Classics Speaker Series: Laura Nasrallah

Cornell University community restorative day is scheduled for Friday, November 3. The Classics Speaker Series will occur as planned. 

Intergenerational responsibility and ancestral fault: What we might learn at the Areopagus

This paper centers on the Areopagus, real and imagined. This rocky outcropping just to the north of the Athenian Acropolis is a particularly potent site to think about justice. It was, of course, the site of a court whose membership the emperor Marcus Aurelius sought to regulate; it is also famously where the Furies or Erinyes were appeased despite the injustice of intrafamilial violence; it is where the apostle Paul was said to have stood, speaking philosophically about God’s judgment. Just to its north, sunk into a well in the Athenian agora, a first-century CE curse calls upon the Erinyes to exact justice. This paper brings together these historical data to explore the role of divinities and the violently dead in bringing about justice, and to develop ancient and modern ideas of reparations and intergenerational responsibility.

Reception will follow.