The Jerome Lectures are one of the most prestigious international lecture series for the presentation of new work on Roman history and culture and are presented at both the American Academy in Rome and the University of Michigan. In 2016, the 44th year of the Lectures, noted Classical philologist Maurizio Bettini will discuss the invention and identity of one of the most fascinating gods of the Roman/Etruscan world: Vertumnus, the god of change. Integrating anthropology and the history of Roman religion, Bettini will present three lectures, each of which offers a different view of Vertumnus, the Roman/Etruscan god associated with transformations of all kinds.

Lecture I

Autobiography of Vertumnus I: The God of Change
Monday 20 June, 6pm
The first lecture centers on a celebrated Elegy of Propertius, in which the god Vertumnus is introduced as a persona loquens reciting a sort of autobiography. Vertumnus describes himself as a god presiding over any possible form of change (vertere = to change): from the turning of the seasons to the ripening of fruits, from the power of diverting a river’s course to the practice of metamorphosis.

Lecture II

Autobiography of Vertumnus II: The God of Perpetual Metamorphosis
Wednesday 22 June, 6pm
The second lecture questions the identity of Vertumnus, a god defined by maleability. Is Vertumnus the god of a single identity, or does this figure instead possess multiple identities at once? Such questions were integral to Roman society, where social and personal identities existed within a rigid hierarchy.

Lecture III

Many Vertumni: Gods, Grammar and Fractals
Friday 24 June, 5:30pm
The third and final lecture considers Vertumnus in the plural, a proposition first put forward by Horace. Debating the multiplicity of Vertumnus, or Vertumni, this lecture highlights how ancient gods were awarded the privilege of being singular and plural at once, a status that ignores the linguistic categories that grammar imposes on ordinary mortals.

Maurizio Bettini is a Professor of Classical Philology at Università degli Studi di Siena. He has published extensively on anthropology in ancient Rome (The Portrait of the Lover, trans. L. Gibbs, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1999; Anthropology and Roman Culture, trans. J. Van Sickle, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991) and on the role of myth in antiquity (C’era una volta il mito, Sellerio 2007).

Thomas Spencer Jerome (1864-1914) was an American lawyer and lover of Roman history who lived on Capri from 1899 until his death. In his will he endowed a series of lectures to be jointly administered by the University of Michigan and the American Academy in Rome and delivered at both institutions. The revised lectures are typically published by the University of Michigan Press.

All lectures will be given in English. You can watch this event on live stream at https://livestream.com/aarome.

The Jerome Lectures are one of the most prestigious international lecture series for the presentation of new work on Roman history and culture and are presented at both the American Academy in Rome and the University of Michigan. In 2014, the forty-second year of the lectures, the eminent historian Aldo Schiavone of the Scuola Normale Superiore will discuss equality in the ancient and modern worlds.

The idea of equality is one of the constituent features of Western identity. Bound up within it in an almost inextricable fashion are the legacy of the classical world and modern thought, the ancient polis and industrial society. The aim of the lectures is to outline a genealogy of this character, beginning with two elements that made its birth possible: the invention of politics and democracy by the Greeks, and the invention of law by the Romans. These were the two paradigms that enabled the modern construction of equality through the great revolutions of the eighteenth century in America and France. And it is from them that we must begin if we wish to ask ourselves what the future of this decisive experience will be.

Schiavone is professor of Roman law at the Scuola Normale Superiore. He has served as rettore of the Istituto Italiano di Scienze Umane in Florence, head of faculty in the school of jurisprudence at the Università di Firenze, and director of the Fondazione Istituto Gramsci. Schiavone has been visiting faculty member at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and the Collège de France, and in the United States, has been a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has published widely in the field of Roman law as well as on Roman history and Italian cultural history and criticism. He was the coeditor of the canonical Storia di Roma series and the author of many monographs including Ius. L'invenzione del diritto in Occidente/The Invention of Law in the West, La storia spezzata. Roma antica e occidente moderno/The End of the Past: Ancient Rome and the Modern West and most recently, Spartacus.

Thomas Spencer Jerome (1864–1914) was an American lawyer and lover of Roman history who lived on Capri from 1899 until his death. In his will he endowed a series of lectures to be jointly administered by the University of Michigan and the American Academy in Rome, and delivered at both institutions. The revised lectures are typically published by the University of Michigan Press.

Monday, February 24, 2014

6pm, Villa Aurelia
Lecture I
L'invenzione greca della democrazia (in italiano)

Wednesday, February 26, 2014

6pm, AAR Lecture Room
Lecture II
The Roman Invention of Law (in English)

Introduction: Elio Lo Cascio, Università di Roma "La Sapienza"

Friday, February 28, 2014

11:00am, AAR Lecture Room
Seminar Discussion
Slavery in the First Book of Aristotle’s “Politics”/Schiavitú nel primo libro di “La Politica” de Aristotele
To participate, please contact Kim Bowes at kimberly.bowes [at] aarome.org (kimberly[dot]bowes[at]aarome[dot]org)

Monday, March 3, 2014

6pm, AAR Lecture Room
Lecture III
Economy and Inequality (in English)

Introduction: Andrea Giardina, Scuola Normale Superiore

Wednesday, March 5, 2014

6pm, AAR Lecture Room
Lecture IV
Il mondo globale: nuovi problemi e vecchie risposte (in italiano)

The Jerome Lectures are one of the most prestigious international series for the presentation of new work on Roman history and culture and are presented at both the American Academy in Rome and the University of Michigan. In 2013, the forty-first year of the lecture series, the eminent archaeologist and historian David Mattingly of Leicester University, will offer new interpretations on the interactions between the Roman Empire and the indigenous peoples of North Africa.

The consensus view of Africa in the Roman empire has tended to be closely aligned with the view from Rome and is heavily focused on the hundreds of urban sites, the huge volume of Latin epigraphy and the many extraordinary classical artworks. David Mattingly’s lectures will follow a different transect across the African landscape, using the concept of identity to explore inter- and intracommunal differences in behaviour and material culture in Roman Africa.

The lectures embrace the great swath of territory from the central Sahara to the coast spanning western Libya and eastern Algeria—the desert to the sea—during the last centuries BC and early centuries AD. The series starts with an overview of Africa and its varied populations in the pre-Roman period, contrasting the ancient historical and geographical sources with newly emerging archaeological evidence. The rest of the series looks at the relationship of three broad cultural communities with the Roman state: the army, the rural populations and townspeople. The second lecture focuses on the military community, reconsidering the development of the Roman frontier, the role of the army in Africa and the cultural self-definition of the garrison settlements and how and why these differed from indigenous settlements in the frontier zone. The third lecture explores the diverse histories, economic trajectories and cultural attributes of rural communities, asking to what extent these can be attributed to pre-Roman regional diversity or to active agency in response to Rome’s massive impact on land-use and landholding. The final lecture examines different types of urban biography in Africa and the possible explanations for the diversity detected.

Thomas Spencer Jerome (1864–1914) was an American lawyer and lover of Roman history who lived on Capri from 1899 until his death. In his will he endowed a series of lectures to be jointly administered by the University of Michigan and the American Academy in Rome, and delivered at both institutions. The revised lectures are typically published by the University of Michigan Press.

Thursday 21 February 2013
6pm, Villa Aurelia
Lecture I
Cultural Encounters in 1st Millennium BC Africa: Romans, Liby-Phoenicians and Libyans
Presenter: Christopher S. Celenza, FAAR'94, Director, American Academy in Rome

Saturday 23 February 2013
Seminar Discussion
Romanisation and Discrepant Identity: a visit to the exhibition Roma Caput Mundi and discussion
To participate, please contact Kim Bowes at kimberly.bowes [at] aarome.org (kimberly[dot]bowes[at]aarome[dot]org)

Monday 25 February 2013
6pm, AAR Lecture Room
Lecture II
Pacifying, Protecting, Policing, Posturing? The Military Community in Roman Africa
Presenter: Elizabeth Fentress, President, AIAC

Wednesday 27 February 2013
6pm, AAR Lecture Room
Lecture III
A World of Difference: Rural Communities in Africa under Rome
Presenter: Kimberly Bowes, FAAR'06, Andrew W. Mellon Professor, American Academy in Rome

Friday 1 March 2013
6pm, AAR Lecture Room
Lecture IV
Africa in the Roman Empire: Urban Identities and Urban Trajectories
Presenter: Luisa Musso, Professore, Università degli Studi Roma Tre

The Jerome Lectures are one of the premier international venues for presenting important work in Roman history and culture and its subsequent reception. In the course of five presentations from 9 through 16 March 2011, Leonard Barkan, the fortieth speaker in the series, will explore connections in the Renaissance between what is called “high culture”—poems, paintings, musical composition—and the world of eating and drinking. Leonard Barkan, RAAR’10, is Class of 1943 University Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at Princeton University and Director of the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts.

All lectures will be in English.

Wednesday 9 March at 6 PM
I Lecture: What Kind of a Subject is Food?, Villa Aurelia
Eating and drinking, cooking and feasting, are fundamental human activities. But they are not always accorded their full importance within the history of civilization. This lecture asks the question how we might study them in the context of such parallel cultural expressions as art, music, and poetry. In particular, what happens when we observe the ways that culinary antiquity might have been reborn in the Renaissance?

Friday 11 March at 6 PM
II Lecture: Honest Pleasure, Villa Aurelia
Food may be the earliest source of enjoyment in the life of human beings, and as such it becomes one of the definitions—positive or negative—of pleasure itself. From Plato’s Symposium, which was, after all, a drinking party, to Horace’s Satires, which often centered on dining, to the gorgeously decorated dining rooms of Renaissance princes, the question of food and pleasure has been enacted and debated.

Saturday 12 March at 11 AM
III Lecture: Foraging in the Text, American Academy in Rome (Lecture Room)
What happens when one “reads” for the food? That is, carefully scrutinizing words and images from the past in which food seems like a marginal issue but turns out to be of central importance? Texts by Juvenal and Shakespeare, plus two visual works, one from antiquity and the other from the Renaissance, both on display in Rome, are explored.

Monday 14 March at 6 PM
IV Lecture: Copia and Cornucopia, Villa Aurelia
Where eating and drinking have been represented, in both words and pictures, they are often represented as extraordinarily copious—which may count positively as bounty or negatively as excess. From the classical myth of the cornucopia to the New Testament to Erasmus, from Athenaeus’ fifteen-volume description of a learned dinner party to paintings by Velázquez and Boucher, food has often been seen in quantity. And language has had to keep up with all this multiplicity and variety.

Wednesday 16 March at 6 PM
V Lecture: Metaphor and Embodiment, Villa Aurelia
These lectures have concentrated on food as a literal experience. Yet food is basic to figures of speech in every language. The series concludes by asking what the metaphors have to do with the reality and how certain famous cases of consumption—like Adam and Eve’s apple and Proust’s madeleine—manage at once to be figurative and also to relate to the body.