On Monday, Oct. 6, 2025, Classical Studies co-hosted the international workshop ‘Female Roles in Ancient Foundation Legends’. The event was spear-headed by the Waterloo Institute for Hellenistic Studies (WIHS) and invited into the Dragen Lab at St Jerome’s University, which allowed for zooming in colleagues from around the world. Topics ranged from the use of the Amazonian myth by Ionian cities (presented by our guest lecturer Dr. Jean Coert, Assistant Professor at TU Dresden, Germany) over the Biblical city founder She-eh-rah (1Chron 7:20-29), the happier or unhappy love stories in Archaic Greek foundation legends, Gyptis / Petta of Massalia (as depicted in the copper engraving by Alphonse de Neuville), the cult of Juno in the un-founding of Veii and re-founding of Rome, all the way down to the random (yet systematic) use of Greek mythical figures in their construction of the Nordic race. Particularly impressive was the attempt by our alumnus Stone Chen (now PhD candidate at the University of Toronto) to develop a global typology of female foundation figures by comparing Classical Greek with stories from Eastern Asia, Africa, and the Americas. The highlight was the keynote by Dr. Eva Anagnostou-Laoutides from Macquarie University, Sydney, who showed how the dynastic founding queen of the Seleukids, Stratonike (early-3rd century BCE), was integrated into the fertility cults of the Babylonians, Syrians, and Anatolians. The workshop ended with a podium discussion on “The Power of Storytelling”, which included expertise ranging from Homeric scholarship to the traditions of the First Nations of Canada. Paper abstracts can be read on the conference website, and recordings of the lectures will soon be shared on the website of WIHS.
