Conference | Penn-Leiden Colloquium on Ancient Values XIII
The Values of Language(s) in the Ancient World
- Date
- Thursday 12 June 2025 - Saturday 14 June 2025
- Location
- Different locations at Leiden University
The Penn-Leiden Colloquia on Ancient Values were established as a biennial venue in which scholars could investigate the diverse aspects of Greek and Roman values. Each colloquium focuses on a single theme, which participants explore from various perspectives and disciplines. Since the first colloquium in Leiden (in 2000), a wide range of topics has been explored, including manliness, free speech, the spatial organization of value, badness, ‘others’, aesthetic value, the past, landscapes, competition, nighttime, labor, and the sacred. All earlier colloquia have resulted in edited volumes published by Brill.
The topic of the thirteenth colloquium, to be held at Leiden University, June 12-14, 2025, will be: The Values of Language(s) in the Ancient World. This conference will examine the ways in which Greeks and Romans valued language in general, their own languages, and other languages. What values are connected with Greek and Latin terms like λόγος, γλῶσσα, διάλεκτος, lingua, sermo, and oratio? How does language acquire sociocultural value within specific Greek or Roman contexts? What are the values or powers ascribed to language in general, to language diversity, and to specific languages?
This conference will not only celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Penn-Leiden Colloquia on Ancient Values, but also pay tribute to prof. Ineke Sluiter, co-founder (with Ralph Rosen) of the Penn-Leiden Colloquia. Ineke Sluiter is co-organiser of many of the colloquia, co-editor of many volumes, and one of the world’s leading scholars of ancient views on language.
Interested in joining? Please contact Casper de Jonge (c.c.de.jonge@hum.leidenuniv.nl) for registration.
Programme
Location: Telders Auditorium, Academy Building (Rapenburg 73, Leiden)
09.30-10.00: Coffee and registration
10.00-10.15: Welcome and introduction
Panel 1: Languages of Animals, Greeks and Non-Greeks
10.15-10.45: Jeremy McInernery (Penn): ‘… They were turned to pigs…; their minds remained the same…’: Speech, nonsense and the human animal
10.45-11.15: Irene de Jong (Amsterdam): Breaching the convention of shared language in Greek narrative
11.15-11.45: Coffee and tea
Panel 2: Languages of Non-Greeks in Greek Drama
11.45-12.15: Evert van Emde Boas (Aarhus): The use of Greek/Attic by ‘atypical populations’ in Greek drama
12.15-12.45: Amelia Bensch-Schaus (Penn): The voices of the enslaved in Euripides‘ Medea
12.45-14.30: Lunch
Panel 3: Etymology in Literature, Greek and Latin
14.30-15.00: Sheila Murnaghan (Penn): Tragic knowledge and the truth value of names
15.00-15.30: Johanna Kaiser (Penn): Etymology and the values of language in Martial’s Xenia and Apophoreta
15.30-16.00: Coffee
Panel 4: Ancient Scholars on the Values of Greek and Latin
16.00-16.30: Caroline Petit (Warwick): Galen, language, and Hellenocentric rhetoric: Uncovering the hybridity of medicine
16.30-17.00: Stephanos Matthaios (Athens): Disqualifying grammar, qualifying language. Sextus Empiricus on what grammar fails to recognize about the nature and value of language
17.00-17.30: Christoph Pieper (Leiden): The Scholia Gronoviana on Cicero’s speeches: Valuing Latin at the end of antiquit
Location: Telders Auditorium, Academy Building (Rapenburg 73, Leiden)
Panel 5: Graeco-Roman Views on Minority Languages
09.00-09.30: Marta Capano (Siena Stranieri, Groningen) and Viviane Léger Pirus (Paris, Bruxelles): Lost languages: status, prestige and perception of Messapic in the ancient world
09.30-10.00: Harriet Fertik (Ohio State University): A matre doctus… rogare Iudaeus: Martial and Juvenal on the language of Jews in Rome
10.00-10.30: Adam Gitner (TLL, München): The Roman revaluation of Hebrew
10.30-11.00: Coffee
Panel 6: Roman Views on Bilingualism
11.00-11.30: Hugo Simons (Liège): Litteras Graecas Athenis, non Lilybaei, Latinas Romae, non in Sicilia (Cic., div. in Caec. 39): The attitude of Latin-speaking authors towards Sicilian Greek-Latin bilingualism
11.30-12.00: Katherine MacDonald (Durham): Spies, treachery and deceit: attitudes to bilingualism in Livy’s Samnite Wars and Punic Wars
12.00-14.00: Lunch
Panel 7: Homer and / as Language
14.00-14.30: Lucien van Beek (Leiden): Feathered words, or: How to say things with arrows
14.30-15.00: Egbert Bakker (Yale): Homer the language
15.00-15.30: Coffee and tea
Keynote and Celebration
15.30-16.30: Ralph Rosen (Penn): Galen’s anthropology of language
16.30-17.15: Celebration in honour of Ineke Sluiter and 25 years Penn Leiden
17.15-19.00: Reception
Location: Lorentzzaal (KOG A1.44), Kamerlingh Onnes Gebouw (Steenschuur 25, Leiden)
Panel 8: Languages in the Second Sophistic
10.15-10.45: Bé Breij (Nijmegen): Rerum tumor, sententiarum vanissimus strepitus: the language of Sophistopolis
10.45-11.15: Teddy Fassberg (Tel Aviv): The value of Latin in the Greek Second Sophistic
11.15-11.45: Coffee and tea
Panel 9: Greek versus Latin
11.45-12.15: Susan Bilynskyj Dunning (Oxford): The significance of Greek and Latin funerary divine associations
12.15-12.45: Paul Johnston (Stanford): Devaluing Greek: the correspondence of Paul and Seneca and the monolingualisation of Latin literature
12.45-14.15: Lunch
Panel 10: Valuing Varieties of Greek
14.15-14.45: Joanne Stolk (Leiden): The need for revision. Scribal awareness of language variation in Greek papyri from Egypt
14.45-15.15: Niels Schoubben (Leiden): John Philoponus on dialects in his treatise on accents
15.15-15.45: Coffee and tea
Panel 11: Valuing Ancient Languages in and after Antiquity
15.45-16.15: Mariia Timoshchuk and Raf Van Rooy (Leuven): Graece aliquid addere litteris suave est: Latin-Greek code-switching through Roman and Renaissance eyes
16.15-16.45: Han Lamers (Oslo) and Bettina Reitz-Joosse (Groningen): Language myths: the politicization of ancient languages in comparative perspective
16.45-17.00: Closing remarks