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A graffito (CIL 4.4533) from a Pompeian carpentry workshop (VI.14.37) describes a knight as born Roman between a beet and a cabbage. This paper explores the graffito's possible meanings by reviewing the ways these vegetables have been featured in discourse regarding agriculture, dining, parties, and metaphors or characters and posits that they were initially featured in a positive light. In later discussions, however, these humble vegetables not only signified poverty, but also the deterioration of traditional Roman values. The paper then considers the graffito's significance in the context of a carpentry workshop in a town under the Roman Empire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the historiographic controversies and disagreements surrounding the figure of Septimius Severus and highlighted by Herodian in his Roman History as a means of investigating the development of history writing during and in the aftermath of that emperor's reign. Herodian cites Severus' transition to power and reign as a locus for historical and historiographical controversy and debate, and a comparison of Herodian with other Severan writers allows for an examination of Herodian's competitive relationship with his older historiographic peers and of the innovative aspects of his work that set it apart from others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the poetic interplay between the poet and angry goddess Juno, the two metacharacters in the Aeneid , that is central to the composition of Vergil's epic poem. In addition to the conflicting characterization that links both figures with the epic as well as elegiac genres, their agonistic relationship evokes a typically elegiac discourse between the poet-lover and his dura puella that is known to play a role in his poetic language. The power dynamics of elegy that Vergil has reproduced in the subtext of the Aeneid closely associate Juno's metapoetic role with the process of creating a new Roman epic. In fact, Juno is unveiled as a dominant figure within the poetic discourse who not only animates the poet's talent but essentially shapes his poetic project and allies it with the masculine genre of the epic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In many of his works, Seneca puts a philosophical premium on the ability to see through the deceptive appearances of words and things, identifying the hidden truths that underlie these appearances. In this paper, I turn to a passage that casts doubt upon the efficacy of this interpretive method: Seneca's excursus on flattery in the preface to Book 4a of the Natural Questions. Seneca locates in flattery a pleasure that listeners cannot eradicate by exposing its insincerity. By undermining a hermeneutic practice at the heart of many of his therapeutic methods, Seneca draws out, and invites us to dwell within, a contradiction in his system of thought. Furthermore, in his transition from his discussion of flattery to the scientific content of Nat. 4a, Seneca suggests an alternative approach to treacherous pleasures, which locates therapeutic potential not in the ability to look beyond appearances, but in the "surface-level" experiences of distraction and amazement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers how Cato's status as a "new man" in the competitive social and political arena he entered at Rome shaped his self-representation in the sphere of his historical writing. At the heart of the argument is the question of how Cato's insertion of his own speeches into the fabric of the Origines modulated the tenor of his self-commemoration in that work. After briefly considering how previous historiography may have helped determine Cato's choices, the argument looks to Roman discursive practices that appear to have taken shape around the 4th- and early 3rd-century rise of the nobilitas. Especially in focus are the functions of the ancestor mask and the use of voice in honorific epigraphy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I expose some of the ways contemporary ideas about race permeated the rise of American classical philology during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. More specifically, I identify places where ideas about race, slavery, skin color, and "race suicide" surface in the writings of Basil Gildersleeve and John Scott, then show how those concepts can be traced to the rise of racial science in the United States—especially in the work of the American School of Ethnology and the eugenics movement—and its response to the American experiences of slavery, emancipation, and immigration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines the four-step degeneration of the ideal state in Books 8 and 9 of Platon's Politeia (timocracy, oligarchy, democracy, tyranny) and addresses the question of the number, choice, and succession of bad regimes. Against the common view which considers this part of the Politeia a confusing and structureless narrative, it is argued that the four steps of the devolution represent a systematic account based on the tripartition of the state and the soul. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the performance dynamics of onstage texts in Plautus' comedies and, in the process, argues that an audience-level viewpoint is essential to understanding Latin stage comedy. Examples of rare epigraphic texts are compared with the more common motif of in-play "perishable texts." The perishable type were performed by actors as though verbatim and transmit novel information to the audience. In contrast, epigraphic texts are paraphrased and so require specific knowledge. Each kind of text thus does different dramatic work, and the difference originates in the different material "entanglements" of each medium in the lives of ancient Italians. As such, Plautus' audiences understood comic theater through its extra-textual elements as much as through "the text" as we have it. To understand Roman comedy, scholars must also account for how ancient objects were entangled in Roman culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses literary sources to investigate how Romans carried objects. Carrying took place openly, in purses, and in clothing, especially the sinus , a fold of cloth created by togas or tunics. While open carrying is portrayed as reinforcing social hierarchies, carrying things in the sinus escaped hierarchies and was closely associated with the individual: with intimacy, character, and the ability to take potentially disruptive action (since people could retrieve objects from it unexpectedly in front of others). References to the latter cluster in the imperial period and center on men's political power and their potential vulnerability to women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines an inscriptional epigram from Sardis (04/02/05 Merkelbach-Stauber), which was designed to accompany a bust of Cicero set up by a Greek named Polybios in the 2nd century c.e. The epigram, I argue, fuses Hellenistic poetological imagery with the echo of a Roman declamatory topos concerning Cicero's decapitation by playfully suggesting that Cicero's head had miraculously traveled from Rome to Sardis. Reflecting on the implications of this imaginary voyage, I explore the complex dynamics of Polybios' epigram, which is exceptional in expressing a Greek's admiration for a Roman figure, against the backdrop of the period's bicultural discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to analyze four topographical elements featured in Apuleius' Metamorphoses : the marshes, the door, the seashore, and the mill. It will be argued that in their literary representations, these spots, familiar and ordinary as they are, turn out to be quite different than they appear, evoking feelings of the uncanny. They serve as the "sites of passage" as they enable transitions to other states, along with being central thematic lines of the novel. Examination of narrative strategy, as well as of intertextual allusions and ideological underpinnings of these locales, will allow a deeper understanding of Apuleius' work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper evaluates the centrality of the body in Euripides' Trojan Women , arguing that physical and metaphorical movement is a constituent element of the dramatic narrative. My analysis seeks to promote the convergence between the "page" and the "stage" by demonstrating the close interrelation between visual and verbal meaning, and how embodied experience decidedly shapes both the language and performance of this tragedy. In particular, I indicate how the tragic playwright relies on embodied gesture and metaphor to illuminate important themes and motifs in the drama, most notably the concept of metabolê (change), the overturn of fortune, and the transition from freedom to enslavement. I ultimately aim to suggest that the play's thematic unity is also established and relayed though the materiality of the lived body. By means of its remarkable emphasis on kinetic actions and expressions, Trojan Women makes its somatic meaning felt, as the spectator (like the modern reader) is invited to evaluate tragic (un)moving bodies through the corporeal imagination of the script. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aēr in Homer has rarely been discussed; the few studies that do exist focus on the word's semantics and scope of reference. This article proposes that we focus instead on how aēr works and what aēr does, both to characters within the Iliad and the Odyssey and, especially, for the poet responsible for composing them. First, I argue that aēr offers the poet a stratagem for navigating complex narrative demands and that it is best understood primarily in terms of the phenomenological effects it produces on Homeric characters. Next, I consider the implications of this argument for discussions of Homeric things and objects, particularly those influenced by New Materialism. Finally, I explore the consequences of this argument for our understanding of the Presocratic thinker most associated with aēr , Anaximenes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Assumptions about the tirocinium fori are based on claims by Joachim Marquardt that it was a form of training for young elite Romans at about the age of 16, that it lasted for one year, and that it consisted of mentorship by a distinguished elder. Though there is little evidence to support these claims, the theory of a tirocinium fori continues to influence discussions of oratory in the age of Cicero, where it gives a false picture of the process by which aspiring young orators made the transition from the school of rhetoric to practice in the courts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the citation context of fragments from the Epic Cycle in scholia in order to re-assess its ancient reception. In contrast to negative comments like Callimachus', literary criticism in practice demonstrates that the Cycle held great authority among readers and critics. In the Homeric scholia, commentators vigorously debated whether Cyclical epics should aid in the interpretation of Homer. In the scholia to Pindar and Euripides, the Cycle was used to explicate and even to emend the text. For Hellenistic poets like Lycophron, critics' presentation of the Cycle in scholia offered a generative model for continuing the Trojan War myth in dialogue with Homer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the prologue to the Rhetorica ad Herennium Book 4, the author boldly departs from tradition and explains that he will create his own examples, rather than drawing from poets and orators. This methodological discussion portrays itself as an exemplum and hence carries a meta-literary and mimetic dimension. In particular, this prologue anticipates and illustrates the precept propounded in Book 4; its fine style and rhythm amount to a defense of rhetoric itself; and this defense must be considered in the political and cultural context of the time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Part sociological analysis of race and class in colonial Trinidad, part autobiographical Bildungsroman, Beyond a Boundary is the cricketing memoir of Trinidadian intellectual and anticolonial activist C. L. R. James (1901–1989). We argue that it offers a good site for thinking through the position of the racially minoritized intellectual entangled in neocolonial logics of cultural hierarchy and identification. We examine James' use of ironic narrative voice to instrumentalize the colonial values encoded in the "Spirit of Cricket." Beyond a Boundary therefore re-imagines the scope of knowledge-making, be it in cricket, art, or indeed Classics, beyond traditionally naturalized hierarchies of race and class. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Frantz Fanon uses the metaphor of the Tower of the Past in his conclusion to Peau noire, masques blancs (Black Skin, White Masks) to argue that racialized historical narratives alienate and imprison their readers. In the first part of this article I read excerpts from Polybius and Bede to isolate the metaphors that both authors use to describe and explain the phenomenon of empire and its impact on historical understanding. In the second part I return to Fanon, and particularly his discussion of the phrase "Our ancestors, the Gauls," to trace his critique of discourses of ancient history in the context of French colonialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines the experiences of three 19th-century African American travelers to Greece—David Dorr (1852), Frederick Douglass (1887), and John Wesley Gilbert (1890–1)—using evidence from their letters, diaries, and published writings. The essay shows that although each traveler's unique personal perspective shaped his response to seeing the ancient sites and monuments of Greece, all three men responded most deeply to a site connected with Greece's Christian heritage: the Areopagus or Mars Hill, where according to 19th-century understanding the Apostle Paul had spoken the words recorded in the Book of Acts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The lack of extant contemporary comparanda obscures the workings of iambic trimeter in Senecan tragedy. This article offers a quantitative analysis of the reception of Senecan trimeter in four early works of Italian Humanist Tragedy, which illuminates the creative possibilities afforded by the basic structure of the meter and identifies specific features important to questions of style and semantics. Our analysis demonstrates, among other things, that both Seneca and the Humanist tragedians use clusters of resolution in conjunction with antilabe as a literary device to convey high emotion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lucian's Fatherland Encomium is thought to have been delivered at Samosata, Lucian's hometown. Although he never mentions "Samosata" in this speech, he repeatedly toys with the "name of the fatherland" as the speech's theme. But what is the name of his native city? The Greeks called it "Samosata" but this is clearly a transliteration. I consider the Aramaic, Persian, and Armenian versions of the name, and notice that the Aramaic "Shemshat" has a number of resonances in Lucian's speech, not least the set theme of the speech itself "the name of (shem) the fatherland." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Thesmophoriazousai brims with themes of imitation, from its broader tragic parodies to its finer sonic textures. This study uncovers the functions and effects of imitation on the dramatically crucial (but often neglected) verbal level by means of Echo—a bizarre metatheatrical character who embodies the dynamics of mimicking speech and parody. The aural echo is provided as a conceptual frame, illustrating how verbal mimicry functions to both degrade and bolster identity and status in Echo's scene and elsewhere in the play. Echo's speech patterns ultimately serve to perform, manipulate, and expand forms of mimicry in Old Comedy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses a representative sampling of texts from the 17th century to today in which indigenous writers of North America reflect on or make use of the Latin language, simultaneously no one's native language and marker of that European antiquity which has played a distinct role in colonizing processes on a continent which has its own still-living antiquity. With varying emphases, strategies, and effects, sometimes reflecting on education in general and language learning in particular, and not infrequently talking back to prejudiced or misinformed views of Native culture, these writers have cumulatively and collectively contributed to what has been called indigenous survivance. I end by considering some implications for those who study and teach Greco-Roman antiquity in North America today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2017, we founded the international conference series Racing the Classics to challenge foundational assumptions about knowledge production and race within the discipline. The inaugural event invited participants to unabashedly center race and ethnicity in their research in order to counter the dangerously universalizing pretensions of "Western Civilization" and other white supremacist ideologies suffusing the academy. Over time and subsequent iterations, we have pushed participants, ourselves included, to depart even further from the habits and normative scripts that circumscribe what gathering together to do this kind of work looks like now or could be in the future. We here reflect on the origin and progress of the conference series and offer practical suggestions for differentiating abstractly "inclusive and equitable" goals from targeted transformations of racializing practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses La Odilea , Francisco Chofre's prose adaptation of the Odyssey , which refigures both Homer's heroes as guajiros (peasants) and the ancient epic itself through the adoption of an oral Cuban dialect. My examination first highlights Chofre's linguistic transformations, which I consider a model of "philological" reception, as well as the ambiguous and complex relationship that he posits between his work and the Greek source text. I then explore the broader questions that this text poses regarding vernacularity and canonicity in La Odilea's two main contexts: the Cuban Revolution and the postcolonial Caribbean. Its role in Chofre's novel reveals the Odyssey 's unique resonance across the Caribbean while also challenging existing models of classical reception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the close of the U.S. Civil War, the future of Black citizenship remained an open question. Schoolrooms and peer-taught extracurricular lessons became critical training grounds for learning to speak, recite, and proclaim—the building blocks of 19th-century American citizenship. Lessons derived from Quintilian's Institutio Oratoria (95 C.E.), preserved in early American schoolbooks and pedagogical exercises, introduced thousands of formerly enslaved Black learners to classical rhetorical principles at a crucial historical juncture. Through elementary lessons in oral recitation, Black learners adapted classical imitatio to support practices of self-teaching and participatory civic engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the question of how the dithyramb was classified in antiquity, examining in detail two fragmentary papyri (P.Graec.Vindob. 19996a–b; P.Berol. 9671 verso) alongside other testimonia which comment on the nature and development of the dithyrambic genre. While the majority of these testimonia expect the dithyramb to be associated with Dionysus, some show that this Dionysiac link was not exclusively followed as the defining criterion for the poems' classification, even after the Alexandrian taxonomy of lyric genres had been established. This article demonstrates that throughout antiquity generic identification of dithyrambs was a process that was always in the making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reframes the cultic prohibition of sound in Homeric Hymn to Demeter 478–9 as an emic model for understanding sonic encounter with the divine in early Greek epic. It argues that these lines represent divine resonance, that is, the experience of divine sound, according to the themes of space, knowledge, and affect. This framework guides three close readings: Penelope and the eidôlon (Od. 4.830–4), Talthybios and the boar (Il. 19.249–68), and Agamemnon and the false dream (Il. 2.35–41). In these readings, the model not only enriches interpretation but also reveals that passages of varying lengths can operate as nonlinear resonant circuits in which divine resonance anticipates divine revelation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A number of foundational narratives of archaic Greek culture revolve around courtship competitions in which a multitude of suitors subject themselves to a fierce, often deadly, competition for the hand of one woman. Most retellings of these stories focus on the competition and its outcome, a marriage that typically confirms, and occasionally upsets, the dynastic ambitions and power alliances of the bride's male guardian. Conversely, they offer no more than glimpses of the anxieties brought about by courtship competitions—from the rivalry and jealousy between the competing suitors to the question of the bride's own desire and her interest in the contest's outcome. As this article shows, however, it is the comico-satyrical traditions that fill the gap by providing an explicit, if skewed, commentary which subverts the "official" version. The focus here is on the courtships of Helen, Penelope, and Agariste; it is argued that this last case (Herodotus 6.126–131.1) confronts the "official" account of the courtship with its satyric double. Courtship narratives are thus shown to reveal not just a way of representing social and political practice, but also the anxieties and social dangers which elite narratives suppress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reexamines the function of the topos opportunitas mortis ("the timeliness of death") in Seneca's Consolation to Marcia. I argue that Seneca does not use this consolatory topos in a purely conventional way, but rather in order to advance a complex and philosophically dynamic persuasive strategy. In particular, close attention to the recurrence of the topos in the final part of the work allows us to follow Seneca's manipulation of both Epicurean and Stoic philosophical principles for the purpose of consoling Marcia. The use of principles from both schools reveals Seneca's pedagogically sensitive approach to philosophical therapy in the Consolation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that a letter attributed to the Jesuit missionary and chronicler Blas Valera, sometimes dated to 1618, was written in the 20th century. A study of the Latin text shows that it is a patchwork of literary sources, including Petronius' Satyricon , the letters of Politian, a treatise by the Renaissance philosopher Marsilio Ficino and Dante's Latin essays and letters. Linguistic analysis, source criticism and the transmission of those sources, particularly Petronius and Dante, show that Exsul Immeritus is inauthentic and date the forgery, on those grounds, to the second half of the 20th century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article challenges the idea, presented by both ancient and modern writers, that the armies of the Middle Republic were governed by a clearly articulated ideology of discipline. I contend that the notion of an all-encompassing system of military discipline is a fiction created by a variety of interconnected and historically-constructed intellectual genealogies by examining the two most important sources for the discipline of Middle Republican army, Polybius and Livy, and the reception of their ideas in post-Renaissance Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]