Latin Poetry

In the final Eclogue, Gallus imagines a scenario where he, either as a shepherd of a flock or a dresser of ripened grapes, would receive the attention of Phyllis or Amyntas as he lays among the willows under a supple vine. In his longing to have been an Arcadian himself and expressing a desire for either Phyllis or Amyntas or any other passion, Gallus, as Coleman notes, "accepts the bisexuality of Arcady" (Coleman 1977). In doing so, Gallus turns to the two characters in the Eclogues that Hahn has labeled as "universal darlings" (Hahn 1944).

Previous accounts of Vergil’s Camilla have focused on her literary models (Arrigoni, Horsfall, Fratantuono), her violation of gender norms (Boyd, Becker, Viparelli, Raymond-Dufouleur), and her ethnic background as either Italian (Williams, West, Quint) or Volscian (Rosenmeyer, Trundle, Pyy). Although most scholars recognize the warrior’s importance to the Italian cause, little work has examined closely how Camilla’s unique characterization informs the Aeneid’s complex representation of Italian identity.

In this paper I argue that to Roman authors there was an understood connection between the many-mouth topos and Typhon in Hesiod’s Theogony. In particular, the description of Typhon as hundred-headed influenced the evolution of the motif’s original ten mouths to its eventual hundred.

In a refinement of the aesthetic category of sublimity in Lucretius (Porter 2016; cf. Conte 1966, Segal 1990, Conte 1994, Hardie 2009), this paper advances a new interpretation of the finale of De Rerum Natura by reading the plague as evidence of a “sublate” aesthetic experience founded on disgust. My reading builds on the work of Korsmeyer 2011, who defines the sublate as “aesthetic insight into a bodily, visceral response.” This sense of pleasure and fascination, facilitated by material, sensory descriptors of disgust, maintains the subject’s proximity to the object of disgust.

Critics agree on the broad outlines of the dream that opened Ennius’ Annals: Homer appears, explains (inter alia) the process of metempsychosis, and reveals that he once became a peacock and that his soul has now been reborn in Ennius. In this paper, I pose a simple question: To whom does the soul in Ennius’ body actually belong?