Seminar Series Michaelmas 2023

This seminar will use a range of texts to consider the relationship between motherhood and temporality, of maternal thinking in relation to time. When asked his parentage, the Odyssey’s Telemachus insists that “no-one knows his own begetting (gonon)” (1.215-216) – a statement that is oddly fitting his mother Penelope’s assurance that he resembles his father. But what is the role of remembering mothers, and how do maternal acts shape and steer the future and the past, including the future and past of poetry and writing?

18 October (Week 2): Matronymics at work  and female succession in Lucian 
Dr Dawn LaValle Norman, Australian Catholic University

25 October (Week 3): Early Greek Hexameter Mothers 
Homeric Hymn to Hermes 1-19; 52-67; 154-183; 418-462 [Charlie Baker]
Homer, Iliad 1.357-427 and Odyssey 11.152-224 [tbc]

1 November (Week 4) : Historiographical Mothers
Herodotus, Histories 6.52 [Valentina Brizio]
Plutarch, Sayings of Spartan Mothers [Sara de Martin]

8 November (Week 5): Comic Mothers
Aristophanes, Clouds 518-62 [Megan Bowler]
Menander, Samia 206-355 [Marina Paschalidou]

15 November (Week 6): (Not those) Tragic Mothers 
Euripides, Phoenissai 1-87 [Constance Everett-Pite]
Sophocles, OT 911-1000  [Holly Hunt]

22 November (Week 7): Christian Mothers
Colluthus, Abduction of Helen, 328-88 [Ben Broadbent]
Christus Patiens, 1-90,  Professor Simon Goldhill, Cambridge

29 November (Week 8): Roman Mothers
Vergil, Aeneid 1.606-30, 4.74-128, 4.504-17 [Tom Nelson]
Statius, Achilleid: 1. 126-17 and 1.243-84 [tbc]