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Where have all the fabri tign(u)arii gone?

CIL XIV 4365 & 4382, a reassessment of the fabri tign(u)arii in Rome and Ostia in the early 4th century CE

One of the chief attributes of Sallust’s historiographical style, across his corpus, is his emphasis on moral turning points in Rome’s history. This paper reconsiders our understanding of these turning points in Sallust, and argues that they serve as a literary and narratological device for conveying his particular interpretation of Roman history. Moreover, I illustrate that Sallust’s use of turning points as a literary tool finds both precedents in earlier historiographers and confirmation in his historiographical successors.

Recent scholarship has demonstrated Virgil’s pervasive aemulatio in the Aeneid with Ennius’ Annales (see e.g. Casali 2007, Gildenhard 2007, Elliott 2013, and Goldschmidt 2013). But the reception of Ennius in Latin epic does not end with Virgil’s poem. This paper explores the imperial epic poet Lucan’s manner of polemical allusion to the father of Latin epic. Scholars have long noted the echoes of Ennius’ self-presentation at Annales 12-13 (Skutsch) in Lucan’s programmatic passage at 9.980-6 (see Zwierlein 1982 95-6 and Skutsch 1985 167-8).

The Ludi Saeculares (or “Saecular Games”) celebrated after civil wars by Augustus in 17 BCE recreated Republican traditions in order to establish a series of religious festivals that would be held once in a lifespan, that is, once every saeculum of hundred and ten years. In 47 CE, Claudius assigned new significance to the Saecular Games, with celebrations calculated once every century from the foundation of Rome.

This paper takes as its starting point Hipponax frr. 26 and 26a West, two fragments sequentially joined by most editors (e.g. Schneidewin, Adrados, Medeiros, Masson, presupposed in West 1993; notably cautious is Degani) which appear to be an invective describing gluttony and profligacy. Through a close reading of fr. 26, it is argued that the fragment is instead a passage of thinly veiled sexual innuendo describing the fortunes of an avid cunnilinctor, a role signified through comparison with a pathic Lampsakene eunuch.

Despite the absence of concrete textual evidence for satyric drama in Rome there are several indirect testimonies of the cultivation of the satyric genre in the Republican period, which include references to satyric productions and titles of satyr plays, while in the Augustan period we find in Horace’s Ars Poetica (220-250) the most important theoretical treatment of satyr play in the ancient world (Wiseman 1988; Shaw 2014).

My talk outlines manuscript evidence and internal authorial references to argue against the currently dominant, unitary authorship theory for the Historia Augusta. In 1889, Hermann Dessau published a thesis arguing that the Historia Augusta was not the work of the six authors whose names appear over various of the short biographies in our extant manuscripts, but rather a single writer, masquerading as a collective (Dessau, 1889).

This paper argues for a limited generic relationship between the “Orphic” gold lamellae and inscribed funerary epigram, with particular attention to conventions of apostrophe and direct address as reflections of ritual practice in both genres. The lamellae are a collection of small gold tablets/leaves deposited in Greek graves of both men and women in the later Classical and Hellenistic periods.

In Aeneid 2.469-568, an ancient laurel (veterrima laurus) overhangs Pyrrhus’ murder of Polites and Priam, ironically crowning his sacrilegious triumph over Troy. Metamorphoses 1.452-567 aetiologizes the tree as the product of Apollo’s attempted rape of Daphne, (p)rewriting the laurel as a sign of violence and cooptation from its mythological moment of origin up to modern times. Ovid’s text thus retroactively politicizes Vergil’s to comment on the laurel’s use within Roman visual culture to elide the violence that underpinned Augustan power.

The influence of the Sophists on New Music has recently become more recognized (e.g. LeVen 2014; Fearn forthcoming). This relationship not only sheds light on the aesthetics of New Music, but also its politics. There has been a tendency in the scholarship to downplay the inherent politics of New Music. For instance, Eric Csapo writes, “It would be difficult to argue that politics motivated New Music in any fundamental way…The poets and musicians were mainly interested in exploring the potentialities of musical form” (Csapo 2004: 229).