Bryant Kirkland (UCLA), “In Some Mystic Shrine: Spectacle and Speech in Dio’s Olympian Oration”

Often analyzed for its theological notions, Dio’s Olympian Oration (Or. 12) is rarely treated as an organic whole, a work whose components intermingle to form a complex relation among ideas of sight, speech, and the truth-status of art. This talk attempts an integrated reading of Dio’s Olympian, attentive to its form and sometimes odd flow—and to how Dio’s ideas of artistic coherence are realized processually as an unfolding event that mingles the ekphrastic and the philosophical. Exploring some of the work’s intertextual activations, synaesthetic junctures, and embedded histories of value, Dr. Kirkland will dilate on a few of the work’s peculiar narrative notches to argue that the oration is concerned less with divine creation than with promulgating an idea of human creativity, and that its concern with representation (in the statue of Zeus) also prompts readers to wrestle with the intricacies of the oration’s own form.