22/05/2024 08:30 - 16:30

HALL: FATESI - TRIPPODO

Proponent: Chiari G., Spampinato G.

Chair: Chiari G., Ellis A., Spampinato G.

Speaker: Chiari G., Ellis A., Geraci S., Grantaliano G., Magnani A., Pepoli M., Read L., Reali F., Reese B., Spampinato G.

This panel investigates how political, social, and religious "enemies" are represented and stigmatized within (not only) polemical discourses from the Hellenistic era to Late Antiquity. The focus of the various papers, however, is not only on the "representation of otherness" - a theme that has found widespread diffusion in recent decades. Rather, our goal is primarily to observe how the portrayal of the enemy, especially in religious contexts, is functional to other controversies and conveys different messages. In other words, the identification of an external enemy is often used by ancient authors to reflect on themselves, on developments in their own society and on internal struggles. The enemy can therefore also take on a positive value and sometimes prove to be a "necessary otherness". This panel proposes a heterogeneous series of contributions, on a temporal and geographical level: from the representation of enemy kings in the Septuagint to the stigmatization of the Zoroastrians in 6th-century Armenian texts. This broad panorama permits us to trace the endurance and reuse of themes and images in the representation and use of the enemy across different periods. At the same time, it should reveal shifts in the "paradigm of otherness", not only on diachronic level, but also, on the synchronic one, exploring the social and cultural milieus of contemporaneous authors, as well as, of course, their different polemical or apologetic intentions.