The
Politics of Fatness in Archaic Greece
Dr. Emily
Varto, Associate Professor
Department
of Classics, Dalhousie University
This
talk explores how modern narratives that imbue fatness with personal and
communal ethical significance compare to ancient narratives of fatness,
particularly in archaic Greece politics. Through examining art and poetry, it
explores how fatness was not exactly a marker of elite status, but was a
metaphor of the abuse of status with economic, social, and ethical consequences
for family, community, and state. Although elitism was central to the
significance of fatness in archaic Greece, so were ideas about uncontrollable
appetite, lack of restraint, and communal harm familiar to us from modern
narratives about lower socio-economic classes.
Monday
27 February, 2017 at 7:30 pm
The
Silent Grandeur of Cyrene, a Greek City in Libya
Gerald Schaus, Professor Emeritus
Wilfred Laurier University
In
2007. Col. Gaddaffi’s son, Saif, announced a $2 billion plan to turn the
ancient Greek city of Cyrene, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, into a popular
destination for eco-tourism. Today, the city stands largely deserted in a
struggling Libya, despite the grandeur of its monuments, built originally by
Greeks from the Aegean islands, and re-built by Italian archaeologists in the
20th century. The temple of Zeus was as large as the Parthenon; the sanctuary
of Apollo was home to a gushing spring of water “where the heavens had a hole”,
the sanctuary of Demeter reflected the bounty of the fertile land, and people,
especially its rulers, became wonderfully wealthy from their harvest of a wild
miracle plant called silphium, from which the ancients made medicines of many
kinds before it became extinct.
