This paper examines how, in the Iliad, remembering through wooden objects- and alongside wooden objects-is a powerful way of connecting to the hidden, imbricated pasts of a more-than-human world. While Iliadic tree similes anticipate the transformation of trees into craft items, Achilles foregrounds the arboreal origins of wooden objects, for example, in his oath on the scepter. The capacity to see the tree in the wood accounts for Achilles' exclusive ability to wield the Pelian spear. Assisted by Ian Hodder's concept of "entanglement," I demonstrate that similar experiences, overlapping histories, and a mutual recalcitrance to human agency constitute a complex and sympathetic connection between warrior and weapon.
This article reproposes that the elegy known as the Nux is a genuinely Ovidian poem, written during Ovid's relegation in the early first century CE. The poem's current status as a pseudo-Ovid rests more on the lack of conclusive authentication than on positive evidence: this study provides new stylometric analysis which argues for a reconsideration of the text as genuine. We situate the Nux in Ovid's exile, before reassessing its authorship using stylometric analysis. Our analysis strongly suggests Ovidian authorship, and, further, demonstrates that the analysis can competently detect imitation. We consider the implications of accepting the Nux as genuine.1
This article focuses on a series of episodes from Herodotus's Histories that feature hands or other body parts as fluctuating boundaries of vitality. Part one reframes the phenomenon of iconatrophy in terms of the narrative agency of material objects. Material agency vies with the agency of the narrator as Herodotus and his objects meet each other halfway. Part two picks up on the theme of the severed hand, showing the body generating a story. The hand is a porous meeting point of human/nonhuman agency. The severed hand materializes the 'gap' that is central to the process of storytelling.
Cassius Dio referred to the sexual excesses and behaviors of the emperor Elagabalus as atiomx ("strange things"), and scholars ever since have grappled with the problem of how best to interpret Cassius Dio's account of Rome's most reviled emperor. In this article I offer a new contextualization of Cassius Dio's and other related accounts of Elagabalus with the goal of developing a deeper appreciation of both the gender regime of the period and the emperor's place within it. To accomplish this, I draw first on contemporary or near contemporary medical texts that cast new light on Elagabalus's desire to have an i&i yuvatxc xv ("female sexual organ") contrived for himself. Then, drawing on numismatic and archeological evidence, I give considerable attention to the religious innovations of the period. Crucially, in his efforts to bridge the human and the divine, to invest women with unprecedented prominence in Roman public religion, and to fashion a new religious identity which also entailed the transformation of his body, Elagabalus was bound to scandalize his more traditionally minded contemporaries. Finally, as argue in the conclusion, transgender studies-which enable an understanding of such behaviors as part of a search for a new identity outside the traditional gender binaries-offer a powerful lens through which to develop a deeper understanding of Elagabalus in relation to the cultural dynamics of the period.
