CASA Northern Branch Meeting at UNISA [2013]
Date and Time:
14 September 2013, 09:00 – 13:00
Venue:
Kopanong Hall, Room 10-24, Theo van Wijk Building, UNISA
Programme:
08:30 – 09:00
Arrival, coffee and tea
09:00 – 09:15
Welcoming and Introduction
09:15 – 09:45
Paper 1:
Claude F. Heyman (Unisa): ‘Scilicet horrores putares’:
Opposition to same-sex marriage in the Early Empire.
09:45 – 10:15
Paper 2:
Richard J. Evans (Cardiff/Unisa):The reception of time and place
- Sybaris and Syracuse in ancient literature.
10:15 – 10:30
Comfort break
10:30 – 11:00
Paper 3:
Luca di Campobianco (UJ): The body of the hero: a
metaphorical place for struggle.
11:00 – 11:30
Paper 4:
Dylan Futter (Wits): Self-refutation in Plato’s Theaetetus.
11:30 – 12:15
CASA Northern Branch meeting
12:15 – 13:00
Light lunch
Chair: Johan Steenkamp (NWU)
Abstracts of papers:
1. ‘Scilicet horrores putares’: Opposition to same-sex marriage in the Early Empire.
Claude F. Heyman
The references as given in Martial, Juvenal and Suetonius to marriages between men in the Early
Empire are discussed. It is contended that though these must have had real-life referents, their only
manifestations were either parodic or decadent. Two fundamental problems with male same-sex
marriages are outlined by them: the subjection of the freeborn male, and the lack of procreative
dynastic stability. These problems would have made it impossible for same-sex marriage to be
conceivable as a real part of Roman society.
2. The reception of time and place - Sybaris and Syracuse in ancient literature.
Richard J. Evans
Reception studies have a tendency to focus on literature and the way this is admitted into the
current corpus or the ways in which the ancient has influenced, or interacted with, the modern. Less
attention has perhaps been given to the reception of artefacts in modern thought, and still less the
reception of an ancient site. It is certainly true that Rome, Athens and other major cities of the
Mediterranean have evoked their fair share of comment and provide the backdrop to much
contemporary literature. Some places remain largely ignored. The reason for this lies in a perceived
lack of material on which to draw.
A reception of Sybaris and Syracuse is however not only possible but rewarding since two major
ancient writers dwell on one or both of these cities. My attention here is therefore to discuss the
value of the literary evidence found in Athenaeus’ Deipnosophistae and in Cicero’s orations in
Verrem.
Furthermore, I shall argue that a modern reception of Sybaris and Syracuse has been guided by the
characterisation of the places in the two main sources, but that this was distorted through the
reliance placed by Athenaeus and Cicero on earlier writers they employed. Hence the main point in
this discussion: that in a civilisation which spanned a millennium reception of a place could be
affected in time by prevailing opinions and judgements which in due course produce a further layer
inhibiting our ability to discover the truth.
3. The body of the hero: a metaphorical place for struggle.
Dott.di Campobianco
Following the footsteps of Lucian’s Hellenistic enquiry after the hero’s true ontological identity
(LUC.Dial. Mort.3.10; 11.6), in this talk I wish to read the main references to Achilles’ birth(APOLL.
RHOD.4.869-79; APOLL. 3.13) through a semiotic angle, interpreting the hero as ametaphorical place
used by myth so as to reason in tangible terms on the ever on-going strugglebetween the opposite
destines of life and death.
According to these premises, I wish to interpret Achilles’ paradigmatic heroic figure byunderscoring
his nature of σύνθετος, and stressing his function as a cultural construction defined byhybridism
whose body is used to force into cohabitation the contradictory natures of man and god,brought to
him by his double heritage. By means of Achilles, myth can therefore set a struggle forcoherence on
the stage: relations and dynamics between the two natures are exploited and exploredon the living
field of his body, as both of them are described trying to overcome each other andbecome thewhole
of the hero’s heritage and reality. As the fight ends, Achilles is used again bymyth as a general
exemplum of the human condition, shedding light on man’s physiology and on thereasons behind his
destiny of death.
Finally, I would like to stress how Greek myth, perhaps mirroring its key role as carrier of genes in
Greek society, chooses to focus the narration of this struggle on blood. This proves to be a truly
Greek feature, for a comparison with the sources recounting the birth of Achilles’s
Romancounterpart Deimophon (APOLL. 1.1.5; HYG.Fab.147) shows an interesting cultural shift, as
mythseems to adjust its language to Latin culture and focus on milk.
4. Self-refutation in Plato’s Theaetetus
Dylan Futter (Wits)
Much scholarly attention has been focussed on the validity of Socrates’ refutation of Protagoras’s
relativism at Theaetetus 171a. In this paper, I argue that concentration on formal logical questions
has distracted attention from the more fundamental self-refutation contained in the drama of the
dialogue. On this account, Plato shows that Protagoras’s relativism is pragmatically rather than
logically self-refuting: it is incompatible with Protagoras’s attempt to defend it.