Mirrors on the Moon: Lucian's Sci-fi Technology and Anticipated Innovation
By A. Everett Beek
In Lucian’s True History, the narrator journeys to the moon and witnesses many outlandish phenomena, including a magic mirror (Ver. hist. 1.26). This mirror can be used to see anything happening on earth, from a greater distance and with greater accuracy than would ever be possible using a real-life mirror.
‘Just as Honeycomb’: Queer Money in Petronius’ Cena Trimalchionis
By Elliott Piros
Mortality and familial continuity are central preoccupations for attendees at Petronius’ cena Trimalchionis. My paper argues that money, invested profitably, figures as an alternative to biologically reproducing marriages for freedmen, not least Trimalchio himself. The agent of this substitution is a recurring metaphor wherein monetary objects are said to be as fertile as honeycombs.
The Mulier Equitens: Erotic Display in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses and Roman Wall Painting
By Victoria Hodges
The iconography of sex workers and the figurae veneris in Roman wall painting throughout the empire has been the subject of much debate in scholarship, namely as to their didactic, pornographic, or comedic function (Myerowitz 1992; Guzzo 2000; Clarke 2007).
Dramatizing the Gendered Subject: Examining the Pseudo-Stomach in Leucippe and Clitophon as a Prop of Performative Gender
By Emily Waller
In her essay “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution,” Judith Butler describes womanhood as an enacted reality which requires one “to materialize oneself in obedience to an historically delimited possibility, and to do this as a sustained and repeated corporeal project” (Butler 1988).
Glasses and Other Tableware in Achilles Tatius: Making Sense of a Complex Novel by Looking at Objects
By Marine Glénisson
In this paper, we intend to show how the inclusion of glasses, cups and other tableware in Achilles Tatius’ Leucippe and Cleitophon contributes to unify a novel with a complex narrative structure by closely link the literal level of the narrative to its figurative and metaliterary sense for the educated reader of the Second Sophistic.
Votive Inscriptions, Aretalogy, and the Epigraphic Habit in the Ancient Novels
By Barbara Blythe
Inscriptions on durable objects take center stage in epigraphic studies, while texts inscribed on perishable materials that rarely survive in the archaeological record (such as textiles, trees, and loaves of bread) occupy a more peripheral position in the field. The ancient novels offer opportunities for examining ancient conceptions of the ephemeral margins of the epigraphic habit in order to better understand how the Greeks and Romans imagined and experienced their lettered environments.