Please be sure to save the date for our second Furst Forum talk of the semester. Professor Janet Downie will deliver a paper on “The City as Material Object in Aelius Aristides’ Smyrna Orations”, Thursday November 19 at 2 pm in Donovan Lounge, Greenlaw Hall. Light refreshments will be served.
Professor Downie’s talk focuses on five orations on the city of Smyrna, in the Roman East, from the second century CE. In the context of the ancient rhetorical tradition, these pieces are remarkable for their persistent focus on the material substance of the city—to the near exclusion of its human virtues, its architectural features, its history or mythology. In this paper Professor Downie discusses the intellectual and political context for Aristides’ unusual perspective on the city, and hopes to stimulate conversation about the symbolic and the material city in other literatures.
Janet Downie is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Classics at UNC-Chapel Hill.