106th CANE Annual Meeting
St. Sebastian’s School
Needham, Massachusetts
March 16–17, 2012
Paper Session Abstracts
FRIDAY, MARCH 16
Paper Session I
Seider, Aaron
College of the Holy Cross
Endings that Open: Horace Odes 1.4 and 1.5
The end of a Horatian Ode is a moment when we seek closure. As is the case with any poem, whether or
not its final lines inspire this feeling largely depends upon how we experience its entire structure (Smith 1968, viii;
Schrijvers 1973, 140). When the end of an Ode turns away from the path its earlier sections outlined, a tension
arises: structurally, the poem’s final lines signal completion, but their semantic content denies closure’s satisfaction
and prompts an additional reading. In this paper, I consider two Odes whose unity is threatened at their close, and I
argue that a re-reading of the poems from a narratival perspective reveals that their final lines actually construct a
temporal unity.
At the end of Odes 1.4 and 1.5 a change in imagery and the introduction of a new character, respectively,
effect an unexpected turn in the poem’s closing verses. In both cases, I claim that while these sudden changes
threaten the poem’s unity on a literal level, from a temporal perspective the poem’s last lines represent another step
in its story. Playing on the Odes’ general tension between narrative and lyric (Lowrie 1997), these moments
transform lyric into an expansive genre which encapsulates narrative and offers a story with several distinct stages,
all of which occur in the lyric here and now. In these instances, lyric looks beyond the present moment to different
times and sets these times inside of itself. In a brief conclusion to the paper, I consider how the expansive quality of
these poems speaks to Horace’s ambitions for the lyric genre.
Evans, Marley
University of Vermont
The Twisted Symposium: Sympotic Elements in Euripides’ Cyclops
The Cyclops, a satyr play by Euripides, is a retelling of Homer’s story. This paper offers a fresh look at the
old play. Euripides managed to add new humor to a well-known story by weaving sympotic elements into the play.
To the audience, being well versed in sympotic practices, the perverted symposium would be both evident and
comical.
An ancient symposium had several main components: male guests who were crowned in wreaths and
reclined during the event, a meal proper followed by drinking, wine mixed in a krater, a homosexual element, and
some form of entertainment. All of these components are present and recognizable in the Cyclops. They were not
part of Homer’s original story but were added by Euripides. The playwright sets the stage for a symposium—but
not the traditional one of his day. Euripides twists each of these elements in grotesque and strange ways. The
Cyclops takes on Silenus as his eromenos (lines 581-584), mixes milk in a krater (lines 216-218), and dines on the
flesh of anthropos. (lines 382-405)
Scholars have been less than impressed with Euripides’ Cyclops, and in particular, the penultimate scene of
the satyr play. Some choose to call it redundant, others unoriginal. Peter D. Arnott, in his article, “The
Overworked Playwright: A Study in Euripides’ Cyclops,” even goes so far as to suggest that Euripides, out of
exhaustion and lack of time and energy, created a mediocre version of Homer’s story.
This paper argues that Euripides intentionally added a perverse symposium into the plot for the sake of
humor. Euripides used the additions to call to mind the image of a traditional symposium. Euripides through the
twisted symposium proves himself to be not only a masterful tragedian but a skilled comedian as well.
Findley, Samuel
Penn State
Spending Hector’s Corpse
In Jonathan Shay’s now classic reading of the Iliad, the tragedy of Achilles is the tragedy of the
dismantlement of a good man’s character, and his recovery of it only when he is at death’s door. However, there
are glimmers in the Iliad pointing to the fact that Achilles has not merely been set adrift from his moral center. His
tragedy, I will claim, becomes all the more terrible, because the picture which Homer paints of his reasoning is not
simply that of a man become monster, but of a man whose monstrosity evolves directly out of his continued moral
behaviour in a situation which forces those morals to provoke bestial action. This is to explain his brutalization of
Hector’s corpse, and the bad faith in which the Homeric narrator expresses horror at Achilles’ action.
Drawing on the scholarship of Fineberg, Dodds, Shay, and Redfield, and their exploration of heroic codes
of conduct, I will propose that even at his most brutal, when Homer himself appears to disavow the morality of his
bestial treatment of Hector’s corpse, Achilles’ logic is the logic of Homeric honor. He never stops his engagement
with the the double exchange that supports Homeric honor, and he is still trying to be good as best he knows how.
Even in his wrath and explicit rejection of it, that good is inextricably founded on getting and giving away the stuff
of battle. His mistreatment of Hector’s corpse is a calculated potlach of his goods, and his brutality an attempt to
escape the double bind in which he finds himself when stripping his enemy of armor that, rather than spoils of war,
is merely the return of his own property.
Waldo, Christopher
University of California, Berkeley
Down by the Water: The Contradiction of the “Song of Zeus” in Pindar’s Nemean 3
The opening lines of Pindar’s Nemean 3 seem to describe a scene of epinician performance. We find a
chorus beside a stream in Aegina anxiously waiting to sing the victory ode, which Pindar characterizes as a song to
Zeus (10-11). Unfortunately, this characterization appears to contradict Bundy’s notion that the singular purpose of
epinician is the glorification of the victor. According to Bundy’s formulation, it should be impossible for one poem
to be both an epinician to a man and a song to a deity. The first part of this paper will provide a reading of Nemean
3 which argues for the existence of a song to Zeus within the epinician. The second part will offer a new conception
of the epinician genre, which attempts to reconcile the simultaneous epinician and divine song by a consideration of
performance contexts. I will argue that, in the epinician, the praise of the victor is constituted on the level of the
oikos, the praise of the heroes on that of the polis, and the praise of the divinity on that of Hellas. The epinician to
Aristocleides and the song to Zeus are ultimately reconciled, because the epinician is the performance context and
the song to Zeus Pindar’s acknowledgment of the divine element which works to Panhellenize the ode.
Paper Session II
Properzio, Paul
Boston Latin Academy
C.P. Cavafy: Alexandrian Poet Echoes the Past
C.P. Cavafy is considered by many to be the most original and influential Greek poet of the 20th century, if
not one of the most important poets of his generation. The qualities of his poetry that were unfashionable during his
lifetime are the very ones that make his work endure: his sparing use of metaphor; evocation of spoken rhythms and
colloquialisms; use of epigrammatic and dramatic modes; aestheticism; honest treatment of homoerotic themes;
lively sense of history; and commitment to Hellenism, along with an astute cynicism about politics.
He writes about people on the periphery, and he was one of the first to express a specifically homoerotic
sensibility. His poems present brief and vivid evocations of historical scenes and sensual moments, often infused
with his distinctive sense of irony.
This paper will look at those poems of Cavafy that echo the poetry (works) of Apollodorus, Callimachus,
Homer, Homeric Hymn to Demeter, Plato, and Simonides of Ceos.
Menon, Deepti
University of Vermont
The Lion and the Mouse: Where are They Now?
The story of the lion and the mouse, two animals who realize that they have much to gain from a mutual
alliance, is one that is familiar to many Western readers. However, it is possible that the original moral has been
lost or garbled in a centuries-long game of “telephone.” Aesop’s original fable has changed as it was retold in the
postclassical age, namely in 12th century France, and in so doing it has taken on nuances not present in the Greek
original.
In this paper, I will examine the following aspects of this fable and its transmission. First, I will consider
the symbolism and cultural implications behind the animals themselves. In the vein of Ziolkowski’s thesis that
“animals are a language common to all people,” I will illuminate the specific implications borne by both lion and
mouse to their respective audiences in both ancient
Greece and medieval France. Secondly, I will discuss the varying presentations of the moral itself. In particular,
some authors, for instance Marie's contemporary Gualterus Anglicus, choose to address the lesson by speaking to
the lion, exhorting him to do good, while Ademar, who precedes them both by about a century, bypasses the lion
entirely and addresses the reader instead. Finally, I will consider the wider ramification of the fable as it pertains to
a possible comparison between ideals of justice in human society as opposed to the rule of the “wilderness” and the
ultimately a meditation on what it means to be
human as opposed to bestial.
Adler, Eric
Connecticut College
Kipling’s Rome in “Puck of Pook’s Hill’
In the popular imagination, Rudyard Kipling was a simplistic and unreflective enthusiast for British
imperialism. For this reason, it is unsurprising that Kipling has served for some classical scholars in reception
studies as a potent example of imperial optimism. In Roman Officers and English Gentlemen (2000), for instance,
Richard Hingley contends that Kipling’s work offers evidence of an imperialist intellectual climate in Britain that
decisively shaped scholarly output at the time.
But what sort of vision of the Roman past did Kipling present? This paper examines Kipling’s view of
ancient Rome through an analysis of his children’s novel Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906). More specifically, it discusses
the so-called Parnesius tales in the book, which revolve around the career of an Anglo-Roman centurion in late
Roman Britain. The paper argues that these Parnesius stories—if in fact they helped shape Victorian and Edwardian
classical scholars’ impressions of antiquity—amounted to a far more qualified take on the Roman Empire than
Hingley avers.
To be sure, Puck of Pook’s Hill suggests pride in English continuity and tradition—and this includes the
Roman period, despite Kipling’s portrayal of Rome’s various failures. Even so, the book offers a dour impression
of a doomed Rome. In places, the Parnesius tales also amount to a rebuke to Britain’s purported imperial
exceptionalism. If Britain fails to heed the lessons of Rome’s downfall, Kipling seems to suggest in Puck of Pook’s
Hill, it may suffer a similar fate. In short, the paper demonstrates that Kipling’s novel likely undercut preexisting
inclinations to tout Britain as Rome’s auspicious successor.
Stringer, Gregory
UMass Boston
You are the Light, the Truth...You are my Palinurus? Christian Doctrine, Classical Inspiration and Virgilian
Echoes in William the Breton’s 13th Century Epic, the Philippide
In the early 13th century, William the Breton (ca. 1160 – 1225), personal chaplain to King Philip Augustus
of France, decided to turn his chronicle of the king’s deeds into epic verse. He produced the "Philippide," a twelve
book, 9,000 line classicizing poem, making it the longest Latin epic written since antiquity and an invaluable
testament to the depth and breadth of classical learning in northern France in the High Middle Ages. One
particularly interesting element of this largely overlooked work is William the Breton’s approach to classical
models of poetic inspiration. A Master of theology and an ordained priest, William nevertheless repeatedly invokes
the pagan gods of inspiration alongside Christ and ultimately melds them all into a complex hierarchy which is
without precedent in all of medieval literature. A central figure in this enterprise is Palinurus, Aeneas’ unfortunate
helmsman in Virgil’s Aeneid, who appears in this epic over one hundred years before he would be famously
revived in Dante’s "Divine Comedy." In this paper, I hope to make better known a fascinating and largely
unfamiliar chapter in the history of Latin epic, to help dispel some common misconceptions about the medieval
reception of the masterpieces of classical antiquity, and to demonstrate some of the originality and artistry of a
talented author of medieval Latin verse.
Lunch Discourse
"Latin Conversation Hour"
Emily Lewis, Thomas Howell, and Jacqui Carlon
Interested in speaking Latin or even just hearing it spoken? Then this Latin-only hour is just for you! We'll
have small conversational spaces available, each with a facilitator to keep things moving with topics of
conversation and easy games (like 20 questions!). People with all levels of experience, even (and especially!) those
who've never tried it before, are welcome!
Paper Session III
Travis, Roger
University of Connecticut
Bioware’s Epic Style
The BioWare digital role-playing game (RPG) exhibits a distinct style of epic composition that can be
usefully compared to the styles described by Albert Lord in The Singer of Tales and other of his criticism. In this
paper, I demonstrate how a "digital formulaic" analysis of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic illuminates both
the cultural significance of that game and the ways that the homeric tradition is alive and well.
Starr, Ray
Wellesley College
Do You Have That in Stock or Will I Need to Special Order It? What Was on the Shelves of Ancient Roman
Bookshops?
The ancient Roman booktrade is both visible and invisible: We know bookshops existed, and we even
know the names of specific booksellers in Rome and where their shops were located, but what those shops carried
is much harder to establish. Detailed examination of the surviving sources, especially Catullus and Martial, will
show that bookshops did sometimes carry more than one copy of an individual title but rarely more than a handful
of copies of even the most popular current works. We can then broaden the discussion to explore what that shows
about the nature of the Roman booktrade: booksellers often served the function of what we today would regard as a
Copy Shop, but, since all copies were individually made by hand, a bookseller could custom-make a copy to meet
the specifications of a particular purchaser.
Zarrow, Edward
Westwood High School
Ancient Coins for the Latin Classroom
For many years now, teachers of Latin at the high school and college levels have sought to enhance their
curricula with historical and archaeological material. Most standard textbooks, at least briefly, discuss episodes of
Roman history as well as the urban topography of ancient Rome itself. However, while there are a number of
recent supplemental works which outline aspects of Roman art, daily life, civilization, and even epigraphy (e.g.
M.A. Brucia & G.N. Donovan, To Be a Roman: Topics in Roman Culture [2007]; M. Hartnett, By Roman Hands:
Inscriptions and Graffiti for Students of Latin [2008]), to date there is little material available which addresses the
subject of ancient coinage for beginning Latin students. Thus, in this paper, I hope to share some of the ways that I
have incorporated the study of ancient coinage in my high school classroom. My presentation will begin with a
sample of passages from ancient authors which discuss aspects of the Roman economy and minting practice, and I
will offer a brief examination of how Roman moneyers used iconography to make statements about themselves and
their political allegiances. In addition, I will discuss a number of coins whose imagery recalls historical events or
whose inscriptions highlight both common Latin epigraphic abbreviations (e.g. co[n]s[ul], imp[erator]) as well as
basic and advanced features of grammar.
D’Angelo, Tiziana
Harvard University
Mirroring Eyes: Narcissus and the Others in Pompeian Wall Paintings
The tragic story of the self-enamored Narcissus has been read and represented over the centuries as a
symbol of the power and fallibility of illusions. In this paper, I will examine a group of first century CE Campanian
murals that portray Narcissus and I will describe the processes by which patrons, artists, and viewers contributed to
turn these depictions into complex polysemic narratives. I will explore the criteria that operated in the selection and
re-elaboration of iconographic motifs and artistic models, and the impact that these images might have had on an
ordinary or a trained Roman viewer.
Modern scholars have mainly looked at the images as reflections mirroring Ovid's tale (Metamorphoses
3.407-510) or Philostratus' discourse (Imagines 1.23). However, the visual and literary Narcissus appear to be
characterized by discrepancies rather than correspondences. Metamorphosis and death, central themes in any
literary formulation of the myth, are neglected in most Pompeian paintings, where they are replaced by a strong
emphasis on Narcissus' sensuality and sexuality. In Ovid Narcissus' self-love has no room for any other, but in the
Pompeian murals the sharp contrast between the disembodied head reflected into the water pool and the charming
youth lying next to it faces the viewer with two Narcissi, both alive, but deeply different from each other. While the
reflection glances up at Narcissus, he usually looks out of the picture, engaging the ideal beholder and the
mythological figures depicted on the other room walls.
This analysis will lead also to consider the new significance that the figure of Narcissus assumed in the
eyes of the contemporary Pompeian society. By transforming passiveness into activeness, he appeared as a model
of mature sexuality that crossed boundaries of gender and imposed itself in homoerotic as well as heteroerotic
situations.
Paper Session IVA
Mahoney, Anne
Tufts University
Reading Caesar with Petrarch: A Study in Style
Petrarch is a great poet both in Italian and in Latin, and many classicists have read some of his Latin letters,
such as Ad Familiares 24.3 to Cicero. His biographies, also in Latin prose, are less well known; there is a
collection of short ones called De Viris Illustribus and a much longer life of Julius Caesar, using Caesar\'s own
Commentaries, Cicero\'s letters, and Suetonius as sources. Petrarch interprets, evaluates, and synthesizes his
sources much as a modern historian does, then writes in his own style, much more ornate than Caesar's. Cicero, in
his dialogue Brutus, famously comments on the austere elegance of Caesar\'s commentaries and says it would be
foolish to try to turn them into a more ornamented history. Though Petrarch greatly respected Cicero, he did not
realize the texts he had were by Caesar himself: he was fooled by the third-person narrative. He therefore felt free
to re-write passages from BG and BC in his life of Caesar.
In this paper I will discuss some of the passages in which Petrarch re-works Caesar's writing, for example
the speech of Ariovistus in BG 1.36 and Petrarch's fifth chapter; BG 2.20 in which Caesar had to do everything at
once, Petrarch 7; or the speech of Labienus to Pompey, BC 3.87, Petrarch 22. Petrarch treats Caesar\'s texts as raw
material, to be turned into literary history. He freely re-writes indirect quotations as direct, introduces varied
vocabulary in place of Caesar\'s consistent use of one word for one thing, and generally makes the text more
complex. The comparative analysis of parallel passages will show just how much difference there can be between
two ways of saying the same thing in Latin, and will help clarify the characteristics of Caesar\'s style by contrasting
his original with the different choices Petrarch made.
Curtis, Lauren
Harvard University
Dancing with the Gods: the Similes of Aeneid 1.498-504 and 4.143-150 reconsidered
This paper re-examines a pair of famous passages from Vergil’s 'Aeneid': the similes in which Dido is
compared to Diana (Aen. 1.498-504) and Aeneas is compared to Apollo (Aen. 4.143-150). Both similes present the
protagonists as Greek-style 'choregoi', that is, as leaders of the lyric choruses whose performances of song and
dance were a central element of Greek religious practice. I argue that in these similes, Vergil emphasizes the the
role of the chorus more strongly than do his poetic models; I conclude that this heightened choral colouring flags
Vergil’s reception of Greek choral lyric as thematically important, and that it complements the tragic patterning that
scholars have often noted in the Dido episode. At Aen. 1.498-504, Dido is compared to Diana leading a chorus of a
thousand Oreads ('exercet Diana choros', 1.499). These recall the sixty Oceanids that Artemis requested as her
dance companions in Callimachus’ Hymn 3, but Vergil hugely increases the ranks of Diana’s followers and
therefore increases the prominence of the chorus and its leader. At Aen. 4.143-150, Aeneas is compared to Apollo
setting up his choruses ('instauratque choros', 4.145). The simile is partially modelled on Argonautica 1.307-311,
where Jason was compared to Apollo visiting his cult centres. Apollonius’ simile contained no choral language;
Vergil, however, transforms his Hellenistic model in order to emphasize the presence of the chorus and its leader.
The influence of one Greek performed genre, Attic tragedy, has often been detected in the Dido episode. My
observations suggest that Vergil’s intertextual play marks another Greek performed genre as important in this
episode, namely the ritual chorus of Greek lyric. Together, lyric and tragic patterning create the sense of
theatricality that is central to the episode’s overall effect.
Joseph, Timothy
College of the Holy Cross
The Death of Almo (7.531-4) and Virgil’s Aeneid
The killing of the young Latin shepherd Almo, which Virgil narrates in four taut lines at Aeneid 7.531-534,
is the first death of the Latin War, the struggle between Trojans and Latins that takes up the entire second half of
the poem. In his description of this “opening death,” Virgil highlights many of the themes that predominate in his
telling of the Latin War, and indeed in the poem as a whole: the youthfulness of those who fight and die in (this)
war; the capacity for (this) war to split apart families (Almo’s status as the son of the royal shepherd Tyrrhus is
emphasized here); the suffering that the Italian landscape itself endures in this war (Virgil has taken the name
“Almo” from a tributary of the Tiber); and the unsightly gore that will characterize the conflict (the poet zooms in
on an arrow’s piercing of Almo’s throat). With his language Virgil also connects Almo’s death to several other,
consequent deaths later in the poem. Furthermore, the chillingly proleptic manner in which the shepherd’s death is
told (the pluperfect fuerat . . . Almo precedes the verb of slaying, sternitur) is representative of Virgil’s (often
darkly) proleptic narrative style. And the description of Almo’s waning life as “slender” or “fine” (tenuem . . .
uitam) may call to mind other passages in Virgil’s corpus (e.g., Ecl. 6.8, Geo. 4.6, Aen. 7.646) in which he holds up
his type of poetry as tenuis, that is, refined and delicate. The concentration and craft put into these four lines about
the end of Almo’s “slender life” are, perhaps, a perfect demonstration of this refined, exacting, and richly
meaningful style.
Fisher, John
Yale University
Ore Cruento: A Homeric Variant in Vergil’s Aeneid
In the Aeneid Vergil uses the phrase ore cruento, “with a bloody mouth,” four times (Aen. 1.296 , 9.341,
10.489 and 12.8). Although there is no obvious Homeric model, the Latin phrase bears a striking semantic
resemblance to the Homeric variant “blood-drinking,” an epithet of the Erinys found only in the scholia to the Iliad.
Moreover, the Homeric variant would presumably have only occurred at the end of the line in place of ἠεροφοῖτις,
(Il. 9.571, 19.87), “moving through darkness,” the same place in the line exclusively occupied by ore cruento in the
Aeneid. If the Vergilian formula is, in fact, an allusion to a Homeric variant, then it not only suggests a deep
engagement with the tradition of Homeric scholarship, but also previously unsuspected levels of meaning for ore
cruento in its various contexts.
It is unsurprising that Vergil was well versed in the tradition of Homeric scholarship. The Alexandrian
poets, who profoundly influenced Vergil, were themselves scholars of earlier Greek poetry. What is surprising,
however, is that Vergil was aware of a compound that is only attested in the scholia.
The similarity suggests that the Vergilian formula evokes the Homeric erinys. This connotation resonates
with the first use of the phrase to describe Furor impius (Aen. 1.294-96), a name etymologically related to furia, the
Latin equivalent of erinys. The lion in the simile that opens Book Twelve of the Aeneid (Aen. 12.4-8) also has an
ore cruento. The use of this simile to describe Turnus suggests that he is also similar to an erinys such as Allecto,
the fury who incites the war between the Trojans and the Latins. The formula therefore connects Furor, Turnus and
Allecto by means of a Homeric image that is not attested in the Homeric poems.
SATURDAY, MARCH 17
Paper Session V
Nerdahl, Michael
Bowdoin College
Tacitus, Pliny, and the Politics of Regime Change
The Obama administration, despite a campaign that consistently branded his potential presidency as one of
“transparency” and “change,” subsequently proposed that we “Look forward, not back.” Rather than truly employ
transparency and look into the possible crimes of the former guard in an effort to change our leaders’ behavior, we
are urged to pardon the transgressions of the old guard as misguided but earnest rather than to involve ourselves in
messy attempts at self-correction. This seemingly contradictory combination, of stressing a fresh start while
protecting one’s predecessors, is not without Roman precedent. The rule of Domitian is commonly portrayed as a
period of senatorial subjugation, paranoia, and maiestas trials. After Domitian’s assassination and replacement with
Nerva and Trajan, the principate is portrayed by Tacitus in the Agricola and Pliny in the Panegyricus as a new
golden age, a time when two disparate elements, libertas ac principatus, converge (Agricola 3.1). Yet both authors
display a concern not only with separating the past ruler from the present one, but an awareness of past senatorial
transgression and guilt, which Trajan, as a former luminary under Domitian, is not necessarily exempt from. Close
readings of the texts reveal suggestive gaps in their accounts of Trajan. Tacitus, for example, reveals condemning
other innocent senators to death (Agr. 45), and Pliny leaves unmentioned many of the honors that Trajan received at
the hands of Domitian (J. Bennett, Trajan: Optimus Princeps. Bloomington, 1996, 44). Such instances, as well as
Tacitus’ eventual admission of career promotion under Domitian (Hist. 1.1) and his growing cynicism, suggest that
Trajan’s principate was not so much different as emphatically trying to appear so. I suggest that this case,
analogous to the Obama campaign of 2008, serves as a typical example of a Roman rhetorical approach to the
depiction of regime change.
Blanchard, Daniel
Fay School
Polybius: Flawed Interpretation of Roman (and American) Republicanism
There was no love for humankind found within the pages of Polybius, especially in his exploration of the
relationship between people and government. Polybius argued that it was government, and government alone,
linked naturally with human evolution, which made collective human existence, society, both feasible and
productive. It was government which raised humans out of their bestial state in nature providing laws, supplanting
base animal instincts, and confining the inbred self-preservative destructive nature of humans. Inherent however in
this relationship was a paradox for government was a human institution, prone to all of the frailties of humanness,
and thus always doomed to corruption and failure. In order to be human, government existed, but by being human,
government was destroyed. This was the central premise for the cycle of political revolution. Throughout the cycle
of political revolution, it was human nature, the Machiavellian arch-villain, driving the degeneration of monarchy,
aristocracy and democracy into their associated, corrupted and debased forms of tyranny, oligarchy and the brutal
rule of violence. Humans were greedy and emotional, lacking reason, morals, ethics, principles governed by desires
for wealth and power. For Polybius then, the age old adage that absolute power corrupted absolutely was false, for
it was humans, always absolutely corrupted, which were the destroyers of peace and prosperity. Stable government
was fleeting, short lived at the hands of humans. The concept then of mixed government, the ancestor to
republicanism, was that the balance formed between monarchical, aristocratic and democratic political elements
prevented the degeneration of government and staved off the cycle of political revolution. The paradigm of this
achievement was and always has been, the Constitution of the Lacadaemonians. It was a source of inspiration to
both Polybius and the Founding Fathers, touted as the most stable of the Ancient Greek governments. The flaw,
dangerous from inception, was that Polybius failed to recognize that at its very heart, the Lacadaemonian
Constitution deprived humans of their humanness by ruthlessly enforcing equality, repressing the self in service to
the polis. Sparta was a classless society dedicated to conformity and equality, in its most rudimentary forms. Land
was shared, currency debased, education and meals communal, and there was no opportunities for work save for the
barracks. Spartiates and their families dedicated their lives to the polis, priding themselves on humility, obedience,
discipline, sacrifice and selflessness. Culturally then, Spartans were deprived of the tools of political corruption:
greed and ego and took comfort in the old Pausanian maxim that laws controlled men, not men the laws. Polybius,
in his analysis of the Roman Republic, discussing it as a mixed government, ignored the fundamental basis of the
Constitution of the Lacadaemonians, the cultural reforms, which prohibited humanness, in all of its ugliness, to
exist. As a result, Polybius' description of the Roman Republic lacks the humanity of his earlier descriptions. His
conclusion was equally detached from the realization that humanness corrupts all forms of government. Mixed
government alone cannot prevent degeneration. The Gracchi would certainly have agreed. The flaw perpetuates
itself in American Republicanism.
Jones, Brandon
University of Washington
Why Did You Become a Robber? Place’s Place in Banditry Narratives
In Book 76 of Cassius Dio’s Roman History a clever bandit, Bulla Felix, frustrates Severus while
entertaining Dio’s audience. Bulla leads a large group of robbers throughout Italy, continually baffling Severus’
magistrates with his schemes. Some scholars have deemed Bulla a “noble bandit” of the kind described by Erik
Hobsbawm (1969). Some, like Thomas Grünewald (1999), have argued against the existence of social banditry in
ancient Rome.
Like others, this paper aims to answer a question posed to Bulla by a Roman prefect—“Why did you
become a robber?” But I propose an approach in which banditry is viewed from within the narrative. In reading
Dio’s tale with other banditry narratives, from Strabo to the ancient novel, we find the authors proposing two main
answers— the robber robs occupationally or he does so politically. I will further suggest that the answer to this
question is linked closely with geography—both micro (that which we see from the ground) and macro (that which
we see from a map). That Dio’s bandit narrative relies little on microgeography suggests that he is using Bulla as a
political mouthpiece.
Paper Session VI
Leach, Eleanor
Indiana University
Pliny’s Diffident Suetonius
This paper focuses on the amusingly nuanced portrait of Suetonius Tranquillus, the future biographer, as it
emerges from five letters distributed throughout Pliny’s nine epistolary books. Such juxtapositions of individually
addressed letters are not the way in which Pliny wanted his books to be read, as his brief programmatic letter 1.1.
makes clear. Perhaps he wanted to avoid the clustering of letters to one and the same person that posthumous
editing had imposed upon Cicero’s ad Familiares. but the difference between the tempers of the collections is
profound. Whereas the grouping of the ad Familiares foregrounds events or circumstances such as Trebatius
Testa’s appointment to Caesar in Gaul, or Claudius Marcellus’ exile, the long-term recurrence of Pliny’s most
frequent correspondents does not treat single issues but rather a range of shared interests as varied as the everyday
experience of friendship.
Nevertheless this dialogue of mutual interests played out in letters to certain frequent correspondents rivals
many Ciceronian letters in indirect characterization of their recipients. Certainly Pliny’s long-term distribution
encouraged Syme to override Pliny’s arrangement of letters by such prosopographical extrapolations as “Pliny’s
Less Successful Correspondents” (1979). Much recent scholarship also overrides Pliny’s epistolographic structure
to conduct thematic explorations of such matters as women, leisure, spatial employment, history, rhetoric (Gibson
and Morello 2003), these latter topics drawing especially upon some of the 20 letters to Tacitus. But the Tacitus
letters, while highlighting a literary friendship with the leading intellectual of the day, afford scant insight into
Tacitus himself. Conversely Pliny’s correspondence with Suetonius, situates an idiosyncratic personality within its
social climate. Their composite picture shows a backwards entrant into public life, reluctant to accept favors or
opportunities, even to reveal his writings to well-wishers. Pliny’s exasperation with this reluctance makes the
characterization comical.
Yatsuhashi, Akira
SUNY College, Oneonta
A New Perspective on SH 977: Literary Fictions and Forging Community in Early Ptolemaic Egypt
The famous archive of Zenon, a third century BCE secretary to the Apollonios, the finance minister of
Ptolemy Philadelphos II, provides a baseline for understanding how texts and letters traveled among elites during
the early Hellenistic period. They reveal that letters could easily travel over political boundaries and over great
distances (from Karia to Egypt for example) along with the interests of the elite of the day. Although most of his
letters concerned themselves with mundane business affairs, some reveal the cultural activities of the elite male of
the period, such as two epigrams from the same archive (SH 977). These epigrams were supposedly composed for
the purpose of being inscribed on the grave of Zenon’s beloved Indian hunting dog, Tauron, commemorating his
premature death by a wild boar. Most scholars (Fraser 1972, Bing 2009) have viewed this epigram as based on the
actual experiences of Zenon and that this epigram had been ordered for the purpose of being put on a grave for his
dog. For these scholars, the literary aspects of these texts have been nearly wholly neglected or at least subordinated
to the broader “historical” importance for recovering the nitty-gritty “realities” of the period. This paper will argue
that these epigrams are, in fact, literary fictions sent from one elite male to another, whose purpose might have been
to entertain one another rather than to retell or commemorate an actual event. From this perspective, these
epigrams might also demonstrate one of the new ways elite males forged the idea of a shared community in the face
of the vast distances opened up by the conquests of Alexander the Great.
Chiu, Angeline
University of Vermont
The Edge of Story: Reading the Marginalia in Ben Johnson’s “Sejanus”
The 1605 printed text of Jonson’s play “Sejanus: His Fall” can be considered not only the revised script of
the disastrous 1603 stage performance but also the playwright’s attempt to justify himself and control his reading
audience’s perception of the work (Jowett 1988, Tribble 1993, Slights 2001). This paper examines the extensive
marginalia that accompanies the text of the play and that marginalia’s expression not only of classical learning but
also the use of it for Jonson’s purposes. I shall first consider the historical context of the 1605 quarto and Jonson’s
pointed preface to the reader as an exercise in defensive self-presentation. Then I shall look at the marginalia as
self-justifying demonstration of the breadth and depth of Jonson’s classical learning used in the creation of the play.
The almost distractingly insistent profusion of notes becomes in itself the point as Jonson’s references to ancient
authors—Tacitus in particular—emerge collectively as a thorough going campaign to revise and rehabilitate the
audience’s perception of the play’s value and meaning. Finally, I submit that as a text, the “Sejanus” must be read
with its marginalia, as the play shorn of it loses a vital component of Jonson’s authorial craft and engagement with
his audience.