The Horror of Orientalism: Plutarch’s Artaxerxes Meets the Internet
Sara Raup Johnson (Associate Professor, Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies, UConn)
Wednesday October 30, 2024, 12:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)
The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.
The “cruelty of the barbarian” is a well-worn orientalizing trope that traces a continuous line from the literature of fifth-century Athens to the movie 300 (2006) and beyond. In his life of the Persian king Artaxerxes [Artaxerxes II Mnemon, 404-365 BCE], the Greek biographer Plutarch devotes an entire chapter to a detailed description of an exceptionally gruesome method of torture and execution known as “scaphism” or, more informally, “the torture of the boats.” Evidence suggests that Plutarch found the description in the now lost but notoriously sensational history of Persia by Ctesias, a Greek doctor who served as physician to the royal family at the court of Artaxerxes.
This talk explores the unexpected afterlife of scaphism, from its origins in Ctesias and Plutarch, through the 12th-century Byzantine historian Zonaras, by way of nineteenth-century encyclopedias of torture, to its present-day vogue on the internet and in the death metal music community. It ponders the uneasy intersection between orientalizing discourse and the visceral—pun intended—pleasures of horror.
Sara Raup Johnson is Associate Professor of Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies in the Department of Literatures, Cultures and Languages at the University of Connecticut. Her publications include Historical Fictions and Hellenistic Jewish Identity: Third Maccabees in Its Cultural Context (2004), the edited volume Reading and Teaching Ancient Fiction (lead editor, 2018), and articles and book chapters on topics ranging from the date of the book of Esther to classical allusions in the Japanese manga Fullmetal Alchemist. She is currently working on a book-length project on historical fictions centered around Greeks, Jews, and the Persian court in the fourth century BCE.
Access note
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