Seminars

Is ‘ancient history’ just that – proverbially remote, irrelevant, and obsolete? Far from it: the real ancient history was global in nature, a decisive phase in human development that provided the shared foundation of our world and continues to shape (and trap) our lives today. That’s when the earliest versions of today’s ways of life were created and spread. Transforming the planet, this process unfolded all over the world, in Eurasia, Africa, and the Americas, often at different times, sometimes haltingly but ultimately unstoppably. Yet it is rarely studied or taught that way. For many generations, Western intellectuals have dismembered the ancient world, driven not only by their quest for professional expertise but also by nationalism, colonialism, racism, and the idealization of Greece and Rome. Specialized scholarship has fractured into numerous academic niches, obscuring broader patterns and dynamics, and keeping us from understanding just how much humanity has long had in common. The time has come to put the ancient world back together – even if that were to spell the end of ‘Classics’ as we know it.

The Pompeian portrait of a couple (often identified as a baker and his wife) and the so-called “Sappho” (also found in Pompeii) have long fascinated modern viewers. Both frescoes depict elegantly dressed women who hold a wax tablet with one hand, while lifting a stylus to their lips in a gesture that suggests intellectual engagement. Yet despite numerous evocations of daily life in both compositions, these first-century images of women writers have been largely interpreted as aspirational, optimistic representations of non-elite subjects. In this paper, I will interrogate the continued assumption that images of women writers in Campanian wall painting belong solely to the realm of fantasy. By looking at Pompeian graffiti that either reproduce or recreate the poems of Latin love elegists, I aim to bring Pompeian depictions of women writers into closer dialogue with the actual experiences of late-first century individuals. At the same time, I also investigate the potent symbolism of the wax tablet. Although in everyday life they served many purposes, in Roman art these objects frequently denoted an amatory epistolary exchange. The representations of women writers on the walls of Campanian houses should be seen then as participating in a larger intermedial network of metaphors. After all, like the “baker’s wife,” “Sappho,” too, was paired with the image of a male “poet.” In both instances, couples were transformed into perfect correspondents whose romantic bond, though redolent of elegy, had been thoroughly domesticated.

Recently, the nature and ideological functions of the experience of sublimity in Augustan literature and culture have aroused keen critical interest. In this paper, I propose a new way of thinking about the phenomenon. I argue that multiple writers of the Augustan period conceive of the regime via the sublime: it’s as an unstoppable force of nature that is both overwhelming and inspiring, an irrepressible deluge, a wild and untamable conflagration. Such imagery is rooted in a longstanding tradition of political philosophy, but Augustan writers and their successors reimagine it through the sublime, and Augustus himself may have sought to harness nature’s sublimity to convey his own inescapable and sometimes threatening grandeur. I begin by arguing that through the flood and fire narratives of Metamorphoses 1 and 2, Ovid characterizes the experience of the Augustan moment as one of human-induced climate change, a phenomenon that appears to exceed the capacities of the human mind to comprehend but nevertheless gestures toward the princeps’s own limitless potential. Subsequently, I connect Ovid’s negotiation of the Augustan sublime with Virgil, Horace, Seneca, Longinus, and others.

At the end of Book VIII of his History of Animals, Aristotle concludes a discussion about seasonal changes in birds with a surprisingly long quotation from tragedy, most likely Sophocles’ Tereus (Soph. fr. 581 TrGF). These ten lines of verse, which describe Tereus’ metamorphosis into a hoopoe, have long been deemed tangential. In this talk, I argue that, on the contrary, the quotation not only is integrated within its immediate context but even generates part of Aristotle’s discussion, both about birds and, in the following book, about humans. I suggest that, by including these verses, Aristotle activates a dramatic tradition of using birds, especially the hoopoe and the nightingale, to explore questions of human ontology and in doing so extends the generic boundaries of his own work. My analysis demonstrates the potential of a holistic and interdisciplinary approach both to Aristotle’s “biological” treatises and to tragic fragments.

The discovery, on the Croatian island of Pag, of an important dedication to the Myrionymous Isis from the very early 1st century AD, provides an opportunity to re-examine 3 previously known inscriptions, discovered in the 20th century and undoubtedly from the same place, but very difficult to interpret until now. The dedicator is a certain Calpurnia, the daughter of L. Calpurnius Piso Augur (cos. 1 BCE) and granddaughter of Cnaeus Calpurnius (cos. 23 BCE). A deep analysis of these four inscriptions sheds exceptional light on the situation of the followers of Egyptian gods in Italy after the scandal of the knight Decius Mundus and the banishment of the isiacs to Sardinia ordered by Tiberius in 19 CE.

Parmenides has the reputation of being a great philosopher, the West’s first epistemologist—but also of being a poetaster, otherwise known as a rotten poet, whose misbegotten lines do nothing but hinder the meaning and the brilliance of this thought. Not true. He may not be as fine a poet as his fellow Presocratic Empedocles (few are), but there are unrecognized aspects to his verses that are not only admirable in themselves, but which also, in the oblique way poetry can, support his philosophical message about existence, truth, and language; as well as explaining and defending his detailed descriptions of the world we live in, which was the subject of more lines than the account of existence, even though Parmenides’ goddess declares the former to lack all truth. I shall also consider Parmenides as a wandering poet, justifying his choice, puzzling (if not annoying) to many, of verse to convey his message, when prose would seem the better choice for the introduction of epistemology to the world.

I will look at Livy’s productive conflation of physical and narrative space. He achieves this primarily through metaphors, which change and develop throughout the extant history. We are familiar with the comparison in Livy’s Preface of his history to a visible monument. And we know too about the elision of text and content in his remark, “res est immensi operis” [“my subject/subject matter is a matter involving boundless work”] so well elucidated by John Moles. The conceptual metaphors I will touch on today – with no pretense to being exhaustive – are: light and growth; the locus; the journey; and food. This is not a new line of inquiry—in some ways really just a footnote to John Henderson’s 1989 piece on “Livy and the invention of history”—but I hope to add some things to it, and to have some fun.

In this presentation, I discuss my research on the role of Greco-Roman antiquity in Haitian literature. I trace the story of how I came to work on this topic, which brings together Caribbean Studies and Classics, and I chart the development of ‘hacking’ as a methodology. With this foundation in place, I then present various examples involving uniquely Haitian spins on topics such as the Roman myth of Romulus and Remus and the Sophoclean Antigone. As the first modern nation built upon a renunciation of slavery and an endorsement of Black citizenship, Haiti forms an apt intellectual pair with ancient Athens, the canonical font of democratic values, through a shared history of revolutionary political innovation. From Haiti’s independence in 1804, leaders such as Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Jean-Pierre Boyer were turning to Greco-Roman antiquity to champion and solidify Haitian political ideals.

Rome's conquest of the Mediterranean catalyzed a massive wave of emigration from Italy. Romans and Italians became numerous, wealthy, and powerful in provincial cities, where they plied a range of trades and participated in local life. This paper traces the use of collective action by such Romans in Sicily to control local populations and manage relationships with Roman authorities, and explores how Rome used Romans in Sicily for its administrative needs on the island. In doing so, the paper draws on evidence from across the Mediterranean basin and ultimately offers broader conclusions about the nature of Roman imperial activity in the second and first centuries BCE.

Aeacid monarchy in Molossia/Epirus ended in an explosion of violence about 232 BCE, yet some Aeacids continued to celebrate their predecessors and, indirectly, themselves, even more than two centuries later. At Delphi and possibly at Olympia, Nereis, the last survivor of the immediate ruling family, with her husband, Gelon II, soon after the abolition of monarchy in Epirus, dedicated multiple statues of some of the last ruling Aeacids to Apollo. The burials of at least three other members of the Aeacid clan, resident in Macedonia, clustered around the burial or tomb of Olympias in the region of Pydna, the site of her death. The name “Neoptolemus,” that of the son of Achilles and supposed founder of Molossian monarchy (and of several Epirote kings), appears in all three inscriptions, as does pride in Aeacid identity. Two of these inscriptions celebrate Olympias, but none mentions monarchy, either Epirote or Macedonian. This paper will examine the nature and apparent motivation of these post-monarchy memorials.

While sympotic approaches to Archilochus’ elegiac poetry (e.g., frr. 2 and 4 W) have already paid interpretive dividends, particularly in the elucidation of his playful use of metaphor and polysemy, this talk considers how such an interpretation of Archilochus’ shield poem (5 W) might also influence scholarly methods of textual criticism for archaic elegy. In the case of the shield poem, a pressing issue is that a variant of the third line, as found in a four-line quotation of Archilochus’ poem in Sextus Empiricus, seems to have a strong claim as a textual allusion to a specific episode from Homeric poetry. This is a problem because the version of the third line usually printed in modern editions, referenced in Aristophanes’ Peace and quoted with slight variation in Neoplatonist texts, also has a potential Homeric parallel. This complex situation leads to (at least) two difficult questions. First, how does one choose between variants in such a scenario? Second, what kind of textual evidence allows one to distinguish between Archilochus’ general engagement with traditions of archaic epic (most of which are lost to us) and his specific allusion to Homeric poems resembling ours? A potential answer to the first question invokes parallels from other drinking songs from Greek antiquity; a partial answer to the second question involves the contextual significance of a Homeric hapax legomenon in the shield poem.

This paper examines divine fragrances in Greek tragedy. I focus on two moments in which characters claim to recognize the presence of a god through smell: the closing scene in Hippolytus in which the dying protagonist notes the apparition of Artemis (Eur. Hipp. 1391-3) and the moment preceding the parodos in Prometheus Bound, in which Prometheus becomes aware of the entrance of the chorus of Oceanids (Aesch. PV 115). I position the two scenes in relation to recent work on the cultural history of olfaction and the ways in which smell played a key role in establishing religious meaning and the experience of the divine. I argue that these scenes provide a unique insight into two crucial issues for the Greek dramatic stage: the ambiguously material tragic gods, and the equally unstable materiality of the sense of smell. Not only do these two scenes draw attention to the fluctuating corporeality of the Greek gods, but they also illuminate the strangeness of relying on the ambiguous sense of smell as a primary means of recognition on the stage. As I contend, these two scenes furthermore enable us to rethink the general “smellscape” of ancient Greek drama, and the ways in which tragic aromas and stenches differed from those found in satyr play and Old comedy. In a genre so heavily invested in visual and aural spectacle, it is easy to overlook the manner in which smell contributed to the experience of fifth-century Athenian theatre.

In 184 B.C. the censors M. Porcius Cato and L. Valerius Flaccus expelled from the senate seven of its members, of whom the most famous was L. Quinctius Flamininus. The accusation against Flamininus was that, while serving as consul for the year 192 B.C. and campaigning in the province of Gaul, he personally slew with a sword a Boian deserter who had reached his quarters while he was in his cups. This he did to compensate his prostitute lover Philippus who had quit Rome with him just before the gladiatorial games and complained to Flamininus that he had missed the entertainment. Livy 39.42-43 records this episode and cites the principal sources for subsequent versions of the story. In Controversiae 9.2, Flamininus stands trial under the statute 'maiestatis laesae sit actio'. This paper asks the following questions of the Senecan exercise: (i) Is there any historical basis for an actual trial of Flamininus under the lex maiestatis? (ii) What does it mean for declaimers operating at different points in the reigns of Augustus and Tiberius to try the case by application of the crimen maiestatis? (iii) What perspective on the different iterations of this exercise and on those credited with contributing to it is offered to Seneca as he gathers together his material at the very end of the reign of Tiberius and published it at the start of that of Gaius?