RENOWNED CLASSICIST LESLIE KURKE '81 TO SPEAK

Leslie Kurke '81, a professor of classics and comparative literature at the University of California at Berkeley and one of seven Bryn Mawr alumnae who have won MacArthur Foundation "genius" grants, will return to Bryn Mawr to present a classics colloquium on Friday, April 30, at 4:30 p.m. Her talk, titled "Herodotus and Aesop: The Sociopolitics of Greek Prose," will take place in Thomas 110; it will be preceded by tea in the Quita Woodward Room at 4 p.m. The event, which is free and open to the public, is sponsored by the Department of Greek, Latin and Classical Studies.

Kurke, who authored or edited four books, published numerous articles in edited volumes and served as the editor of the journal Classical Antiquity, is one of the nation's most respected scholars of ancient Greece. Students at Berkeley know her as an imaginative teacher who inspires profound intellectual engagement with classical texts. She has won the university's Distinguished Teaching Award.

"I want to convey to students my sense of ancient Greece as a profoundly alien culture that we need to approach with the combined skills of literary critics, historians and anthropologists," Kurke says. She exposes her students to noncanonical texts, such as speeches made in courts of law or "The Life of Aesop," juxtaposed to the central texts of the Greek canon like Homer, tragedy or Herodotus. "Students are often most excited and engaged by the strange, noncanonical texts that challenge and resist their easy assumptions about 'the Greeks.' I often have the feeling as a course proceeds that I am breaking through a sediment of blandification that coats these 'classic' texts for most students," Kurke says.

Kurke's lecture at Bryn Mawr will focus on a site where high and popular cultures of ancient Greece intersect. According to Kurke, the Greek historian Herodotus, whose work is a staple of the classical canon, cites two ancient sources as his predecessors in prose writing: the historian Hecataeus and the fable-teller Aesop, a slave who reportedly lived in Samos during the sixth century BCE. Scholars have thoroughly explored the possibility that the writing of Hecataeus served as a model for Herodotus' prose style, says Kurke, while the possibility that Aesop's tales were a similar source of inspiration has been neglected.

"One way in which Herodotus uses Aesop and popular Aesopic traditions is his incorporation of beast fable into historical narrative," Kurke says. "There are several places in the Histories where scholars have identified Aesopic fables, either explicit or implicit, recast as historical narrative. Ultimately, I want to use the Aesopic in Herodotus to suggest an alternative genealogy for the beginnings of ancient Greek prose writing."

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