Monday 26 October 2015 at 7:30 pm
A journey through
the ruins of Ancient Abdera: Man-eating horses, bombs, and cranial surgery
Maria Papaioannou, Associate Professor in Classical Archaeology
Department of Classics and Ancient History
Director of the Centre for Hellenic Studies
University of New Brunswick
Ancient Abdera, a city little known to the western world, lies along the fertile coast of northern Greece. According to some mythical accounts it was founded by the hero Herakles, however the city’s ‘claim to fame’ was not mythical but cultural as it was once the home of the famous philosopher and mathematician Democritus, often acknowledged as the father of modern science and the atom theory. Dr. Papaioannou, who has worked at the site of Abdera for more than a decade, will take us on a tour through the ancient site as she explores the remains of houses, ship sheds, harbours, and cemeteries, and presents some of the results of her research in an attempt to reconstruct the physical environment and provide a glimpse of everyday life in this ancient city
.
Monday 30 November 2015 at 7:30pm
A Globalized
Greek World? Mainland Greece in the Hellenistic Period
Alexander McAuley
Department of
Classical, Near Eastern & Religious Studies, UBC
The campaigns of
Alexander the Great and ensuing wars among his successors, so the story goes,
forever changed the Greek world by vastly broadening its horizons, and
transplanting Greek culture into far-flung exotic locales. But what became of
those who remained behind in the Greek Mainland? How did they respond to the
diversity and plurality of this massive new Hellenistic World? This lecture
explores the Hellenistic Mainland by examining the regions of Boeotia, the
Argolid, and Euboea. Considering each on the level of local culture gives us
some measure of insight into whether the Greeks discarded their ancestral
traditions in favour of integration, or if they clung to their own ways ever
more tightly. Throughout, we shall bear in mind the relevance of this Greek experience
to our understanding of contemporary globalization. Their world, perhaps, was
not so different from our own
