The Michael Rostovtzeff Lecture is an annual endowed lecture given in honor of one of the twentieth century’s greatest ancient historians, who taught at Yale from 1925-1944.
We invite you to learn more about Rostovtzeff’s life and work.
The XIXth Rostovtzeff Lecture will be delivered by Prof. Sara Forsdyke, University of Michigan, on November 10, 2026, and a symposium on the lecture will take place on November 11. Further information will follow.
Please contact Linda Dickey-Saucier with any questions.
The Eighteenth Annual Michael I. Rostovtzeff Lecture
Lecture by Emma Dench, McLean Professor of Ancient and Modern History and of the Classics, Harvard University
Thursday, November 13, 2025, 5:00pm
Humanities Quadrangle, L02
Reception following lecture
Olea
39 High Street
Speaker: John Ma, Professor of Classics, Columbia University
Speaker: Clifford Ando, David B. and Clara E. Stern Distinguished Service Professor, University of Chicago
Speaker: Susan E. Alcock, Interim Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs, University of Michigan-Flint. Department of Classical Studies, Uinversity of Michigan-Ann Arbor.
Speaker: Cyprian Broodbank, Cambridge University
Speaker: Brent Shaw, Andrew Fleming West Professor in Classics, Princeton University
Speaker: Mary Beard, University of Cambridge
Mary Beard is one of Britain’s best-known Classicists—a distinguished Professor of Classics at the University of Cambridge, and Fellow of Newnham College, where she has taught for the last 30 years. She has written numerous books on the Ancient World, including the 2008 Wolfson Prize-winner, Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town which portrays a vivid account of life in Pompeii in all its aspects from food to sex to politics. Previous books include The Roman Triumph, Classical Art from Greece to Rome and books on the Parthenon and the Colosseum. Her interests range from the social and cultural life of Ancient Greece and Rome to the Victorian understanding of antiquity. Her Rostovtzeff lecture eventually played a role in the publication of her 2021 book Twelve Caesars: Images of Power from the Ancient World to the Modern.
Speaker: Alain Bresson, University of Chicago.
Speaker: Susanna Elm, University of California, Berkeley
In 427 or 428, Augustine, bishop of Hippo Regius in North Africa, wrote a letter to his friend and fellow bishop Alypius, a highly trained legal expert at that moment on his way to the imperial court in Ravenna. Augustine’s letter, followed by a second one to a local legal expert, was prompted by the recent mass-enslavement of persons Augustine identifies as free Roman provincials to be sold, from Hippo, to provinces overseas. Members of his church had intervened and set 120 of those captured free. However, these persons were not a homogeneous group.
They included “true” slaves; children sold, contrary to Roman law, in perpetual servitude; the wife of a colonus, a tenant of the church at Hippo; and a notarius of one of Augustine’s churches. In fact, as I will argue, Augustine’s letters were prompted not so much by the capture of these persons, but by issues of personal status, neither slave nor free, brought to the fore as a result of these raids. Using the complex issues of personal status these letters reveal, namely the existence of a grey area between freedom and slavery, the lecture then addresses the question whether and if so to what degree such social and economic realities shaped Augustine’s theological notions of freedom and bondage. Might Augustine’s concept of original sin, his nuanced intellectual and theological proposition about human nature and divine will also be understood as a form of theological reasoning grounded in the social, political, and legal practices of the late empire concerning slavery and new forms of un-freedom?
Speaker: Dr. Dorothy J. Thompson, FBA, Girton College, Cambridge University
When asked about the theme for the upcoming Colloquium held in response to her lecture, Dorothy Thompson responded: Any ruler needs to present him or herself to different constituencies within their kingdom. This was especially the case for Hellenistic kings and queens who, as successors to Alexander of Macedon in areas earlier under Achaemenid control outside Greece, now ruled over both the Greek diaspora and far larger indigenous populations. A further challenge faced Hellenistic rulers. Alexander’s conquest had opened up a wider world to trade, travel and contact. Rulers now competed for influence on the international scene. The varying ways in which different kings and queens responded to these challenges may be charted both in the written record and in the monuments and artistic productions that survive.
The discussion might well be widened since rulers did not act alone. Their courtiers, ministers, military commanders and other representatives formed part of the structure of rule. Royal patronage took many different forms and varied from region to region. Palaces, temples and other constructions reflected royal power. Like other forms of self-presentation, these often depended on local traditions but also brought modifications, as Hellenistic rulers sought to make their distinctive mark both at home and abroad.
Such is the wider context. Lavish entertainment, especially in the context of festivals, was just one of the ways in which kings might seek to impress. My own paper, entitled ‘Hospitality Ptolemaic style: Ptolemy II entertains’ will focus on one example of royal display, the pavilion of Ptolemy II erected in Alexandria for the festival he had set up in honour of his father Ptolemy Soter. Since our knowledge of this structure depends on an elaborate description in Athenaeus’ Table Talk, my paper will necessarily involve the interpretation of literary as well as archaeological and documentary evidence. I am interested in the image of Ptolemaic royal power presented by this pavilion both to those who visited Egypt for the festival from overseas and those who lived there.
Speaker: John F. Matthews, Yale University
John Matthews, John M. Schiff Professor of Classics and History, came to Yale in 1996, having spent his earlier career at the University of Oxford, where he was University Professor of Late Roman History, and Fellow and Tutor at Queen’s College. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1990 and is also a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and of the London Society of Antiquaries.
The main areas of his research have concerned the social and cultural roots of political life in the later Roman empire, and the making and diffusion of Roman law. His 2006 book, The Journey of Theophanes:Travel, Business and Daily Life in the Roman East, a translation and interpretation of a fourth-century papyrus archive, received the James Henry Breasted Prize of the American Historical Association, as the best book published in that year on any period of history before 1,000 CE. His most recent book is Roman Perspectives: Studies in the social, political and cultural history of the First to Fifth Centuries (2010), a collection of seventeen papers, of which six are previously published and others have been extensively revised. He is currently working on a study of the first century of the city of Constantinople, and on a general history of the Roman empire in two volumes, in which the second volume will present a complementary anthology of Greek and Latin texts in translation.
Speaker: Pierre Briant, the College de France
Briant is the leading figure in the study of Achaemenid Persian History and has written widely on the Persian empire both from the point of view of Greek and Persian history. He taught in Toulouse for many years before being appointed Professor at the College de France in Paris, where he is the Chair in the History and Civilization of the Persian empire and of the empire of Alexander the Great. He was the Founder of the influentialachemenet.net online resource for Persian history and archaeology. He received a doctorate honoris causa from the University of Chicago in 1999 and is the author of ten monographs, including the standard history of the Persian empire, and more than 100 articles.
Speaker: Stephen Haber, Stanford University
Haber is A.A. and Jeanne Welch Milligan Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences, Stanford University. Professor of Political Science, History and Economics (by courtesy). He is also the Peter and Helen Bing Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution; senior fellow of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research; senior fellow of the Center for International Development; and research economist at the National Bureau of Economic Research.
His research focuses on the relationship between political organization and economic growth.Most of this research has focused on Latin America, particularly Mexico and Brazil. But through the Social Science History Institute (SSHI) at Stanford, Steve has been one of the strongest supporters of Ancient History in the US over the last 15 years. In particular the SSHI has been instrumental in several important international conferences about the Ancient Economy
Speaker: Ian Morris, Stanford University
Morris is Jean and Rebecca Willard Professor in Classics and Professor in History at Stanford University. He began his career as an archaeologist and historian of ancient Greece, studying early texts and excavating sites around the Mediterranean Sea, but in recent years he has moved toward larger-scale questions and an evolutionary approach to world history. He has written or edited eleven books, among which are Archaeology as Cultural History: Words and Things in Iron Age Greece (Wiley-Blackwell, 2000). From 2000 through
2006 Professor Morris directed Stanford University’s excavation at Monte Polizzo, a native Sicilian town of the seventh and sixth centuries BC. His most recent book, Why the West Rules …For Now (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, forthcoming 2010), asks how geography and natural resources have shaped the distribution of wealth and power around the world across the last 20,000 years and how they will shape our future. Morris’s ongoing projects include a book on slavery and globalization, a study of western civilization co-authored with historian Niall Ferguson of Harvard University, and a volume of the forthcoming Cambridge History of the World.
Speaker: Nicholas Purcell, Oxford University
Purcell is a fellow of St. John’s College and CUF Lecturer in Ancient History in the Faculty of Classics, Oxford University. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2007. Mr. Purcell is an expert on the ancient Mediterranean and is perhaps best known for his monumental study, The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History, co-authored with Peregrine Hordern (Oxford University Press, 2000). In his work he uses archaeological evidence alongside literary and documentary evidence to explore the social, economic and cultural history of the Greeks and Romans and their neighbors. His work especially stresses the longues durées, blending archaeological findings with other data, and insisting that the different themes of history, such as culture, politics, societies, economic behavior, ideas, institutions, must be studied in close association.
Purcell has a special interest in the ancient city of Rome and its Italian setting; in the cultural significance of games of chance, the rôle of women in the Roman imperial family, landscape gardening, and the emperor’s resemblance to an actor on the stage; and in the production and consumption of wine and the socio-economic significance of the villa.