Speaker: Cam Grey, University of Pennsylvania

Earthquakes can be scary things. They occur largely without warning, and may be followed by a series of equally unheralded and unexpected aftershocks that can last days, weeks, months, or even years. The sudden shifting, trembling, or shaking of the ground, the collapse or warping of familiar structures, and the ensuing physical, mental, and emotional instability that these can cause combine to render the earthquake a mysterious, terrifying phenomenon, with a temporal horizon that far exceeds the seconds or minutes of the actual event. Analysis of the impact of seismic events upon communities in late antiquity has tended to revolve around intellectual paradigms that focus upon the ways in which they were employed in the putative “culture wars” between pagans and Christians in the period, or implicate natural disasters in the so-called decline and fall of the late Roman empire. The purpose of this paper is to begin upon the task of rescuing natural disturbances such as earthquakes, together with the human disasters that they sometimes catalyze, from these rather unreflective and tautological analytical frameworks.

Cam Grey is an Associate Professor in the Department of Classical Studies, at the University of Pennsylvania. He works mainly in the late and post-Roman world (third to seventh centuries CE), and has published widely on the structure and behavior of small communities: how they worked, what mechanisms they possessed for maintaining equilibrium, and what they did when things went wrong. This, in turn, has led him to think about how societies respond to disasters: what factors made particular communities vulnerable or resilient in the face of potentially catastrophic natural hazards, and how those communities might have experienced, responded to, and recovered from such events.