[Usyd_Classics_Events] Reminder: USYD Classics and Ancient History Seminar Series : Sept 19, Connor Wood

[Ben Brown]

 Dear Friends of Classics and Ancient History,



You are cordially invited to the sixth Classics and Ancient History research seminar of semester 2, 2024.

Thursday September 19, 4pm AEST (UTC+10), Vere Gordon Childe Centre Boardroom and Zoom: https://uni-sydney.zoom.us/j/82326237855 



Connor Purcell Wood (University of Cambridge)


Canonicity and Society: The case of early Greek catalogue poetry



Abstract:

This paper will trace the evolution of a fragmentary and little-loved subgenre of early Greek epic: the catalogic and antiquarian epics, often anonymous, that told epichoric versions of myths to legitimize local claims to power and divine descent. Seeking to overcome modern tastes and prejudices in favour of poems with a single inspired author, it will show how these poems failed to adapt to changing social and political circumstances that made the archaic local aristocracies irrelevant. Instead, they were absorbed into prose mythographies, while audiences ceased taking interest in them as poems. A unique representative of this genre, the (pseudo-)Hesiodic Catalogue of Women, will be contrasted with them to show how the ‘stamp’ of Hesiod’s name and the poem’s panhellenic structure enabled it to survive much longer and enter the canon and the papyrus tradition. Eventually it, too, failed to justify itself to new generations of readers and was lost.



Biography:

Connor Purcell Wood is an American doctoral student in classics at Trinity College, Cambridge, completing a dissertation on the Hesiodic exegetical tradition under the supervision of Renaud Gagné. A former schoolteacher, coxswain, and Oxford organ scholar, he currently serves as a William Ritchie Visiting Fellow at the University of Sydney alongside his friend from undergraduate days, Daphne Martin. After finishing his dissertation and a related project, the first modern text-critical edition of the scholia to the Hesiodic Shield of Heracles, he hopes to continue to postdoctoral work on a comparative history of exegesis.

Papers this semester will be presented on campus live streamed via Zoom (unless otherwise indicated).

The on-campus location will either be:
Vere Gordon Childe Centre Boardroom, Level 4, Madsen Building, or the Kevin Lee Room (Quadrangle Level 6, Room H6.04).

ZOOM
The zoom address for this and all sessions during semester 2 is https://uni-sydney.zoom.us/j/82326237855

For further information, email: benjamin.brown at sydney.edu.au<mailto:benjamin.brown at sydney.edu.au>

Best, Ben
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