"How to Talk to Paper About Poetry: Materiality 3

and Aesthetic Judgment in a Catullan Diptych"

by EMILIA BARBIERO (New York University)

"The Sublime in Seneca and Statius: Aesthetics, 4

Excess, and the Canon"
by THOMAS BOLT (Lafayette College)

"The Way and Its Poor: Bareness of Life from 5

Seneca to Jerome"
by ALEX DRESSLER (University of Wisconsin-Madison)

"Couture’s The Romans of the Decadence and the 6

Unmooring of Rome’s Decline"
by BASIL DUFALLO (University of Michigan)

"The aesthetic foolsgoldstandard in Petronius" 7

by ERIK GUNDERSON (University of Toronto)

"First-Person Feminine Latin Poetry: Sulpicia’s 8

Elegidia"
by ALISON KEITH (University of Toronto)

"Virgil’s Troilus and Metapoetry" 9

by ANDREW MCCLELLAN (Davidson College)

1
"Beyond Utility: Paradoxes of Knowledge 10
Acquisition in the Aeneid"
by REBECCA MOORMAN (Providence College)

"The Poetics of Hunger in Metamorphoses 8" 11

by MARIAPIA PIETROPAOLO (McMaster University)

"An Unhomely Homecoming: Encounters with the 12

Uncanny in Seneca’s Agamemnon"
by ELAINE SANDERSON (University of Edinburgh)

"gula est: Appropriating the aesthetics of illness 13

in Martial’s Epigrams"
by KATE STEVENS (Rutgers University)

"Empire of Exhaustion: the Tired Subject of Latin 14

Epic"
by JAMES UDEN (Boston University)

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 "How to Talk to Paper About Poetry:
Materiality and Aesthetic Judgment in a
Catullan Diptych"
by EMILIA BARBIERO
(New York University)

This paper focuses on the only poems addressed to texts in the

Catullan corpus. Catullus 35 addresses a papyrus inscribed by
the speaker with a letter to Caecilius, a friend currently
composing a poem on the Magna Mater; Catullus 36 is addressed
to the "shitted-out pages" (cacata carta) containing Volusius'
(apparently foul) Annales.
This paper proposes to explore the implications of this address
to a material object and its effect in disrupting literary
conventions: how do these animate texts function as lyric
addressees? What does their ability to listen and speak ‘say’
about Catullus’ poetry? How do these poems play with the notion
of textual presence and writing as a means of substituting the
self? How does addressing a material object relate to the
aesthetics pronouncements both 35 and 36 make? Finally, it
argues that these unique material addressees are evidence of a
deliberate, authorial arrangement of the Catullan collection.

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 "The Sublime in Seneca and Statius:
Aesthetics, Excess, and the Canon"
by THOMAS BOLT
(Lafayette College)

Recent years have seen a resurgent scholarly interest in ancient

aesthetics. In Latin literary studies, scholars have focused
primarily on the sublime in the epic tradition from Lucretius to
Vergil (e.g., Hardie 2013 and Hardie 2009). Yet Statius’ sublime,
which can jarringly careen from serious to absurd in a short
space (e.g, Venus’ accidental injury at the hands of Mars in
Thebaid 3), seems to resist scholarly consensus. This paper seeks
to construct a different lineage for Statius’ sublime through
prioritizing Senecan tragedy and scientific thought. I argue that
Seneca’s sense of the infinite nature of the universe (e.g., NQ
1.pref.7) influences Statius’ decision to re-deploy the sublime
not as lofty and ennobling but as absurd and subversive. This
paper closes by considering case studies from Statius’ Thebaid in
which the poet debases the sublime as a means to reframe
Vergilian influence on the canon.
.

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 "The Way and Its Poor: Bareness of Life
from Seneca to Jerome"
by ALEX DRESSLER
(University of Wisconsin-Madison)

Continuities between Classical and Christian forms of

asceticism were recognized by the ancients, as when Jerome
called the Neronian philosopher, “our Seneca, of most moderate
existence” (continentissimae vitae, Jer. Vir. ill. 12.850, 629a). While
many modern thinkers (e.g. Foucault 2011, 177-90) have
discussed the aesthetic character of this asceticism, none have
explained its development from the idea of the thesis,
argument, or theme of a work of art, propositum (Jer. Comm. in
Eph. 1.11, 1.558, cp. Quint. 3.3.5), in ancient aesthetic theory.
Reviewing instances of this word, which will come to denote the
monastic “way” of poverty, in the letters of Seneca and Jerome
(Sen. Ep. 5.4, with TLL 1Aβ2), I argue that the reduction of art to
its theme in criticism was fundamental to the formation of the
aesthetics of existence in ethical life and to certain forms of
“realism” or the representation of the poor in Latin literature.

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 "Couture’s The Romans of the Decadence
and the Unmooring of Rome’s Decline"
by BASIL DUFALLO
(University of Michigan)

This paper argues that Thomas Couture’s well-known 1847

painting, Les Romains de la Décadence (“The Romans of the
Decadence”) deploys a powerful aesthetics of disorientation with
roots in classical Latin literature. As a self-conscious reception
of Juvenal’s Satire 6, quoted by Couture himself in the catalogue
of the Paris Salon, the painting profits from its affiliations with
a subversive satiric voice allowing for pleasure in the portrayal
of error and disgust. But what is more, by focusing on the
“impoverished aesthetics” of both painting and poem, we see
that while ostensibly castigating the morals of a particular
historical period in universal terms, both text and image achieve
important effects by staging a variety of queer subject positions
unmoored from conventional notions of temporality and
identity. The subsequent reception of the painting as a recurring
emblem of decadence is especially intriguing in this regard.

6
 "The aesthetic foolsgoldstandard in
Petronius"
by ERIK GUNDERSON
(University of Toronto)

This paper discusses the relationship between the aesthetic

program of the Satyricon and its verse inserts; in particular, it
explores the poetic productions of Eumolpus. The narrator and
inset characters regularly deride his efforts. But one is given
very few cues as to what, precisely the problem with his poetry is
and why, exactly the (generally suspect) people in the world of
the novel find it so appalling. Eumolpus’ kakozelia (i.e., his
affected sublimity) in fact offers the inverted double of the
novel’s own program (i.e., its artful stupidity). Eumolpus’
would-be golden verses consistently both fail to inspire and
succeed in amusing precisely because, despite his cynicism, he
has yet to abandon the idea that verses might somehow still be
golden in the world in which he finds himself. The narrated
world already bodes a new post-epic universe even as Eumolpus
clings to the wreckage of hexameter verse.

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 "First-Person Feminine Latin Poetry:
Sulpicia’s Elegidia"
by ALISON KEITH
(University of Toronto)

This paper focuses on Latin love poetry voiced in the first-person

feminine, by a woman who names herself Sulpicia ([Tib.] 3.9, 11,
13–18), discussing the themes that emerge from her poems and
relate them to the staple themes of the popular love poetry of
Catullus, Gallus, Propertius, Tibullus and Ovid. Yet Sulpicia
differentiates herself from the other Latin elegists by speaking
in the first-person feminine. What happens to a literary form
focused on a man’s desire for an elusive or hard-hearted
mistress when the poet-lover is herself female? Which literary
conventions are overturned, which reinforced when a Roman
woman speaks of love? What social standards are challenged,
what norms upheld by a woman’s expression of desire?
Comparison of Sulpicia’s themes and imagery with those of
other contemporary Augustan authors, all male, illuminates the
radical transformations of Roman codes of conduct for elite
women in this period.

8
 "Virgil’s Troilus and Metapoetry"
by ANDREW MCCLELLAN
(Davidson College)

This paper explores the metapoetic potential of Troilus’ death

depicted on Dido’s temple at Aeneid 1.474-8. The passage
contains a nod to the act of writing in Troilus’ ‘scribbling’ in the
dust with his spearpoint-turned-stylus. The scene ‘militarizes’
Virgil’s description in Georgics 3 of breaking bullocks for the
plow; they ‘sign’ their hoofprints on the dust’s surface. The
Troilus scene is invested with ‘georgic’ plowing imagery, itself a
metaphor for literary composition (writing and plowing are
linked in Latin poetics). The horror lies in Virgil’s
transformation of a farmer training bullocks to drag the plow
into the youthful Troilus who loses control, becoming a plow
cutting agrarian furrows. The metaphorical equivalency of
writing and charioteering is also relevant: Troilus loses control
of his chariot and his literary composition. There’s authorial
self-criticism in Virgil’s ‘restaging’ of georgic imagery: the epic
poet surpasses the Troilian ‘tyro’ drawing ephemeral lines in the
dust.

9
"Beyond Utility: Paradoxes of Knowledge
Acquisition in the Aeneid"
by REBECCA MOORMAN
(Providence College)

This paper examines three impoverished affects — anxiety,

horror, and sovereignty, or Bataille’s notion of the momentary
dissolution of knowledge into nothingness — to argue for a
Roman model of knowledge acquisition paradoxically premised
on “non-knowing,” or a state of cognitive lack. I develop this
model using one representative passage, Aeneas’ violation of
Polydorus’ grave (Aen. 3.13-68). In the passage, horror and
anxiety grant Aeneas insight through opposite means of
proximity and distance (Kristeva 1980; Ngai 2005), an impossible
simultaneity of “towards” and “away from” that creates a
moment of aporetic suspension. Aeneas’ cognitive capacity
dissolves into nothingness, a “sudden opening beyond”
knowledge and the work this entails (Bataille 1991). Momentarily
delivered from his work of pietas, Aeneas enters a suspended
state of “non-knowing” which eventually leads to the revelation
of Polydorus (41-46). I conclude by considering how this model
might inform readings of other passages of questionable
knowledge-seeking in Latin literature.

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 "The Poetics of Hunger in
Metamorphoses 8"
by MARIAPIA PEITROPAOLO
(McMaster University)

Ovid’s personification of Hunger in the story of Ceres'

punishment of Erysichthon offers readers of the Metamorphoses
an aesthetic experience based on a theme, a narrative and
imagery which do not usually elicit delight but revulsion. Ovid
depicts Fames as an abject female character capable of
fascinating the readers with intellectual engagement and an
experience of uncanny delight. A squalid figure, both solid and
vacuous, Fames is the personification of the want of something,
a paradoxical figure whose physicality is constructed out of
emptiness. The personified Fames becomes a weapon for Ceres
and attacks Erysichthon, entering him first through his mouth
and dispersing her emptiness throughout his body, force-
feeding him hunger itself. The imagery and narrative generate
in the readers an aesthetic experience of the grotesque. This
paper explores Ovid's aestheticization of hunger and the role it
plays in the aesthetic project of the Metamorphoses.

11
"An Unhomely Homecoming: Encounters
with the Uncanny in Seneca’s
Agamemnon"
by ELAINE SANDERSON
(University of Edinburgh)

This paper identifies the Uncanny as a major aesthetic force in

Seneca’s Agamemnon, confronting its audience with the same
experiences of unhomeliness, displacement, and uncertainty
suffered by its internal characters. It begins by demonstrating the
unhomely nature of Agamemnon’s homecoming, highlighting the
duplicitous implications of the terms in which Agamemnon
characterizes his safe return and household, and the harmonious
dynamics between Agamemnon and Clytemnestra are described.
It then argues that this disruption constitutes more than just tragic
irony and that this semantic slippage represents a reflection of the
kind of uncanny descent into unhomeliness which runs through
this episode. Finally, it builds on studies by Dodson-Robinson
(2010) and Gunderson (2018) to consider how instances of
repetition and doubling – such as the doubling of Troy and Argos;
past and present crimes; and Agamemnon’s death(s) foreseen and
reported by Cassandra – create a pervasive and recurring sense of
the Uncanny throughout the Agamemnon.

12
 "gula est: Appropriating the aesthetics of
illness in Martial’s Epigrams"
by KATE STEVENS
(Rutgers University)
In a number of epigrams [2.16, 2.40, 9.85, 11.86, 12.56], Martial
repeats a scenario: he accuses a man of malingering for the
purpose of enjoying unearned social and monetary benefits such
as well-wishing and gifts. These men take on similar forms of
contrived illness that are aesthetically similar: their symptoms are
fevers, listlessness, and coughs, and their illnesses are acute
(rather than chronic), potentially fatal (where recovery is cause for
celebration), and not visually disfiguring (without perceivable
lasting impairment). In contrast, there are two poems where the
subject falsifies illness with applications of ointments and
bandages [7.39, 10.22]. Martial notably does not attack the greed
of these individuals, who utilize a visibly ill aesthetic not to
demand sympathetic gifts but to avoid unpleasant social
responsibilities to those with equal or higher status. His
treatment of men who feign illness is not uniform, but highly
dependent upon how they manipulate their presentation of (ill)
health to optimize their social position. This paper explores how
Martial criticizes men who adopt a particular impoverished
aesthetic—that of ill health—to enable their abuses of power,
exploiting feigned illnesses to manipulate their social positions
for profit.
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 "Empire of Exhaustion: the Tired
Subject of Latin Epic"
by JAMES UDEN
(Boston University)

A number of negative ideas cluster around exhaustion. It exists

as the unpleasant precursor to sleep, which, through its
connection to dreams, has a far greater potential for sublimity
in ancient texts. In aesthetic terms, the 'exhausted' theme or
trope is one that is empty of inspiration, waiting for some
artistic spark. Something that is exhausted shouldn't really
interest us on its own. Yet Virgil opens his epic by emphasizing
repeatedly that Aeneas and his men are exhausted. Why? What
did it mean for Virgil to fashion a tired subject for his national
epic? How was that tiredness reinterpreted by successive poets
in the Latin tradition? Could tiredness in literature signal
resistance to a political imperative to embrace energy,
productivity, work? Why embrace exhaustion?

14