On Saturday, October 21, at 4:30 pm, Dr. Andrew Riggsby spoke on “Building a Better Barbarian: the Creation of France and Germany in Caesar, de Bello Gallico.” The meeting was held at the CUNY Graduate Center, Room 9205-6, 365 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan between 34th and 35th Streets, diagonally opposite the Empire State Building. The event was co-sponsored by The Graduate Center, CUNY Continuing Education & Public Programs.

Andrew Riggsby (Ph.D. Berkeley 1993) is Associate Professor of Classics at the University of Texas, where he specializes in Roman cultural history and Latin prose. Recent publications include Crime and Community in Ciceronian Rome (1999); he is currently working on a book on Caesar, Writing the Gallic War. This is his description of the talk:

Caesar makes more complex use of “barbarian” Others than any other Greek or Roman author. This is true in two respects. First, Caesar's appropriation of the ethnographic tradition is highly analytic, rather than following the usual approach of cut-and-paste with stylistic variation. Second, his text depends not on a simple Roman-barbarian dichotomy, but on a triangular structure. Historically, this seems to have been the cause as much as the effect of the distinction between France and Germany. The talk has three parts. The first examines the Greek ethnographic tradition regarding the northern peoples. The second compares Caesar's representations of Gauls and Germans to this tradition. The third traces a specific theme—the Gallic appropriation of virtus—to illustrate the strategic dimension of Caesar's unusual text.

The Club's winter conference was held on Saturday, February 3, from 9:30-3:00 at MacMahon Hall, Fordham University, Lincoln Center. This year, in celebration of the NYCC Centennial, our popular day-long conference invited reflection on approaches to classical studies and the teaching of classics over the last hundred years. The conference was coordinated by Dr. David Sider and co-sponsored by the Fordham University Classics Department. The conference included the following events:

The spring meeting was held at Barnard College on Saturday, May 5, 2001 at 4:00 pm. Professor Susan G. Cole of the University of Buffalo presented a slide-illustrated talk on changes in our conceptions of the way the Greeks described and imagined the afterlife. The meeting, which included announcements of contest winners and scholarship recipients and the election of officers for the next biennium, was held in the Sulzberger Parlor on the third floor of Barnard Hall (enter through the main gate of Barnard College from Broadway; see campus map). This is Professor Cole's description of her talk:

The possibility of a divided landscape in the realm of the dead is explicitly described for the first time in extant Greek literature in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, where the boundary between darkness and light for the souls of the dead depends on ritual experience in the mysteries. The hymn implies that the Eleusinian mysteries are the ones that made the difference, but in practice, there were other opportunities to prepare for the choice between sunlight and eternal gloom. The famous gold tablets found in graves throughout the Mediterranean show that some people had confidence in exclusive rights to special treatment by the gods of the dead, achieved through purification, ritual experience, communication of esoteric information, and attention of the soul to special landmarks upon arrival in the world of the dead. Scholarly attention has often been diverted by attempts to identify the philosophical source or specific ritual background for beliefs implied in these texts, but agreement is rare. In the last twenty-five years, several important new tablets have been published (Hipponion 1974, Thessaly? 1977, Pelinna 1987, Pherai and Entella 1994, and Rethymno 1998). . The talk will discuss the roadmap of the dead as presented in the tablets and the evidence for its survival in the topography of the afterlife as represented in later inscriptions at the grave.

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