Friday, October 23th, 4:10 p.m.

Prof. Athena Kirk (Cornell University)

"Plutarch on Herodotus: The Case of Polykrite"

Location: Hamilton Hall 603, Columbia University

Prof. Kirk has kindly shared an abstract for her talk:

This paper considers Plutarch’s relationship to Herodotan narratives about women in the essay Mulierum Virtutes. Plutarch, I argue, employs women as devices through which to distinguish his own brand of storytelling from that of Herodotus, who highlights women as blameworthy sources of conflict—a tendency Plutarch elsewhere condemns. In Mulierum Virtutes, Plutarch’s anti-Herodotean self-fashioning emerges in the diction and framing of the essay and in the vignette of the Naxian Polykrite. Plutarch reworks the narrative to suit his agenda of presenting women as able to resolve (rather than merely cause) war. This analysis culminates in a reading of Polycrite’s story alongside an episode in the Histories about the Harpagus the Mede, which I argue Plutarch re-deploys as an

anti-Herodotean tale.

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