This article argues that the late antique Epistula Didonis ad Aeneam engages with anti-imperial treatments of Dido in Virgil and Ovid. Through its criticism of Aeneas, the Epistula reflects on the role of fate in Roman imperial projects and on the unequal political relationships between Rome and Carthage. The poem's reworking of these themes sheds new light on the connections between the political and the elegiac elements of Dido's character and offers a fresh perspective on the importance of anti-imperial critique for the anthology in which the Epistula is preserved and for the Vandal audiences who likely read the poem.
The Iliad shows several temporalities of nonhuman life being violently disrupted by the temporality of human industry. This disruption is expressed figuratively through explorations of "tree time" as intertwined with human time. I examine this temporal disruption in the tales of Simoeisius and Menelaus and show how these elements are refracted in passages involving Achilles and Thetis. Finally, I suggest that the manipulation of poetic time through enjambment complements the characters' experiences of time of the epic.
Framed as a rejoinder by Ovid to an anonymous detractor, Tristia 3.11 tells as its centerpiece the story of the tyrant Phalaris and his torture device, the bronze bull. In this paper, I argue that the tale is a metaphor by which Ovid reflects upon the morality of both his downfall and poetic philosophy. He accomplishes this through allusion-first by inverting his version of the story from the Ars, then by evoking arguments advanced earlier in his exilic collection. I conclude by demonstrating that the elegy, unified via themes of justice, clemency, and rulership, forms a veiled polemic directed against Augustus.
This article argues that the Capitoline Hill was strongly associated with futurity in Roman culture. Drawing on contemporary practice theory and a wide range of material and textual evidence, the article proposes that activity around the hill from the archaic through high imperial period-construction, public rituals, storytelling, poetic prediction, juristic exemplification-generated Capitoline futures. More broadly, the article seeks to affirm the value of anthropological histories of Roman futurity.
The enclosed spaces in which Encolpius and his companions frequently find themselves stranded meta-narratively mirror the novel's episodic structure. The text thus works to provoke politically tinged reflection in its audience, echoing the readers' sense of confinement in one-man rule.
Apuleius' novel, The Golden Ass, is well known for the elements of quotidian realism it contains. The perspective of the donkey, the lowliest beast of burden, introduces the reader to a world of slaves, gardeners, barbers and cooks whose lives are seldom seen in such detail. In this article I argue that the space the novel gives to these figures of quotidian Roman experience is not limited to human subjects, but extends to the everyday objects against which these sub-elites measure their object-status. Everyday objects move from the background into the foreground of this text and repeatedly take on a life of their own. Beds, door hinges and storage jars, items that usually remain invisible in a literary text, break the bounds of expectation when they are turned upside down, burst their bolts or are given voice by containing unexpected human visitors. Drawing on Sara Ahmed's Queer Phenomenology, I argue that Apuleius' depiction of the repurposing of these objects feeds into the novel's interest in subverting hard and fast distinctions between subject and object in its extended meditation on the experience of subservient and colonized subjects living under the rule of Roman masters.
This paper challenges the general impression in previous scholarship that Ovid's commemoration of the Ara Pacis Augustae at Fasti 1.709-22 does not engage with the visual display of the monument itself. My reading argues that the iconography of the Altar is an abiding intertext in Ovid's eulogy of Pax, as he reflects upon festive procession, imperial family, the goddess herself, and the dialectic between war and peace in Augustan Rome.
This article revisits the tradition of Greek and Latin consolatory writing. While much of this literature can be understood in relation to an underlying social act of sympathy or condolence giving, I argue that a subset of such writings, "philosophical consolation," had the special purpose of addressing and treating grief that was recognized as abnormal or disordered by Greco-Roman cultural norms. In this way, philosophical consolation anticipates modern approaches to disordered grief.
This paper argues that polarization pervaded the imaginary and the practice of democratic debates in classical Greece. The consensus (homonoia) of the assembled demos, often foregrounded in our sources, was the endpoint of a process shaped by polarized dissent, as suggested by the Athenian assembly's voting procedure (diacheirotonia) as well as Demosthenes' Prologues. For their part, tragic plays like Euripides' Orestes and Aeschylus's Suppliant Women contributed to the democratic imaginary by exploring both the challenges and the possibilities opened up by polarized dissent in the public sphere. Yet, polarization was also a distinctive marker of stasis. Several passages in Herodotus, Thucydides, and Euripides' Hecuba evince an anxiety that, under particular circumstances, the ordinary polarization of democratic debate could turn into the extraordinary fractures of civil war.
This article applies to the analysis of Homeric epic the concept of the "narrative node, a point where multiple possibilities are opened up for the continuation of the plot. By inviting the audience to guess at which possibility will materialize, nodes help to generate suspense and surprise, supporting audience engagement with the narrative. I focus on "landscape nodes," points where branching paths through the space of the storyworld correspond to different plot continuations. Taking Cape Malea and Crete in the Odyssey as case studies, I argue that both the Homeric narrator and Odysseus use these nodes to engage their audiences.
This paper considers Phaedra's image of time exposing the evil among mortals as if "proffering a mirror to a young girl" in Euripides' Hippolytus (Hipp. 428-30), and offers a new interpretation of these lines rooted in ancient Greek beliefs about the female body, female physiology, and stages of maturation. The paper then charts the refractions of the mirror image as it applies to Hippolytus and Theseus in the second half of Euripides' play.
This article treats the political outlook of Phaedrus's Fables. Scholarship on the Fables has generally argued that Phaedrus subtly critiques monarchical power in his work, that he advocates for an attitude of passive political resignation, or that his authorial stance reflects some combination of critique and resignation. Such approaches figure imperial power as something distinct from its subjects, imposed upon them from on high. By contrast, drawing upon the ideas of Jacques Lacan and his successors, I argue that Phaedrus's Fables confronts subjects with their own agency in shoring up the imperial state by supplementing the rule of law with meaning that it inherently lacks.
This paper proposes that linguistic pitch accents facilitated the expression of emotion and character in ancient Greek texts written for performance. Following a short survey of ancient and modern theories for voice melody's expressive function, I assess the patterning of circumflex accents in Euripides' Iphigenia in Aulis through a combination of large-scale computational text analysis and close reading of select passages. The rate of circumflex accents turns out to vary significantly between characters, suggesting that intonation patterns could facilitate the expression of the actor's assumed identity (e.g., gender, age). Examining individual lines and passages with high numbers of circumflex accents, I observe that such passages generally express emotional states that modern research associates with high pitch variability (e.g., "pleading," "astonished," "scornful, "admiring"). These findings suggest that the patterning of pitch accents is interpretively significant as evidence for the audible intonation contours that would frame a text's meaning in performance.
summary: Despite impressive advances in computational philology for attribution and textual criticism, more general questions of classical literary criticism remain underserved by quantitative methods. This article uses machine learning and exploratory data analysis to address such questions regarding the stylistics of genre and character speech in Latin literature. We describe a set of interpretable features, largely comprising function words and syntactic elements, and show how they can reveal distinguishing aspects of genres, subgenres, and individual characters. In the final part of the article, we present a complete critical workflow, which begins with open-ended exploration of mortal and divine speech in Latin epic and culminates with the testing of specific hypotheses about Vergil's Juno and Juturna.
summary: This paper examines the racialization of "the Gauls" in French colonial Vietnam and in the ancient Roman world. I explore two contesting uses of the Gauls from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century, one which universalizes the Gauls as a paradigm of assimilation, and the other which racializes them to limit integration and to maintain the colonial hierarchy. Alongside the modern source materials, I analyze representations of the Gauls in Cicero's speeches ( Pro Fonteio and De provinciis consularibus ) and Caesar's Commentarii de Bello Gallico as case studies of Roman racializing rhetoric. This paper demonstrates that parallel readings of racialization in modern and ancient contexts help us better understand not only how race is made and remade, but also how we can work towards countering this sinister process.
summary: Euripides' Ion features several prominent images of birds at its moments of crisis and misunderstanding. Giraud, Zeitlin, and McPhee have connected these birds to the play's central themes of prophecy and pollution. In this paper, I propose a dual paradigm for interpreting the play's birds, drawing on both ancient and modern bird discourse: People tend to view birds in one of two ways, either as meaningful signs or as meaningless trash/vermin, and this tendency leads them to make errors of interpretation. By applying this lens to the play's bird imagery, I show that the poet exhibits a pessimistic attitude about both signs and the gods.
summary: The status of the Plataian exiles in Athens has been debated as a result of the terms of their naturalization and their identifiable ethnic community. I argue that the enfranchised Plataians gained full Athenian citizenship, equal to all other enfranchised persons. Through comparison to a modern migrant group—twentieth-century c.e. Cuban Americans—I will show that their migratory situation generated an ethnic enclave and that misunderstandings of their status hinge partly on a narrow view of migrant adaptation. The broader goal of this article is to demonstrate the efficacy of comparison between ancient and modern migrant groups and membership regimes based on their formal features.
summary: In the Roman context, female figures crowned by the ears, tusks, and trunk of an elephant are commonly interpreted as images of the personification of Africa. This article argues that, in some cases, the ancient viewer would have understood these images to be the goddess Caelestis, sometimes associated with Juno. I trace a Roman iconographic program that conflated the genii ("divine spirits") of the territory of Africa and the city of Carthage with the goddess. I thus both provide a new reading of some controversial images and use the visual evidence alongside the linguistic to reframe how the relationships between Africa, Caelestis, and Juno were understood, seen, and portrayed at the intersection of religion and territorial conquest across the Roman world.
summary: The publication of Philodemus' On Poems: Book Two in 2020 has changed our understanding of enargeia (the "vivid" quality of writing that puts the subject "before the eyes"). We now can see that enargeia was already an important term of literary theory in the fourth century b.c.e., but also that Heraclides, Heracleodorus, Pausimachus, and Demetrius did not connect enargeia to the "before the eyes" formulation. This connection was made in the first century b.c.e. during the Aristotelian revival when enargeia was confused with Aristotle's word energeia ("activity"). Before the first century b.c.e., rhetorical enargeia meant what it meant more generally: not "vividness" but "clarity/obviousness."
