The Jerome Lectures are one of the most prestigious international lecture series for the presentation of new work on Roman history and culture and are presented at both the American Academy in Rome and the University of Michigan. In 2016, the 44th year of the Lectures, noted Classical philologist Maurizio Bettini will discuss the invention and identity of one of the most fascinating gods of the Roman/Etruscan world: Vertumnus, the god of change. Integrating anthropology and the history of Roman religion, Bettini will present three lectures, each of which offers a different view of Vertumnus, the Roman/Etruscan god associated with transformations of all kinds.

Lecture I

Autobiography of Vertumnus I: The God of Change
Monday 20 June, 6pm
The first lecture centers on a celebrated Elegy of Propertius, in which the god Vertumnus is introduced as a persona loquens reciting a sort of autobiography. Vertumnus describes himself as a god presiding over any possible form of change (vertere = to change): from the turning of the seasons to the ripening of fruits, from the power of diverting a river’s course to the practice of metamorphosis.

Lecture II

Autobiography of Vertumnus II: The God of Perpetual Metamorphosis
Wednesday 22 June, 6pm
The second lecture questions the identity of Vertumnus, a god defined by maleability. Is Vertumnus the god of a single identity, or does this figure instead possess multiple identities at once? Such questions were integral to Roman society, where social and personal identities existed within a rigid hierarchy.

Lecture III

Many Vertumni: Gods, Grammar and Fractals
Friday 24 June, 5:30pm
The third and final lecture considers Vertumnus in the plural, a proposition first put forward by Horace. Debating the multiplicity of Vertumnus, or Vertumni, this lecture highlights how ancient gods were awarded the privilege of being singular and plural at once, a status that ignores the linguistic categories that grammar imposes on ordinary mortals.

Maurizio Bettini is a Professor of Classical Philology at Università degli Studi di Siena. He has published extensively on anthropology in ancient Rome (The Portrait of the Lover, trans. L. Gibbs, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1999; Anthropology and Roman Culture, trans. J. Van Sickle, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991) and on the role of myth in antiquity (C’era una volta il mito, Sellerio 2007).

Thomas Spencer Jerome (1864-1914) was an American lawyer and lover of Roman history who lived on Capri from 1899 until his death. In his will he endowed a series of lectures to be jointly administered by the University of Michigan and the American Academy in Rome and delivered at both institutions. The revised lectures are typically published by the University of Michigan Press.

All lectures will be given in English. You can watch this event on live stream at https://livestream.com/aarome.