Pontes ad Fontes – Bridges to Sources

Abstract

The 2015 Colloquium Balticum took place at the University of Tartu from 5 to 7 November. This annual colloquium first held in 2001 at Lund University, has continued to bring together Antiquity scholars from Sweden, Germany, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Finland and Russia. While participants come mainly from classical studies, researchers from a variety of disciplines have also recognised the conference’s merit. Over the years, the programme has addressed disciplines such as philosophy, Greek and Latin literature, as well as, for instance, the Greek and Latin education or the influences of ancient mythology in contemporary literature. The delivered papers are authored by both recognised scholars and by MAand PhD-students presenting their first academic achievements. The subtitle of this year’s Colloquium Balticum XIV Tartuense was Pontes ad fontes (Bridges to Sources), aiming to draw attention to methodological questions in researching Classical Antiquity and reception of ancient culture. As expressed in the conference invitation, a wide variety of activities could be considered Pontes (Bridges) to Antiquity: discovery, interpretation, translation, commentaries and teaching of ancient heritage. This subtitle offered an opportunity to include papers on poetry and poetics, methods and possibilities of textual analysis, themes and forms of ancient poetry in contemporary literature, and so on. We will give a short overview of such papers presented during the eight sessions on the colloquium in Tartu. During the first session on 5 November, Anna Strode from the University of Latvia discussed the themes of 17th century occasional poetry in Riga and their relation to the history of Livonia. Due to the domination of Swedish Empire at the time in Livonia, the level of education improved, and in 1631 the Riga Academic Gymnasium was founded and soon scientific texts started to appear. Hand in hand with the growing importance of Latin and Greek language in education, occasional poetry in these languages began to bloom. In order to graduate from the Gymnasium, students had to take part in various disputations (disputationes) held in school as well as in public. Texts of these disputations were printed before the disputations themselves took place; the printed versions included occasional poems congratulating the respondents (that is, students of the Gymnasium, who were the authors of the disputations), which were added to the end of the texts. Strode described how the main