The Centre hosts the following lecture: Yannis Assael (Google DeepMind), ‘Predicting the past with deep neural networks’.

The lecture will be chaired by Dirk Meyer (Queen’s).

Please register at this link (whether you are planning to attend in person or online): https://forms.gle/qrdgtwBXKnLy1Leg7

Abstract: Ancient history relies on disciplines such as epigraphy for evidence of the thought, language, society and history of past civilizations. However, over the centuries, many inscriptions have been damaged to the point of illegibility, transported far from their original location and their date of writing is steeped in uncertainty. To address these challenges we present Ithaca, a deep neural network for the textual restoration, geographical attribution and chronological attribution of ancient Greek inscriptions. The goal of this presentation is to demonstrate how recent advances in the field of Deep Learning can assist and expand a historian’s workflow, and highlight the importance of joint interdisciplinary research.

The Centre hosts the following two talks:

1. Giulia Colli (Pisa), ‘How to Rewrite Greek Tragedy: Oedipus’ parting words in the end of Euripides’ Phoenician Women’

2. Enrico Prodi (UCL), ‘Commentary by excerpts: Didymus’

The talks will be chaired by Chiara Meccariello (Exeter).

Please register at this link (whether you are planning to attend in person or online): https://forms.gle/dARYUHzX1a9iA2EU9

Abstracts:

1. Tragic endings are a very problematic issue, as our understanding of how ancient authors conceived the end of their plays rests on uncertain data and is likely to be influenced by our modern literary taste. In addition, final lines are often liable to textual corruption and omission. These objective limitations, together with the increasing awareness that the tragic texts have been widely interpolated by readers and actors, has led critics to question the authenticity of the extant endings. This critical trend has led radical intervention (e.g. Ritter expunged all of Sophocles’ endings), but tragic endings have been shown, beyond reasonable doubt, to be a favourite target of interpolators.
The finale of Euripides’ Phoenician Women has surely been tampered with additions and rewriting by ancient actors who wanted to create an intertextual as well as intervisual connection with the other famous plays by Sophocles on the Theban saga. Oedipus’ parting lines (1758-63) in particular are very similar to the last lines delivered by the chorus at the end of Oedipus the King (1523-30), which have also been suspected of interpolation. An investigation of the language, content, and dramaturgy of these closing lines will allow us to shed light on the agenda and poetics of interpolators, as well as on the relative chronology of these two texts. I will argue that Oedipus’ parting lines are likely to be the result of adaptation of Sophocles’ model to a new context, since they fit less into the dramatic action and show a systematic use of patchwork technique with less meaningful variation.

2. Didymus ‘Khalkenteros’ was one of the most prominent commentators of Greek texts in the late first century b.C. and early first a.D. Material from his commentaries survives in the scholia to many works of poetry, but a papyrus published in 1904 gives us a large chunk of a complete work: a commentary of Demosthenes. Almost half of the text consists of quotations, mostly from historical sources. The paper investigates Didymus’ use of, and explicit reflection on, excerpts.

The Centre hosts the following lecture: Mykola Tarasenko (Kyiv/Trinity College, Oxford): ‘What Can the “Greenfield Papyrus” (pLondon BM EA 10554) Tell Us about Its Owner?’

Please register at this link (whether you are planning to attend in person or online): https://forms.gle/nEye2odPFrqV3DKGA

Abstract: In this lecture I shall discuss the papyrus of the Egyptian priestess Nesi-ta-nebet-asheru (pGreenfield), pLondon BM 10554 (21–22^nd Dynasties).  The unique composition of the text and the illustrations in this roll, along with its impressive length (40.53 m), will be contextualised by different factors, such as the social rank/status of the owner, their inclination for “innovative” actions in funerary ritual that was marked on the burial goods, and the anxiety about their real and posthumous position at the end of the Dynasty and possible family fraction.

The Centre hosts the following two talks:

Benedetta Bessi (Venice/Stanford): ‘Towards a Digital Edition of the Liber insularum by Cristoforo Buondelmonti’

Joseph Mason (New College, Oxford): ‘Oral and Written Transmission in Old French Song: a reassessment’

Details will be provided soon!

The event will be hosted on Zoom: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87842150494?pwd=ZXdibzA1d3R1RG1hN3BqcWdGOXJSdz09

1. Amin Benaissa (Classics, Lady Margaret Hall): Ancient Slavery from the Perspective of the Papyri. New documents from Oxyrhynchus

After a brief introduction to the Oxyrhynchus papyri for non-specialists, this talk will discuss some documents relating to slavery recently published in vol. 86 of The Oxyrhynchus Papyri. These new texts illustrate some typical life-patterns of the enslaved: slavery from infancy, repeated sales, in some cases displacement across the Mediterranean, employment in weaving and wet-nursing, and, for the fortunate, manumission. Of particular note are two sale contracts concluded outside Egypt (one of them in Lycia in modern-day Turkey), which would have reached Oxyrhynchus along with the slaves concerned. In other sales, we encounter slaves brought from Crete, Mauretania, and Phrygia – stark examples of the deracination of slaves in the Roman world and Egypt’s integration in the Mediterranean-wide slave trade. There are also more unusual texts, such as a letter about a missing slave and a record of proceedings of an auction.

2. Katherine Olley (English, St Hilda’s College): Liminal Landscapes: Childbirth and the Uncanny in Old Norse Literature

Childbirth scenes in Old Norse literature frequently involve negotiating a liminal space, whether it be the dreamscapes of Sverris saga and Ectors saga, straddling the worlds of waking and sleeping, or the burial mounds present in Óláfs þáttr Geirstaðaálfs and Gǫngu-Hrólfs saga, which intertwine the worlds of the living and the dead. The paper explores these liminal landscapes in more depth, taking as its central focus Óláfs þáttr Geirstaðaálfs, in which a man called Hrani is visited by Óláfr Geirstaðaálfr in a dream. Óláfr Geirstaðaálfr instructs Hrani to break into Óláfr’s burial mound and take his ring, his knife and belt, and his sword. Before leaving the mound, Hrani is to cut off Óláfr’s head with the sword. He is then to take the belt to Ásta Guðbrandsdóttir, who is labouring with a difficult childbirth. When he wraps the belt around her, she will be delivered and he is to claim the honour of naming her son as a reward. Everything happens as Óláfr Geirstaðaálfr predicts and the boy, the future Saint Óláfr, is named by Hrani after Óláfr Geirstaðaálfr. By close analysis of Óláfs þáttr Geirstaðaálfs, the paper argues that Old Norse childbirth narratives are not just liminal but specifically ‘uncanny’, loosely defined as the disquieting or eerie sensation evoked by the alienation of something once familiar⁠. Recognising the uncanniness of childbirth in Old Norse literature allows us to advance beyond simplistic ‘rites of passage’ analyses to a more nuanced understanding of childbirth and its role in Old Norse literature and life.