The international workshop ‘Female Roles in Ancient Foundation Legends’ (Oct. 6, 2025) provided the ideal opportunity to introduce Dr. Eva Anagnostou-Laoutides, Professor of Classical Studies at Macquarie University, as the new member of the WIHS Executive Committee to a wider Waterloo audience. She is an expert in Near Eastern traditions, Classical mythology, kingship ideology, the Platonic symposium, as well as the reception of these themes in the transformative Hellenistic and Late Antique periods.
The panel papers focused on Greek mythology as well as colonization in the Archaic and Classical periods, although the perspectives were often extended into Hellenistic, Roman and even contemporary times, including digressions into the Hebrew Bible and pseudo-academic racial constructs of Nazi Germany. The keynote by Dr. Eva Anagnostou-Laoutides focused on Stratonike (early-3rd century BCE), the second founding queen of the Seleukids and ancestress of all later kings. It was fascinating to see how she was equated with the fertility goddesses of the Hellenistic and Near Eastern pantheon, ranging from the Babylonian Ishtar over the Syrians Astarte to Aphrodite of Smyrna. The workshop also featured a podium discussion on “The Power of Storytelling”, in which experts from fields as diverse as Homeric scholarship and the traditions of the Australian Aboriginals and Canadian First Nations were included.
The desire to work across institutional boundaries was also manifest by its partnering with UWaterloo Classical Studies, the Dragen Lab at St Jerome’s University College, and the new student-run journal for creative writing on Antiquity, Epic Threads.
