Phi Beta Kappa Scholar Sarah Morris to speak April 16

Event Calendar Listing


Monday, April 16
4:30 p.m.
Twilight Auditorium, located on College Street (Route 125)
Free and open to the public

Sarah Morris, a classicist and archaeologist in both the department of classics and the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA, will deliver a lecture titled “Isaac and Iphigenia: Human Sacrifice in Antiquity” on Monday, April 16, at 4:30 p.m. in Twilight Hall, located on College Street (Route 125).

Morris taught at Yale University for eight years before joining the UCLA faculty in 1989. She was named the Steinmetz Professor of Classical Archaeology and Material Culture in 2001. Her teaching and research interests include early Greek literature (Homer, Hesiod, and Herodotus), Greek religion, prehistoric and early Greek archaeology, ceramics, Greek architecture and landscape studies, and Near Eastern influence on Greek art and culture. She has excavated in Israel, Turkey, and Greece, and is currently excavating an early Iron Age burial mound in Albania.

She is the author of “Daidalos and the Origins of Greek Art,” winner of the Wiseman Book Award from the Archaeological Institute of America in 1993. She has co-edited a volume of essays titled “The Ages of Homer” on the archaeological, literary and artistic background of and responses to Greek epic poetry, and has published several articles on the archaeology of ancient Greek slavery.

For her lecture at Middlebury, Morris will discuss the images and stories of human sacrifice that abound in classical art and mythology, primarily tales of parents forced to offer the lives of their own children in extreme situations or under divine compulsion. She will share visual, historical, and archaeological evidence for the offering of human victims in Greek, Roman and Punic cultures, compare them to examples of human sacrifice recorded in other world cultures, and consider the survival of such notions in major world religions, including Judaism and Christianity.

For more information, contact Trish Dougherty, classics department coordinator, at 802-443-5013 or pdougher@middlebury.edu.