The next in Durham University’s series of Online Lectures on Roman Greece will be:
Tianqi Zhu (Cincinnati): “Boom During Crisis? Festival Cultures and Performance Spaces in Third-Century Roman Greece.”
https://ucincinnati.zoom.us/j/9919951778
Meeting ID: 991 995 1778
Abstract
The Roman Empire in the third-century AD is traditionally understood to have suffered a period of crisis externally and internally characterized by the Gothic and Persian invasions, the frequent turnovers of emperors, the collapse of the economy and monetary system, and ultimately the disintegration of the empire. In this context of empire-wide crises and instability, agonistic festivals and public spectacles somehow continued to flourish in the East on a more intensive scale compared to the second century. Both epigraphic and numismatic evidence attests to this phenomenon, as funding contests became the dominant form of public benefaction in the third century and coins increasingly carried references to imperial and local festivals. Hence, an interesting paradox arises: why did festivals still boom in the third century, when the empire experienced profound crises in virtually all aspects of the society? This lecture, which is based on my dissertation work, will explore the paradoxical boom of festivals in the third-century Roman East and the intricate relationship between festivals, crisis and the imperial state by examining three case studies: Aphrodisias, Thessaloniki, and Corinth.
Chris de Lisle (Durham) and Shanshan Bai (Sichuan)