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Construction on Domitian’s Forum Transitorium began at the same time as the emperor, in his capacity as censor, revived Augustus’ Julian laws. Along the entablature of Le Colonnacce (the only two surviving columns projecting from the walls of the Forum), a frieze depicts Minerva and the myth of Arachne, flanked by images of spinning and weaving women: a visual program expressing not just an ideology of reform indebted to and evolving from the ‘moral topography’ of the Augustan principate, but also a powerful warning of the consequences of disobeying authority.

In the years following Nero’s death, authors and leaders alike were intent on advancing a set of images and narratives designed to further tarnish Nero’s memory, even as they laid claim to the purported ideals of Augustus, his dynasty’s founder. Evidence from multiple forms of representation suggests the totalizing and intermedial nature of this project.

In this paper I will offer a formal analysis of several of Jacopo Sannazaro’s Piscatoriae Eclogae, concentrating on the features of the eclogues’ poetic seascape. My aim is to grasp the significance of Sannazaro’s transposition of pastoral from land to sea, beyond the apparent drive of Neo-Latin authors to “outdo” classical authors “by introducing new uses and forms of literary genres” (Grant 117). Not only is Sannazaro’s pastoral seascape integral to his poetic content in a way that transcends mere novelty, but it also disrupts normal pastoral convention.

This talk will discuss how Girolamo Fracastoro, in his poem Syphilidis, sive Morbi Gallici, brilliantly reimagined the tree transformations from Ovid’s Metamorphoses to showcase the impact of syphilis on the human body and psyche. Ovid was an ubiquitous presence during the Renaissance (Burrow; Moss), and Fracastoro’s familiarity with Ovid has not escaped some notice of scholars (Eatough, 1984). This previous scholarship on Fracastoro’s use of classical texts in his poem, however, has only skated across Fracastoro’s nuanced engagement with Ovid.

Cristoforo Landino (1424–1498), though best known as a philosopher and a scholar of Dante and Vergil, wrote several dozen Latin poems, published under the title Xandra. Most of these poems are in elegiac couplets, but two are in phalacean hendecasyllables and four are in sapphic stanzas; all of these are in the first of the three books. Landino chooses the phalacean meter in imitation of Catullus, as is well known (Gaisser p. 216, Chatfield p.

Known widely throughout the seventeenth century as the ‘miracle of her sex,’ and ‘the Dutch Minerva,’ Anna Maria van Schurman (1607-1678) challenged her male-dominated world by existing within it. She was the first woman to attend University in the Netherlands, though she remained hidden behind the lattice window of a confessional—so she wouldn’t “distract” the men (van Beek, 2010). She penned a Dissertatio which argued that women should be educated exactly as men were, though it met with fierce opposition from her intellectual sponsors and mentors.

The Samaritans, today a small minority in Israel, were an important and active part of the Mediterranean world from at least the second century BCE through the eighth century CE (for overviews see Crown 1989; Pummer 2016). Under the Emperor Zeno in 484, at least according to our main sixth-century sources (Procopius; Malalas; Chronicon Paschale) the Samaritans revolted (see Crown 1986-7; Di Segni 1998; Sivan 2008). The group rebelled twice more, under Anastasius (ca.529CE) and Justinian (556CE; see Procopius; Cyr.

The historian Livy called his work a memorial of exemplary models ( exempla ) that
individuals and states should imitate or avoid ( praef. 10). He arguably desired Augustus’
readership, and that the allusive exempla of unconstrained monarchs such as Romulus and
Tarquin would exercise a check on his own power (Petersen 1961, Simmons 2008). Within the
period of Late Antiquity we likewise find historical prose aimed at guiding, and limiting, the
exercise of imperial power through the exempla of past monarchs (Bird 1993). During the later

The usurpation of the general Vetranio in 350 was an outlier: it was neither a successful seizure of the purple that produced a new dynasty, nor a spectacular failure that resulted in the bloody demise of its adherents. While this would-be emperor has attracted scholarly attention as a participant in the civil wars fought and won by Constantius II in 350–53, Vetranio was a uniquely Danubian solution to the sudden apparent weakness of the Constantinian dynasty (Drinkwater 2000, Bleckmann 1994).

Previous studies on what is often called ‘the third-century crisis’ (235-284 CE) have
primarily focused on the role of the military in legitimating imperial authority, which has led
many scholars, such as A.H.M. Jones, to identify the period as a “military anarchy” (Jones, 23).
Hence, emperors beginning with Maximinus Thrax, the first emperor after the end of the Severan
dynasty, are read through the lens of civil war and military upheaval. Cursory readings of the
literary evidence would seem to support this interpretation. This focus on the military has also