Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies

Lela Aleksidze (Tbilisi State University; Visiting Fellow, Program in Hellenic Studies)
Scheide Caldwell House, Room 103

Medieval Georgian texts (both original compositions and translations) deserve to be studied thoroughly from the perspective of their authors' attitude toward the (non-Christian) Greek philosophical tradition. Georgians became acquainted with Greek philosophy either indirectly, through Greek patristic texts, or directly, on the basis of the primary sources and their neo-platonic interpretations. Interesting aspects of Georgian attitudes toward the Greek philosophical tradition are reflected in the 11th century translation of John Scythopolis's Commentary on the Dionysian Corpus, and in the major 12th century commentary by Ioane Petritsi on Proclus' Elements of Theology.

Professor Lela Aleksidze teaches at the Department of Philosophy, The Tbilisi State University, Georgia. Her research focuses on orphism, neoplatonism, and patristics. She has worked on the manuscript tradition of the medieval Georgian translations of John Chrysostom and the Pseudo-Dionysian Corpus. She has also studied the relationship of these Georgian translations to the Greek original. She has translated Petritsi's commentary on Proclus' Elements of Theology into German, and Athenagoras's The Resurrection of the Dead into Georgian. [Last Updated 2006]

Athina Chatzidimitriou (Hellenic Ministry of Culture; Visiting Fellow, Program in Hellenic Studies)
Respondent: Michael Padgett (Princeton University Art Museum)
Scheide Caldwell House, Room 103

It is well established that the 5th century B.C. was a formative period in Athenian education. During that period democratic social and political structures in Athens, as well as the increasingly wealthy commercial-maritime economy, created ideal conditions for the growth of educational practices. Representations of teachers with their pupils in Archaic and Classical Attic vase-painting reflect this phenomenon. They are one of the richest sources of information about education in ancient Greece and indicate the value that the Athenian society placed on the cultivation of youth. The pictorial material amounts to more than three hundred paintings from Attic vases of the 6th and 5th centuries B.C. (mostly red-figured with a minority of black-figured) now held in numerous museum collections. The paintings represent various aspects of Athenian education and teacher specializations. This paper considers depictions of teachers for reading and writing (grammatistai), of music-masters (kitharistai), of dance-masters (chorodidaskaloi), and of slaves specially trained to supervise children and help with their upbringing (paidagogoi).

Athina Chatzidimitriou is a classical archaeologist who has worked as curator in the Archaeological Service of the Hellenic Ministry of Culture since 1994. She holds a first degree in Law from the University of Thessaloniki (1985) and a degree in History and Archaeology (specialization in Archaeology) from the University of Athens (1988). She received her Ph.D. in Classical Archaeology from the University of Thessaloniki (1999) with a dissertation, published recently, entitled Representations of workshops and commerce in the iconography of the Archaic and Classical Period. Her dissertation was supported by a scholarship from the Hellenic State Scholarship Foundation (I.K.Y.) and by the Österreichischen Akademischen Austauschdienst for study at the Institute of Classical Archaeology of the University of Salzburg. She has published several articles in journals, conference proceedings, and two separate booklets on archaeological sites and finds from Southern Euboea and on iconographical themes of vase painting.  [Last Updated 2006]