The chapter explores the anxious cultural construction of women as intergenerational mediators that emerges from several epistles in Pliny’s collection (3.3 and 4.19; 4.2 and 4.7; 2.7 and 3.10). At once expected to be bearers of their father’s imprint and vehicle for the transmission of their husband’s identity, Roman women were the object of a discourse in which notions of biological filiation significantly intersected with issues of artistic reproduction and literary allusion. Building a typology of intra-, inter-, extra-, and alter-textual relations which connect Pliny’s topic and diction to relevant passages in Martial (6.37 and 38) and Tacitus (Dial. 28-29), my argument illuminates some crucial, common semiotic practices in his age.

Chapter 4 analyses epigrams and objects between 100 ?? and ?? 100, and discusses how objects and texts engage with one another in expressing the idea of carpe diem. Rarely studied Greek epigrams from the Garland of Philip and texts by the Latin authors Martial, Pliny the Elder, and Petronius point to exciting interplay between the textuality of epigrams and the presence of objects. Besides more conventional literary sources, the analysis also includes numerous artworks and inscriptions. Particular attention is paid to cups, such as the well-known Boscoreale cups, as well as to gems. This interdisciplinary chapter makes a strong case for studying literature alongside other forms of cultural production.

The rise of the epigram, that most distinctively early modern genre, emerged from the confluence of several elements of literary culture, including humanist Latin epigrams; the distinct (though related) tradition of moralizing and didactic distichs and other short poems; the role of verse composition in schools and universities; and the increasingly important role of translation and bilingual circulation. This chapter outlines the relationship between Latin and English epigram in England between the mid-sixteenth and the later seventeenth century: in doing so, it builds upon previous work which has concentrated on the English-language tradition, and extends the chronological range of the existing studies, none of which ranges beyond 1640. By focusing in particular upon the ways in which epigrams circulated in the manuscript record, it treats epigram culture as a bilingual phenomenon, the bilingualism of which evolved over the course of the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and demonstrates how thekind of‘witty’, topical and frequently satiric epigram, which most critical work has prioritized, sits within a broader and on average more serious and more generalizing literary phenomenon.

Soon after the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE, Pompeii seemed to have vanished. The buried city maintained a presence in the region’s collective memory primarily as an overwhelming absence, repressed even in the near-contemporary poetry that ruminated on its demise. In such texts, the name of Pompeii is conspicuous by its absence, and the shock over the swallowing up of this solid ancestral ground is keenly felt. This chapter argues that Martial, Statius, and others initiate the trope of Pompeii as an absent presence that continues to characterize our responses to the site today, even in the face of the apparently abundant materiality of the site. By following Pompeii’s disappearing act from these Latin authors through a variety of more recent engagements with the city – from the subterranean journey to the site in Jacopo Sannazaro’s Arcadia (1504), to the sci-fi dislocation of the city in Amelie Nothomb’s novella, Péplum (1996), and the recent video installation Soleil Noir (2014), in which Pompeii becomes a post-human landscape – we can observe Pompeii’s importance as a locus for understanding the absences that permeate Roman culture, and our modern receptions of it.

The chapter includes readings of Germania 1, 2, 3, 28, 33, 37, 46.

The first person to write elegiac couplets in Latin, Ennius, already wrote a kind of epigram that we do not see in Greek: a paradox is stated, then a question is asked about the paradox, and an answer is given. The chapters shows the popularity of this ‘paradox epigram’ in Latin literature, particularly in Catullus and Martial, arguing that both of these poets, in different ways, deconstructed the form.

The Conclusion brings us back full circle to the Introduction. A first section opens with a brief epilogue on Latin receptions and the reinventions of the Hyperborean nexus as a figure of liminality beyond the reach of Rome's power, shaped by the tense and shifting dialogue of geographical knowledge and Roman imperium. The brief epilogue continues with further thoughts on the Western medieval fortunes of Hyperborea, as it makes its way through negotiations with the baggage and authority of classical geography, and the difficult integration of a northern earthly paradise in the eschatological space of Christian cosmovision. This is the moment when Hyperborea, the focus of our etic study of cosmography, becomes a figure of emic cosmographia. The discussion in these two sections rapidly moves from Catullus to Claudian, and from Aethicus Ister to the Hereford Map and Roger Bacon, an occasion to end with a glance at the emergence of Hyperborea as an object of scientific and theological knowledge in the early European university. A final section ends with a quick retrospective and further considerations on cosmography and the philology of distant worlds.

This chapter examines the role played by lectica (litter) in Roman literature. Investigating Roman accounts of the conveyance's origins, it shows how lectica was repeatedly framed as an exotic import from the Near East, only available to Romans upon their exposure, through the process of imperial expansion, to Eastern softness. But such a projection involved carefully distinguishing this ‘decadent’ litter from already existing, sanctioned litter use (including its use as a 'stretcher'). The litter’s status as a newfangled import is moreover belied by coexisting narratives of republican-era patriarchs riding in lectica because of injury, old age, or disability, and numerous able-bodied Roman commanders who take the field in a lectica. That Cicero could at one moment lambast his juridical or political opponents for employing the litter and then invite a friend for a lectica joy-ride points up how such an object was used to focalize moral discourses in conflict. The chapter ultimately argues that the vehicle's configuration as an awkward boundary-crosser, constantly out of place whether in public or in private, helps shore up other more dominant categories, vehicular and otherwise.

A counterpoint to Rome’s most powerful (and most proudly Roman) vehicle, essedum, is the subject this chapter. A brief introduction discusses another non-Roman battle car, the scythe-chariot, and the ways in which its portrayals can externalize onto Eastern enemies Roman currus’ dangers and violence. Essedum represents an alternate strategy of domestication. This war-chariot of the Britons, first encountered and described by Caesar during his British expedition, was subsequently appropriated as an exotic and fashionable means of getting around Rome and its environs. As the vehicle’s original associations fade through time, the conveyance becomes increasingly normalized for quick trips and even seems to have become a kind of light stagecoach for long-distance journeys. Still, as the chapter argues, essedum’s lingering identity as mobile spoils of war available for leisure use by elites allowed the vehicle to function as a safe, subordinate alternative to the pinnacle achievement represented by the triumph.

This chapter considers the importance of scribal skills, particularly letter writing, through a focus on the insha (epistolary) treatises of the Bahmani vizier, long-distance merchant and scholar, Mahmud Gavan. Against a background of court factionalism, Gavan advocated the cultivation of a genre of writing, insha or letter writing, which not only had strong practical uses for communication at court, but had the potential, if manipulated adroitly enough, to transform society, the recipient of the letter, and the individual writing the letter.

This chapter focuses on the martial skills of sword fighting, archery and wrestling. Courtiers were the military elite: a high position was frequently the reward of prowess in battle, and the ability to direct men and attract followers in daily life was directly related to one’s skill in battle. However, martial skills were not merely a prerequisite for worldly success. I examine the tale of Yusuf, who – by virtue of his skills as a wrestler – rose from lowly service in the kitchens of the sultan’s palace to become one of the most powerful courtiers in the Bahmani sultanate, and eventually the founder of the independent sultanate of Bijapur. In historical accounts like this, the refinement of martial skills and the perfection of one’s physical body came to be framed as a key ethical endeavour through the ideal of javanmardi, or ‘young manliness’.