Maria Gerolemou | Fellows Talk
Channel: The Center for Hellenic Studies
Date: 2022-12-05

Talk presented on Thursday, 1 December, 2022. 

Missing Persons and Recognition in the Greco-Roman World 

What happens when missing persons, after a long time has passed, find their way back and how are they accepted back into their family and community? A person who returns home after a long period of time has possibly changed and must eventually be recognized as the same person who left. Recognizing a missing person in antiquity, I suggest, is a process that occurs in two steps. The first step refers to the identification of the person missing through their unique bodily features and/or symbola (which could refer to pieces of clothing, jewellery, letters). The second step is to be able to verify their identity and single them out “in the crowd”. The latter requires, in addition, the ability to retrieve related information from memory. There seems to be a difference between recognizing someone of whom you just heard of and recognizing someone who is already familiar to you. Although both modes of recognition lead to social respect and honour, the second type of recognition requires not just matching of the signs to a stored representation of a familiar figure but also subsequent access to experience-based information. I will discuss this phenomenon throughout classical antiquity, but the discussion will be anchored in Homer’s Odyssey.

About Maria - 

Maria Gerolemou has published widely on a) ancient Greek drama, specifically on Gender and Madness b) on Wunderkultur and c) on ancient science and technology. Her first monograph, Bad Women, Mad Women: Gender und Wahnsinn in der Griechischen Tragödie (Classica Monacensia, 2011), investigates female deviant behavior in Greek tragedy and seeks to define the influence of social and ideological discourses on the presentation of normative female behavior. Her second monograph Technical Automation in Classical Antiquity (Bloomsbury, 2022) explores up to which point nature acts as an inspiration for technical automation, it discusses the consequences of technical automation in relation to human skills, and it examines its role in mechanical manufacturing processes. While at the CHS, she will be working on her new book project ‘Missing Persons in the Greco Roman world’ which explores how the condition of a person gone missing, that is, of a person who left and is ‘presumed’ missing by the left behind, is conceptualised in antiquity. This project continues her work on drama, science, technology and its social impact and focuses, inter alia, on emotions, recognition, human identification technologies and geography.