Papers
Roger S. Bagnall - "The Councillor and the Clerk: Class and Culture on a Roman Frontier"
Konstantine Panegyres - "The Ethnic Elements of Greek Music"
Though ethnic language pervades Greek musical culture, little has been made of this information. This paper is an attempt to understand to what extent and why music was influenced by issues of ethnicity in ancient Greece. Analysis of musical historiography, musicians' poetry, and epigraphy suggests that Greek music was considered to be a heterogeneous agglomeration of different local traditions, and that these differences were expressed by ethnic language. Ethnic identity was critical to Greek concepts of music because local communities used and promoted their own musical cultures for interaction with other intra-Hellenic and foreign communities.
Lisa Pilar Eberle - "Making Roman Subjects: Citizenship and Empire before and after Augustus"
Beginning with a semantic history of the term negotiator, this essay reconsiders Augustus's role in the history of Roman citizenship. It restores negotiator as a byword for how Roman officials in the Late Republic understood Romans in the provinces and argues that the term's connotations, combined with several Late Republican institutions, reveal a vision of these Romans as partaking in Roman imperialism. Several of Augustus's actions, including the development of a new language for understanding these Romans, promoted a new vision of the place of citizens in the empire, making them subjects of an empire which had previously been theirs.
James Corke-Webster - "Trouble in Pontus: The Pliny-Trajan Correspondence on the Christians Reconsidered"
The letters exchanged by Pliny and Trajan concerning Christians have occasioned abundant commentary. But scholarship remains confused over two questions—first, Pliny's procedure and motivation in writing, and second, the extent of the emperor's response. I argue that the letters are evidence only of an overexposed governor's effort to shut down an escalating situation, and that they elicited a tailored, local and limited imperial response. This reading not only prompts a more nuanced understanding of the role of the governor and of his correspondence, but also prevents erroneous use of the letters in discussions of the "persecution" of the Christians.
Andrew Scott - "Cassius Dio's Julia Domna: Character Development and Narrative Function"
This paper examines how and why Cassius Dio portrayed Julia Domna in the manner that he did. Dio consistently depicts Julia as foreign and power-hungry, a portrait that appears to be driven by his analysis of the later Severan regime. Julia serves as a link between the two halves of the dynasty, a claim that runs counter to the official line of Elagabalus and Severus Alexander. The later Severan house, seen by Dio as foreign and dominated by powerful female figures, informs his portrayal of Julia Domna and shows a continuity of analysis throughout the final books of his history.
Julia Scarborough - "The Channels of Song in Calpurnius Siculus and in Virgil's Georgics"
In a song exchange in his second Eclogue, Calpurnius presents the canales through which water is piped to a garden as equivalent to a pastoral singer's pipe, anticipating his innovative use of canales to denote musical pipes at Ecl. 4.76. Calpurnius's choice of the term suggests a metaphorical reading of Virgil's two references to canales in the Georgics as conduits for water and honey. Calpurnius makes explicit Virgil's implicit association of irrigation through canales with the nourishing value of song. This double sense of canales dramatizes a productive relationship between human song and the natural landscape in Calp. Ecl. 2.
Volume