When Lucius, in the final book of the Metamorphoses, prays to an unknown lunar goddess and receives a reply from Isis, Apuleius has his characters, one human and one divine, address each another in Latin literary versions of well-known Greek texts: hymns and self-revelations of Isis.  Apuleius was not simply adapting particular texts; he was also participating in a dialogical discourse attested in a range of Greek inscriptions and in the network of correspondences between them.  Several of these texts adopt and adapt typical expressions and formal features from each other that were regarded as characteristics of a distinct genre of discourse.  Drawing on examples from the Memphite self-revelation of Isis, the aretalogies from Maroneia and Andros, as well as the hymns of Isidorus from Medinet Madi, this talk explores the dialogical discourse of Greek hymnic texts belonging to Isis and her circle.  While these texts have long been understood as domesticating representations of an exotic divinity intended to facilitate her assimilation into Hellenistic and Roman societies, examining them collectively and in their dialogical relations with one another shows that their discourse held a place for difference, figuring Isis as a stranger who was neither fully assimilated nor wholly other.

Ian Moyer (associate professor of history at the University of Michigan) explores the ancient history and modern historiography of cultural and intellectual encounters between ancient Greeks and Egyptians. His work ranges across history, classical studies, Egyptology, religion, and reception studies, and addresses questions of culture, identity, and agency in cross-cultural interactions. His first book, Egypt and the Limits of Hellenism (2011), explores the ancient history and modern historiography of cultural and intellectual encounters between ancient Greeks and Egyptians. He is co-editor, with Celia Schultz, of a special issue of Archiv für Religionsgeschichte on “The Religious Life of Things” (2016); a collection of essays entitled Classicisms in the Black Atlantic (2020) with Adam Lecznar and Heidi Morse; and a volume on Cultures of Resistance in the Hellenistic East with Paul Kosmin (2022). With Chris Faraone, Sophía Torallas Tovar and an international team of collaborators, he has produced a new edition of the hymns of Isidorus from Medinet Madi together with translations, commentary and interpretive essays (forthcoming).  He is also currently writing a monograph entitled “At the Gates of the Temple,” in which he studies the gates and forecourts of temples as a form of public space in first millennium BCE Egypt.

Sponsored by the Classical Association of the Pacific Northwest and the department of Greek, Latin, and Ancient Mediterranean Studies. Free and open to the public.