Day 2 was dedicated to Late Antiquity.
Professor Anca Dan (Centre National de Recherche Scientifique, Paris) delivered the lecture Heraclius like David and Meleager: Mythical Projections of the Basileus, in War and Peace, in which she investigated the possible political message transmitted by the Byzantine emperor Heraclius (610- 641), by depicting himself as the Homeric hero Meleager hunting the boar, on a silver plate made in the imperial workshop in Constantinople in 613-629, now exhibited in the Hermitage Museum. This representation has been linked to other silver plates, depicting David defeating a lion, in the context of Heraclius defeating Sahrbaraz („boar of the Empire"), the Shah of the Sassanid Empire.
Dr. Mariana Bodnaruk (Central European University of Vienna, University of Fribourg) highlighted the way in which the great military commanders were represented, from an epigraphic perspective, according to the inscriptions on the statues of Stilicho, Flavius Ardaburius Aspar, Flavius Ortygius, in her presentation Forging War Legacies in Stone: The High-Ranking Military Commanders in the Honorific Statuary and Epigraphic Representation in Late Antiquity (4th-7th Centuries AD). These extremely rare and valuable sources provide us with a great historical information and offer a key to understand the mentalities regarding war and honor or, on the contrary, damnatio memoriae of great commanders.
