British School at Athens

Polly Low, "Towards a new history of ancient Greek empire(s)"
2025-11-03 18:00 - 19:00 (Europe/Athens) | British School at Athens, Upper House, 52 Souedias Street, Athens, Greece
NHRF/ICS/BSA Lectures in Classics series
Professor Polly Low (Durham University), “Towards a new history of ancient Greek empire(s)”
Abstract: Can we talk of ’empire’ when studying the behaviour of Greek states in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE? Does using this terminology clarify or obscure our understanding of how states and individuals behaved, and how they understood their behaviour? These questions are not new, but they are made newly important by recent developments (in and beyond Greek history) in thinking about empires and imperialism, and particularly by current emphases on the diversity and flexibility of imperial practices, and of subject experience(s) of imperial power. This lecture will use a selection of case studies to explore the problem of identifying and analysing ’empire’ and ‘imperialism’ in Classical Greece; a particular aim of the lecture is to show how far the practices and ideologies of the fifth-century ‘Athenian Empire’ dominate not only modern but also ancient models of coercive interstate power.
Bio: Polly Low is Professor in the Department of Classics & Ancient History at Durham University (UK). Her research deals with the foreign relations of ancient Greek city states, particularly in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, historiography (especially Thucydides), and Greek epigraphy. Her publications include Interstate Relations in Classical Greece (2007), The Athenian Empire (ed., 2007), The Cambridge Companion to Thucydides (ed., 2023), as well as several contributions to the series of studies Attic Inscriptions in the UK. Her current project is a history of imperialism in the Classical Greek world.
poster image: Walls at Eleutherae (ca. 1913), BSA SPHS Image Collection (BSA SPHS 01/4365.8984)
Hybrid lecture
To attend in person in Athens, please register HERE
To attend online via Zoom webinar, please register HERE

Seeking the Divine in a Faraway Place: Western Greeks and Sanctuaries Abroad
2024-11-04 19:00 - 20:00 (Europe/Athens) | National Hellenic Research Foundation, 48, Vasileos Constantinou Ave., Athens, 11635, Greece
BSA / NHRF / ICS Autumn Lecture
Professor Judith Barringer (University of Edinburgh), “Seeking the Divine in a Faraway Place: Western Greeks and Sanctuaries Abroad”

ABSTRACT Greek colonies in Magna Graecia, founded in the eighth and seventh centuries BCE, soon established their own sanctuaries, religious practices, temples, etc. in their new communities. Yet colonial cities and individuals within them invested great quantities of effort and money to make dedications and create bonds with sanctuaries very far from their own homes, even centuries after the founding of a given colonial city. In some cases, the deities were the same as those worshipped at nearby sanctuaries, yet the dedication was destined for a sanctuary on the mainland of Greece, the Aegean islands, or Asia Minor. This talk considers the benefits accrued to both western Greek donors and the sanctuaries they patronized and will touch on colonial western Greek notions of ethnicity, self-perception, and self-representation.
BIO Judy Barringer received her PhD in Classical Archaeology from Yale University in 1990. She has taught at several colleges and universities in the USA and joined the staff at the University of Edinburgh in 2005. Her scholarly work centers on the archaeology, art, and culture of Greece, particularly the intersection between art, myth, and religion, from the Archaic through Hellenistic periods. She is especially interested in why images, particularly sculpture and vase painting, appear as they do, where images and structures are placed, and how they acquire meaning for ancient patrons and viewers from their physical and social contexts.
She has received numerous awards, including fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, a British Academy Larger Research Grant, a Senior Fellowship at the Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften in Vienna in 2011-2012, and a Marie Curie Fellowship from the Gerda Henkel Stiftung (2013-2015) at the Freie Universität in Berlin. She also was elected as a Korrespondierendes Mitglied of the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut.
Her publications concentrate on vase painting iconology, myth and religion, social history, and contextual readings of sculpture in both public sanctuaries and private contexts. Her most recent monograph is Olympia: A Cultural History (Princeton University Press, 2021), and she published a collection of essays that she co-edited with François Lissarrague: Images at the Crossroads (Edinburgh University Press, 2022). Her textbook, The Art and Archaeology of Ancient Greece (Cambridge University Press 2014) received the PROSE (Professional Scholarly Excellence) Award for the best textbook in the Arts and Humanities from the American Association of Publishers (2016) and the Bolchazy Book Award (2018). Forthcoming is a volume co-edited with Gunnel Ekroth and David Scahill, Logistics in Greek Sanctuaries: Exploring the Human Experience of Visiting the Gods (Brill). Her lecture is drawn from her current research project, for which she received another two-year scholarship from the Gerda Henkel Stiftung in 2022.

Hybrid lecture, online and in person
Livestream: https://www.youtube.com/live/6ZTdNEvLK6A

Jason König, "The Folds of Olympus: Mountains in Ancient Greek Culture and in Nineteenth-Century Travel Writing"
2023-10-16 19:00 - 20:30 (Europe/Athens) | National Hellenic Research Foundation, 48, Vasileos Constantinou Ave., Athens, 11635, Greece
NHRF/ICS/BSA Lectures in Classics series
Professor Jason König (Professor of Classics, University of St Andrews), “The Folds of Olympus: Mountains in Ancient Greek Culture and in Nineteenth-Century Travel Writing”
Abstract: The history of ancient Greek responses to mountains has been largely invisible to classical scholarship, with its tendency to focus on urban culture. This lecture aims to bring that history to life by giving attention to five separate mountains: Lykaion, Hymettus, Helikon, Parnassus and Olympus. It looks at the literary and archaeological evidence in order to explore what makes each of these mountains distinctive, while also arguing that they have a shared importance, as examples of the ancient Greek tendency to see mountains as spaces where the present and the past have a special connection with each other.
The second half of the lecture looks at the way in which those assumptions have been replicated in modern responses to the mountains of Greece, with special attention to the writing of a series of 19th-century travel writers (especially Edward Dodwell, Edward Daniel Clarke and Henry Fanshawe Tozer) who visited and wrote about these five mountains in ways that closely mirror our ancient sources. I argue that giving attention to their work, and to the mountains of Greece, can help us to rethink conventional histories of mountaineering and mountain writing in the nineteenth century.
Bio: Jason König is Professor of Classics at the University of St Andrews. He has published widely on ancient Greek and Roman culture, including 12 books and more than 50 chapters and articles. His work has focused especially on the Greek literature and culture of the Roman empire, and more recently on ancient representations of landscape and human-environment relations. His recent publications include The Folds of Olympus: Mountains in Ancient Greek and Roman Culture (Princeton University Press, 2022) (shortlisted for the London Hellenic Proze 2022) and Mountain Dialogues from Antiquity to Modernity (Bloomsbury, 2021; jointly with Dawn Hollis). He was Principal Investigator on a project funded by the Leverhulme Trust on ‘Mountains in ancient literature and culture and their postclassical reception’, 2017-2023.

Hybrid lecture, 7pm (Greece)
Auditorium ‘Leonidas Zervas’, National Hellenic Research Foundation, 48 Vasileos Constantinou Av., Athens
The lecture will be webcast live at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94BmhlMRQBc

Christy Constantakopoulou, "Gods, Slaves, Goats and Pirates in the Aegean Islands. Insular Life and Inter-island Connectivity in the Classical and Hellenistic Periods."
2020-11-09 17:00 - 18:00 (Europe/Helsinki)
Professor Christy Constantakopoulou (Birkbeck, University of London), “Gods, Slaves, Goats and Pirates in the Aegean Islands. Insular Life and Inter-island Connectivity in the Classical and Hellenistic Periods.” [Autumn Lectures in Classics]
Abstract
The lecture will explore some little-known stories of island connectivity from the Classical and early Hellenistic Aegean. The presence of many islands is a dominant feature of the Aegean Sea. The geographical landscape of the Cyclades, in particular, created the necessary context for increased maritime traffic throughout classical antiquity. Contrary to literary sources, which normally reflect elite points of view, inscriptions often reveal everyday stories about the people living in the insular landscape of Aegean Greece. I shall look at specific inscriptions that display maritime mobility and inter-island traffic between neighbouring islands in the Cyclades. These inscriptions speak of gods, slaves, goats, and pirates, all moving between islands.
Christy Constantakopoulou is Professor of Classics and Ancient history, in Birkbeck College. She is the author of The Dance of the Islands: Insularity, Networks, the Athenian Empire, and the Aegean World (OUP 2007), and Aegean Interactions: Delos and its Networks (OUP 2017). She studied in Greece and the UK.
Monday 9 November 5pm (UK) / 7pm (Greece)
Please register to participate in this event:
https://zoom.us/webinar/register/9216024856600/WN_s8iJBJ1_RyCConBDJDRM6Q
