Dr. Dylan James presenting at the Classical Association Conference, Swansea University
Dr. Dylan James, HCMH post-doc, will be giving a talk at the hybrid “Classical Association Conference 2022” taking place at Swansea University, Wales on April 8-11, 2022.
Dylan’s lecture is on Saturday April 9, at 17:30–18:00 and is entitled “Individual Bilingualism and Greek Identity in the Fifth Century BCE”.
The study of bi- and multilingualism in the ancient Mediterranean has come into its own in recent decades, in line with increasing emphasis on ethnic and cultural identity more broadly. The work of the late James Adams and others on bilingualism in the Roman world has inspired a boom in scholarly output on related topics. The evidence, of course, is far greater for the Hellenistic and Roman periods than the Archaic and Classical Greek worlds, so naturally scholarly attention has focused less on those earlier eras. Notable exceptions have examined specific authors or genres, especially Herodotus and Athenian drama. Themistocles’ bilingualism in exile has also been an endless source of fascination to scholars ancient and modern. All studies of Greek identity consider language, but rarely the place of individual bilingualism. If speaking Greek was an important element of Greek identity (or even the most important, as some would have it), then what did it mean if one spoke another language as well?