154

The period from the Theodosian dynasty and continuing into the sixth century AD saw the emergence of what many scholars – M. McEvoy (2013) and J. Hilner (2019) – have seen as new avenues for elite women to exercise their influence, most notably as royal mothers and sisters who were able, by working closely with trusted generals and imperial family members, to establish long and stable regimes in the name of child emperors. In religion, as well, a new visibility for elite women has also been detected.

Widows, Horses, Taxes… and Cato? The aes equestre between History and Historiography

This paper challenges a dominant axiom in the field of ancient Greek religion: that remains were essential to the cult of heroes. The prevailing notion is that the bones of illustrious people, whether mythological or historical, were held as relics imbued with power (Nagy, 115–6; Burkert, 199–203).

The agonistic inscriptions of Roman Corinth have been almost entirely published in the magisterial volumes of Meritt 1931, West 1931, and Kent 1966 (one exception is noted by Wiseman 2015: 237n.211; the other–I 1973 4–we will publish in an expanded version of the twenty-minute paper we propose). Our paper asks a new question of this dossier: what can be gleaned from the epigraphy of the rising Corinthian elite as they construct hybrid political lineages?

The first and last major narratives of Metamorphoses VI feature women depicting rape through tapestries: Arachne portrays eighteen of the gods’ infamous encounters and Philomela relates her experience of rape by her brother-in-law, Tereus. Both women create physical documents of sexual violence and weave transgressive narratives that threaten established hierarchy.

Voices from the Cave: An Enslaved Woman as a Source in Plutarch’s Life of Crassus

Scholarship on Book 5 of Cicero’s Letters to Friends has often considered it an incoherent assemblage of letters belatedly discovered and arranged together, without much scheme, only after the compilation of the other books in IV-V AD (Cavarzere 2007; White 2010). I argue that its letters (as in other books in the collection: Beard 2002; Gunderson 2007; Gibson 2012; Grillo 2016; Martelli 2017; Gibson 2022) were posthumously selected and re-organized around specific narrative and thematic threads.

This paper introduces the concepts of "implicit" and "explicit" bilingualism to better understand the complex linguistic landscape of Sicily in antiquity.

ubique praesentem mihi: Long-Distance Amicitia and Physical Presence in the Letters of Paulinus of Nola

Scholars such as Henriette van der Blom, Alison Cooley, and Susan Treggiari observe that a biological connection with heroic ancestors inspired descendants to emulate their deeds and mannerisms (van der Blom 2010: 88; Cooley 1998: 206-7; Treggiari 2003: 144, 148, 150). Silius Italicus’ Punica features the descendants of many famous regnal and early Republican heroes, such as Cloelius, a descendant of the early Republican heroine Cloelia, and Scaevola, descended from Mucius Scaevola.