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In this talk, we are going to outline a new collaborative research project on Messapic, a language and culture present in Apulia in the second half of the first millennium BCE (cf. De Simone 2018, Marchesini 2020, 2021 Matzinger 2019). This is a project carried out by a newly-constituted working group named SPEM (Seminario PErmanente sul Messapico) and composed of specialists from different disciplines: linguistics, archaeology, epigraphy, and ancient history.

In the ancient grammarians we find descriptions of the outcomes of adding an enclitic to an orthotonic host. Some of these are distilled in today’s grammars and textbooks, however, an analysis of how enclitic accentuation functions—a linguistic explanation of the causes of accentual expressions—has been frustratingly elusive to formulate. This paper proposes a solution based on my own analysis of Greek recessive accentuation (Trzaskoma 2023) and that of Steriade (1988).

This paper describes a large-scale computational study of anagrams in classical Latin literature. Notwithstanding a small number of high-profile examples, such as the close collocation of Latium, maluit, quoniam latuisset, and paulatim at Aen. 8.322-326 (Ahl, O’Hara, Nelis, Chaudhuri and Dexter 2022), there remains a general skepticism about both the frequency and literary significance of anagrams in Latin poetry (Cameron, O’Hara).

In Georgics 4, Clymene sings a song within a song, an epyllion within the epyllion. I argue that the description of Clymene and the Nymphs, an underappreciated moment within the Orpheus-Aristaeus epyllion, is a mise en abyme, a smaller reflection of the larger epyllion.

Achilles and Orestes are well-studied models of mythical vengeance for the Aeneid. Allusions to Achilles and Hector’s duel and Achilles’ Shield are well known (West 1974). Curtis (2017) has shown that the final duel of Book 12 culminates a series of militarized choral scenes drawing on the association of battle with human and cosmic chorality displayed on both Homeric and Virgilian shields (also Hardie 1986). Scholars have also noted evocations of Orestes’ myth throughout the Aeneid (Rebeggiani 2015, Hardie 1991). In this paper I will merge these two models.

Despite the continued efforts to elucidate Homer’s precise influence on Virgil (e.g. Knauer 1964, Barchiesi 1984, Farrell 2021), scholars have overlooked just how literally Virgil translates Homer’s language for divine rescue. In Homer’s Iliad, the verbs σώιζω, “I save,” and ἐξαρπάζω, “I snatch out,” do more than describe a god whisking a hero off to safety: they reflect the traditional fate of that hero.

Vergil’s attentiveness to aural detail has been well-known for some time (Roiron 1908, Whately 1954, Fratantuono 2014, Thomas 2014), but the effects of this attentiveness are far from obvious. After all, interpreters tend to attribute disparate functions to the sounds of the poem, treating them either as agents of vividness, scattered throughout multisensory descriptive passages (the majority view), or alternatively as privations, non-sights with which the poet makes “darkness visible” (e.g. in Burke’s Enquiry, or Johnson 1976).

In this paper I explore the theme of enslavement in Cicero’s early speeches (81–66 BCE) and argue that Cicero instrumentalizes this theme to serve his rhetorical and political ends.

The rhetorical use of silence represents a peculiar feature of Cicero’s prose, which has recently attracted much scholarly interest (Gowing 2000, Guerin 2011, Taylor 2013, Marchese 2014, Stephan 2016, Winter 2021). The notion of silence appears particularly connected to the literature of exile since it symbolizes the void surrounding the exiled. Although silence has been interpreted as a key theme in Ovid’s exilic poetry (Natoli 2018), few scholars (Claassen 1999, Garcea 2005) have devoted attention to silence as a literary motif in Cicero’s letters during his banishment.