Lightning Session 1: History and Literature

In a rare instance of a Ptolemaic queen’s direct speech, a hieroglyphic inscription at Philae records Cleopatra II advising her brother-husband Ptolemy VIII on military and religious affairs. I argue for the queen’s role as a military decision-maker; her association with bellicose Isis, who massacres her own brother-husband’s enemies; and the value of integrating non-classical sources for studying Hellenistic history.

Verbal play in Ovid's Ibis (521-530) includes a near-symmetrical arrangement of repeated words, plus an acrostic (S-I-C-T-E) in the pentameter lines that answers the anaphora (utque) of the hexameters. This talk invites discussion of the acrostic’s "cue" words, its significance for the passage's theme (poets' deaths), and its place in the landscape of acrostics in antiquity.

This talk explores how Lucretius, Ovid, and Horace use spuere to indicate aesthetic judgment (DRN 2.1040-42; Rem. am. 1.123-24; Epist. 2.1.41-42). Spuere expresses rejection but can also suggest acquired taste: “spitting out” poetry that, with experience, becomes appreciable. The verb's gustatory resonances hint at an ancient notion of literary connoisseurship and aesthetic taste based in disgust.

Living with the specter of disease is a frightening experience. It can also be a powerful stimulus for reflection on our attitudes towards life and death. Taking contemporary discussions of COVID-19 as a starting point, I explore Seneca's experience with asthma (Ep. 54) as a paradigm for the therapeutic value of philosophy in the face of respiratory distress.

Although germ theory as such was unknown to Greek medicine, observations about relationships between disease outbreaks and urban planning influenced practitioners’ ideas about disease etiology. Using Hippocratic texts such as Airs Waters Places and Galen’s references to the Antonine plague, I argue that medical practitioners acknowledged the importance of what we call ‘social distancing’ in mitigating the spread of disease.