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.
