Interested students are welcome to attend Dr. Larisa Ficulle's (University of St. Andrews) webinar
"Byzantine Polysemy. Myth, miracles and mirabilia in Procopius and Agazia."
Monday, January 31, 2022 hours 14:30-15:30
as part of the "Byzantium and Us" Seminars of the Classical and Modern Literatures and Cultures Ph.
Channel Teams Byzantine Studies (code 71jwl4r).
Core of the seminar are the Histories in their most manifestly and Dantean polysemous places. Starting from the reading that has been proposed by Kaldellis and taken up by Alexakis of Hist. 2.3.6-7 (the death of the Alemannic chief Leutari, struck down by a disease identifiable with rabies) as a learned allusion to the myth of Erisittone and to Ovid's Metamorphoses, we will introduce the theme of the multiple levels of interpretation possible in a historical work of a classicizing nature, in which the mere narration of events is often, and of necessity, accompanied by literary quotations and references to the ancient historiographic tradition. The red thread of the seminar will be the presence (or rather, absence) of mythological and miraculous material in Agazia, especially in the light of the treatment of the same material in Procopius' Wars. We will try to demonstrate how these passages lend themselves to at least a double reading: the literal one and the allegorical/allusive one, in which the fantastic or miraculous event can often conceal a reference to Herodotus' mirabilia and to the subsequent paradoxographic tradition, or to the miracles of contemporary Christian historiography.