UCL FACULTY OF ARTS AND HUMANITIES

22 November 2011

Medea: transformations of a Greek figure in Latin literature

UCL Wilkins Gustave Tuck Lecture Theatre - 6.30pm

Professor Gesine Manuwald (Department of Greek and Latin)

Gesine Manuwald studied Greek, Latin and English literature in Freiburg (Germany), where she also completed her PhD and her Habilitation. After some years as a research fellow, which brought her to Oxford and Princeton, she joined UCL in 2007. Her main research interests are in Roman Epic and Roman drama, Cicero’s rhetoric and the reception of the classical world, esp. in Neo-Latin literature. She has recently published several works on early Roman drama.

The Colchian princess Medea was a popular topic among Roman writers. In love with the Greek hero Jason, Medea helped him gain the Golden Fleece and was later abandoned by him for a new wife, which made her kill her own children. This subject matter was taken over from Greek literature, but Latin writers also gave Medea a range of different faces in various contexts and literary genres. A survey of a number of treatments from the beginning of Latin literature to the end of the first century CE will show the multifacetedness of this figure in the hands of Latin writers.