Since Heinrich Schliemann’s excavations in the late nineteenth century at Troy and Mycenae, there has been a continuous quest to prove the presence of historical truth underlying the Homeric epics. From the mid-20th century onwards, thanks to new archaeological discoveries, this debate was greatly expanded by scholars who tried to link numerous aspects of the Late Bronze and Early Iron Age material culture with the poems, with opinions varying significantly. Homeric issues even became the focus of political manipulations within modern geopolitical views in the Aegean itself. This talk reviews these developments and assesses whether it is still worth pursuing a connection between objects and epics, or if it is pointless to continue posing such questions.

BIO

Alexander Mazarakis Ainian was born in Athens in 1959. He studied History of Art and Archaeology at the Free University of Brussels and completed his PhD at the University of London (UCL) with a scholarship from the “A. Onassis” Public Benefit Foundation. He initially worked as an archaeologist at the Greek Ministry of Culture. He taught for eight years at the Department of History of the Ionian University and since 1999 he has been Professor of Classical Archaeology at the University of Thessaly. He has also taught at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, National Technical University of Athens, Paris I/Panthéon-Sorbonne, Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris), UCL-Louvain-la-Neuve (Belgium), and Paris IV-Sorbonne. His field projects include Skala Oropos and Vari in Attica, Kythnos in the Cyclades, Soros in Magnesia, and Kefala on Skiathos. He has published numerous books and studies on Early Iron Age architecture in Greece, Homeric questions, and the results of his excavations. He was awarded the prestigious Chaire Internationale de Recherche Blaise Pascal in 2012 by the French state. In 2016 he was elected Corresponding Member of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in Paris, and in 2024 he received an honorary doctorate from Paris 1/Panthéon-Sorbonne.

Event Details:
When: Monday 22 September 2025, 7pm
Speaker: Prof Alexander Mazarakis Ainian
Seminar: “Homer and Archaeology”: is the quest worth pursuing?
Where: The Greek Center, Mezzanine Level, 168 Lonsdale St., Melbourne
Language: English

Sponsors: Joseph Tsalanidis