Affiliation: Pennsylvania State University
Mark Munn is Professor of Ancient Greek History and Archaeology at the Pennsylvania State University. He holds a BA in Classical Studies from the University of California, San Diego, and a PhD in Ancient History from the University of Pennsylvania. He has been a Junior Fellow of the Center For Hellenic Studies in Washington, D.C., and a Regular and Associate Member of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, leading two Summer Sessions for the ASCSA in Greece with his wife, Dr. Mary Lou Zimmerman Munn. In the field in Greece he has served as Assistant Director of the Southern Argolid Survey, Director of the Dema Tower Excavation, Director of the Skourta Plain Survey Project, and Co-Director with Vassilis Aravantinos and Sharon Gerstel of the Panakton Excavation Project. Most recently Mark has been studying the monuments of Phrygia and Lydia in Turkey. The scope of Mark’s research is the history of classical Greece through its literary and material culture and in its broader Mediterranean context. From texts and archaeological evidence Mark investigates the environmental conditions and ideological formations that motivated social and political action in the Greek world from the early Archaic to the Hellenistic periods, with special interest in the influence that Anatolian civilizations of the Iron Age had on the Greeks. Among other books and articles, he is the author of The School of History: Athens in the Age of Socrates (University of California Press, 2000), and The Mother of the Gods, Athens, and the Tyranny of Asia: A Study of Sovereignty in the Ancient Religion (University of California Press, 2006), “Why History? On the Emergence of Historical Writing” in Ancient Historiography on War and Empire (2017), “Inscriptions from Panakton” Hesperia 2021, “Sophists Between Aristocracy and Democracy” in The Cambridge Companion to the Sophists (2023), “The Phrygian Inscription W-03 on the Arslan Kaya Monument” Kadmos 2024, “The Lydian Origin of the Cult of Attis: A Study of Kingship and Divinity” Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions 2025, and “Herodotus on the Death of Atys: An Anatolian Heroic Archetype” Journal of Hellenic Studies 2026. He has been the recipient of research grants from the Pew Memorial Trust, the American Philosophical Society, the Packard Foundation, Dumbarton Oaks, and the Institute for Aegean Prehistory. In 2026 he received the Class of 1933 Distinction in Humanities Award from the College of the Liberal Arts, Penn State.
Periclean Athens is remembered for the flourishing of the first true democracy and for the creation of celebrated monuments and artworks that define the classical period of ancient Greece. In this lecture I propose that the motive and the justification for the establishment of the sovereignty of the people at Athens was Eros, the embodiment of desire. The connection between Eros and democracy is made explicit in revealing ways in the art, literature, philosophy and political rhetoric of fifth-century Athens.
Selected Bibliography
Plato, Symposium
Aristophanes, Lysistrata
Mark Munn, chapters 4-7 in The School of History: Athens in the Age of Socrates, University of California Press, 2000, pp. 95-194
The banqueting dead, a popular theme in the funerary monuments of the Greco-Roman east, can be shown to originate in the ideology of elite Anatolian culture in the Lydian and Achaemenid Persian periods, where the banqueting couple can be seen to represent a marriage that symbolizes the elevation of the deceased to semi-divine status as potent intermediaries between the realms of mortals and the gods.
Selected Bibliography
Robert Garland, “Life in Hades,” chapter 5 in The Greek Way of Death, Cornell University Press, 1985, pp. 48-76
Mark Munn, “The Mother of the Gods and the Practices of Lydian Tyranny” chapter 4 in The Mother of the Gods, Athens, and the Tyranny of Asia, University of California Press, 2006, pp. 131-177
Mark Munn, “Herodotus on the Death of Atys and an Anatolian Heroic Archetype,” forthcoming in Journal of Hellenic Studies 146, 2026
A landmark of Phrygian archaeology, the rock-carved façade in the highlands of western central Anatolia known as the Midas Monument has been thought to be the tomb of King Midas, or a tribute to the greatness of his kingship at the end of the eighth century BCE, or a hero shrine to the memory of King Midas and his deified mother in the sixth century BCE. Supporting this last interpretation, this lecture explores the meaning of Midas and his patron deity, the Phrygian Mother of the Gods, as they were viewed by the kings of Lydia, successors to the kingdom of Midas.
Selected Bibliography
C. Brian Rose, “Midas, Matar, and Homer at Gordion and Midas City,” Hesperia 90, 2021, pp. 27-78
Lynn E. Roller, “The cult of the Mother Goddess in Phrygia,”” chapter 4 in Search of God the Mother: The Cult of Anatolian Cybele, University of California Press, , pp. 63-115
Mark Munn, “The Mother of the Gods and the Sovereignty of Midas,” chapter 2 in The Mother of the Gods, Athens, and the Tyranny of Asia, University of California Press, 2006, pp. 56-95
Mark Munn, “Journey to Translation: Deciphering the Inscriptions of an Ancient Phrygian Monument,” Expedition Magazine, 67.1, summer 2025, pp. 43-53
