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Much ink has been spilled on the literary role of rivers as metaphors, personifications, and narrative devices (see Jones 2005). However, the role of rivers as active agents in the environment has not been extensively explored. The rising paradigm of ecocriticism calls for a rejection of the traditional image of non-human elements as (passive) landscape and for a reconsideration of the environment as a network of elements with their own agency (see Martelli 2020).

The goal of this paper is twofold: to use environmental philosopher Timothy Morton’s theory of dark ecology to better understand Vergil’s conception of the mythical Golden Age in the Georgics and the Eclogues, and to use Vergil to better understand dark ecology and modern human-nonhuman relations. These texts display awareness that human cruelty to nonhumans leads to human suffering, as the climate crisis is teaching us anew today.

In its imagination of human beings and the land, the Georgics explores the emotions farming prompts, ranging from the old man of Tarentum’s satisfaction to the despair caused by the need for incessant labor. By drawing on ideas from affect studies about people’s emotional responses to and impacts on their environment, I argue that the Georgics portrays its characters and poet as experiencing and creating fundamentally different emotions as they move through space.

Vergil’s tenth eclogue is often read as a pessimistic coda to the collection as a whole, not least as a rejection of the genre of pastoral. Not only does Gallus, the main figure of the poem, spurn the bucolic hexameter in favour of love elegy, but the poet himself is preparing to leave the world of shepherds and flocks. As modern readers, we know that in closing the collection Vergil is already looking ahead to the Georgics, to the world of organised farming and the loftier genre of didactic.

On the peak of Mt. Nebo (near Khirbet el-Mukhayyat, Jordan), amidst a desert landscape, people were baptized amongst mosaics of flowers, hunting scenes, and grafted trees (Piccirillo, 1998). The floors of this 6th-century baptistry parallels the region’s tendency for a profusion of so-called natural imagery (Kitzinger, 1976; Britt, 2011). Scholars use Nebo as a case-study in the trends of late antique art, as an example of changing styles from classical to Byzantine periods (Maguire 1987, 2012). From this vantage point, this space is a rare instance of plant portrayal prior to iconoclasm.

This paper explores the semantic and infrastructural dimensions of plaster in antiquity. As an artificial composite, plaster was a mixture of earth, fire, water, and air. Labourers manufactured plaster by firing limestone or marble to produce quicklime, which was treated with water to release heat, forming slaked lime. The powder was then suspended in water and mixed with selected earthen grits like sand, marble powder, and crushed terracotta (Vitr. De Arch. 7.6.1).

Harnessed by scholars seeking to understand stylistic development in terms of both increasing naturalism (Brückner; Homolle) and as a purely internal formal development (Riegl; Hauglid), acanthus ornament occupies an unstable position in Greek art. Unlike geometric patterns such as meanders and saltire squares, which lack a clear referent in nature, acanthus ornament, characterized by serrated edges, is readily recognized as the distinct plant found throughout the Mediterranean.

Harnessed by scholars seeking to understand stylistic development in terms of both increasing naturalism (Brückner; Homolle) and as a purely internal formal development (Riegl; Hauglid), acanthus ornament occupies an unstable position in Greek art. Unlike geometric patterns such as meanders and saltire squares, which lack a clear referent in nature, acanthus ornament, characterized by serrated edges, is readily recognized as the distinct plant found throughout the Mediterranean.

In this paper, I will explore how the harvesting of wood in Homeric poetry is inextricably linked to the topic of human mortality. In particular, while scholarship has explored how Iliadic tree similes use tree death and the production of wood for craft production to highlight the ambivalence of heroic death, I will focus on how the harvesting of wood for heroic funerals associates wood with a different component of human mortality, collapsing the simile’s boundaries between vehicle and tenor by uniting the mortal material of humans and trees in a process of cremation.

Oedipus’ name, a Latin transliteration of the original Greek Οἰδίπους, translates as “swollen foot'' as a reflection of his clipped ankles. Early in his infancy, he is established as an impaired figure, and it is this impairment that brings upon recognition of the conflict of the play with his limp acting as intentional symbolism (Catenaccio). This paper will explore how a lens of disabled self-performance can transform Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus into a play of representation and reclamation.