 My name is Michael Brumbaugh and I'm an associate professor in the Department of Classical Studies and affiliate faculty in Latin American Studies. Since coming to Tulane in 2013, my teaching and research have ranged broadly over topics in the languages and literatures of the ancient Greeks and Romans, as well as their subsequent legacies from antiquity down to the present day. In particular, I'm interested in topics related to how Greek literature and literary culture intersect with political ideology. Now today, when we hear the word political, our minds naturally go to our own political system, dominated as it is here in the U.S., by two opposing political parties. Now ancient versions of this sort of factionalism do occasionally crop up in my work, but more often I'm focused on a broader view of what constitutes politics. Today I'll be talking about my book, The New Politics of Olympus, which came out in 2019. But before getting into the details of that book, I thought it'd be useful to take a step back and get a clearer picture of the kind of politics I'm referring to. So let's start off with a reasonably well-known quotation by a pretty well-known ancient Greek. In the first book of his Politics, Aristotle says that the human is by nature a political animal. Of course, when he said it, it sounded something more like Goentropos Fusse, Politikons Doan. Now whatever image that may conjure to a modern mind, it might be more helpful to translate Aristotle's phrase, Politikons Doan, as a creature of the polis, which is the Greek word for a city state. Aristotle goes on to say that unlike other animals, say bees, for example, who are similar to us in so far as they live in a sort of community and respond to positive and negative physical stimuli, humans have the power of speech. And this, in Aristotle's view, is crucial, because it allows us to respond to pleasure and to pain by saying, I like that, or hey, that hurts. In the context of a community, humans thereby come to develop both individual and shared perceptions of what is good and bad, right and wrong, etc. Naturally, perceptions of these moral qualities are going to vary over time from place to place and indeed within a single community. But Aristotle believed that language and communication with others in the polis is what enables the uniquely political animal to make the leap from merely experiencing pleasure and pain physiologically to articulating and debating more nuanced moral ideas that emerge from efforts to collectively maximize pleasure and minimize pain. As moral ideas take shape, they come to have influence over the structure of our lives within the polis community. And taken together, they form ideologies or constellations of ideas that guide our decision making and help us rationalize and justify our political structure. Given that language is the medium for working out these ideas, it's hardly surprising that literature would serve both as a vehicle for transmitting them across space and time, but also as a laboratory for experimenting with them. So we've got to think about literature not just as a static heap of book rolls tucked away in the library, but instead as an ongoing dynamic conversation, just as Raphael sought to depict it here in the School of Athens Fresco. And so Greek literature offers us a distillation of the Greek's obsession with asking and answering questions about the best and the worst way to organize just about everything from an individual life to the entire political community. Sometimes this takes the form of a philosophical treatise that explicitly teases out this or that set of questions. Plato famously carries out his investigations in dramatic dialogues where characters discuss the nature of piety or goodness or justice while going on a walk together or sitting under a shady tree beside a stream. Most literature, however, doesn't attack these questions head on, but instead examines them in the context of human lives. Thus, we can see how moral and political questions are being worked out in narratives set in front of reading or listening audiences who can actively engage with the material by creating inferences and analogies relevant to their own experiences. My book examines the intersections of politics and literary culture at a period when Greek power and influence was not limited to the area occupied by the modern nation of Greece, but instead swept over most of Mediterranean basin, extending as far as present day Pakistan. At the head of a vast army, Alexander the Great absorbed most of this territory into a single kingdom in just a few years, but his sudden and unexpected death in 323 sent fishers shooting through his empire as his successors struggled to assert claims to his power. The most successful of these carved up his Spear 1 territory and set about creating kingdoms of their own, in most cases ruling over ethnically and culturally diverse populations who had not previously existed together in a single political community. The most effective of these successors was named Ptolemy, who ruled over Egypt, controlled the waterways and many of the islands of the eastern Mediterranean, as well as significant portions of the coastline from present day Libya to Lebanon. The dynasty he established stood for nearly 300 years until the future Roman emperor Augustus deposed the last Ptolemy, Queen Cleopatra and annexed her territory. The Ptolemy kingdom with all its power, the vast territory it claimed, the dynasty that lasted three centuries, all of it, had to be invented. It had to be manufactured because it was newly created from the ground up. Now, let's say you're Ptolemy, you've got this huge army and the resources to keep them loyal to you, which is a whole different issue. It's terribly inefficient, and not to mention completely impractical, to trot your army out every time you want someone to do something. You need a way to manifest that power that doesn't principally rely on the use of physical force, a way to fix that power indelibly into the imagination, both of those you seek to rule and of your neighbors who want to take away bits of your kingdom from you. To pull this off, Ptolemy and later his successors invested heavily in symbolic forms of power in order to project authority and legitimacy at home and abroad. Art, literature, and knowledge production more generally quickly became central to their efforts and a massive research complex known as the library and museum was created to serve as both a cultural repository and an international think tank that attracted superstars in every branch of learning in order to transform an insignificant peripheral city into the cultural capital, not just of the Ptolemy regime, but of the entire Greek world. No single figure was more important to this effort than a Greek polymath named Colimacus whose efforts are the central focus of my book. Born into an elite Greek family in Kyrene, a well-known Greek colony in modern day Libya, Colimacus became an influential power broker in Alexandria, the city on the Nile Delta that Ptolemy was constructing as the center of his sprawling kingdom. Over the course of some five decades, Colimacus manipulated the levers of power as the first three Ptolemy kings set in place the building blocks of a dynasty that would endure for three centuries. While his name is unfamiliar to most people today, well-known Roman authors like Virgil, Horus, and Ovid considered Colimacus to be the most influential Greek literary figure after Homer. Among other things, Colimacus was responsible for organizing the vast and growing collection of texts that Ptolemy was acquiring for his library which aimed to acquire every book ever written. Colimacus thus became a gatekeeper for a vast store of knowledge and cultural memory. He wrote dozens and dozens of works in both prose and poetry establishing himself as the dominant literary figure of his time. Of that massive output, only a single one of his books survives today. Paradoxically, that one book has received rather little attention from modern scholars who've been kept pretty busy trying to piece back together his other fragmentary works. Though long overlooked, Colimacus' surviving book offers us an important window into the foundations of the Ptolemaic regime, an anthology of poems written throughout his career. We call this book the hymns because it contains six songs of praise celebrating the major Olympian gods. Zeus, Apollo, who gets two hymns, Artemis, Athena, and Demeter. Long thought to be curiosities of a purely religious or literary character and of interest only to a small group of esoteric poetry specialists, these carefully crafted works must be read in dialogue with the burgeoning efforts to manifest political power and authority in the first decades of the Ptolemaic regime. Colimacus was neither a propagandist for the crown nor a reactionary critic and instead he staked out a position all his own that allowed him to stay close to power and yet also influence its development. Working within an authoritarian regime in which the king's favor could devastate you just as quickly as it could elevate you was tricky business and so Colimacus was forced to become a master of figured speech. When Colimacus sang the praises of the all-powerful gods he described them as kings and queens part of a divine family and a unified political regime. In so doing he adapted and amplified elements that were central to the narratives that the Ptolemies were advancing about themselves. In this way, Colimacus helped merge the Ptolemaic kings and queens with gods and heroic figures from legend who already occupied a place in people's imagination. Thus when Colimacus sang a song praising Zeus as the king of the gods he subtly repackaged the god in a way that gave him a sort of Ptolemaic family resemblance thereby co-opting him as a supporter and legitimizer of the new regime. Of course when Colimacus did it it looked a little nicer. Moreover, Colimacus sought to redefine both Zeus and Ptolemy all but erasing the space between the two as individuals presenting them as virtually synonymous with one another. This went hand in hand with other efforts the regime was undertaking to harness the authority of such larger than life figures. So we can set Colimacus's song side by side with freshly minted coins, new monumental building programs, innovations in religious worship and even foreign and military policy to gain a more complete picture of the diverse efforts that coalesced around institutionalizing and perpetuating the regime's power. My book is the first attempt to study Colimacus's hymns in its entirety. Analyzing how the six hymns both individually and collectively seek to reshape political values in order to bolster the Ptolemaic regime and secure a place for literature and for Colimacus at its core.