Conference: An Afternoon with the Apiones: New Evidence from an Aristocratic Large Estate in Late Antiquity

An Afternoon with the Apiones: New Evidence
from an Aristocratic Large Estate in Late Antiquity

Date & Time: Friday 4 September 2015, 2:15–6:30 PM

Place: Lady Margaret Hall, Norham Gardens, Oxford OX2 6QA; Room: Talbot Hall

Organizers: Amin Benaissa (Faculty of Classics, University of Oxford) and Nikolaos Gonis (Department of Greek and Latin, University College London)

The so-called "Apion archive" is one of the largest groups of papyri recovered from the sands of Egypt: it consists of hundreds of documents relating to a wealthy aristocratic family with a large estate in the Egyptian city of Oxyrhynchus. Its members rose from middling managers of imperial estates in the fifth century to holders of some of the highest offices in Constantinople in the sixth century. We do not know of any other Egyptian family with such a high profile on the imperial scene, nor are we informed so well about the estates of any other senatorial family across the empire. The Apion archive has therefore always been at the forefront of discussions of the economy, society, and administration of Late Antiquity, and it has generated no less than five monographs dedicated exclusively or in large part to it in the past 15 years.

This small conference will bring together members of an informal "Apionic network" to discuss new perspectives on the archive and Late Antique Oxyrhynchus in general and to consider new papyrological evidence. Speakers and respondents will include Giuseppina Azzarello (Udine), Todd Hickey (Berkeley), Sophie Kovarik (Vienna), Roberta Mazza (Manchester), Margaret Mountford (London), and Bernhard Palme (Vienna). The conference will follow a workshop between the participants on unpublished texts.

Attendance of the conference is open to the public and free (including tea & coffee), but advance registration is necessary as space is limited. If you plan to attend, please inform the organisers (amin.benaissa@classics.ox.ac.uk; n.gonis@ucl.ac.uk) by 20 August.

The workshop and conference are generously sponsored by the Craven Committee (Thomas Whitcombe Greene Fund; Faculty of Classics, Oxford), the Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents (Faculty of Classics, Oxford), and the Department of Greek and Latin of University College London.