Materiality and Literary Culture

The folded tablet (Iliad 6.169: πίνακι πτυκτῷ) in which Bellerophon unwittingly carries the baleful signs (168: σήματα λυγρά) of his own death sentence in Iliad 6 has long tantalized modern readers with its early and allusive reference to the act and idea of writing.

Built by Domitian the Forum Transitorium (or Forum Nervae) bears a double name and identity grounded both in the damnatio memoriae of the emperor and its construction over a portion of the Argiletum, the primary arterial road leading from the Subura to the Forum Romanum.

Visitors entering a third-century CE house at Skala, on the island of Cephalonia, would have been greeted by a ghastly image: that of a young man choking himself while being gored by beasts. Who is the young man and why is this happening? The accompanying poem tells us that he is Envy (Φθόνος), punished thus for casting his malign gaze upon human prosperity (SEG 19 145/46 no. 409). The point of the image would, then, appear to be apotropaic, just as numerous studies have argued.

This paper examines the representation of different national identities in a seventeenth-century cycle of paintings depicting Heliodorus’ Aethiopica by Jean Mosnier. These paintings decorate the floorboards of the king’s bedroom in Chateau Cheverny in the Loire Valley. Their only previous recognition in scholarship has been by art historians who note that these works are the earliest contemporary representations of Ethiopians as having black skin (Spicer 2010, Stechow 1953). There is so much more to these paintings than their depictions of black Africans.

In this paper, I examine the relationship between Athenian tragedy and the City Dionysia’s pre-play ceremonies as represented in epigraphic sources, using IG I³ 117 and Euripides’ Archelaus as a case study.