27.05.2025 Einladung zu einem Gastvortrag von Prof. Dr. em. Liba Taub am Dienstag, 17. Juni

Science at the Symposium

Men at a symposium drinking wine and chatting Attic kylix, 500 BCE, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Das Seminar für Klassische Philologie lädt alle Interessierten herzlich ein zum Gastvortrag von Prof. Dr. em. Liba Taub (Universität Cambridge / Deutsches Museum Forschungsinstitut) zum Thema "Science at the Symposium" am Dienstag, 17. Juni 2025, 18 Uhr c.t., Wilhelm-Röpke-Str. 6, Block D, Raum WR 05D07.

Ancient historians have devoted a great deal of work to studying the drinking and dinner parties known as symposia, using many types of historical evidence: epigraphical, archaeological, literary. In the 1980s, Oswyn Murray, inspired by contemporary anthropology, described the symposion as a select all-male group bound by mutual obligation and shared activity. Prof. Taub is intrigued by the setting of the symposium as a site of knowledge production, reception and negotiation, particularly as it relates to what we think of as ‘scientific’ knowledge.

Was scientific knowledge being pursued or developed at symposia? What does it mean to claim that science was being done in this particular social setting? For the talk, the chief informant is Plutarch, who in the Table-Talk (Quaestiones convivales) describes in detail a number of conversations on a broad range of topics, including some which might be classified as ‘science’, mathematics, and medicine. Prof. Taub will review some of the subjects discussed, asking what is accomplished by choosing the discursive and dialogic setting (especially as Plutarch used other genres to consider similar topics). She will then turn to Vitruvius, who describes objects which may have been designed for and used at symposia and will briefly consider the writings of Hero of Alexandria as well as some archaeological evidence for devices that may also have featured at symposia.

Liba Taub is Professor Emerita (Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge), and a Visiting Scholar at the Forschungsinstitut of the Deutsches Museum, Munich. She was Director of the Whipple Museum of the History of Science (University of Cambridge) from 1995–2012 and Director of Research 2022–2024. She is a Fellow Emerita of Newnham College, Cambridge. Her main areas of interest are centred on early science and mathematics, the history of scientific instruments, and the preservation of material relating to scientific heritage. 

She has published widely on ancient Greek and Roman science. With Sabine Föllinger and Aude Doody, she co-edited and introduced Structures and Strategies in Ancient Greek and Roman Technical Writing, a special issue of Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 43 (2012). Her most recent book is Ancient Greek and Roman Science: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2023). She has also edited The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Greek and Roman Science (2020).