Corinthian Matters

A Resource for the Study of the Corinthia, Greece

Category: Sites, Theater

Published Proceedings of Corinth Conference held in Urbino, Italy, 2009

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Big conferences seem to be the new thing in Corinthian studies. Gather a gaggle of scholars to hash out the complexity of ancient Corinth. In the last fifteen years, the recent flurry of conferences on the Corinthia have slowly been making their way to publication.

In December, someone kindly posted in the comments field of an unrelated post about a new book in Italian on the city of Corinth that publishes the proceedings of another conference held in 2009. Here’s the reference from Worldcat: Angeli Bernardini, Paola, ed. Corinto: luogo di azione e luogo di racconto : atti del convengo internazionale, Urbino, 23-25 settembre 2009. Pisa [etc.]: F. Serra, 2013.

I haven’t yet seen it, but the book apparently runs 300 pages with images, and includes essays on the history and archaeology of the city from the Bronze Age to the late antiquity. The focus, though, appears to be the archaic and classical city as revealed in studies of ancient literature. Essays include topics such as Eumelus, Pindar, lyric poetry, tyranny and Cypselus, the Argonaut myths, Thucydides and Herodotus, Aelius Aristides, Nonnus of Panopolis, and the Corinth canal. An abstract, bibliography, and purchase information are available here. I’ve copied the abstract below:

Abstract: “Polis di lunga storia, annoverata già da Omero nel Catalogo delle navi e ricordata nell’Iliade (13, 663-665), la città in epoca postomerica ebbe anche un cantore epico, Eumelo, quale che sia la sua identificazione, autore di un poema dal titoloKorinthiaka. Celebrata da Simonide e da Pindaro e più volte menzionata da Bacchilide, le sue vicende erano ben conosciute anche da Simonide. Nel complesso, nei versi dei poeti e nell’eco della loro poesia nel corso dei secoli troviamo lo specchio della rilevanza di questa città nell’arcaismo. Tucidide parla della sua ricchezza e prosperità, legate soprattutto alla singolare posizione geografica e all’ardire dei suoi commercianti. Tanti, dunque, i problemi di ordine mitico, storico, politico, religioso, letterario che la riguardano. Una città che poteva vantare due porti e che aveva l’opportunità di affacciarsi su due mari, vie di accesso verso l’Oriente e verso l’Occidente, veniva considerata singolare e fortunata, almeno dal punto di vista geografico. Nel corso del volume e nei vari contributi si incontrano, di Corinto, molte definizioni, legate all’approvigionamento idrico, all’abilità nautica e commerciale dei suoi abitanti, alla manualità tecnicoartistica, alla perizia degli armatori, alle qualità militari. E soprattutto al patrimonio religioso e mitico. Vengono inoltre illustrati gli aspetti politici e sociali delle vicende più significative cui la polis andò incontro fin dai primi secoli della sua storia; vicende che hanno lasciato un segno nella tradizione poetica e nella documentazione storiografica. Sotto tutti questi profili l’antica città di Corinto, grazie ai contributi qui stampati, può dire di più di quanto non sia stato rilevato fino ad ora.”

 

Sections and Chapters:

Introduction: Paola Angeli Bernardini, Premessa.

Myth:

  • Gabriella Pironti (Università di Napoli Federico II), L’Afrodite di Corinto e il ‘mito’ della prostituzione sacra
  • Marco Dorati (Università di Urbino Carlo Bo), Il sogno di Bellerofonte: incubazione e modelli ontologici

Epic-Lyric Tradition:

  • Alberto Bernabé (Universidad Complutense de Madrid), Bacchide, Dioniso e un frammento dell’Europia di Eumelo
  • Alessandra Amatori (Università di Urbino Carlo Bo), Corinto, Corcira e il mito argonautico nei Naupaktia
  • Paola Angeli Bernardini (Università di Urbino Carlo Bo), Le definizioni di Corinto e dell’Istmo nell’epica e nella lirica arcaica: semantica e retorica
  • Liana Lomiento (Università di Urbino Carlo Bo), Lode della città in Pindaro, Olimpica 13 per Senofonte corinzio
  • Andrea Debiasi (Università di Padova), Riflessi di epos corinzio (Eumelo) nelle Dionisiache di Nonno di Panopoli.

Theater:

  • Suzanne Saïd (Columbia University, New York), Corinthe dans la tragédie grecque
  • Oretta Olivieri (Università di Urbino Carlo Bo), Alcmeone, un eroe itinerante a Corinto: i frammenti dell’omonima tragedia di Euripide

Post-Classical Literature:

  • Luigi Bravi (Università G. D’Annunzio di Chieti-Pescara), Poeti, scrittori e artisti in area corinzia dopo la guerra del Peloponneso
  • Elisabetta Berardi (Università di Milano), Elio Aristide e il discorso Istmico a Posidone (Or. 46).

History:

  • Domenico Musti (Università Sapienza di Roma), Corinto città cruciale
  • Carmine Catenacci (Università G. D’Annunzio di Chieti-Pescara), Delfi e Corinto arcaica. Gli oracoli pitici sulla colonizzazione di Siracusa e sulla tirannide dei Cipselidi
  • Pietro Vannicelli (Università Sapienza di Roma), Aristeo figlio di Adimanto tra Erodoto e Tucidide
  • Maurizio Giangiulio (Università di Trento), Per una nuova immagine di Cipselo. Aspetti della tradizione storica sulla tirannide di Corinto
  • Eleonora Cavallini (Università di Bologna), Peripezie di unadynaton: il canale di Corinto nelle fonti antiche.

Archaeology and Iconography:

  • Adele Zarlenga (Roma), Culti e siti di area corinzia in alcune recenti ricerche
  • Cornelia Isler-Kerényi (Erlenbach), La madre di Pegaso
  • Sara Brunori (Università di Urbino Carlo Bo), Eracle e l’Idra di Lerna nell’iconografia corinzia. Indice dei nomi. Indice dei passi discussi.

Contact me if you are interested in reviewing this work.

West of Theater in Corinth

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Hesperia 82.3 just posted at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens website. The new issue includes an article by C.K. Williams II titled “Corinth, 2011: Investigation of the West Hall of the Theater.”

The article comprises an overview of the work carried out by the ASCSA Corinth Excavations west of the theater in 2011.

 

 

 

We reported briefly on this work in 2011:

And on MacKinnon’s analysis of the cattle bone for an AIA paper last year:

Haven’t yet had a chance to get a copy, but the abstract suggests there is much relevant here for our understanding of Greek, Roman, and Late Antique Corinth. Here’s the abstract:

The 2011 excavations at ancient Corinth focused on the Roman use of the area west of the theater’s stage building. Indications of the interior decoration of the West Hall were among the most interesting finds; also found was evidence for the continued vitality of the area after a.d. 400, which was indicated by a large number of amphoras and by a dump of 8 to 10 tons of cattle and sheep/goat bones over the, by that time, defunct West Hall. The 6th-century Roman fortification wall was also investigated. Also significant was the discovery of the westernmost foundation block of the west parodos of the Greek theater, which was exposed under the earliest Roman floor.

Cattle Bones at Corinth

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It doesn’t get any more exciting than a heap of cattle bones.

I stumbled upon this story by accident yesterday when I checked a twitter feed, but might have seen the full academic talk on the subject had I attended the AIA last weekend.

The story that hit Discovery News yesterday, “Heap of Cattle Bones may Mark Ancient Feasts,” is a summary of a paper about the enormous volume of animal bone recently discovered and documented in the theater at Corinth. We covered the preliminary report about these finds a little over a year ago. Nice to see the study developing so quickly.

Here’s the opening from yesterday’s article:

“A metric ton of cattle bones found in an abandoned theater in the ancient city of Corinth may mark years of lavish feasting, a new study finds.

The huge amount of bones — more than 1,000 kilograms (2,205 pounds) — likely represent only a tenth of those tossed out at the site in Peloponnese, Greece, said study researcher Michael MacKinnon, an archaeologist at the University of Winnipeg.

‘What I think that they’re related to are episodes of big feasting in which the theater was reused to process carcasses of hundreds of cattle,’ MacKinnon told LiveScience. He presented his research Friday (Jan. 4) at the annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America in Seattle.”

Read the rest here.

This research is important not only for what it says about the state of the theater in the 4th century AD, but its implications for our understanding of ritual feasting in Late Roman Corinth.

Archaeological Research at Corinth – Summer 2012

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The ASCSA website carries a recent report by Ioulia Tzonou-Herbst summarizing archaeological work in Corinth and the region last summer. The essay offers a snapshot of a wide range of research and programs currently being carried out by archaeologists, art historians, and historians:  the Sanctuary of Demeter and Kore, the Gymnasium, Fountain of the Lamps, Theater, Captives Façade, Frankish pottery, Hellenistic and Roman ceramics, Late Bronze Age stirrup jars, Roman portrait sculpture, early 20th century architectural drawings, Perachora topography, Isthmia, digital archaeology, and educational programs.

Here’s the opening:

“This past summer was hot in Corinth, the hottest I remember since I arrived in 2001. Summers are busy and fascinating, full of discoveries. After the excavations finish at the end of June, the hostel is emptied out and we say our goodbyes to the Regular Member excavators. Their stories of digging are added to the long, long history of generations of excavators. The rooms are filled once again, with a different crew this time. Starting July 1, a wise and stimulating group of people gather in Corinth: professors and researchers who dug different parts of the site come back to make sense of their discoveries.

Our days are spent working in the museum. The short working hours of the museum this year put pressure on resident scholars to work straight through lunch, ‘doing the Mary’ and having a late lunch, which they considered a sacrifice that would please Demeter. Plenty of study and discussion took place in the afternoons in Hill House library and into ouzo time on the terrace overlooking the Corinthian Gulf.”

Read the rest here.

Abstracts of the AIA / APA 2012 Meetings

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I had planned to post reviews of the AIA / APA meetings a little more than a week ago, but illness and the preparations for a new semester sapped all my momentum.  I have a lot of material in the queue including December scholarship monthly and the scholarship rolls of 2011 which I hope to roll out in the next two weeks.

The meetings were excellent in many ways.  I heard great  papers related to new research in the Corinthia, but missed many more that I wanted to see.  I caught the Nemea session in time to hear Effie Athanassopoulos’ discussion of excavation  and survey evidence for habitation and agriculture in the Nemea Valley in the 12th-13th centuries; and Jared Beatrice’s and Jon Frey’s fascinating work on Late Antique and Middle Byzantine burials in the Nemea Valley (largely similar life experiences between periods, but males mysteriously outnumber females in the later period by a factor of 2 to 1).  I happened to be at the poster session when Bice Peruzzi and Amanda Reiterman were awarded second place for their work on the potters’ quarter at Corinth.  I include abstracts for all the papers at the end of this post.

The session sponsored by the Medieval and Post-Medieval Archaeology Interest Group (“Sailing Away from Byzantium”) was excellent in its exploration of the notion of communication and connectivity in its economic, geopolitical, and religious aspects–a theme that I saw covered in many other sessions.  I myself contributed (with Bill Caraher) to a session on peasants.  Our paper on Corinthian peasants in the Classical-Hellenstic, Roman, and Modern periods is available here, and our Powerpoint presentation  here).  The fact that an entire session on “peasants” was a smashing success is some indication that countryside studies are doing well.  If the organizers of the conference thought peasants would not attract crowds (they assigned us to a small room), we were glad to see lines of people out the door trying to get in.

Surprising was that the AIA and APA attendees seem not to have caught the Digital Humanities bug that swept through this year’s meetings of the Modern Language Association and American Historical Association.  Other than one paper session (only 3 papers) related to visual approaches in archaeology and a round table about preparing digital images for publication, no one seemed aware or interested in the big DH.  By contrast, Anthony Grafton, the outgoing president of the American Historical Association, claimed that the introduction of Digital History and Humanities into the meetings of the AHA marked one of the greatest accomplishments of the year, while Stanley Fish in a recent New York Times editorial said the following about DH at the meeting of the Modern Language Association:

So what exactly is that new insurgency? What rough beast has slouched into the neighborhood threatening to upset everyone’s applecart? The program’s statistics deliver a clear answer. Upward of 40 sessions are devoted to what is called the “digital humanities,” an umbrella term for new and fast-moving developments across a range of topics: the organization and administration of libraries, the rethinking of peer review, the study of social networks, the expansion of digital archives, the refining of search engines, the production of scholarly editions, the restructuring of undergraduate instruction, the transformation of scholarly publishing, the re-conception of the doctoral dissertation, the teaching of foreign languages, the proliferation of online journals, the redefinition of what it means to be a text, the changing face of tenure — in short, everything.

Perhaps the digital revolution is still to come for the AIA/APA meetings?  Perhaps most archaeologists and philologists are just not interested?  At the business meeting of the Medieval and Post-Medieval Archaeology interest group, several academic librarians proposed a session for AIA 2013 on meta-data, which might connect the digital work of technologists, librarians, and archaeologists.  The session for 2013 will be co-sponsored by the Forum for Classics, Libraries, and Scholarly Communication.  It would be interesting to see a session on Byzantine archaeology as one of next year’s DH sessions.

Finally, it was a pleasure to meet people at the meetings who knew of this site.  Thanks to everyone for your interests, and as always, we welcome suggestions for contributions.

Corinth

Territory

Nemea

Mediterranean

“Straight from the Butcher’s Block” – A report on Corinth Excavations of 2011

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In the late spring and early summer, we reported on new excavations in Corinth in the area northwest of the theater.   The latest issue of Expedition from the Penn Museum includes a preliminary report by C.K. Williams II titled “From the Field—The Corinth Excavations of 2011.”  In the document (available here as a PDF), Mr. Williams describes a late antique layer of butchered animals (mainly cattle) from the West Hall of the Roman Theater. 

IMG_2504

Williams notes that the context postdates the use of the theater and postulates that it could possibly be connected with a religious celebration:

“It is the hall at the west end of the Roman stage building upon which the American School of Classical Studies at Athens focused  this year, largely because, when about two-thirds of the hall  was excavated in the 1920s, a good portion of a concentrated  dump of cow, sheep, and goat bones was removed without much notice.  We planned to correct that oversight in the spring of 2011  by the careful excavation and analysis of a sample taken from  the deposit, about a third of which still remained in situ…

The evidence does point, however, to the bones recovered  from the West Hall having accumulated as a result of butchering focused on supplying some sort of celebration or festival.  If the meat had been used to celebrate a Christian martyr, the church that was honoring him or her—if it was in the neighborhood—is still to be found.”

Read the rest of the report here. 

New Excavation Season at Corinth now underway

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The staff at the American School of Classical Studies Excavations at Corinth announce the beginning of their 2011 field season.   The short note from their website:

On April 4, the 2011 excavation season began in Ancient Corinth in the theater.  Regular members, Evelyn Adkins, Emilia Oddo, Reema Habib, Katie Lamberto, Andriy Fomin, and Tristan Barnes are participating in training led for part of the season by Charles K. Williams.  Nancy Bookidis (field assistant), Orestes Zervos (numismatics), David Scahill (architecture), Mark Hammond (field assistant), and Kathleen Slane (Roman pottery) are offering assistance.  Two more regular members, Bice Peuzzi and Amanda Reiterman, are working in the museum with Assistant director, Ioulia Tzonou-Herbst.

 

Visit the website for pictures of the first few days.  The excavations are taking place northwest of the theater.  Look for reports on this new program of fieldwork at the end of the year.