Public Lecture by Dr Olivier Mariaud, Université Grenoble Alpes
SYDNEY
Wednesday 17 September 2025, 6.30pm
Vere Gordon Childe Centre Boardroom
The University of Sydney
“I believe that the earth is very large and that we who dwell between the pillars of Hercules and the river Phasis live in a small part of it about the sea, like ants or frogs about a pond, and that many other people live in many other such regions.” Plato, Phaedo 109a-b
This famous dialogue in the Phaedo illustrates a common idea: the Mediterranean was settled by Greeks “like frogs about a pond”. This is particularly the case for the Aegean, when the Greeks crossed the sea to settle on its eastern shore at the dawn of the first millennium BCE. But archaeology tells a much more complex story. This lecture will show that the Aegean was not merely a pond around which the Greeks lived. Emphasis will be on the Carians of Anatolia, another ‘men of bronze’ population, whose history of interactions and engagements with the Greeks is long and complex.
2025 AAIA VISITING SCHOLAR
Dr Olivier Mariaud, Université Grenoble Alpes
Dr Olivier Mariaud is a lecturer in Greek history and archaeology at the University of Grenoble-Alpes, and since September 2024, director of the journal GAIA, an interdisciplinary journal on archaic Greece founded by Fr. Létoublon in Grenoble. He is leading a CNRS delegation to ArScAn aimed to develop a research theme focused on the appearance and spread of the inscribed stele and the inscribed figurative monument within Greek necropolises during the Archaic period.
Download the lecture’s programme.
