IHC Research Seminar Room, 6056 HSSB
“Pliny the Younger famously writes to and about his contemporary Tacitus in his Epistles. He even mentions the Histories as work in progress. This paper argues that Pliny’s engagement with the Histories goes much further, extending to large-scale imitation across a series of letters, and asks what this tells us about Pliny, about Trajanic culture, and about intertextuality in Latin prose.”
IHC Research Seminar Room, 6056 HSSB
This seminar explores the theme of ‘reading’ Roman portraiture’. But it does so with a view to one of antiquity’s greatest – and most overlooked – ‘picture-poets’, active in the first decades of the fourth century AD: Publilius Optatianus Porfyrius. We’ll be focusing on just one of Optatian’s poems – a gridded poem of letters that promises to depict the literal portrait of Constantine within its literary verses.
HSSB 4080.
A significant insight that we have gained from the idea of the Anthropocene is that the time of the human is entangled with that of the non-human in ways that we can no longer ignore. Ovid’s Metamorphoses contains material that speaks to this insight in a number of ways. Yet the poem’s interests in the temporalities of non-human species, are often overlooked by scholars whose anthropocentric bias leads them to focus exclusively on the linear narrative of human progress. In this paper, I seek to complicate their picture of time in the Metamorphoses by demonstrating how Ovid depicts a number of non-human species as knotted in time to the human, and by showing how this focus on their cycles of living and dying disrupts the poem’s linear chronology.
