Papers
David Sansone - "Herodotus on Lust"
The account of mutual abductions that is found at the start of Herodotus’s Histories occupies a prominent place because the historian wishes to begin with stories exemplifying a basic determinant of human behavior that is generally felt to require no special explanation, namely acquisitiveness, which is conflated with sexual desire. This conflation, which is shown to be pervasive in Greek thought, is clear from the very start, where the abduction of Io for seemingly commercial purposes is followed by three abductions in which the sexual motivation is increasingly apparent.
Edwin Carawan: "Documents in the Case: Demosthenes 23–24"
In Demosthenes’ speeches we find documentary versions of laws and decrees which were not included in the prepared text nor (apparently) in early versions for circulation. Recent work on manuscript stichometry suggests a pattern in what appear to be the earliest inserts. In Demosthenes 23 and 24, in cases against unlawful legislation, a significant set of documents was included in the line-count edition; these largely correspond to the paragegrammenoi nomoi, the opposing laws listed in the indictment. This finding suggests that the early editor either had that indictment in hand or attempted to reconstruct it.
Michael Brumbaugh - "Kallimachos and the Seleukid Apollo"
In his Hymn to Apollo, Kallimachos conspicuously omits mention of Apollo’s famed oracle at Didyma. However, he draws his audience’s attention to the Euphrates, which has no special significance to the god. The itinerary he charts for his Apollo hymn maps onto the inter-kingdom politics of the eastern Mediterranean, and a geopolitical reading of the poem reveals the poet’s engagement with contemporary relations between the Ptolemaic and Seleukid empires, offering further clues about the poem’s date. This politically antagonistic dimension resonates with the literary polemics long recognized as a central feature of the hymn.
Aaron L. Beek - "The Pirate Connection: Roman Politics, Servile Wars, and the East"
In 102 b.c.e., the Romans sent Marcus Antonius Orator to Cilicia with an army, opening a new theater of campaigns. The timing seems strange: in 102, Rome had a manpower shortage and Roman forces were still bogged down in Gaul, Sicily, and quite probably Africa. I argue that the beginning of Roman involvement in Cilicia was rooted in Roman reactions to the ongoing struggles in Sicily and a Roman perception (whether true or false) that the slave wars in Sicily were actually instigated by Easterners. Moreover, this perception continued to affect Rome’s legislation in and control of Cilicia for years afterward.
Stephanie Ann Frampton - "What to Do with Books in the De finibus"
This paper studies the encounter between Cicero and Cato the Younger in Lucullus’s Tusculan library at De finibus 3–4. I examine Cicero’s attitude toward Cato’s physical presence in the library room in conjunction with surviving philological, archeological, and literary evidence regarding Republican villa libraries and the settings of Cicero’s other philosophical dialogues. This evidence suggests that we approach the scene from the De finibus cautiously, not as a normative presentation of a library and its use, but as a finely crafted literary set piece within Cicero’s larger work of philosophical literature.
Darcy A. Krasne - "Crippling Nostalgia: Nostos, Poetics, and the Structure of the Ibis"
This paper examines the structure of the catalogue in Ovid’s Ibis. In the catalogue’s first half, Ovid highlights the important exilic themes of exile, nostos, and meter through repeating markers located at significant points, specifically a quarter of the way through and at the catalogue’s center (identified by a couplet that forms a ring-composition with the catalogue’s opening). In the catalogue’s second half, Ovid emphasizes poets and poetry, divine punishment, dismemberment, and the consumption of one’s own flesh and blood—again, recurrent themes in the exile poetry. Throughout, metapoetic language suggests both elegy and iambus, appropriately for the poem’s genre-crisis.
Julia Mebane - "Pompey’s Head and the Body Politic in Lucan’s De bello civili"
Conceptualizing Rome as a body had a long history in Latin literature, but only after the transition to the principate did the head assume a central role in such metaphors. Designating the princeps as the caput rei publicae naturalized singular authority and contributed to the process of imperial legitimation. Lucan’s De bello civili critically responds to this discourse through the beheading of Pompey, which is staged as a mutiny of the body politic. The ramifications of Pompey’s failure to fulfill the role of the head-of-state extend beyond the plot of the poem, offering a critique of the principate’s ideological underpinnings