“The Indo-European heritage and the Greek poetic tradition” will be the theme of the conversation that Prof. Claudio Meliadò, Professor of Greek Language and Literature at the Department of Ancient and Modern Civilizations (DICAM) of the University of Messina, will hold at the Archaeological Museum of Reggio Calabria Wednesday 26 June at 5.30 pm as part of the meetings dedicated to “perception of the Ancient” promoted by the Anassilaos Cultural Association jointly with the MArRC itself, a “project” which has so far involved – and will also involve during the summer – scholars from different research fields (historians, archaeologists, scholars of law and ancient art, philologists, numismatists) from various Italian and European universities with a series of workshops that also aim to bring us closer to the “daily life” of the Ancients, to their beliefs and habits, to their diet (taking into account that most of what we eat comes from the Americas and was unknown to the Ancients), to the techniques with which they coined coins, forged weapons, made ceramics (the Reggio Calcidal one is famous).
The Indo-European culture, from which the scholar will start, has been partially reconstructed over the last few decades through linguistic investigations, which have highlighted a common derivation for a large number of words belonging to linguistic strains spread from Europe to the Far East. Hence the discovery of a common European linguistic family divided into many branches which include Indian (Sanskrit), Iranian, Tocarian, Armenian, Albanian, Greek, Italic (with Latin), the Celtic, the Germanic, the Baltic, the Slavic, the Hittite:. In particular, the almost common terminology used to designate the material reality experienced by the people we call Indo-Europeans has found confirmation in finds emerging from the excavations of necropolises and settlements dating back to the 3rd millennium BC, thus allowing us to arrive at plausible hypotheses of geographical location. The Indo-European heritage it also clearly emerges from the literary texts in Sanskrit, Iranian and Greek in our possession, which not only share completely overlapping expressions, images, ideas and techniques (think of the Homeric metaphor “in the milk of the night” more understandable if you consider that in Vedic the night and the dawn are compared to “dairy cows” or the use of the meter) but also refined stylistic peculiarities, which the scholar will illustrate during his speech. At the meeting, after a greeting from the Director of MarRC Dr. Fabirzio Sudano, Prof. Pina De Felice, Head of Poetry of the Anassilaos Association, will speak. You will introduce and lead Prof. Amos Martino, Head of the Anassilaos Glauco Study Center in Reggio for Greek and Latin literary culture.
