Event

Speaker: Cam Grey, Associate Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania

Title: "Seismic Riskscapes of the Late Fourth Century CE"

Abstract: A concentration of late fourth- and early fifth-century sources seem to suggest that a massive earthquake shook the eastern Mediterranean in the second half of the fourth century CE, precipitating a tsunami that reached as far as Croatia, Northwestern Greece, Libya, and Egypt. This earthquake is conventionally dated to the morning of July 21, 365 CE. However, this neat picture of a single, universally-destructive event is open to question, as too are attempts to explain its impact upon the communities of Crete and the eastern Mediterranean by recourse to grand claims of religious and political transformation, or predetermined narratives of widespread societal and economic collapse. This paper eschews those grand narratives, and instead uses the textual, archaeological, and geological evidence for seismological activity in the second half of the fourth century to explore late Roman society’s 'riskcapes’—its strategies for understanding, mitigating, and exploiting the manifold uncertainties of the physical and metaphysical world. I will suggest that those strategies must be understood as manifestations of a society within which risk was normalized. Descriptions of disasters, therefore, are motivated less by a sense of dislocation or afront at the event itself and more by an impulse to enlist the event in addressing, expressing, and shaping other societal concerns.

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