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The Ptolemies fostered a literature of exquisite polish and slender proportions, most strikingly embodied in Callimachus, whose aesthetic principles became synonymous with Alexandrian artistry. At the same time, however, they had a penchant for ostentatious display and gigantism, as evidenced e.g. in Ptolemy Philadelphus’ “Grand Procession”.

River systems were critical for transport and connectivity throughout the Roman world. Although there have been several important studies of riverine landscapes in recent years (see Campbell 2012; Franconi 2017; Arnaud and Keay 2020), we know little about how they were fished in the diverse regions of the Roman Empire, or precisely what role freshwater fish played in local cultures.

Caput Factionum? Rethinking Rome through Ancient Sports Merchandise

Praxiteles' Knidian Aphrodite was one of the most famous statues in the ancient Roman world. It was so famous that, even more than 1500 years after its destruction, more than 500 images that replicate its distinctive vulva-covering gesture—the “modest Venus” replica series—have survived to the present day. Among these are 51 Roman provincial coin series struck in bronze from ca. 161 to 268 CE (Bernhart 1936; Jurukova 1973, 1981, 1987; Hristova & Žekov 2007).

This paper examines trends of display and collecting in the provinces of the Roman Empire from the 2nd century C.E. onward by mobilizing a particular Hellenistic sculpture’s unique history of copying and transmission. The “Pasquino Group,” was a popular ancient image, depicting an older bearded Homeric warrior carrying the body of a dead younger comrade. Although the bronze original no longer survives, its composition can be inferred through fourteen fragmentary Roman copies in marble, dispersed across the Mediterranean (Andreae and Conticello 1962).

This talk investigates the ancient Egyptian belief which deems Sakhmet and decans as the cause of contagious diseases and epidemics. Sakhmet is a lioness goddess who is associated with plagues due to her epithet “Sakhmet in the year of pestilence” (Sḫm.t-m-rnp.t-iꜣd.t); while decans are the 36 stars or constellations which rise at one-hour interval throughout the course of one year. Since the reign of Amenhotep III (1400-1350 BCE), decans have frequently appeared together with Sakhmet, as the goddess’ disease-carrying emissaries.

Villainizing an unknown other as guilty of spreading or causing contagious disease has a long, odious history. In antiquity, it was often the marginalized who fell victim to the ritual dynamics of scapegoating. The poor, the enslaved, the disabled––those who lived at the margins of society suddenly became the focal point of cathartic expulsion in times of plague. Scholars have mainly focused on the purificatory aspects of the scapegoat ritual (Parker 1983, Burkert 1985, Vernant 1988) and its role in periodic festivals of renewal (Deubner 1932, Graf 2008).

This study will examine how early modern Ottoman medicine used fragrances to prevent the contagion of the epidemic. The main question of this study is why and how the Ottomans used fragrances in the treatment of the epidemic. For Classical Islamic scholars and the Ottomans, as their successors, one of the reasons for the spread of epidemics is the theory of miasma which signifies the negative effect of the presence of foul odors and spoiled air on the human body.

Lucan’s Pharsalia reads as an extended pathology of rabies civilis, or civil madness, in which individual disasters are symptomatic for the larger disaster that is civil war (Fratantuono 2012). For his only plague account, Lucan draws on Caesar’s Commentaries to stage the disasters of plague and famine at the siege of Dyrrachium in Book 6, thereby undercutting the lessons from its intertextual predecessors, especially Virgil’s Georgics, and crushing the hopeful prospect of regeneration and redemption.

The aim of this paper is to explore causality as a channel and as an environment (Meyrowitz 1999) within which information about the plague is produced, transmitted and (mis)recognized in Greek plague narratives.