Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies

The Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs presents:
Euripides L. Evriviades (Ambassador of Cyprus to the U.S.)
Location: Bowl 016, Robertson Hall

David Holton (University of Cambridge; Hellenic Studies Short-term Visitor)
Scheide Caldwell House, Room 103

The Cretan romance Erotokritos by Vitsentzos Kornaros, is still frequently performed in Crete and elsewhere, and many people claim to know large sections of it by heart. Despite its reception as a work of "popular" entertainment, it should not be seen just as a part of the folk tradition. In recent years scholars have come to appreciate and analyse its artistic merits as the greatest work of Cretan Renaissance literature. The lecture will examine the way the story is structured, the poetic qualities of the text, and other significant features of Kornaros's style.

David Holton is Reader in Modern Greek and a Fellow of Selwyn College, University of Cambridge where he has taught since 1981. He studied Classics and Byzantine and Modern Greek literature at the University of Oxford. His Oxford D.Phil. (1971) comprised a critical edition and study of the rhymed version of the Alexander Romance, first printed in 1529. In the 1970s he continued his studies at the University of Thessaloniki and then spent three years as a research fellow at the University of Birmingham. His books include: . The Tale of Alexander: The Rhymed Version. Critical edition with introduction and commentary (Thessaloniki, 1974; revised reprint Athens, 2002); Erotokritos (Bristol Classical Press, 1991); two Greek grammars in collaboration with Peter Mackridge and Irene Philippaki-Warburton: Greek: A Comprehensive Grammar of the Modern Language (London-New York: Routledge,1997; Greek edition: Athens, 1999) and Greek: An Essential Grammar of the Modern Language (London-New York: Routledge, 2004); (editor) Literature and Society in Renaissance Crete (Cambridge University Press, 1991; Greek edition: Herakleio, 1997). He is currently principal investigator of a five-year research project to produce a reference grammar of Medieval Greek. The project is funded by the UK Arts & Humanities Research Council. [Last Updated 2006]

211, Dickinson Hall

Please join us for a series of conversations with faculty and students highlighting the history, daily life and context of a flourishing monastic center in northern Greece. Members of the Princeton community will share their thoughts and experiences from a two-week workshop held at the monastery in June, 2005.
Workshop schedule

All attendees are welcome to lunch and an informal reception at the conclusion of the program.

Theodoros Pangalos (Member of Parliament, Greece)
Scheide Caldwell House, Room 103

Theodoros Pangalos has served as Minister of Transport and Communications (1994), Minister of Foreign Affairs (1996-99) and Minister of Culture (2000) of the Hellenic Republic. He studied Law and Economics at the University of Athens and earned his Ph.D. in Economic Sciences (1973) at the University of Paris I (Pantheon, Sorbonne), where he was appointed (1969-1978) as instructor and researcher on issues of economic development, programming and land use, and as the Director of the Economic Development Institute. Since 1981, when he was first elected to the Hellenic Parliament, he has been M.P. for the Panhellenic Socialist Movement party (PASOK). Theodoros Pangalos has also served as the Representative of the Hellenic Parliament at the Council of Europe, and has held government posts as Deputy Minister of Trade and Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs on European Community Issues.   [Last Updated 2006]

This seminar is made possible by the Alexander S. Onassis Public Benefit Foundation (USA).

Cosponsored by the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies.

Why does the idea of Roman imperialism remain such a compelling rhetorical and analytical touchstone for contemporary American society and politics?

Friday, March 10 * 101 McCormick Hall

Please join faculty from the Columbia, New York University, Princeton , Rutgers, and Stanford departments of Classics, History, Politics, Sociology, and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs as they discuss:

• the characteristics of the Roman Republic and its 'imperialistic' behavior, and the applicability of modern international relations terminology;
• the role of Western European Enlightenment thought, especially concerning the reception of Roman imperialism, in shaping the intellectual debates that affected the early American republic;
• the effects of 'imperial' and 'republican' regime structures on civic identity and the writing of history.

For full abstract, schedule, and list of participants, please visit www.princeton.edu/~classics/conferences/2006.

Download Professor Walter Scheidel's pre-circulated paper from the "Schedule" page of the conference website.

Co-sponsored by the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, University Center for Human Values, and the Department of Classics.

David Holton (University of Cambridge; Short-term Visitor, Program in Hellenic Studies)
Scheide Caldwell House, Room 103

A team of researchers at the University of Cambridge has begun a five-year research project to compile a reference grammar of Medieval Greek. The period which the grammar will cover (c. 1100-1700) encompasses the ruciallinguistic developments which mark the transition from medieval/Byzantine Greek to the modern language. The grammar will fill a major gap in our knowledge of the history of the Greek language, and provide a research tool for scholars, who deal with texts of the period, whether as editors, literary critics, linguists, historians, or specialists in a variety of other historically-based disciplines. The presentation will discuss some of the research questions which the grammar will address, such as the distribution of linguistic phenomena according to register and style, the dating and geographical spread of specific linguistic features, dialect differentiation, and matters of linguistic evolution, particularly in morphology and syntax.

David Holton is a Reader in Modern Greek and a Fellow of Selwyn College, University of Cambridge where he has taught since 1981. He studied Classics and Byzantine and Modern Greek literature at the University of Oxford. His Oxford D.Phil. (1971) comprised a critical edition and study of the rhymed version of the Alexander Romance, first printed in 1529. In the 1970s he continued his studies at the University of Thessaloniki and then spent three years as a research fellow at the University of Birmingham. His books include: . The Tale of Alexander: The Rhymed Version. Critical edition with introduction and commentary (Thessaloniki, 1974; revised reprint Athens, 2002); Erotokritos (Bristol Classical Press, 1991); two Greek grammars in collaboration with Peter Mackridge and Irene Philippaki-Warburton:Greek: A Comprehensive Grammar of the Modern Language (London-New York: Routledge,1997; Greek edition: Athens, 1999) and Greek: An Essential Grammar of the Modern Language (London-New York: Routledge, 2004); (editor) Literature and Society in Renaissance Crete (Cambridge University Press, 1991; Greek edition: Herakleio, 1997). He is currently principal investigator of a five-year research project to produce a reference grammar of Medieval Greek. The project is funded by the UK Arts & Humanities Research Council.  [Last Updated 2006]

Cookies and drinks will be provided
(Please bring your own lunch)

Antonis Liakos (University of Athens; Visiting Fellow, Program in Hellenic Studies)
Respondent: Petre Guran (Post-Doctoral Fellow, Program in Hellenic Studies)
Scheide Caldwell House, Room 103

This talk will address the question of how history is related to thinking about the past and imagining the future. The debate on the Book of Daniel will be presented as a case in point for three reasons. First, the debate was indeed long, extending from the Greco-Roman learned tradition to early European scholarship. Second, it offered an explanation that was central for the historical positioning of Empire as the embodiment of Power in time. Third, this theory of Empire structured historical time until the era of modernity: prior to the seventeenth-century canon of historiography structured along the ancient, medieval and modern eras, World History was conceived through the scheme of the four Empires, a cosmological conception of the world. The debate itself illuminates the relationship and differences between thinking transcendentally and thinking historically. These differences were not merely intellectual theses, but were related to the affirmation or the subversion of Power and the handling of anticipation and fear. The one attitude held that history was not related to the past, but to the thinking of time, comprising of past, present, and future. The other tried to confine historical thinking to what already existed, to the past.

Antonis Liakos is a Professor of History at the University of Athens where he teaches contemporary history and history of historiography. His main books are The Nation: How it Was Imagined by Those who Wanted to Change the World, Athens: 2006 (in Greek); L'Unificazione Italiana e la Grande Idea (1859-1871), Firenze: 1995; and Labour and Politics in the Interwar Greece, Athens: 1993 (in Greek). He is a member of the editorial board of the review Historein and of the European Science Foundation Network of National Histories in Europe (NHIST).  [Last Updated 2006]

The Group for the Study of Late Antiquity presents:
Sergey A. Ivanov (Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow State University)

1:30-4:30 p.m.
211 Dickinson Hall
Reception to follow

Reading packets will be available in the Departments of History and Classics or from Uriel Simonsohn.

Richard Clogg (St. Antony's College, University of Oxford; Visiting Fellow, Program in Hellenic Studies)
Scheide Caldwell House, Room 103

Most histories of Greece, whether by Greek or non-Greek authors, tend to focus on the history of the independent state. Such a focus can be misleading for the present borders of Greece might have assumed a very different shape. As one acute observer of late nineteenth and early twentieth century Greece, William Miller, observed, Greece had the appetites of a Russia but the resources of a Switzerland. Long after the emergence of a Greek state more Greeks were to be found in the Near East, outwith the bounds of the state, than within it. Moreover, from the nineteenth century onwards large-scale emigration led to the emergence of the world-wide Greek diaspora. Although xeniteia, or sojourning in foreign parts, has been central to the historical experience of the Greek people in modern times, it is only relatively recently that historians have given this phenomenon its due. Is it possible to envisage a history which will unite the Tourkokratia, the centuries under Turkish rule, the history of the independent state, the history of I kath'imas Anatoli, or the Greek East, and the history of the diaspora? Should the history of Greece be approached more as the history of a people than of a state?

Richard Clogg  is an Emeritus Fellow of St. Antony's College, Oxford. He previously taught at the Universities of Edinburgh and London, where, formerly, he was Professor of Modern Balkan History. He is the author or editor of a number of books on Greek history and politics, including A Short History of Modern Greece and A Concise History of Greece. He is currently working on a history of the Special Operations Executive in Greece and on a large-scale history of the Greek people in modern times.  [Last Updated 2006]