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    • Alexis Castor

    Associate Professor of Classics
    Classics
    717-358-7151
    Goethean Hall
    Office: GOE-106
    Office Hours: M 1:00-2:00 / W 3:30-4:30
    Summary: Greek social history; historiography; Roman history; archaeology
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    Professional Biography


    My teaching encompasses the history of ancient Greece, Rome and Mesopotamia. In my introductory history courses, we investigate the cultural history of the diverse societies that were created in the Mediterranean and Near East. Within a chronological framework, we study political and civic – or imperial – organization. We explore the way of life in the ancient world, considering religious practices, professions, urban and rural life, disease, childhood, entertainment and other daily concerns. We read historical texts, poetry, official records, lawsuits, drinking songs and a range of other written sources that survive. In addition, we also evaluate archeological evidence from the graves, temples and houses in order to investigate the physical environment of the ancient world.
     
    While students learn the major contributions of Greek, Roman and Near Eastern societies to world history, we always return to key analytical questions: How complete is the surviving evidence? What areas of society do different types of evidence document? What does the evidence ignore? How can we deepen our understanding of ancient cultures?
     
    Classical Greek prose, specifically the funeral orations given for the Athenian war casualties, is the focus of my intermediate ancient Greek courses. In most instances these courses are the first time that Greek students are reading pure Greek, and this can result in excitement and anxiety as they apply the grammatical expertise they learned in first-year Greek to the texts of Gorgias, Lysias or Plato. The funeral orations allow us to see how the Athenians identified themselves in comparison to other Greeks, even as they were fighting them in civil wars.
     
    I organize my advanced ancient history seminars around specific topics such as Alexander the Great, Caesars’ Wives: Imperial Roman Women, and 5th Century
    B.C. Athens. These small, discussion-centered classes allow us to debate issues like: Did Alexander present himself as a Persian king? How did Roman empresses influence politics during the Roman Empire? What did the Classical city of Athens look like? Students work on a semester-long research project, for which I provide guidance on outlines, bibliography and written drafts. This project gives them the opportunity for practical, hands-on experience in collecting and evaluating sources and presenting their results in a major research paper and an oral presentation to the class.

    Research Interests


    My research interests focus on how Greek and Etruscan elite classes in general, and women in particular, used jewelry to express their status, gender and cultural identity. Gold earrings, necklaces and bracelets represented real wealth in the ancient world, and men and women wore jewelry on specific occasions to show off their own social position in the community, particularly in religious and funerary rituals. The roles that women inhabited over the course of their lives, as girls, brides, mothers, grandmothers, and the arenas in which they appeared in these guises, especially in sacred venues, required them to adapt their appearance and their jewelry accordingly.  My interest in the wider social meaning and uses of jewelry requires me to use a broadly comparative approach in my analyses. My graduate training focused on Greek culture in mainland Greece and Asia Minor, but since then I have explored the use of jewelry in Etruria and I am currently investigating material from the Greek settlements in South Italy.

    Publications

    “Grave Garb: Archaic and Classical Macedonian Funerary Costume,” in C. Colburn and M. Heyn, eds., Reading a Dynamic Canvas: Adornment in the Ancient Mediterranean World (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2008) 115-145.
     
    “Protecting Athena’s Children: Amulets in Classical Athens,” in C. C. Mattusch, A.A. Donohue and A. Brauer, eds. Common Ground: Archaeology, Art, Science, and Humanities. Acta of the XVIth International Congress of Classical Archaeology 2003 (Oxbow Books, 2006) 625-626.
     
    “Archaic Greek Earrings: An Interim Survey” Archäologischer Anzeiger (2008) 1-34.
     
    I have been fortunate to study and publish the Etruscan jewelry hoard discovered in 2003 at the site of Poggio Colla. This extraordinary discovery of gold jewelry in a sacred context allowed me to investigate the use of jewelry as votive offerings, particularly in moments of communal stress. See:
     
    “An Early Hellenistic Jewelry Hoard from Poggio Colla,” Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome 54 (2009) 245-262.
     
    This research has led to other explorations of Etruscan jewelry and specifically, its use in the Classical period.
     
    “Etruscan Horseshoe Earrings: Exploring a Native Jewelry Type,” Mitteilungen des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts, Römische Abteilung 116 (2010) 159-204.
     
     
    “Jewelry,” in M. Gagarin and E. Fantham, eds., Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece and Rome, vol. 4 (Oxford University Press, 2010) 120-122.

     

     

     

     


    Presentations


    “Gilding the Lily: Animals and Gold in Persian and Hellenistic Jewelry.”                                   
    AIA Annual Meeting, Anaheim, January 2010
     
    “Reconsidering Girls’ Jewelry: The Archaeological Evidence from Late Classical and Hellenistic Greece,” Girls in Antiquity.
    Berlin, October 2010
     
    “All that Glitters: Jewelry and Identity in the Mediterranean.”
    University of Pennsylvania Classics Colloquium (2011)