If you’d like to be on email lists to receive regular events announcements,
please email Departmental Administrative Assistant Kathy Fox at kfox@midway.uchicago.edu.

New Hires | George B. Walsh Lecture | Conferences

New Hires

Alain Bresson has been appointed Professor in the Classics Department.  Before coming to Chicago, Bresson had been Professor at the University of Bordeaux for thirteen years, a visiting professor at Hamburg (2000) and Chicago (2005) and a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (2001).  He has edited five volumes of collected essays and one volume of Greek inscriptions.  He is author of some seventy articles, dedicated primarily to the history of Rhodes and Asia Minor: to the anthropology and above all to the economy of ancient Greece, which today constitutes his principle field of research.  He is the author of “La cité marchande” (2000) and “L'économie de la Grèce des les cités (fin VIe - Ier siècle a.C.)” (2007).  He will begin teaching in the winter quarter of 2008.

George B. Walsh Lecture

Denis Feeney, Professor of Classics and Giger Professor of Latin at Princeton University, has been selected to be the 2007 Walsh Memorial Lecturer and will be speaking on October 26th 2007 at 4pm. "Crediting Pseudolus: trust, credit, and belief in Plautus' Pseudolus"

Professor Feeney, a native New Zealander, received the BA from the University of Auckland in 1976 and hisD.Phil. from Oxford in 1982. Professor Feeney teaches in the area of Latin poetry in particular, and has published two highly regarded books on the interaction between Roman literature and religion (The Gods in Epic; Literature and Religion at Rome). As Julia Haig Gaisser wrote of the former in the BMCR, the six chapters on Apollonius, Naevius and Ennius, Vergil, Ovid, Lucan and Silius Italicus, Valerius Flaccus and Statius let readers “see each poem both in its place in the tradition and in a kind of dialogue with the others on essential topics such as: the authority of the narrator, Herakles/ Hercules as the bridge between human and divine...and the epic as the arena for the fulfillment or accomplishment of divine will.” Feeney was the Sather Lecturer at Berkeley in 2004, where he spoke on "Charts of Roman Time: The Uses of Time in the Formation of Roman Culture,” and he is currently at work on a book on this topic.

List of previous Walsh Lecturers

Conferences

An International Conference on

“The Centrality of Animal Sacrifice in Ancient Greek Religion:
Ancient Reality or Modern Construct?”

April 11-13, 2008

at the Franke Institute for the Humanities
at the University of Chicago

Organized by Chris Faraone (Classics), Bruce Lincoln (History) and Fred Naiden (UNC) as the annual meeting of the Mid-Western Consortium on Ancient Religion.

The two giants of the post World War study of Greek Religion are without a doubt Walter Burkert and the late J.P. Vernant.  Each of them argued that animal sacrifice was the most important ancient Greek ritual and the one that has the most to tell us about ancient Greek culture.  In Homo Necans (1972) Burkert focused almost exclusively on the act of killing the animal in a sacrifice, which (he argued) was the survival of a Neolithic hunting ritual expressing grief over the animal’s demise. His book, which highlighted texts and stories from Greek tragedy, transformed the modern interpretation of animal sacrifice. Vernant, on the other hand, virtually ignored the act of killing in The Cuisine of Sacrifice (1989), an equally influential book published with his colleague Marcel Detienne. They focused on the next stage of the ritual: the division, cooking and eating of the meat that was produced by the sacrifice.  The central texts were not Greek tragedy, but Hesiod’s versions of the Prometheus story, which explain the division of body parts between the gods and their human worshippers, and comic accounts or enactments of sacrificial cooking and eating. With the theme of cooking and eating came a sociological orientation derived from the work of Emile Durkheim, one contrasting with Burkert’s anthropological approach. There was also a contrast of tone. For Burkert, animal sacrifice was a tragic deception. For Vernant and Detienne, it was a comedy of errors. Where Burkert discerned violence, the French discerned the minimization of violence.  Both the German and French schools, however, do share some important assumptions: (i) the exceptionality of animal sacrifice in ancient Greek religion -- it is qualitatively different from and more important than other forms of sacrifice and ritual; and (ii) the importance of animal sacrifice (and the meal it created) for male bonding, group formation and self-definition. 

Recent work around the edges of these two paradigms suggests that a shift may be in the offing.  In the case of the French school, for example, much emphasis was placed on Homeric and especially Hesiodic descriptions of the division of the sacrificial animal into two portions: the useless fat and bones for the gods and the valuable meat and innards for mortals.  Recent osteological analysis from Isthmia and elsewhere suggests, however, that contrary to Hesiod’s foundation story the forequarters of the animal were not part of the sacrificial meal.  In the case of the German school, archaeological evidence has intervened in a different way: nearly all of the Neolithic evidence upon which Burkert built his theory has been questioned or dismissed and scholars are increasingly restive that his primary source for guilt-ridden sacrifice -- the Bouphonia at Athens -- is both idiosyncratic and heavily influenced by later Pythagorean and vegetarian concerns. Both schools, moreover, assumed that the sacrificial animal consented to being sacrificed, an important feature of Burkert’s notion of deception on the one hand and of the French notion of minimized violence on the other, yet this assumption has come under attack in recent or forthcoming publications in both France and England.

This conference aims to examine the problem of Greek animal sacrifice from a number of different perspectives.  First comes an introductory question: how can recent work and the established paradigms be synthesized? Next come deeper questions about assumptions. Is Greek animal sacrifice both central and distinctive, as now thought? How does it compare with other oblations to the gods and also to heroes? Does it play a similarly central and crucial role in the consciousness of other cultures with which the Greek shares Indo-European background (e.g. Persian and Roman) or proximity (e.g. Phoenicians or Anatolians)?  Did the pre-Greek Minoans or the proto-Greek Myceneans share this fascination with sacrifice?  There are also important questions about types of evidence.  Since Burkert, Vernant and Detienne focused almost entirely on the literary evidence – Homer and Hesiod, Greek tragedy and comedy -- we are impelled to ask whether we find the same primal focus on animal sacrifice in visual representations as well, both on public monuments and on smaller, household artifacts.  Finally, there are important historiographical questions to be asked about twentieth-century development of the idea of the exceptionality of animal sacrifice in the Greek world.

Presentations will include:

Bettina Arnold: “Beasts of the Forest and Beasts of the Field: Animal Sacrifice in Pre-Roman Iron Age Europe."

Jas Elsner:  “Images of Sacrifice in the Late Roman Period”

Fritz Graf: “Violent Origins, Violent Debates?  Girard, Burkert, Vernant”

Sarah Johnston: "Demeter Winks: Agriculture, Wild Women and Sacrifice."

Bruce Lincoln: “From Bergaigne to Meuli:  How Animal Sacrifice became a Hot Topic”

Carolina Lopez Ruiz: “A Comparative Approach to Sacrifice: The Case of Ugaritic and Mycenean Religions”

Nanno Marinatos: "Minoan and Mycenaean Sacrifice in the Second Millennium BCE: The Suffering Animal and its Killer."

Fred Naiden: “Self-Interest as an Aspect of Greek Sacrifice”

Richard Neer: "Alkamanes' Prokne and Itys and the Politics of Violence."

James Redfield: “Animal Sacrifice and Comedy”

John Scheid: “Roman Sacrifice and the System of Being”

E. Teeter: “Animals and Other Sacrificial Offerings in Ancient Egypt

Roundtable Participants include: C. Ando, D. Collins, C.A. Faraone, M. Gaifman, E. Mayer, I. Moyer, S. Palmie and D. Schloen.

top