Apr 11, 2024

Kathryn Caliva Smart, assistant professor of history, recently traveled to St. Louis to present a paper at the annual meeting of the Classical Association of the Middle West and South.

In her paper, “Ventriloquizing Ixion: Myth and Authoritative Speech in Pythian 2,” she argued that that the ancient Greek poet Pindar uses his ability to interpret mythic narratives and control the speech of mythic characters as an emblem of his own authority as a speaker.

This paper is part of Caliva Smart’s current research into how speakers in the ancient world used myth as a type of religious and cultural knowledge that served as a source of authority for their speech acts.