The Rediscovery of Rome - Museum Saturday Series

Event Details

Date:

Saturday, 07 June 2014 - Saturday, 07 June 2014

Time:

10:00 am - 3:00 pm

Room:

RD Milns Antiquities Museum, Level 2, Building 9

UQ Location:

Michie Building (St Lucia)

URL:

Event category(s):

Full Description:: In conjunction with A Study in Stone: A History of Epigraphy the RD Milns Antiquities Museum is proud to invite you to our second Saturday Series featuring a presentation by Professor John Bodel, Professor of Classics and History at Brown University, and the 2014 RD Milns Visiting Scholar.

‘The Rediscovery of Rome and the Formation of the American Epigraphic Collection’
Professor John Bodel

‘As the nineteenth century drew to a close, Italy and the United States were two nations at a crossroads, and the chief cities of each, Rome and New York, were both symbolic of their countries’ ambitions and instrumental to their fulfillment. Americans had wealth and craved respectability; Italians, nurturing their fledgling nation state, lacked cash but had antiquities, which in those years were being unearthed at a prodigious rate as Rome expanded into new residential neighborhoods laid out to accommodate the growing population of the nation’s new capital. This paper tells the story of how the mutual needs of Rome’s Superintendent of Antiquities and half a dozen young American scholars gave a distinctive shape during these years to the ‘American epigraphic collection’, a convenient if inaccurate designation to describe the nearly 3,500 Greek and Latin inscriptions that found their way from the classical Mediterranean into American universities and museums, more than half of which arrived during the quarter of a century between 1890 and 1915’