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This paper has two aims: to offer a review of the approaches to Lucan’s Cato in the thirty years since Henderson 1988 and to add my voice to those who view Lucan’s Cato as a character that brings a glimmer of light to a sea of darkness.

Lucan’s Bellum Civile has long bedeviled critics with vexing questions concerning its unity and coherence. Chief among these questions has been that of its chief protagonist. Does the epic have a hero, and if so who? Arguments have been put forward for Caesar, Cato and Pompey, for the three of them as a group, and much more besides, including abstractions such as Libertas.

Lucan’s civil war epic accounts for the unmaking of Rome. Mirroring in format its chaotic subject matter, it has resisted easy analysis and interpretation due to its deliberate openendedness, episodic structure and lack of teleology (Henderson 1988; Masters 1992). Recent scholarship has moved away from ideological interpretations and suggested reading the Bellum Civile in an alternative way by considering imagery, stylistics and leitmotifs as ways to bind together Lucan’s meandering verses.

One of the central theses of the deconstructionist interpretation of the Bellum Civile is that the poem lacks a conventional teleology. Picking up on the identification between the epos and its subject proposed by Johnson (1987), Henderson (1988) and Masters (1992) argue that the poem is a civil war itself, and Lucan is a schizophrenic poet, who resembles Caesar in his ambition of writing an epic about nefas, and Pompey in his remorse. For this reason, the narrative flow is constantly interrupted and delayed.

This paper analyzes how the figure of the Virgin Mary came to be adopted as model for rulership and civic pride in the Middle Ages, and how today this can help to identify and articulate what female leadership means. Having dealt with the early medieval definition of Mary as principal intercessor for humankind and Queen of Heaven, I am interested in understanding something of a paradox: How Mary, the paradigm for modesty, became a symbol of political power? In Late Antiquity, Mary was the protector of Constantinople and Rome.

The Survival and Rhetoric of Aphrodite in Byzantine Art

Scholars of Byzantium have acknowledged the widespread practice of associating the emperor with the great religious feasts of the liturgical calendar. This practice, attested by ample textual and visual evidence, formulated ideas about the nature of Byzantine imperial power and its relationship to the divine. Empresses too are linked with religious feasts in Byzantine texts and images, although much less frequently than emperors.

A Hellenistic inscription from Treskavec, published in the 1930s, tells us about a woman who, alarmed by Ephesian Artemis, freed slave Helena and her son Perister with the heirs (female) at the locality of Kolobaise. A preserved inscription built into the dome of the Treskavec church testifies to the existence of a temple to Ephesian Artemis, which was originally located in Kolobaise, which is assumed to represent an ancient city on the site of the medieval monastery of Treskavec.

The goal of the paper is to examine different ways in which, through visual representations and patristic rhetoric, the Mother of God came to be a mirror of women within Late Antique Christianity. The images of Mary from the fourth and fifth centuries indeed display a certain disparity: the Mother of God can be represented as robed in a rich patristic gown, elsewhere as a widow with a heavy maphorion, or as a simple young woman.

During one of the early planning meetings for the Digital Latin Library project (http://digitallatin.org/), in an attempt to enumerate all of the features one might wish to encode in a digital edition, we projected a page from the Harvard Servius onto a whiteboard and used markers to annotate all of the places where there was useful information implicit in the formatting