Late antiquity scholar Glen W. Bowersock will address intriguing questions about gods, myths, cults, and poets, when he delivers this year's John Lax Memorial Lecture October 19.

How did early Christians view their pagan neighbors? What precipitated the burning of books and the destruction of temples in ancient times? Glen W. Bowersock, professor of ancient history at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, will address these and other intriguing questions about gods, myths, cults, and poets in this year’s John Lax Memorial Lecture. Titled “Recapturing the Past in Late Antiquity,” the talk will take place Thursday, October 19, at
4 pm in Gamble Auditorium. A reception will follow the lecture.

Bowersock has been a professor of ancient history at the Institute for Advanced Study since 1980. A former professor of classics and history at Harvard University, Bowersock has written or edited more than a dozen books and published more than 200 articles on Greek, Roman, and Near Eastern history and culture, as well as on the classical tradition in modern literature. His book Hellenism in Late Antiquity earned him the James Breasted Prize of the American Historical Association. Other works include Julian the Apostate, Roman Arabia, Fiction as History, and Martyrdom and Rome. He is also coeditor of Late Antiquity: A Guide to the Postclassical World, published last fall by Harvard University Press.

The John Lax Memorial Lecture was endowed in 1982 by professors Peter and the late Anneli Lax of New York University’s mathematics department, in memory of their son, John, a historian who taught at Mount Holyoke in the mid-1970s. After John Lax’s premature death, his parents created a permanent memorial in the form of this annual lecture. The Lax Lecture is given by a historian of the highest distinction to commemorate the work and spirit of John Lax by making the latest advances in history accessible to the public.

Recent John Lax Memorial Lecturers have included Carol Gluck, who spoke last year on war and memory; Fritz Stern, who lectured in 1998 on Jews and assimilation in pre-World War I Germany; and Sandra Luderdale-Graham and Richard Graham, who spoke in 1997 on slave-planter relationships in nineteenth-century Brazil.

PHOTO BY RANDALL HAGADORN