Date: Wednesday, July 31
Time: 4:15 p.m. MT
Location: Junior Commons Room, Pritzker Student Center
Speaker: Dr. Duane Roller, Professor Emeritus of Classics, The Ohio State University
Speaker: Duane W. Roller is Professor Emeritus of Classics at the Ohio State University. He received the PhD in Classical Archaeology from Harvard University, and has excavated in Italy, Greece, Turkey, Israel, and Jordan. He is the author of 20 scholarly books, most notably Cleopatra: A Biography (Oxford University Press), and numerous scholarly articles. He has received Fulbright teaching awards for residency in India, Malta, Poland, and Austria
Description: Cleopatra VII (69-30 BC), the last queen of Egypt, is probably the most famous woman from classical antiquity, if not all history. Yet her modern reputation is based largely on the presentation of her in literature, art, and cinema, rather than the actual historical reality of this most fascinating of women. We tend to know about Cleopatra through Shakespeare rather than her actual reputation as handed down from antiquity.
She has been positioned as one of the great seductresses of human history, but she had only two known relationships in 18 years. She was a highly educated person who knew at least a dozen languagaes and was a published scholar whose reputation as a medical author lasted for hundreds of years.
She was a naval commander who took her own fleet into battle, and was skilled in the art of warfare. She was a dynamic personality who was influential throughout the eastern Mediterranean; some even thought that she was the Messiah, and her cult lasted in Egypt for hundreds of years.
Perhaps the most famous story about Cleopatra was her death by the bite of an asp, but even this did not happen. Because her career was preserved by those who defeated her, she became both romanticized and demonized, yet remained a major and influential figure in Western history for 2000 years. The lecture will acquaint the audience with the real Cleopatra, no less interesting and exciting than her literary construct.
Graphic:
Cleopatra Testing Poisons on Condemned Prisoners by Alexandre Cabanel (1887)
Bas relief fragment portraying Cleopatra (3rd-1st century B.C.)
30 июл 2024
