The nature and appeal of ancient Roman satire will be explored during Syracuse University's first Moses Finley Lecture of the semester, to be held March 2. The lecture will begin at 4:30 p.m. in Heroy Auditorium, located in the Heroy Geology Building. Sponsored by the Program in Classics in SU's College of Arts and Sciences, it is free and open to the public.
Paul Allen Miller, professor of classics and comparative literature and the director of graduate study in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at the University of South Carolina, will speak on "Satire is Wholly Roman."
Miller has received a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, was a George Walsh Memorial Lecturer in the Department of Classics at the University of Chicago and was named to the Outstanding Honors Faculty at Texas Tech University. He has published several works, including "Lyric Texts and Lyric Consciousness: The Birth of a Genre from Archaic Greece to Augustan Rome" (Routledge, 1994); "Latin Erotic Elegy: An Anthology and Critical Reader" (Routledge, 2002); and his most recent work, "Subjecting Verses: Latin Love Elegy and the Emergence of the Real" (Princeton University Press, 2004).
Miller has also held teaching positions at Texas Tech University, the University of Texas, Hamilton College and Drury College. Miller received a bachelor's degree in comparative literature from Washington University in St. Louis and a master's degree and Ph.D. in classics from the University of Texas.
The Finley Lecture Series honors the memory of Moses I. Finley '27, who enjoyed a long and distinguished career as a professor of ancient history and master of Darwin College at Cambridge University after graduating from SU.