This year’s keynote speaker is Elizabeth Irwin, an Associate Professor of Classics and Director of Graduate Studies at Columbia University. Her talk, entitled “Thalassocracy – a concept at its (near?) inception” will take place at 3:30 pm ET. The abstract is below:

While the idea of controlling the sea can hardly have begun with Periclean Athens, the use of the specific term ‘mastery of the sea’ (τὸ τῆς θαλάσσης κράτος, with its compounds thalassokrateîn, thalassokrátôr) increasingly proliferated in the second half of the fifth century, both in reference to Athens and also in constructing a history of those said to have possessed it. This paper will examine the appearances and meaning of the collocation of κράτος and θάλασσα at – or close to – its inception. The aim of the paper is two-fold. It seeks to draw greater attention to the political circumstances of the period over which the concept gained currency and evolved: the transformation of the Delian League into Athens’ archê (‘empire’), the Thirty-Years’ Peace, the Atheno-Peloponnesian War, and Sicily. In addition, it seeks to appreciate the meaning of the term’s deployment by the authors constituting our primary sources, namely Herodotus, Thucydides, and the Old Oligarch. Overall, this examination of the term in context, historical and historiographical, seeks to trace the concept’s contested ethical standing as an ambition, not least through its relationship to another salient term of the period likely associated with naval archê – megaloprepeia (‘magnificence’) – whose moral valence, it will be seen, was likewise subject to debate.

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