removed from their unique spatial context, meaning that the reader was required to imagine the statue and to mentally reconstruct its ceremonial setting. This seminar proposes to bridge the gap between the inscribed artefact and the written page by examining realistic depictions of statues in hellenistic literary epigram. I seek to do so by investigating statue epigram’s relationship to its epigrammatic past, the communicative methods employed by the poets to unsettle and distort the reader’s sense of reality, and the extent to which epigrammatic statues are an accurate reproduction of nature. By demonstrating how hellenistic poets portrayed statues as living entities in their epigrams, this seminar offers an important contribution to how the poetic practices of animating statues developed and the enduring philosophical debate between reality and artistic representation.