Dear all,
We are happy to invite you to the next lecture in our Ancient World Seminar
series. This month's Seminar takes place on *May 23rd*, and features our
own *Jacqueline Klooster and Inger Kuin*. The topic of their lecture will
be:
*"What is a crisis? The Rhetoric of Crisis and Order"*
In a well-known letter Cicero asks L. Lucceius to produce a flattering
account of his consulship in the year 63. In this year, of course, he
discovered and successfully repressed the Catilinarian conspiracy. Cicero
states that the material will especially prove interesting for Lucceius
because the latter will be able to make use of his knowledge of political
changes (*civilium commutationum scientia*) in explaining the origins of
the revolutionary movement (*rerum novarum*) and suggesting remedies (*remediis
incommodorum*) (5.12.4). This suggests that Cicero regarded political
crises like the Catilinarian conspiracy as particularly rewarding material
for the moralistic historiographer. He seems to be invoking a specific
template for the writing up of such political crises.
In this paper we suggest that Hayden White’s theories of meta-history
(1973) can help us better understand Cicero’s rather particular manual for
the historiography of political crises. By comparing Cicero’s proposed
narrative to other reports of similar crises (e.g., the Catilinarian
conspiracy in Sallust and the Gracchi in Livy and in Plutarch) we will
investigate whether it is indeed possible to discern something like a
‘crisis template’ in ancient historiography. A larger question that we hope
to explore is the power of crisis rhetoric in general. Cicero famously
presents the Catilinarian conspiracy as an attempt at revolution, a
special, high stakes event, while modern day historians have questioned the
actual meaning and significance of the conspiracy.
In writing political history the stakes are high, for Lucceius and for us
as ancient historians. With this paper we want to question the ‘crisis
template’ of ancient historiographers, while at the same time also
critically engaging our own paradigms for narrating and framing crises from
the ancient past.
*Inger Kuin* <http://www.rug.nl/staff/n.i.kuin/>* studied Philosophy and
Journalism at the University of Amsterdam, and she received a PhD in
Classics from New York University for her dissertation Playful Piety:
Lucian and the Comic in Ancient Religious Experience (2015). Her research
focuses on the cultural history of the Greek-speaking world in the Roman
period, while she has also published on Latin epigraphy and on papyrology.
She is currently working on the **After the Wars*
<http://www.afterthecrisis.nl/?page_id=38>* project, while she is also
preparing a book manuscript on ancient religion, humor, and
anthropomorphism based on her dissertation. *
*Jacqueline Klooste* <http://www.rug.nl/staff/j.j.h.klooster/>*r was
educated at Amsterdam University, where she completed her PhD (2009) on
Hellenistic Poetry (Poetry as Window and Mirror, Positioning the Poet in
Hellenistic Poetry, Brill 2011). She has worked as a research fellow (post
doc) at the University of Amsterdam and Ghent University (Belgium). Among
her research interests are (self-)representation of poets (Poetry as Window
and Mirror, 2011), Space in Greek Literature (The Ideologies of Lived Space
in Literature, Ancient and Modern, Ghent Academia Press 2013, with Jo
Heirman), and the evaluation of the literary activities of ancient rulers
(A Portrait of the Statesman as an Artist, Writing Rulers in Antiquity, in
progress). She is currently working on the project **After the Civil Wars*
<http://www.afterthecrisis.nl/?page_id=42>*.*
The session takes place as usual in *room 130* of the Faculty of Theology
and Religious Studies (Oude Boteringestraat 38), Groningen, *16.15 –
17.30*. Join us for drinks afterwards!
Best regards,
The CRASIS team
--
CRASIS is the Groningen Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies in Culture,
Religion and Society of the Graeco-Roman World. Follow CRASIS on Facebook
<https://www.facebook.com/rug.crasis>or find out more about us on
www.rug.nl/crasis.
