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Aratus’ Phaenomena is commonly read as a poem about the constellations, but it has in fact a much broader scope: the signs in the universe and our ability to read them. Although recent scholarship (such as Volk 2012) has argued for this re-orientation of our understanding of the poem, the theory of signs advanced in the poem have garnered little attention. This paper will describe Aratus’ semiology in detail, as explained in key passages in the poem.

This paper examines the ways in which students and researchers can begin to engage with texts more deeply through digital tools that allow better geographic visualization of both historical and literary topographies. This pedagogical approach is exemplified through the text of the Satyricon. At the beginning of Petronius’ Satyricon, Encolpius bemoans the worthlessness of gaining an education from a umbraticus doctor, a “cloistered instructor” who teaches students nothing of use in daily life by using inapplicable rhetorical exercises (2.4).

Beneath the elegiac topos of the Propertian amator in thrall to his mistress’s beauty and talents, Elegy 2.3 rhetorically enacts Rome’s rivalry with and appropriation of Greek culture within the imperial context of Roman geographic conquest. Analysis of the poem’s use of spatial and cartographic imagery reveals Cynthia as a variable symbol of Roman imperialist expansion, with both her appearance and her artistic skills suggestive of Roman culture imitating, assimilating, and ultimately aspiring to eclipse its Greek forerunners and origins.

The second-century physician Galen’s investigation of the function of the recurrent laryngeal and intercostal nerves and muscles, and the anatomical displays in which he demonstrated their role in producing the voice, represent a critical part of his medical work. Not only did these demonstrations catch the attention of both his contemporary audience and his readers, but they serve conceptually as the “cornerstone and crowning achievement” of his anatomical studies (Salas 2013: 139).

This paper examines intertextuality between Martial’s Epigrams and the opening of Juvenal’s first Satire, aiming not just to define its effects on Juvenal’s representation of Rome, but to rethink its implications for his self-presentation and poetics. The beginning of Satire 1 is saturated with images and jokes reminiscent of the world constructed in the Epigrams. It picks up where Martial (either near the end of his career, or already dead) left off while also promoting an image of Juvenal as a solitary literary rebel.

The “Ascanius problem” is a much-debated and increasingly researched topic in Aeneid scholarship and reception. For a figure so emblematic of Vergilian themes of pietas and family, and one who directly reflects Augustus’ emphasis on succession, he is often conspicuously absent from the narrative – an absence that persists in Vergilian reception, where Ascanius is a negligible presence at best.

In his Legatio ad Gaium, Philo claims that the Augusteum in Alexandria served as a “hope and sign of deliverance to those setting sail, and those coming in to land - ἐλπὶς καὶ ἀναγομένοις καὶ καταπλέουσι σωτήριος” (151). A similar sentiment is echoed by Josephus in his Antiquitates Judaicae when he states that Herod constructed a temple to Roma and Augustus in the harbor city of Caesarea that could be seen far out to sea and offered hope to sailors and travelers of a safe end to their journey (15.339).

In recent years, classicists have increasingly explored the intersection of intertextuality and historiography. A series of SCS panels, articles, and books have have questioned how historiographical intertextuality relates to poetic intertextuality (e.g., O'Gorman 2009; Damon 2010; Levene 2010: chap. 2; Pelling 2013). They have raised the questions: how do historians reflect or contradict the prevailing cultural discourses? How do they translate reality into words? How do historians interact with literary texts?

The earliest evidence for the Koinon of the Cities in Pontus, comprised of a group of cities in coastal Paphlagonia, is a Trajanic honorific inscription, which happens to be one of two lost "official documents – as Søren Sørensen (2016) describes them – that provide the full title of the koinon’s existence, as well as some indication that their findspots at Amastris and Heraclea were likely the metropoleis of the koinon (Sørensen 2016, p. 73-74).

Among the conspirators who are alleged by later historians to have plotted against the princeps Augustus, the senator Marcus Egnatius Rufus presents a peculiar case. According to Cassius Dio and Velleius Paterculus, Egnatius obtained the popularity of the Roman people and a series of offices in succession. When the presiding consul blocked him from canvassing for the consulship in 18 B.C., Egnatius conspired against the life of Augustus (Vell. Pat. 2.91-92; Cass. Dio, 53.24). But his plans were detected and he and his co-conspirators were imprisoned and executed.