Monday 27 January 2014 at 7:30
Children and Youth in the Spartan Mirage
Nigel Kennell
UBC Classics, Near East and Religious Studies
From Plutarch to
the movie 300, the way Spartans brought up their children has both fascinated
and appalled. In this lecture the Spartan historian Nigel Kennell will unlock
the mysteries of Spartan training to show how boys and girls were actually
educated to be members of society in one of the most powerful Greek city
states. Nigel Kennell’s research
interests include The History of Sparta, Greek Epigraphy, and Greek Civic
Culture in the Hellenistic and Roman Periods.
Monday 24 February 2014 at 7:30
Energy, Prime Movers, and Machines in the Ancient Greek
World
John P. Oleson
Department of Greek and Roman Studies
University of Victoria
In modern popular culture the ancient Greek world is often represented as a slow-moving and tradition-bound, more interested in theory and dialectic than in practical accomplishments. The ancient Romans often serve as a foil to this construct, shown as vigorous and forward-looking, and fitted out with equipment and machinery that fostered their conquest of the Mediterranean world. In fact, the Greeks were very interested in sources of energy that could be harnessed for human benefit, including inanimate prime movers, and machines of varying degrees of complexity were important to the Greek way of life. Many of the machines used by the Romans evolved from Greek innovations or inventions. In this illustrated lecture Professor Oleson reviews the literary and archaeological evidence for this neglected aspect of ancient Greek culture.
