Twenty years ago today

I realised something today that has shocked me - it was twenty years ago today that a conference I organised along with Karen Pierce took place in Cardiff at the institution that was then the University of Wales College of Cardiff and which is now Cardiff University. The conference topic - Violence and Power: An International Symposium on Rape in Antiquity - grew out of the work that Karen and I were each doing in Wales on aspects of rape in the ancient world. What I was focusing on at this time was Athena's vulnerability to rape at the hands of Hephaistos. From memory, the paper I gave at the conference was called 'abusing Athena' and it grew into a chapter on 'the vulnerability' of Athena for the book that grew out of the event, Rape in Antiquity (1997, 2002). My thinking has become increasingly sophisticated over the decades (DECADES!) but there was a freshness to my work then that I'm finding it interesting to recall.  I'm also enjoying remembering the range of participants at the event many of whom are still active practitioners in classics and other fields.  But a lot of us will always deeply miss one of the speakers, Keith Hopwood, my doctoral supervisor, who died in 2007. I kept one of the posters, which is up on my office wall. I hopefully have the progamme and abstracts somewhere, and, somewhere, at least one version of my paper.

 

Stop press! Karen has blogged on this anniversary too at http://darksideofthecatalogue.wordpress.com/2014/11/19/rape-in-antiquity-twenty-years-ago/

Athena in books not about Athena

I am currently compiling a list of uses of Athena in the titles of book, publishers' series etc etc. What interests me are books and other publications that do not actually discuss the ancient goddess or the postclassical reception of that goddess but that are using the goddess as a symbol to convey in a snappy way what the purpose of the project is.  I have previously discussed in postings to this blog two such examples - the Head of Athena Press and Martin Bernal's Black Athena. The latter example does concern ancient evidence for the goddess - in fact Bernal's derivation of Athena from the Egyptian divine name Neith is key to his case that Greece was colonised by settlers from Egypt in the second milennium BCE. However, Athena is also played out in Black Athena as a symbol of a) the elite basis of classics and classicism and b) the new ('ancient') model Bernal proposes with a view to wiping out what he saw as centuries of Eurocentrism and sometimes racism.

Here are a few further examples:

Athena’s Shuttle: Myth, Religion, Ideology from Romanticism to Modernism. Edited by Franco Marcucci and Emma Sdegno, 175–194. Milan: Cisalpino, 2000.

• Edited volume coming out of a conference in the late 90s on myth, religion and ideology.

Athena’s Camp: Preparing for Conflict in the Information Age. Edited by John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, 1–20. Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 1997.

• Edited volume, again from the 90s, this time from beyond the humanities - on the potential for conflict from cyber operations.

Hermes and Athena: Biblical Exegesis and Philosophical Theology. Edited by Eleonore Stump and Thomas P. Flint, 37–58. University of Notre Dame Studies in the Philosophy of Religion 7. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993.

• Yet another edited volume from the 90s, this time in biblical studies - drawing on Hermes and Athena as symbols for schoalrship and philosophy.

Athena Press of London - "an author-funded book publisher mainly dedicated to the publishing of books by new authors" which uses the head of Athena as its logo.

The Athena series of Holt, Rinehart and Winton of NY which publishes works in Maths, Physics and Engineering.  The one book I've looked at from the series to date includes no explanation for the name of the series.

More examples to follow...