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Lists & Roman Law

By John Matthews

From the Catalogue of the Ships through the inventories of everyday items that we find on papyri, the late Roman catalogues of governmental and military structures of the Notitia Dignitatum, to the lists of war dead on a modern memorial, the effect of lists and catalogues is to fix attention on the specific in relation to the general in human experience.

Consular Lists as Genre

By Alan Cameron

Consular lists were a common and public genre of list throughout the imperial period, but assumed particular importance during the later empire (Bagnall, Cameron, Schwartz, Worp 1987) It was in this moment when the magisterial functions of the office were at their lowest ebb that the consulate took on an ever more important symbolic role—as the eponymous name of the year and the concomitant personae of the festivals that marked that year.

Jerome’s De Viris Illustribus and the Beginnings of a Christian Curriculum

By Irene SanPietro

Jerome's De viris illustribus has most often been read as a Senecan project (Ceresa-Gastaldo 1988) and interpreted as the catalogue of an ideal Christian library (Tanner 1979), but these heuristics do not account for many features of the text. In order to better understand Jerome’s project, I analyze his text using social network theory to trace the relationships Jerome constructs between the archive, agents and ideal of knowledge under Christianity (building on Grafton 2009 & Williams 2008).

An finitus sit mundus et an unus: Reading Pliny’s Lists of Nature

By Stephanie Frampton

The Trophy at La Turbie stands with a panoptic view across the Ligurian coast and the southern Alps. As a marker of Augustus’s triumph over the local tribes, set up in the wake of his campaigns of 25-9 BC, it is a powerful reminder even today of the vastness of Rome’s influence.

Divergent Series: A Poetics of Greek Inventories

By Athena Kirk

This paper explores the visual rhetoric of infinity in Greek temple inventory inscriptions. Scholars of temple inventories have often grappled with their content (Hamilton 2000, Harris 1995, Aleshire 1989, Linders 1972) and their elusive ancient purpose (Scott 2011, Dignas 2002, Linders 1988). While these studies have resulted in greater attention and access to the inventories, they have tended to approach them as administrative texts with a singular audience and context.