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The Magna Mater's Uncanny Ease in the Aeneid

The tenth poem of Prudentius’ Peristephanon, the account of a martyr who miraculously continues to speak after the removal of his tongue, is a tour de force celebration of the corporeal rhetoric of violence. In addition to rich engagement with his literary predecessors (e.g. Malamud 1989, Levine 1991, Fux 2013), the works in this collection equate the bodies of the martyrs they commemorate with texts and with the poems themselves, creating a complex relationship between written, oral, and corporeal communication (see e.g. Ross 1995, Ballengee 2009, Fielding 2014).

The bucolic landscape as we know it is a peaceful paradise far from the troubles and toils of city life—for men. Our prevailing notion of the pastoral is based on a scholarly tradition that is almost as male as the ancient authors themselves. From the perspectives of women, I argue, the pastoral world is a much darker place, where sexual violence is the rule, not the exception.

Cogor amare: Embodied Compulsion and Elegiac Passivity 

The aim of this study is to analyze the use of epithets in funerary inscriptions in Greek language for girls and women, contrasting them to the relationships between the deceased woman and the commemorator/s as they appear in the inscriptions themselves. The aim is to enhance our understanding of the representations of women in the city of Rome, according to whether the female was commemorated in a Greek or Latin speaking context, in the hope of moving beyond the examples that appear to denote a dependence on topoi in literary sources.

At the end of the 1st c. CE, Claudia Trophime, a priestess and prytanis from Ephesus, inscribed two epigrams to Hestia, in which she praised the goddess and her city (IEph 1062; SGO 03/02/37). Rarely commented upon in general, her poetry was seldom used in topographical studies of Ephesus to identify Mount Peion from the second epigram (Brein 1976-1977, Engelmann 1979 and 1991).

Docta Puella Picta: Experiencing Elegiac Poetics and Erotics through Painting

In his Compositiones, a first-century CE collection of pharmaceutical recipes, Scribonius Largus notes that a number were used by members of the imperial family. Of these, three recipes, described at chapters 59-60, were for dentifrices that were used, so he tells us, by Octavia (sister of Augustus), Livia (wife of Augustus), and Messalina (wife of Claudius), respectively.

By the Roman Imperial period, tools for hourly timekeeping, such as sundials and water clocks, had become so widespread that monumental versions could be found in many urban squares, sanctuaries, and gymnasia; and private clocks had become common sights in the gardens (and even on the persons—see Talbert 2017) of the sociocultural elite.

In his Laurentine villa letter, Pliny the Younger describes a chamber where he avoids the Saturnalian celebrations of the enslaved people in his household (Plin. Ep. 2.17.22-4). In this paper, I consider this account of the Saturnalia, a festival that notionally relaxes everyday hierarchies, alongside his praise of Trajan in the Panegyricus for restoring normative social distinctions that his predecessors distorted or inverted.