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Besides his own volumes of poetry from the Black Sea (Tristia 1-5, Epistulae ex Ponto 1-4, Ibis), only two references to Ovid’s exile in Tomis are extant from classical antiquity (Stat. Silv. 2.1.253–5, Plin. NH 32.152; later sources collected in Clark, Miller-Newlands).

Ovid has always been a controversial writer. But, as Hawes argues, ‘flexibility of significance’ allows Ovidian narratives to remain relevant as they migrate through different interpretive communities ‘in the face of changing social, poetic, moralistic and personal concerns’ (Hawes 2018). The Actaeon myth is a case in point: in London in 2012 a major exhibition of Renaissance and contemporary art and poetry explored fresh interpretations of this myth. Reception studies of Ovid, however, tend to focus on works produces by great metropolitan centres.

This paper looks to the future of Ovidian scholarship by starting with a meta-critical reading of the last 30 years of Ovidian research, then forecasting future trends.

From the first stirrings of writing in the late fourth millennium BCE to the latest dated cuneiform texts in the 1^stcentury CE, the phenomenon of cuneiform culture raises an array of questions which touch on all aspects of literature, beginning with the definition of “literary.” Assyriologists generally approach this strategically, separating quotidian administrative and legal texts from the long traditions of word lists (“lexical texts”), “royal inscriptions”, of the corpora of religious experts which might be termed “scientific and technical”, and the relatively small group of

The Phoenician cities lived between literatures, both in space and time: the dramatic myth and epic of Bronze Age Ugarit and the rich literatures of the Iron Age Greeks and Israelites create expectations of the inhabitants of the Northern Levant that are not fulfilled until the Hellenistic period, and even then only in Greek.

Ancient Greek has no word for “literature” (“μουσικήwithout a requirement for music or the main content of παιδεία?). Yet Greeks created institutions, public and private, Panhellenic and local, supporting the creation and transmission of literature, including rhapsodic competitions, dramatic festivals, and symposia. Schools taught both performance and reading; with further literacy, there were libraries, a book trade, and the apparatus of auxiliary texts— glossaries, commentary, epitomies.

What sorts of things can the broad comparison of ancient literatures conceal? In what ways might cross-cultural analysis open up new possibilities for obfuscation even as it sets other things in illuminating new perspective? In this talk I will examine one fundamental pattern that cross-cultural literary analysis seems not only poorly suited to see but perhaps systemically to miss. The talk covers three points: 1.

Writing in the Achaemenid Empire was not necessarily used for the same purposes as in contemporary Greece. Herodotus famously mentions “the learned men of the Persians” and implies a rich tradition and practice of oral history, and the similarities in the stories of Cyrus preserved in Herodotus and Xenophon suggest such histories might be widely known even if not written down. Instead, writing in the Empire filled a wide range of particular functions that were at least sometimes distinct from the literatures of contemporary Greece.

This paper will demonstrate how the Haitian-feminist writer Edwidge Danticat’s novel, The Farming of Bones (1998), adapts Virgil’s treatment of epidemic disease in the Georgics and Aeneid as an organizing principle. Virgil presents the Roman Civil Wars as a type of infectious disease in these poems to signal the threat of Egyptian contagion and to highlight the potential of Augustus’ divine healing, though the pestilential danger of Egypt is never fully quarantined (Hawkins 2019).

Among the prophecies on the eve of war that conclude Bellum Civile 1, Figulus describes the calamity as a matura lues (645) and pestis (649), anticipating how plague and civil war will reciprocally inform each other throughout the poem. Plague narratives expose the contagious nature of violence within the social order, violence described by René Girard as “mimetic,” since individuals mirror each other in their desire for the same distinctions (1974).