The poet, the grammarian and the Origines: Servius, Vergil and the record of Cato’s history in ancient scholarship
By Jackie Elliott (University of Colorado Boulder)
The poet, the grammarian and the Origines: Servius, Vergil and the record of Cato’s history in ancient scholarship
The Interrupting Sea: From Primordial to Historical in Livy’s Cleonymus Digression (10.2)
By Kyle Khellaf (University of California, Riverside)
Why do so many ancient historical digressions take place at sea? In his short novella, Watermark, Joseph Brodsky declares, “There is something primordial about traveling on water, even for short distances...Water unsettles the principle of horizontality” (1992, 14). The same could be said for digressions: they frequently delve into the murkier “plupast” (cf. Grethlein and Krebs, 2012), and unsettle the seeming horizontality of historical narrative time.
The Goddess, the Seeress and the Wife – Tacitean Reception and the Depiction of Germanic Women
By Teresa Mocharitsch (University of Graz)
When it comes to Roman-Germanic history, one name is omnipresent: Tacitus. The rediscovery of his writings is usually seen as a key moment after which Germanic prehistory is integrated in historical narratives. Most influential was the Germania that served as a resource for the construction of an imagined “Germanic identity”. Alongside, several political incidents were recorded in the Annals and Histories like the Batavian revolt and the battle of the Teutoburg Forest.
Anticipated Memory and the Pregnant Body in Tacitus’ Annals
By Caitlin Cecilia Gillespie (Brandeis University)
In Annals book one, Tacitus records the capture of Arminius’ pregnant wife and her kin, at the urging of her father Segestes. Tacitus describes her as a woman “more like her husband than her father in spirit, neither overcome by tears nor suppliant speech, with her hands pressed firmly together in her lap she looked upon her pregnant belly” (mariti magis quam parentis animo, neque <e>victa in lacrimas neque voce supplex, compressis intra sinum manibus gravidum uterum intuens. Tac. Ann. 1.57.4).
An (A)Political Hero and a Tragic Mother. Plutarch’s Life of Coriolanus
By Federico Ingretolli (University of Oxford)
My presentation explores the tragic intertextuality of Plutarch’s Life of Coriolanus, a Life whose ‘tragic colouring’ has not hitherto been probed. The first part makes the case that the ‘apolitical’ nature of Coriolanus has two tragic models, Sophocles’ Ajax and Adrastus’ funeral oration in Euripides’ Supplices. The second investigates the dramatic structure of the second half of the Life and the different way in which Dionysius and Plutarch use tragic intertexts in the portrayal of Volumnia.
A New Type of Civil War in Tacitus
By Marshall C. Buchanan (University of Michigan)
Civil war is among the central themes of Tacitus’ historical work. It is explicit at the beginning of the work now called the Historiae; it is implicit at the opening of the Annales. This paper reads the opening of the Annales as being in dialogue with the Historiae after demonstrating that the circulation history of both works points to Tacitus’ having conceived Annales 1 as the opening act of a consolidated thirty-book history.