Out of Africa

Many ingredients of today’s Western civilization came from classical Greece and Rome, which had themselves picked up flavors from all around the Mediterranean and beyond. “Greece and Ethiopia: Visiting the ‘Farthest of Men’” will be explored in this year’s David H. Porter Classical World Lecture on Wednesday, April 5, at 6 p.m. in Davis Auditorium. The speaker is Elizabeth Fisher, a professor at Randolph-Macon College who spent 2015–16 on a Fulbright grant at Aksum University in Ethiopia.

Fisher points out that from the very beginning of Greek literature—early in Homer’s Odyssey—Ethiopia figured as a very special place. Her talk will detail particular landscapes and archaeological finds confirming that pictorial and literary references from as far back as preclassical, Bronze Age Greece are not to some mythical land but to a real place that is still part of modern Ethiopia. As Leslie Mechem, of Skidmore’s classics faculty, explains, “The exotic monkeys and incense depicted in the beautiful frescoes in Minoan houses were in fact reflections of Ethiopia.”

With a PhD in Aegean archaeology from the University of Minnesota, Fisher joined the Randolph-Macon faculty in 1988. She teaches classics courses ranging from art history to archaeology, and she has led students on travel seminars to Ethiopia, Israel and Egypt.

This lecture honors the late David Porter, Skidmore president emeritus and professor emeritus of both classics and English. It is sponsored by the Classics and Art History departments.