Date:
Location:
Title:
Latin sayings, culture and lifestyle.
Lecturer:
Costas Panayotakis, Professor of Latin in the Classics Department at the University of Glasgow.
Language:
Greek.
Collaboration with:
University of Crete.
Synopsis of the lecture:
The cultural legacy of the Romans is all around us, in the language we speak, the literature we read, the art we admire and the architecture we appreciate, the legal system within which we operate, the technology we use, the popular entertainment we enjoy. The Romans are, of course, known to us not only because of their impressive large-scale monuments but also through their remarkable literature, which includes short, pithy, and memorable phrases, such as Terence’s "fortune favours the brave", Horace's "seize the day", Virgil's "love conquers all" and "woman is constantly a fickle and changeable creature", Juvenal’s "a healthy mind in a healthy body", to name but a few. My talk will focus on what celebrated sayings such as these meant in their original context, how their meaning changed during their reception, and how they influenced the artistic and intellectual culture of subsequent eras in Europe.
Short bio of the lecturer:
Costas Panayotakis is Professor of Latin at the University of Glasgow. His research focusses on the novel and comic drama, especially Petronius' Satyrica and the popular low forms of Roman theatrical entertainment (the mimes of Decimus Laberius and Publilius and the so-called Atellane comedy), the scripts of which have come down to us only in fragments. His main publications in these scholarly areas are his books Theatrum Arbitri: Theatrical Elements in the Satyrica of Petronius (Leiden, 1995) and Decimus Laberius: The Fragments (Cambridge, 2010). He has also translated into Modern Greek select plays of Plautus and Terence and (with his brother Stelios) Peter Walsh’s influential study on The Roman Novel: The Satyricon of Petronius and the Metamorphoses of Apuleius (Cultural Foundation of the National Bank of Greece, 2000). He is currently preparing new critical editions (with facing translation and commentary) of the fragments of Atellane comedy, the moral maxims associated with the mimographer Publilius, and Petronius' 'Dinner at Trimalchio's'.
