Profs and Pints - Richmond

Profs and Pints Richmond presents: “Witches of Antiquity,” on the sorceresses of ancient Greece and Rome, with Barbette Stanley Spaeth, professor emerita of classical studies at William & Mary and scholar of magic and the supernatural in the ancient world.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/richmond-witches-of-antiquity .]

Seductive enchantress. Murderous sorceress. Corpse-mangling hag. The witches of the ancient world were among antiquity’s most vivid and disturbing characters.

Get to know some of antiquity’s most unforgettable women with the help of Barbette Stanley Spaeth, who last year gave fantastic Profs and Pints talks on ancient magic and ancient terrors of the night.

We’ll spend time with Homer’s beautiful Circe, Euripides’ passionate Medea, and Horace’s sinister Canidia. You’ll encounter Lucan’s terrifying Erictho, a witch so powerful she could raise the dead and force even the gods to obey her.

Along the way, we’ll ask why the image of the witch changed so dramatically as it traveled from Greece to Rome. Greek writers often imagined witches as beautiful, alluring, and sometimes even helpful. Roman authors, on the other hand, increasingly portrayed them as ugly, lustful, dangerous old women. What can these frightening figures tell us about ancient attitudes toward magic, women, sexuality, and power?

The answers take us beyond spells and potions into some of the deepest anxieties of the ancient world, about women who possessed power, men who feared losing it, and what might happen when accepted boundaries—between male and female, human and divine, living and dead, and even order and chaos—began to break down.

For over thirty years at William & Mary and Tulane University, Dr. Spaeth taught courses on ancient magic and the supernatural. She has published several studies of ancient witchcraft and is currently working on a book on the subject. Her talk is sure to leave you spellbound. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image: From “Circe Offering the Cup to Odysseus,” an 1891 painting by John William Waterhouse (Gallery Oldham / Public Domain).

Profs and Pints Richmond presents: “Are We Naturally Egalitarian?” a look at power relationships in humanity’s deep past, with Chris von Rueden, anthropologist and professor of leadership studies at the University of Richmond.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/naturally-egalitarian .]

For the overwhelming majority of our history, humans have lived as hunter-gatherers. What we assume about hunter-gatherers underlies our assumptions about human nature and has shaped public policy in our modern societies. Advocates for generous welfare policies or universal basic income, for example, sometimes argue that such measures are in keeping with our inherent egalitarianism, forged in a hunter-gatherer past of equality and sharing.

But just how egalitarian was humanity’s deep past? Be on hand as Professor Chris von Rueden explores the possible answers to that question by drawing from more than a century of anthropological studies of modern-day hunter-gatherers and other subsistence societies, from the Arctic to the rainforests of central Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Amazon, to the deserts of Australia and southern Africa.

He’ll discuss how some hunter-gatherers actually were highly unequal, to the point of practicing slavery, and how such inequality might have been even more prevalent prior to the spread of agriculture. Furthermore, while the majority of hunter-gatherers do successfully limit many inequalities, there is no society completely lacking inequality in terms of property, gender relations, social status, access to leadership, and reproductive opportunity.

Moreover, while hunter-gatherers are frequently generous, the low levels of inequality we see in their societies often results from self-interested motives such as a desire to acquire resources, status, or personal autonomy.

Finally, Dr. von Rueden will connect what he learned about human egalitarianism to the role that it plays in large-scale politics, as expressed in protests, welfare policy, or the lampooning of authority. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image: A pre-1903 photo of Andaman men and women hunting turtles (Smithsonian Institution National Anthropological Archives / Wikimedia Commons).