The paper will examine literary portrayals of pain in which the witnesses of the suffering are featured prominently, and will seek to uncover the genre-specific modalities and function(s) of featuring these witnesses’ reactions to others’ pain.

This paper examines parallels and contrasts between the stories of Lucretia and Dido (in the versions of both the 'chaste' and 'unchaste' Dido) in a range of texts in the Virgilian tradition, and suggests that Lucretia may have been a significant model in the construction of the Virgilian Dido.

The history of Roman comedy confronting the togata playwright Afranius (late second century BCE) included a century of traditionalism and experimentation in performances in Latin as well as a substantial ‘pre-history’ of Greek drama. In this talk I explore how Afranian comedy extended those traditions and experiments, focusing especially on the comic treatment of marriages and families. I seek to argue that Afranius drew extensively on and reworked that comic past to create innovative theater that also had a role to play in contemporary Rome.

Homer's portrayal of Achilles and Odysseus in the Iliad and the Odyssey as opposite character types had an enormous influence on subsequent literary and critical discourse. Two extraordinarily rich contexts of reception between about 475 to 350 BC were Athenian dramatic and philosophical literature. These two genres share an overriding concern with the suitability of one or the other of these characters as models for ethical behavior in contemporary political and social circumstances.

In 1960 Michael Jameson of the Department of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania published the editio princeps of an inscription from Troezen in the Argolid purporting to represent a decree of the Athenian strategos Themistokles. Because the text appears to conflict with the Herodotean account of the Persian Wars, for fifty years scholars have struggled with the authenticity of this document. Is it an inept Hellenistic copy of the original from ca. 481 BCE? is it an amalgam of decrees from the 5th-3rd centuries?

In this talk I argue that in his Verrine orations Cicero transfers historical responsibility for ethically dubious features of Roman involvement in Sicily onto the person of Verres and thus holds out to the jury the opportunity to purify Rome’s empire by finding Verres guilty.

An important debate has recently formed over the predominant language in the late Roman diocese of Oriens. Whereas Roman historians once looked hard for the eastern spread of Latin, the gradual recognition of the importance of Greek for imperial affairs has led to a rise in the study of official inscriptions in Greek from the region. Simultaneously, there has been a boom in the study of Syriac among scholars of Late Antiquity, many of whom now view Syriac (or Christian Aramaic) as the dominant cultural carrier of Christianity in the Levant.

Cuomo, invoking Bruno Latour's notion of the "inscription" device, has argued for the the power of metrological texts to replace things with numbers in the Roman imaginary.  In this paper, I consider the consequences of such an approach to quantification throughout a broader sample of metrological texts and practices.  While confirming Cuomo's interpretation of the ambitions of her core texts, I suggest that there is reason to doubt their success in practice.