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Financial Foreplay in Plautus’s Mostellaria and Catullus 5

This paper explores how Catullus 5 establishes an intertheatrical dialogue with an amatory scene in Plautus’s Mostellaria, thereby enriching our understanding of both.  When couples conflate kissing with counting cash before the gaze of spectators, the males embrace their role as young lovers, but their girlfriends resist being cast as meretricious.

The Strength of Ambiguity: Constructing Belief in the Apotheosis of Julia, daughter of Nikias (IG Bulg. I2 345)         

The soldiers of Roman Comedy are generally uncouth, particularly with women.

The ancilla Pythias of Terence’s Eunuchus offers a nuanced assessment of guilt and accountability in the aftermath of rape. In her keen assessment of the play’s violence, Pythias identifies both the assailant adulescens, Chaerea, and his servus, Parmeno, as bearing responsibility for the rape of Pamphila. This paper investigates how Pythias’s response provides an additional lens through which the audience might critique the play’s central characters.

This paper presents a new historicist reading of the Greek comic fragment Apollod.Car. 5. By identifying a previously undetected allusion to Arsinoe II, it firmly establishes the Chremonidean War as the contemporary historical conflict with which the fragment engages. This recontextualization allows the fragment to shine as a rare example of pointed political commentary in post-Menandrian Greek New Comedy and reveals a unique new reception of Arsinoe on the Athenian stage.

In the play Casina, Plautus turns the comic romantic plot on its head by removing the young lovers, Euthynicus and Casina, and opting to instead spotlight Euthynicus’ father, the senex amator Lysidamus, who replaces his son in a fake wedding orchestrated by his wife Cleostrata. In his new role as an adulescens, Lysidamus experiences an increasingly disorienting day that culminates on his ‘wedding night’, wherein he is assaulted by a male slave cross-dressing as a bride.

When epic language appears in genres like comedy, iambus, and hexameter parodia, the first impression it lends is one of incongruity; epic collides with non-epic, high register with low, past with present. However, to late Archaic and Classical audiences, epic represented more than the corpus of written poetry that survives to us. Using case studies from Hipponax (fr.

Gods deceive mortals and each other throughout Greek literature, even in contexts that are meant to show them in the best light, such as the hymns composed to praise them. In this paper, I examine examples of divine lies in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes and the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, and I demonstrate that persuasion and deception illustrate a god’s power and essential nature, which are the focus of each hymn’s sequence of words and deeds (Clay).

Lies and Laughter: A Metaliterary Reading of the Homeric Hymn to Hermes

In this presentation, I argue that the poet of Anacreontea 11 as well as Anacreon himself (as preserved in Fr. 127 F. = 445 P. ap. Him. Or. 48.4 [pp. 197-198 Colonna]), take on a persona resonant with that of an ancient magician in their attitude toward the divine Eros/Erotes. In particular, I build on the work of two scholars. First, Faraone 1999, who shows how archaic love poetry’s unsettlingly violent portrayal of desire can help modern readers understand often disturbing ancient erotic magic.