Presented by Marilynn Desmond
(English, General Literature and Rhetoric: SUNY Binghampton)

Monday, February 24th @ 5:00PM | HUMN 250

Troy was of immense importance in the dynastic politics of the Middle Ages, with all the major polities claiming their origins in a Trojan founder. The Roman de Troie (c. 1165) was a French verse romance on the matter of Troy which circulated widely in medieval French-speaking regions and survives in over sixty manuscripts and fragments (more than any other twelfth-century French text). It was translated into Latin, Demotic Greek, Italian and German, and five distinct prose “intralingual” versions were produced. In addition to these textual traditions, the Roman de Troie also generated extensive visual traditions that then migrated into other textual traditions on the matter of Troy. Prof. Desmond’s talk will focus upon five manuscripts of the Roman de Troie produced in fourteenth-century Italy which contain elaborate programs of illustration that exhibit a shared iconography entirely distinct from the visual programs in Roman de Troie manuscripts produced in the Kingdom of France. This paper will use the illustrations to explore the networks and materiality of the artistic tool-world that enabled this specialised iconography to migrate throughout the Italian peninsula, offering a distinctive interpretation of the political significance of Troy.  The event should be of interest to classicists, historians and art historians, medievalists, and those working in the Romance languages, as well as humanists in general."

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Pompeii as a Platform: The Present and Near-Term Future of Reusable Data from a Roman City

Presented by Dr. Sebastian Heath (Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York University) 

ABSTRACT: This talk reports on the work of the Pompeii Artistic Landscape Project (PALP), which was a Getty Foundation funded collaboration between the speaker and Prof. Eric Poehler of UMASS Amherst, and on the current Pompeii Linked Open Data (P-LOD) initiative, a more open-ended effort under the same direction. PALP produced a website that supports sitewide investigation and P-LOD is now focused on the long-term availability of reusable data, on developing new computational approaches to exploring that data, and on delivering new forms of public interaction with its resources. The talk will follow this same arc.

The PALP website demonstrates that applying the principles of Linked Open Data (LOD) to Pompeii enables both sitewide and detailed exploration of the contents of Pompeian wall-painting. Our goal is to make issues of association and distribution easily browsable by all. Myth, natural history, daily life and other topics can now all be explored. PALP is, however, just a website. P-LOD is engaged in delivering reusable data with a particular focus on using it in modern, low-cost computational environments that many people can access. This will be demonstrated, with an emphasis on the ability to conceive and implement new research agendas. It is also the case that change is in the air. Generative AI is an opportunity to explore new forms of interaction with large datasets.

This talk takes the point-of-view that it is archaeologists (or classicists or historians) who should be exploring these tools to see what contribution - if any - they can make. Such early - though results oriented - explorations will be shown in the context of the massive dataset that PALP and P-LOD have compiled for Pompeii.

PALP:
P-LOD:

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Sine Spoliis: The Commemoration of the Third Macedonian War through the Porticus Octavia
presented by Julius Arnold

Friday, January 17th, 2025 at 4:30 P.M.
Eaton Humanities 250

Abstract: The lost Porticus Octavia, constructed after the Third Macedonian War, remains an enigmatic monument of the Middle Roman Republic. Built to commemorate Gnaeus Octavius’ capturing of the last Macedonian king Perseus, the building has received scant attention in surviving ancient literature and modern scholarship. In this talk, I argue that the monument likely served as a display space for spoils of war taken by Lucius Aemilius Paullus, who had defeated Perseus in battle. I shed light on how Lucius Aemilius Paullus and Gnaeus Octavius collaborated to control the public memory of their military successes, situating the Porticus Octavia within the broader context of the commemoration of victories over Hellenistic kingdoms and the display of war spoils in the city of Rome.

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