2017 McKibben Lecture

Kathleen Coleman of Harvard University, a Roman scholar, delivered the 2017 McKibben Lecture at 4 p.m. May 4, 2017, in Joe Rosenfield ’25 Center, Room 101.

As a preview of her talk, she wrote: “The funerary altar of Q. Sulpicius Maximus, aged eleven, was discovered immured inside the Aurelian Wall in Rome in 1871. It now stands in the Centrale Montemartini Museum, where his parents would doubtless derive some consolation from seeing it still preserved nearly two millennia later.

Maximus is depicted on it, surrounded by four texts: his Latin epitaph; the text of a poem he delivered in Greek at a competition in AD 94; and two Greek epigrams, one in propria persona lamenting his premature death, and the other put into the mouth of the passer-by, consoling him with the thought that his poetry will live forever.

This lecture explored Maximus’ social background; his education; the quality of his poem; the nature of the competition that he entered; the relative status of Greek and Latin in Rome at the end of the first century AD; the design of the stone; and other questions prompted by this remarkable and touching monument.​”

The Department of Classics sponsored this free, public event.

Kathleen Coleman

Kathleen Coleman is the James Loeb Professor of the Classics at Harvard University, where she has taught since 1996, having held appointments at Trinity College, Dublin,  and the University of Cape Town in South Africa. Born and raised in Zimbabwe, she studied at the University of Cape Town and what was then called the University of Rhodesia, and earned her D.Phil. degree at Lady Margaret Hall, the University of Oxford.

Coleman is the author of two books, co-editor of four, and contributor of numerous scholarly articles that treat, among many other topics, the Latin poets Statius and Martial, the use of ancient Greco-Roman literature by the modern South African poet Douglas Livingstone, and ancient Rome’s animals, gardens, executions, and gladiators. Her scholarship is recognized the world over. She has won awards and fellowships in the UK, South Africa, Germany, and the US. As a lecturer, she is well sought out and has reached audiences in Australia, North America, the UK, the Netherlands, New Zealand, China, and Italy.

Coleman is committed to the spread of knowledge about the world of the ancient Mediterranean. When she is not directing graduate students and advising undergraduates, she can be heard on NPR and seen on the BBC. You might also remember her from the movie "Gladiator," for which she served as a consultant.