Global Humanities Junior Fellow at Freie Universitaet Berlin

June - September 2016

Greek Identity in the Roman Period

The project aims to better understand the complex dynamics between Greeks and Romans during the first centuries AD through literary analysis. Reading texts by Greeks in the Roman period raises questions related to power dynamics and elitism. The current project focuses on The Life of Apollonius of Tyana, a hagiographic biography of a first-century Greek sage written by a third-century Greek writer, Philostratus. Bearing in mind the self-reflective manner of Greek writing in the Roman world, the project offers a new perspective on these issues and chooses to read this text in the Roman context in which it was written. By reading Philostratus through Roman eyes, we can find intertextual influences from Roman predecessors and contemporaries, such as the Stoics. This research examines the complicated attitude of Philostratus to different aspects of Roman Rule through tracing literal allusions and implications in the text. By reading this text from a Roman point of view, it is possible to consider the identities of Philostratus and his fellow writers as unsettled and fragile and to redefine the manifold identities of Greeks under Roman rule.

Shlomit Kobliner is a Doctoral student at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She studied in the Revivim Honors Program, a program that integrates a BA and MA in Judaic studies and a teacher training program. Her first degree was in the field of Jewish Thought and Bible Studies and her second degree focused on the history and philosophy of the Second Temple Period. Shlomit Kobliner completed her Masters degree in 2014 with a thesis titled : ”Reading The Life of Pythagoras by Iamblichus in Light of the Synoptic Gospels“ under the supervision of Prof. Maren Niehoff.