Session I

Horace received the elite education of an orator and served as a military tribune under Brutus against Caesar in the civil wars. When the Roman Republic collapsed and Augustus came to power, Horace gave up the expectation of becoming Cicero's successor and turned to poetry.

As the territory of literary production and diffusion increasingly extends beyond the book, a number of today's French writers have explored the possibilities of new media technologies and online publication.

This summer the Music Festival at Santa Fe Opera performed for the first time the new edition of Rossini's major 1820 opera, Maometto Secondo. But it is a terribly complicated score to edit. An unusual and innovative score, it did not easily find an audience in the nineteenth century, and Rossini revised it twice—once in Italy, once in France—trying to garner the public he thought it deserved. It remains one of his most priceless scores, and this talk will discuss the problems involved in bringing into the modern theater.

This lecture will explore vase-paintings and votive statues that show how Greek women and male children wore knotted cords and strings of amulets to protect their bodies. The absence of similar amulets on naked adult males points to a restriction of use to females and immature males. This talk will also show how the wearing of childhood amulets by boys (especially on Cyprus and in Athens) seems intertwined with assertions of citizenship and other forms of status.

Some people think that we are morally obligated to do whatever produces the best outcome; other people think that there are some things that we must not do, regardless of the outcome. This dispute lies at the heart of ethical, social, and legal thought and practice. This talk will argue that both parties in this dispute accept a false idea about actions and their outcomes, and that once this idea is cleared away we can resolve the dispute.

When the postwar ban on foreign travel for Japanese performers was lifted in 1950, popular musicians immediately launched into overseas activities. The list of musicians who conducted U.S. tours in 1950-1951 reads like a “Who’s Who” of mid-century Japanese pop. Appearing primarily before Japanese-American audiences, these U.S. appearances represented a breakthrough not only for the Japanese music industry, but also for local audiences.