Episodes
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Myth in Film
Classical myth and film have a long history of being intertwined, as myth was made into film from the days of silent movies, and ancient texts themselves often use what we might see as ‘cinematic’ techniques when framing a scene. This lecture explores how Greek and Roman myths have appeared on...
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Greek Myth at Rome: Power
Ovid’s Metamorphoses was written during the Augustan period, and it is clear that its author was often out of tune with the political regime. This lecture explores the different ways in which the poem transforms Greek mythology to explore issues such as power, justice and censorship. Ovid’s gods...
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Greek Myth at Rome: Metamorphosis
Ovid’s Metamorphoses is one of the most significant ancient texts for the study of Greek mythology, but we should remember that this is a Roman work, which absorbs influences from the whole of the Mediterranean world. This lecture looks at the poem’s cosmogony in book and compares it to the...
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Roman Identity II: Heroines
Although Ancient Rome was clearly a patriarchal society (literally so, as the father had supreme power in the Roman household), Roman myth also features many prominent women, from the Sabine wives who intervene to end a war, to individualised women (both heroines and demonised women) who show us...
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Roman Identity I: Heroes
Rome’s mythic history is littered with heroes who exemplify positive and negative ways of behaving. Livy in particular is fond of using mythic figures as exempla in his historical work, but we see it elsewhere too, for example in poetry and in public monuments. This lecture explores the qualities...
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Rome II: Asylum: Romulus and Remus
Romulus was revered as the founding hero of Rome, later made a god, but his myth is not without ambiguity. A significant element of the city foundation story is the murder of his brother Remus, and the most common version of this myth is that Romulus himself was responsible. This lecture explores...
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Rome I: Foundation
Rome was famously founded by Romulus in 753 BCE, but that’s not the end of the story, for the Romans also traced their ancestry back to Aeneas, a survivor of the Trojan War. In this lecture and the next, we explore what these two lineages offer Rome and howRome’s first emperor, Augustus, claimed...
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Thebes II: Destruction
Incest, fratricide and patricideare central to the Theban myths explored in Athenian tragedy, particularly Sophocles’ Oedipus the King. Written during a plague at Athens, the play opens with plague at Thebes, which as Oedipus discovers, has been caused by his own unwitting murder of his father,...
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Thebes I: Foundation
Thebes, in central Greece, had its own distinctive foundation myths, which combined divine origin, autochthony and immigrant stories. There are several myths of foundation: the walls were built by sons of Zeus, while the territory was laid out by Cadmus, a refugee fromAsia Minor, who peoples…
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Founding Athens II: Ion and Origin Myths in Tragedy
Mythological stories dramatized in Athenian tragedy provide us with a good opportunity to explore how myth is used in aparticular political and social context. Dramatists choose specific mythological episodes, which make it possible to reflect on Athenian society and to question the validity of…
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Founding Athens I: Creating History
Origins of cities and peoples are an important component of Greek mythology, and were central to ancient Greeks’ conception of their own identity. The most famous Greek origin myth is that of the Athenians, who, unlike most other Greeks, thought of their ancestors as strongly connected to and…
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About this show
Geni- och succébloggaren HanaPee och popstjärnan Martin Huss hobbyfilosoferar kring LIVET på ett väldigt trivsamt sätt.
Hosted by
Dr Rhiannon Evans
Categories