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My paper will examine the “Player King” (MANN 9019), one of the excised fresco panels found leaning against a wall in the vicinity of the Palaestra at Herculaneum in 1761 (Borriello et al. 1989: 138-139, n. 103; Parslow 1995: 148-149; Jones 2019: 11-12). In particular, it will argue that this painting responds to and reworks traditional artistic modes of representing dramatic authors. Presumably in transit and awaiting remounting when Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE, the “Player King” is a square composition that depicts three figures.

The wax tablets of Herculaneum, produced by a diversity of ancient hands and uniquely preserved, have given us an unprecedented insight into the daily lives of the residents of the town. One of the more remarkable collections is the archive of L. Venidius Ennychus, found on the upper floor of the Casa del Salone Nero. A series of tablets from this group document what must have been a momentous and life-changing event for him: his successful efforts to have his status as a Junian Latin raised to that of full Roman citizen after his daughter had reached the age of one.

Among the most potent metaphors in Roman authorial discourse is the “personification” of a literary work as a slave or freedman (Fitzgerald 2000). The trope has received ample attention for its prominence in Horace Epistulae 1.20, Ovid’s exilic poetry, and Martial’s epigrams. Each author addresses his libellus in language that conflates the physical characteristics of the book and the body of the enslaved.

Admonitores non nimis verecundi: Personification and Personhood in Cicero’s Letters

Blending personae – Hybrid Speakers and the Performance of Authorship in Cicero’s Dialogues

The paper analyses instances of dynamic and ambiguous speaker-modelling in Cicero’s Dialogues. Focusing i.a. on the Academici libri, De divinatione, De senectute, and De amicitia, it asks what notions of persona and authorship can be derived from this modelling and what purpose it might have in the context of the late Republic.

This paper reveals the systematic dissolution of personae and embodied emotional experiences into the natural world in Senecan texts. Such dissolution represents an authorial technique that serves to organize the memory of emotional experiences in accordance with Stoic principles. In this paper I engage primarily with Margaret Graver’s (2007) tome on Stoic emotion and Thomas Habinek’s 2007 and 2011 works on Stoicism and the nature of physical reality.

Roman conceptions of personhood do not easily intersect with our contemporary delineations of what personhood is or means; we now tend to define personhood in a more malleable, elastic way that is less grounded in particular cultural values such as honor or masculinity (Barthes (1967), Foucault (1978, 1982), Butler (2004)). One striking example of people who possess an identity that is not stable and individual but is embedded in a community are martyrs, especially the early martyrs before the Church became hierarchical.

This paper will discuss the ‘finding’ of the new Sappho fragments and following events in the wider context of discovery narratives, which have been functional to the establishment of papyrology as a discipline and contributed to keep the audience engaged from the late 19th century onwards. I am going to analyse the P.Sapph.Obbink and P.GC. 105 case through a comparison with other recent and less recent findings of Sappho poems in order to show how some methodological misconceptions caused harm to people, texts and their interpretations too.

O Brothers, Where Art Thou? Scholarship on Papyri in Private Collections

Along with many published and unpublished papyri, the papyrus containing Sappho’s Brothers Poem is currently in (anonymous) private hands. This paper intends to contribute to the discussion about what this fact should mean for scholarship on the papyrus in question. 

From Fall of 2019 through Spring of 2020, the Center for the Tebtunis Papyri (Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley) in conjunction with the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology collaborated on an exhibit comprising the papyrological documents housed in Bancroft together with physical artifacts from the site of Tebtunis, which currently reside in the Hearst Museum.