Dialectics of innovation: Embedding Prometheus into Athenian polytheism
Marianne Hopman, Associate Professor of Classics at Northwestern University
Midway in the performance of Prometheus Bound, Prometheus describes to the chorus how he radically bettered human life through the invention of many practical arts, ranging from carpentry to medicine, divination, and metallurgy. The catalog would have surprised Athenian spectators in many ways. Not only does it have no equivalent in the authoritative accounts of the Prometheus myth transmitted in Hesiod’s Theogony and Works and Days, but the attribution of so many arts to a single divinity breaks away from the division of divine prerogatives that underlies Athenian polytheism. In this talk, Ms. Hopman will show how PV both celebrates and acknowledges the theological provocation raised by Prometheus, thus negotiating for its audience the challenge raised by the ascendant popularity of the trickster god in fifth-century Athens.
Marianne Hopman (Ph.D. Harvard University and Paris Sorbonne) is a scholar of ancient Greek culture with an expertise in archaic and classical poetry and special interests in literary theory, feminist studies, animal studies, posthumanism, and the environmental humanities. She is the author of Scylla: Myth, Metaphor, Paradox (Cambridge University Press, 2012), the co-editor of Choral Mediations in Greek Tragedy (Cambridge University Press, 2013), and the author of articles on Homer, Athenian tragedy, and Greek hymns. Her current book project, entitled Prometheus’ Gifts: Environment and Technology in Fifth-Century Athens, draws on the fields of Classics and the environmental humanities to offer a contemporary reading of the fifth-century BCE tragedy Prometheus Bound as an attempt to come to grips with the question of how humans and their inventions fit into the world.
Hopman served as director of the French Interdisciplinary Group from 2012 to 2017 and chaired the Classics Department at Northwestern University from 2018 to 2022. Honors and fellowships include the John J. Winkler Memorial Prize, a grant from the Loeb Classical Library Foundation, and an AT&T Research Fellowship. In early 2015, Professor Hopman was named a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques by the French Ministry of Culture.
Marianne Hopman (Ph.D. Harvard University and Paris Sorbonne) is a scholar of ancient Greek culture with an expertise in archaic and classical poetry and special interests in literary theory, feminist studies, animal studies, posthumanism, and the environmental humanities. She is the author of Scylla: Myth, Metaphor, Paradox (Cambridge University Press, 2012), the co-editor of Choral Mediations in Greek Tragedy (Cambridge University Press, 2013), and the author of articles on Homer, Athenian tragedy, and Greek hymns. Her current book project, entitled Prometheus’ Gifts: Environment and Technology in Fifth-Century Athens, draws on the fields of Classics and the environmental humanities to offer a contemporary reading of the fifth-century BCE tragedy Prometheus Bound as an attempt to come to grips with the question of how humans and their inventions fit into the world.
Hopman served as director of the French Interdisciplinary Group from 2012 to 2017 and chaired the Classics Department at Northwestern University from 2018 to 2022. Honors and fellowships include the John J. Winkler Memorial Prize, a grant from the Loeb Classical Library Foundation, and an AT&T Research Fellowship. In early 2015, Professor Hopman was named a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques by the French Ministry of Culture.
| Building: | Angell Hall |
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| Event Type: | Lecture / Discussion |
| Tags: | Classical Studies, Contexts For Classics |
| Source: | Happening @ Michigan from Classical Studies, Contexts for Classics |
