“Wine is the mirror of a man.”
For Jessica Romney, one of four candidates currently under consideration for a teaching position in the UT’s classics department, this ancient phrase holds merit in the Archaic Greek poetry she studies — especially when its 2,500-year-old content was recited at a free-flowing symposium.
Romney, who specializes in Greek poetry at the University of Bristol, gave a lecture titled “Wine, Women and Song: Identity and Construction in Archaic Lyric” as an extension of her dissertation, focusing on the verses as a device to forge group-centered identity for Greeks.
“I decided that there is this nebulousness and dynamicism of the Archaic period and the sympotic lyric was really where my interests lie,” Romney said. “I like that they’re fragmentary and that there are so many questions we can put to this body of material. It’s really a never ending and its very exciting because of that.”
By categorizing the fragmentary poems into an “in-groups” or “out-groups” setting, Romney shared her insights into the world of ancient Greek life and how such identities could have shaped the greater dynamics of the early Greek city-state.
“Besides the special dynamics of the symposium, what really helps it is the shared consumption of food and drink,” Romney said. “If you’re willing to eat with somebody, you become acquaintances, friends maybe, so in that I think that modern drinking parties, dinner parties, anything circling around consumption is a modern analog of the symposium.
“You have conversations that take place in these that are different, but that kind of dinner party atmosphere or a night out is fairly similar.”
Emily Gregg, a junior in classics, noted the classification of inclusive and exclusive groups pertained to the modern world, referencing both political parties and partisan groups.
“I really liked the idea of ‘in group’ and ‘out group’ mechanisms in literature just because I think it’s a manipulation that’s still very relevant, and people aren’t necessarily very conscious of,” Gregg said. “I think doing comparative studies of culture [like these] is really helpful.”
As a student of Latin and Greek literature, Gregg said Romney’s explanation of the symposium’s “amnesic” quality propelled her own curiosity in tracing wine’s literary symbolism.
“I was actually sitting there thinking how wine could be the original truth serum or truth potion in literature because she was talking about how if you are lying when you’re drunk, then clearly there’s something wrong for you,” Gregg said. “I was wondering if that’s what the inspiration was and wanted to look that up,”
Aside from Gregg’s musings on wine as a Harry Potter-esque “veritaserum,” Romney explained the deeper importance of sympotic poetry as a personal fascination with the lyrics.
“The beauty of a humanities degree is that you can go after something simply because it strikes you,” she said. “And that’s what this poetry did, it spoke to me. This stuff is over 2,500 years old, and yet as a modern woman, I can see something in this poetry written by conservative, male, ancient Greeks that somehow speaks to me.”
