SCS-67: Intertextuality and Greek and Roman Cultural Memory

Verse inscriptions record the fates of numerous people who suffered shipwreck: funeral epigrams tell of those who drowned, and dedicatory epigrams of those who survived shipwreck. Allusions to Homeric poetry frequently paint these people as Odysseus figures (Bing 2009, Hunter 2018). How should we treat such literary allusions in verse inscriptions? Are such allusions simply pieces of poetry which were common knowledge and which even the worst poetaster would have known?

In the fifth century, the tragedian Melanthios was one of Athens’ most prominent komoidoumenoi. Mocked for gluttony (Ar. Pax. 796-816; 1009-1014; Σ Ar. Pax. 803; Ath. 8.343c), effeminacy (Σ Ar. Av. 151; Eust. Il. 1201, 4), and disease (Av. 150-151), he featured in no less than eight comedies, over more than twenty years. However, the details of his life and works were quickly lost: they did not, it seems, make it to Hellenistic Egypt.

In the third book of his Annals, Tacitus interrupts his account of emperor Tiberius’ handling of Augustan legislation to instead turn his audience’s attention towards the role that laws in general play in Roman society. He points out the plethora of existing laws, and argues that a fuller understanding of the origins of law (de principiis iuris) is required to understand the present situation. In the digression that follows, he then provides a fascinating summary of Roman legal history, starting with the earliest humans, and ending in the early Principate.

This paper will address the transformation and misrepresentation of Cicero in Macrobius’ Commentarii in Somnium Scipionis. Written towards the middle of the fifth century CE, the Commentarii reads Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis and its views on the value of engaging in Roman politics through the lens of Neoplatonist philosophy.

The sixth-century historian Procopius of Caesarea had a great deal of classical past behind him, to look back on and to reach for. As a classicizing historian recounting a contemporary war, he not only emulated his classical historiographic models but positioned himself at a nexus of historical memory (Cubitt 2007), making an argument for the continued relevancy of the classical tradition at a time of monumental cultural change and renegotiation of the canon (a la A. Assmann 2008).