Classicist Susan Cole to speak on women and religion in ancient Greece April 4

Women's religious festivals in ancient Greece and their practical role in the Greek diet in ancient times will be the topic of a talk by Susan Guettel Cole on Tuesday, April 4. The talk, titled "Pigs for the Gods and Pork for the Table: Dining Out in the Ancient Greek City," will be at 4:30 p.m. in Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium, Goldwin Smith Hall. It is part of the University Lecture Series and is free and open to the public.

Cole, an internationally recognized classics scholar, is chair of the Department of Classics at the State University of New York at Buffalo and an associate professor there. She has written extensively on women and religion in ancient Greece, in particular, on the Dionysiac cult. "I like to describe her work as being at the intersection of gender studies and religious studies," said Judith Ginsburg, associate professor of classics at Cornell.

In addition to being a highly valued source of protein in the rocky terrain of the Eastern Mediterranean, where meat production was a tricky business, "pigs and pork were prominent in Greek religious ritual," Cole wrote, "especially women's rituals for Demeter and Persephone, providing clues to ancient social codes, gender roles and concepts of cultural identity."

Cole is the recipient of a von Humboldt fellowship, a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship and numerous other grants and awards. She is the author of the book Theoi Megaloi: The Cult of the Great Gods at Samothrace and many articles and book chapters on ancient Greek religion. She currently is working on two books, one on the Dionysiac cult in Asia Minor and one on landscapes and ritual space and is contributing a chapter on Greek religion to the Penguin Encyclopedia of Ancient Religions.

She has been a visiting associate professor of classics at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and was a visiting faculty member at the École Pratique des Hautes Études. Section des Sciences Religieuses. She earned her Ph.D. in Greek and Latin from the University of Minnesota in 1975.

For more information on her talk, contact Judy Bower, 255-4843.