Ancient World Seminar

While literary texts featuring sea voyages are an global phenomenon, medieval Ireland witnessed the production of a distinct type of such narratives. These Latin and Irish narratives differ quite widely in terms of content and structure, but central to each is a remarkable sea voyage that serves to bring the protagonists closer to the divine. Historically these narratives find their roots in two practices: the sentencing of convicted criminals to being set adrift at the sea and the religious practice of Irish clerics to seek hermitage in the ocean. However, they are also fundamentally underpinned by a cosmological conceptualisation of the heaven and hell as being located in or accessible through the far reaches of the Ocean that encircled the known world. This paper will investigate some of the ways that these texts bring lived experience, otherworld cosmologies, and religious faith into conversation with one another.

Dr Sarah Corrigan joined the Discipline of Classics and Archaeology at the University of Melbourne in 2023 as the inaugural Allan J Myers Lecturer in Latin Language and Literature. Sarah completed a PhD in Classics at the University of Galway, Ireland, in 2017. She has worked as a postdoctoral researcher both at the University of Galway and at the Royal Irish Academy Dublin. Her research and teaching span the ancient and early medieval Latin worlds, with an emphasis on the ways in which they are connected.

Cyril of Alexandria’s political machinations are well known within scholarship on late antiquity. Early in his tenure as bishop he had a protracted quarrel with the imperial prefect Orestes, which culminated in the murder of Hypatia and likely resulted in imperial displeasure. Despite these events, Cyril managed to maintain his hold on the throne of St Mark, though fifteen years later his management of church affairs would once again draw the attention of Theodosius II and his court, this time thanks to an intractable debate with Nestorius, the newly enthroned bishop of the eastern capitol. Cyril’s skillful management of this complex theological controversy involving the entire Christian oikumene and competing factions of the imperial household has been well rehearsed in scholarship. However, few scholars working on these events have asked how his own views on the Empire and its ruler relate to his various interactions with the state. To rectify this gap, this paper will examine three key passages in his corpus. First, Cyril dedicated his apologetic treatise Against Julian to the Emperor and used the prologue to sketch an image of Theodosius II as a pious earthly ruler imitating Christ, ‘the great emperor’ in contrast to Julian whose opposition to Christianity required a response from those committed to defending God’s glory. Later, in book six of Against Julian, he drew a sharp contrast between heavenly and earthly rule, arguing that the legitimacy of human rulers rests not upon an ontological superiority to their fellow humans but upon contingent qualities, most preeminently the piety already mentioned in the preface to the work. Finally, in his On Orthodoxy to Theodosius, sent to the Emperor in the early stages of the Nestorian controversy, Cyril once more directly addressed his sovereign and operationalized the themes in Against Julian by calling on Theodosius to take action against the newly installed patriarch of Constantinople whose Christological musings he regarded as defamatory of the divine glory. The tacit implication of this exhortation in light of the statements in Against Julian was that failure to deal appropriately with Nestorius risked invalidating Theodosius’ very rule. The Emperor may not have been pleased by this bold move from the Alexandrian patriarch, but the central role played by the piety of the imperial household in Theodosius’ public propaganda had created the opening for such an appeal.

Matthew R. Crawford is Professor at Australian Catholic University where he serves as Director of the Program in Biblical and Early Christian Studies in the Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry. He came to ACU in 2015 after completing his doctorate and an AHRC-funded postdoc at Durham University. In 2018 he was awarded a Discovery Early Career Researcher Award from the ARC for research on religious belief and social cohesion in late antiquity. The major output of that project will be a jointly authored English translation of Cyril of Alexandria’s apologetic treatise Against Julian which should appear in early 2025 with CUP. In addition, he is the author of a 2019 monograph on the Eusebian Canon Tables published by OUP and the co-editor of a 900-page collection titled The Intellectual World of Late Antique Christianity, which was published last year by CUP, as well as the forthcoming Cambridge History of Early Christian Theology.

The ‘Stone-Robots’ is a collaboration involving archaeologists, theatre specialists, and roboticists at the University of Melbourne, and examines the intersection of cultural heritage and technology through unique immersive performances featuring robots disguised as monoliths. Inspired by significant standing stones from around the world, the team has staged performances at Science Gallery Melbourne in November 2022 and the Victorian College of the Arts in January–February 2024, offering audiences unique interactive experiences with mobile robotic swarms. The project explores data physicalisation and the transformation of digital representations into tangible artefacts, using digital versions of standing stones provided by research partners in Morocco, The Gambia, Costa Rica, and Mongolia. It raises questions about the creation of artificial sites – especially in Australia – as well as responsibility and custodianship. The work aims to fill a research gap in human-scale swarm behaviours, and seeks insights into secular ritual, contemplation, trust and embodied knowledge. In reimagining standing stones and robotic swarms, the project investigates the re/construction of archaeological sites as loci of human interaction, technological engagement and creativity.

Aleksandra Michalewicz is an interdisciplinary researcher at Melbourne Data Analytics Platform (MDAP) where she applies digital and computational methods to data-driven and data-intensive collaborations. She is also a Digital Research Academic Convenor (DRAC), contributing to strategic programs, infrastructure and initiatives that enhance digital research at the University. She holds an MA in Classics and a PhD in archaeology and has taught at Melbourne, La Trobe, Monash and Deakin universities. Her expertise includes digital archaeology, digital heritage, digital HASS, legacy data investigation, research design, research data governance, sensitive data, digital and data ethics and interdisciplinary research methodologies and practices. She has excavated in Georgia between 2008 and 2018 with Georgian-Australian Investigations in Archaeology, the Landscape Archaeology in Georgia research group and for the Mtskheta Institute of Archaeology, and in 2022 with a La Trobe University ARC-funded expedition in Jordan.

Throughout the Late Republic, elite senatorial women played an increasingly active role in Roman socio-political life. With C. Julius Caesar lying dead in the Theatre of Pompey on the Campus Martius, an internal struggle threw the Republic into a turmoil like never before, giving birth to the Triumvirate r.p.c. of M. Antonius, Lepidus, and Young Caesar. In the narratives of Plutarch, Appian, and Cassius Dio two women step onto the stage of Triumviral politics, surpassing all others in fame, notoriety, and exemplarity. Fulvia, damned for all posterity, rose to fame with her alleged role in the proscriptions and her very visible and active role in the Perusine war. Octavia, the exemplary matrona, became the ideal for all elite matronae to follow. However, these two women also came to represent the clash between the old “traditional” Republican female roles and the new possibilities offered by the profound changes in the Roman political landscape. As the emerging Imperial domus and the ideology of the emperors took shape, so too did the narratives which describe this pivotal time in Roman history. Through the narratives of Plutarch, Appian, and Cassius Dio, this paper will reconstruct and reappraise the roles Fulvia and Octavia played in Triumviral politics in the years 47-31 BCE.

Christian is a PhD Candidate in Ancient History at the University of Melbourne. Christian’s research focuses on elite senatorial women in the Late Roman Republic (ca. 133-27 BCE) and their perceived and real influence on the socio-political environment in the times of civil wars, political unrest, internecine strife, socio-economic changes, and transitions. Christian is a former fellow of the Danish Institute in Rome and is currently a junior editor and contributor to the Danish online encyclopedia on the topics of Ancient Civil War, The Late Roman Republic, and Women and Power in Ancient Rome.

The paper takes as its starting point the sources for the history of the Roman triumph under the Republic, in particular the “fasti” triumphales and Livy’s history. The progressive monopolisation of this important and ancient Republican ritual by Augustus and his immediate successor Tiberius implies important considerations about what contemporary sources do and don’t say about the history of the triumph. Arguably the greatest literary work of the Augustan Era, Livy’s Ab Urbe Condita, sits uneasily with the regime under which it was written. Interpreting the position of Livy’s monumental history of the Republic in relation to other sources will be discussed, using the example of triumphs by two strongman politicians from the era of the Second Punic War, Claudius Marcellus and Fabius Maximus.

Dr. Christopher J. Dart is currently an ARC-funded Postdoctoral Research Associate in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies. His research focuses on the socio-political history of the Roman Republic and early empire. He is the author of The Social War, 91 to 88 BCE: A History of the Italian Insurgency against the Roman Republic (Routledge, 2014) and co-editor of the forthcoming book How Republics Die: Creeping Authoritarianism from the Ancient to the Modern World.

Christopher Davey is the Executive Director of the Australian Institute of Archaeology and an Honorary Fellow of the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, University of Melbourne. Prior to studying archaeology and ancient languages at the universities of Cambridge and London, he worked in the resource industry where for a time he was an underground mine surveyor. He first excavated in Egypt in 1976.