Time: 2:00
Location: Manhattanville College, 2900 Purchase Street, Purchase
Speakers: Garrett Fagan, Pennsylvania State University, Steven L. Tuck, Miami University (OH)

Roman Arenas and Crowd Dynamics

In popular perceptions, the gladiator is one of the most characteristic symbols of Roman civilization. The popularity among the Romans of arena games – incorporating animal hunts, executions, and gladiatorial bouts – is not in doubt. Explanations thus far offered by scholars for this popularity have rested on anthropological, sociological, or symbological interpretations of the arena’s function in Roman culture. Yet even a cursory glance at comparative evidence shows that people beyond the Romans have long found the sight of animals and people pitched against each other in bruising and/or lethal encounters both appealing and intriguing: think of combat sports, the medieval tournament, public executions, bullfights, bear-baiting, etc. Psychological factors offer the likeliest explanation for the transcultural and transhistorical appeal of violent spectacle.

In this lecture, he examines the social psychological components of the Roman arena’s lure, with a special emphasis on crowd dynamics. In particular, he examines how the physical disposition of the spectators at Roman arenas facilitated the processes of the crowd and lent the events a heightened excitement and emotional pitch. Other factors were at play too – such as sating prejudices or excitement at sports spectatorship – but crowd dynamics served to channel and focus the spectators’ energies, and this was an attractive prospect in itself.

Prof. Fagan has taught at Pennsylvania State University since 1996. He was born in Dublin, Ireland, and educated at Trinity College, Dublin. He received his Ph.D. from McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, and has held teaching positions at McMaster University, York University (Canada), the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Davidson College, and, the Pennsylvania State University. Professor Fagan has an extensive research record in Roman history and has held a prestigious Killam Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellowship at the University of Cologne, Germany. He has published numerous articles in international journals, and his first monograph, Bathing in Public in the Roman World, was published by the University of Michigan Press in 1999. He has also edited a volume from Routledge on the phenomenon of pseudoarchaeology (2005). His current research project is on spectatorship at the Roman arena, and he is also working on a book on ancient warfare.

De Arte Gladiatoria: Recovering Gladiatorial Tactics from Artistic Sources

The tactics gladiators used in the arena remain a mystery. Their training was almost certainly oral so no training manuals survive. The extant literary sources are of little help. Written by elite men, many specifically deploring the activities of the arena, they remain silent on the specifics of the contests. Our best sources to recover this lost martial art may in fact be artistic representations of the events in the arena. Because of the enormous public interest in gladiatorial combat, these provide a wealth of images in all conceivable media. They are demonstrably specific concerning the circumstances of arena combat, and transcend generalized images of victory and defeat to show detailed and repeated images of arms, armor, opponents, non-verbal communication, and contexts. The artists certainly had a firsthand knowledge of the events in the arena and created these works for a knowledgeable and interested public. Examining representations of gladiators and their counterparts, venatores, and comparing them with the illustrations from the first western fighting manuals of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, allows us to reconstruct the tactics of gladiators and venatores. Identifiable in the art are certain details such as stance, weapon placement, angle of attack, and tactics. Notable in images of gladiatorial combat is evidence of close work: grappling, throws, and wrestling that were, and remain, integral to military personal combat. This study confirms the notion that gladiators were highly skilled, specifically trained, and determined not just to kill their opponents but to entertain and display virtus.

Prof. Tuck earned his Ph.D. in Classical Art and Archaeology from the University of Michigan and a post-doctoral fellowship at Ohio State University. His areas of specialization are Roman spectacle entertainment, and imperial art, and archaeology, especially ideological display. He has conducted fieldwork, research and study tours in Egypt, England, Italy and Greece. He has published articles on Greek and Latin epigraphy, sculpture, architecture, and the monument program in the harbors of Portus and Lepcis Magna, and his recent publications include “Latin Inscriptions in the Kelsey Museum” (2006, University of Michigan Press). He is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Classics and History, Miami University, where he directs a summer study program in Italy and was named a Distinguished Professor in 2007 and 2008.

Time: 9:00-4:30 including an hour break for lunch
Location: Jewish Community Center, 334 Amsterdam Avenue (76th Street), New York
Cost: $225 for the week; $60/day
Registration:  www.jccmanhattan.org or call 646-505-5700
Class Code: JLSAEC01-05WO

Are you interested in the origins of Israel and its impact on its neighbors?  Arab-Israel relations?  Damascus-Israel border disputes?  Are you concerned that an eastern power will destroy Jerusalem?  Spend a day or a week immersed in the archaeology of the ancient Near East.

Time: 2:00
Location: Manhattanville College, 2900 Purchase Street, Purchase
Speakers: Kenneth Lapatin, J. Paul Getty Museum

Pompeii is perhaps the best known archaeological site in the world. It and other sites destroyed by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in AD 79 have been the subject of numerous books, articles, exhibitions, films, television documentaries, etc., all of which, rightly, tend to focus on ancient artifacts and their recovery, with reception included, if at all, as a coda. This lecture, in contrast, examines the paradigmatic role of the destruction of Vesuvian sites on the modern imaginary, exploring the allegorical constructs of decadence, apocalypse, and salvation through painting, sculpture, and other media from the rediscovery of sites in the eighteenth century to the present day. The interplay between history and science, on the one hand, and staged fiction on the other, will be a major sub-theme, for the tragedy of these cities’ demise has long been the foil to empirical and archaeological interest, with its focus on excavation, classification, and recovering a sense of daily Roman life. Pompeii has persisted in western culture as the archetype for a destroyed civilization to the point to which other disasters-from the 1755 Lisbon earthquake to the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina-are regularly compared to it. Catalyzed by the publication of Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Last Days of Pompeii, a wildly popular 1834 novel that melded a Victorian love story with sensational narratives of pagan decadence, Christian subculture, and volcanic eruption glossed with a thin veneer of archaeology, Pompeii has become a platform on which fascination with apocalypse is inexorably linked to (mis)understandings of antiquity. Although seemingly the site where we can recover directly the everyday the life of the ancients, Pompeii is regularly treated anachronistically, in the sense of the disaster being inevitable, cataclysm predestined, portents ignored, and punishment deserved. Indeed, today it is impossible to imagine Pompeii without thinking about the disaster. This lecture will examine how successive generations made the ancient tragedy their own as they vicariously relive the dramatic events of AD 79, albeit from a comfortable temporal distance, and will illustrate these acts of cultural appropriation and projection through some of the finest visual and literary imaginations of the last three centuries.

Lapatin is Associate Curator of Antiquities with the J. Paul Getty Museum. He holds his degrees from the University of California, Berkeley (Ph.D.), and Oxford University (M. Stud.), and his areas of specialization are ancient Mediterranean Art and archaeology (particularly the Aegean Bronze Age, Greek and Roman), historiography, forgery, reception, and luxury arts. He has conducted fieldwork in Caesaria Maritima (Israel), Roma and Corinth, and his main publications include “Chryselephantine Statuary in the Ancient Mediterranean World”, and “Mysteries of the Snake Goddess: Art, Desire, and the Forging of History”. Dr. Lapatin is the AIA’s 2009/2010 Joukowsky Lecturer.

This program is sponsored by the Archaeological Institute of America Westchester Society.

Egypt had been the gift of the river for centuries before the Greeks coined that description. The Nile River dominated the physical landscape and culture of the pre-dynastic, Old Kingdom, Middle Kingdom and New Kingdom periods. During those times it was easy for Egypt to see itself as the cosmic center of the universe, the home of the real people. Given the areas of the world with which it had frequent contact, Egypt truly did dominate militarily, politically, and culturally. While Egypt certainly was aware of the existence of Mesopotamia, it had no real direct impact on the lives of the Egyptians during these two millennia.

Israel/Judah were a people of the covenant with cosmic centers at Shiloh, Shechem, Jerusalem and Samaria during the Iron Age. Over the course of centuries their geographical perspective had changed from that of a wilderness people and deity to one in the highlands of the land of Canaan to one from Dan to Beersheva and then to a deity who was king from the Euphrates River to the River of Egypt. While’s Israel’s claim that its God was king in the land of Canaan violated Egypt’s sense that the land was within its sphere of influence, no threat to Egypt proper had emerged from its neighbor since the time of the Hyksos.

These circumstances changed with the rise of Assyria. Beginning in the 9th century BCE, accelerating in the 8th century, and climaxing in the 7th century BCE, Assyria expanded westward crossing into Egypt itself. Thebes and Babylon were sacked but Jerusalem was spared. One entity now ruled and dominated the known world. This new age of imperialism necessitated a new way of envisioning the universe. How could the Nile Valley be the center of the world that stretched from Nubia to Elam? How could the covenant apply in a world centered at Nineveh? What was to be center of the world in a time of ancient Near Eastern empires and how were Egypt and Israel/Judah to define themselves if their cultures were to remain viable?

Dr. Peter Feinman is the founder and president of the Institute of History, Archaeology, and Education, a non-profit organization which provides enrichment programs for schools, professional development program for teachers, and public programs. He received his B.A. in history from the University of Pennsylvania, a M. Ed. from New York University, an MBA from New York University, and an Ed. D. from Columbia University. His interests cross disciplinary boundaries including (i) Egypt, with the forthcoming “The Tempest in the Tempest Stela: A Cosmic Story in History,” Bulletin of the Egyptological Seminar festschrift to Dorothea Arnold, (ii) biblical, “When Israel and the Arabs Were Allies” published as part of the proceedings of the Israeli-Palestinian Pathways to Peace conference, and (iii) American, “Chautauqua America,” in The American Interest. He recently organized and spoke at a conference on “Immigration: The Melting Pot and the American Dream” and is busy organizing county history conferences in New York State.