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In this paper I argue that Horace’s famous transformation into a swan in Odes 2.20 can be identified with the constellation of the Bird (i.e. Cygnus) described in Aratus’ Phaenomena. The Bird (275-281) is contiguous with the Lyre (268-274), a constellation that symbolizes Horace’s genre in the Odes.

At the end of his article on Martial and Ovid, Stephen Hinds suggests the possibility of studying “Martial’s Fasti,” namely his calendrical references through the lens of Ovidian intertextuality. The majority of scholarship on this theme has focused on the Saturnalia and poetics (Grewing, Citroni), with some work done on the intersection of social and religious ritual (Buongiovanni, Argetsinger). Katharina Burkhard has argued that Martial, unlike his Latin predecessors, has a tendency to erase religious elements from depictions of birthday celebrations.

This talk proposes Roman Religious Metaphysics as a semantic framework that allowed astrology to establish itself in Rome during the 2^nd century BCE, and positioned it to flourish in Augustan Rome. Scholars of ancient religion like Dumezil (1996), Burkert (1985), Bremmer (1994), Beard (1998), and Feeney (1999) have explored the origins and development of Roman religion primarily through a focus on ritual practices as described by Ovid, Varro, and Cicero.

Algorithms have been used as a tool for translating the mathematical astronomy of ancient cultures (Ritter 2016, Imhausen 2002) and a general label for calculation methods like the Babylonian Systems A and B (Ossendrijver 2012). The continued use of the term “algorithm” to understand and translate these ancient ideas highlights the value of taking a closer look at what modern scholars mean when using the word.

This paper will demonstrate that what has been presumed in Aratus of Soli’s Phaenomena to be an error by the poet in his description of the Kneeler constellation is in fact an intentional play on the names of the constellation and an allusion to Eudoxus and Plato. The supposed error occurs at v. 70, where Aratus follows Eudoxus (fr. 17) in saying that it is the right foot of the constellation which lies above the head of Draco and not the left, which contradicts the orientation convention chosen by both texts. Manuscripts unanimously convey δεξιτεροῦ ποδός.

Reexamining the classical archive, and our relationship with it, is essential to efforts to ‘decolonize’ our field. Yet we rarely confront the psychic self-violence this reexamination asks of classicists whose intellectual maturation was inextricable from our disciplinary formation.

Imperialism often asserts itself through an encyclopedic impulse: the drive to collect, evaluate, and classify a wide range of knowledge in a centralized archive (Mbembe 2002; Padilla Peralta 2020, 157). In Rome, this archival drive powered a panoply of intellectual practices, from the sweeping collection of facts and anecdotes in works such as Pliny’s Natural History; to practices of cross-cultural literary citation that might also be understood as a form of “spoliation” (Haimson Lushkov 2018).

Critics have long noted that forgery and philology are curiously entangled (Grafton 1990). Such entanglement has led to a rich reassessment of the ‘pseudepigraphic’ in classical literature as a corpus worthy of our critical faculties (e.g., Peirano 2012, Kearey 2019). And yet, the category of ‘forgery’ per se continues to have a dubious, if not abject, status.

“What is required to imagine a free state or to tell an impossible story?

How can scholars overcome the omissions and misrepresentations that characterize historical evidence in general, and especially evidence about enslaved individuals and other groups on the margins of societies? In this talk, I offer Saidiya Hartman’s methodology of critical fabulation—used by her to re-animate the silenced voices of captives on the trans-Atlantic slave route and of Black women in early 20th-century New York and Philadelphia (2007, 2008, 2019)—as one way forward (see also Kamen and Levin-Richardson 2022).