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Jerome's De viris illustribus has most often been read as a Senecan project (Ceresa-Gastaldo 1988) and interpreted as the catalogue of an ideal Christian library (Tanner 1979), but these heuristics do not account for many features of the text. In order to better understand Jerome’s project, I analyze his text using social network theory to trace the relationships Jerome constructs between the archive, agents and ideal of knowledge under Christianity (building on Grafton 2009 & Williams 2008).

The Trophy at La Turbie stands with a panoptic view across the Ligurian coast and the southern Alps. As a marker of Augustus’s triumph over the local tribes, set up in the wake of his campaigns of 25-9 BC, it is a powerful reminder even today of the vastness of Rome’s influence.

This paper explores the visual rhetoric of infinity in Greek temple inventory inscriptions. Scholars of temple inventories have often grappled with their content (Hamilton 2000, Harris 1995, Aleshire 1989, Linders 1972) and their elusive ancient purpose (Scott 2011, Dignas 2002, Linders 1988). While these studies have resulted in greater attention and access to the inventories, they have tended to approach them as administrative texts with a singular audience and context.

Statius’ Thebaid recounts the Argive expedition and the fratricidal war between Oedipus’ sons and the resolution of the first part of the war through Theseus’ intervention and the burial of the dead soldiers. Recent studies have focused on the dark overtones of the poem, highlighting the prevalence of nefas as a keyword (Ganiban [2007], Augoustakis [2010]), as well as of prouidentia and clementia for the resolution of the miasma in the end (Bessone [2011]).

It has long been recognized that fides is a central ethical concept in the Punica and that this fact is established early on in the epic, in Silius’ account of Hannibal’s siege of Saguntum in books 1-2 (von Albrecht [1964]).

Paper 3 examines the Flavian poet Statius’ deployment of fides as the structuring force of interpersonal relations in the Silvae. I focus primarily on the poet’s appeal to fides as a means of imagining voluntary, enthusiastic participation in structures of domination. My approach is similar to discussion of the fictions of libertas in Silvae 1.6 (Chinn [2008]). Praise of subordinates’ fides suggests that their extraordinary loyalty is a voluntary gift, when in reality the threat of punishment compels their service.

The Octavia, one of the earliest surviving Flavian texts (Smith [2003], Boyle [2008]), actively participates the Flavian era’s renegotiation of the memory of Nero and the Julio-Claudian dynasty. In particular, I suggest, the play rewrites the Age of Nero as a place of fundamentally misdirected and at times perverted fides, especially in its portrayal of the final generations of Julio-Claudian women.

This introduction will outline the aims of the Panel and will provide an overview of the function and importance of fides in the early Roman Principate (Julio-Claudian and Flavian), especially in its literature.

Xenophon reduced the conflict between Lysander’s war aims and those of the Spartan King Pausanias after Sparta’s victory over Athens in 403 BC to personal issues, stating that King Pausanias envied Lysander’s growing, almost omnipotent power, and that he worried about Lysander’s desire to “make Athens his own.” (Xenophon, Hellenika 2.4.29).