Greek Dialogues - Intimacy and Diversity in Classical Collecting

Date and Time: Tuesday, 6th May, 2025 at 17:00h GMT

Venue: Room 1.04, Faculty of Classics, Sidgwick Avenue, Cambridge, CB3 9DA

Across time, the classical past has never been static—it has been collected, contested, and continually reshaped. In this contribution to the Greek Dialogues seminar series, Dr. Alexia Petsalis-Diomidis (Lewis-Gibson Visiting Fellow and University of St. Andrews) invites us to follow those movements, tracing how antiquity has been encountered not only in grand museums and scholarly texts but also in the overlooked spaces of everyday life, travel, and private collections.

"This talk sketches a microhistory of travel and classical collecting in a bicultural British-Levantine family in the first half of the nineteenth century. It concerns the Burgon family and their substantial collection of Greek coins, vases and small-scale antiquities, now in the British Museum.

Unlike other studies of collecting in this period which focus on acquisitions by elite northern European men, ‘pillaging’ or ‘saving’ major sculptural remains, my research foregrounds collaboration with guides and labourers during travels in the hinterland of Smyrna, in Athens and Ithaca. It also explores the private, intimate aspects of living with the collection, including handling and graphic practices, in Victorian Bloomsbury.

This involves the analysis of an uncatalogued archive of annotated drawings, some executed by the children of the family aged as young as ten. I tell a wider, richer story of collecting, one that uncovers a more diverse set of characters. The archival material I discuss can be used to reconstruct classical grave assemblages; it can also be used to challenge our understanding of ownership of the classical discipline and it raises broader questions about attachments to heritage."