Todd Lecture Series

This significant event is held once every two years and consists of a lecture delivered by a distinguished classical scholar with an international reputation. It is sponsored by the University of Sydney in conjunction with the Department of Classics & Ancient History and the Classical Association of NSW. It commemorates the life and work of Professor Todd, one-time Professor of Latin, University of Sydney.

2018 Lecture

Friday, 19 October at 6.00pm

Stephen Harrison (Oxford) 
Pushing genre boundaries: expanded epigram in Horace and Propertius.

Past Lectures

2017 lecture:

22nd Todd Memorial Lecture
Thursday 24 August 2017, 6:00 pm
General Lecture Theatre Quadrangle, A14, University of Sydney

Professor Greg Woolf (Institute of Classical Studies, University of London

How Cosmopolitan was Imperial Rome?

Rome, vast, swollen with immigrants from all the hinterlands of the inland sea, has often seemed the paradeigmatic cosmopolis, a world in a city, a city that encompassed the world. Modern historians of ancient Rome have often reached for parallels with London, Paris, New York or Mumbai in trying to understand the social texture of Europe’s first World City. But what if ancient cosmopoleis were not like modern ones? What if the different processes through which they were formed and repeatedly refilled were not the same as those that built and build the megacities of modernity. I shall be drawing on migration studies and new work on ancient connectivity to argue for the difference of ancient Rome, trying to sketch the outlines of an Alien Cosmopolis, that to our eyes seems strangely homogenous compared to the great cities of the twenty first century.

Click here for a full list of past Todd lectures

Some lectures are available online. Others can be ordered using the forms below:

Order form for the 20th Todd Memorial Lecture,
Harriet Flower, Consensus and Community in Republican Rome

Order form for 19th Todd Memorial Lecture,
Miriam Griffin, Symptoms and Sympathy in Latin Letters

Order form for the 15th Todd Memorial Lecture,
Kathleen Coleman, Bonds of Danger: communal life in the gladiatorial barracks of ancient Rome