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This summer, my team and I are examining a diverse set of Iliad manuscripts in order to identify commonalities in the content of their scholia, as part of the ongoing Homer Multitext Project (HMT). As members of this project, we read, transcribe, and edit high resolution images of 10th and 11th century CE Byzantine manuscripts of the Iliad and their scholia to produce diplomatic editions that are publicly available online.

Maps allow us to visualize more than just landmarks. They also enable us to consider the migration of people, the history of trade routes, and the exchange of culture. The Mythodikos project, Ancient Greek for “connected to myth”, will create a dataset and searchable map-interface which will allow a student or scholar to consider mythological figures not just as they are associated with particular texts, authors, and traditions of writing, but also as they are connected to various geographical spaces.

The overarching aim of the Brandeis Techne Group as Residents at the Autodesk Technology Center in Boston is to develop new equipment and methodologies to help push forward the collaboration between technology and the humanities. With a focus on archaeological research and applications, this group seeks to develop new ways of analyzing the material culture of the ancient world.

José Antonio de Villerías y Roelas (1695-1728), a largely unknown poet from Novohispanic Mexico, composed a highly Vergilian and erudite epic poem in Latin titled Guadalupe. In hexameters and 1752 verses long, it is organized in four books and only available in a manuscript preserved in the National Library of Mexico (Ms. No. 1594).

When the German poet Helius Eobanus Hessus published his translation of the Iliad in 1540 after a decade’s worth of work, he became the first person to translate an entire Homeric epic into Latin verse. This significant if surprisingly belated “first” in the history of Homeric translation has not hitherto been adequately contextualized as a product of late Humanism. My paper not only reconstructs Eoban’s translation practice, but also proposes a novel interpretation of his Homeri Ilias as programmatically anachronistic.

Juan Latino, as Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Maria Wolff demonstrate (Gates and Wolff 1998), was the first poet of African descent whose work was published in a Western language – in his case, Latin. Born into slavery in 1518, Latino eventually attained freedom and became a Professor of Latin Grammar at the Cathedral School in Granada. Latino’s prominence was not restricted to his tenure of this position in Granada, since, as a poet, he also enjoyed the patronage of prominent figures in early modern Spain, among which we find King Philip II.

In 1987 David Lindley and Robin Sowerby published the first edition of a neo-Latin mini-epic in two books on the 1605 London Gunpowder Plot by the musician, physician and poet Thomas Campion (1567-1620), De Pulverea Coniuratione, probably written in 1612-13 and now extant in a single contemporary MS in the library of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge.

Considering ancient epic poetry, the protagonists of these poems were always men: Achilles (Iliad), Ulisses (Odyssey), Aeneas (Aeneid), Caesar and Pompeius (Pharsalia), Scipio (Punica) are only the best-known examples. The protagonists of Neo-Latin epic poems were also usually men whose portrayal—especially from the sixteenth century onwards—was very much based on Virgil’s portrayal of Aeneas.

Of all rivers Ovid mentions being dried up by Phaëton on his hapless ride with the chariot of the sun, only the Roman Tiber is said to be the destined ruler of the world. Similarly, in Claudian’s panegyrical epic for Probinus and Olybrius, consuls of 395 AD, the personified Tiber boasts that a foreign river has never witnessed such eminent rulers. In Neo-Latin epic, much like in classical epic, rivers are often symbols of national identities, that can be compared with other streams in terms of reach and power.

This paper reads the deluge and conflagration narratives in Metamorphoses 1 and 2 as human-induced disasters and argues that they figure the experience of living under the Augustan regime. My discussion draws on an anthropological perspective that defines disaster through its disruptive effects on society and that reframes the nature-society duality as a “mutuality, positing that nature and society are inseparable… each contributing to the resilience and vulnerability of the other” (Oliver-Smith 2019: 42).