Lecture by T. H. M. Gellar-Goad (Wake Forest University) Plautus’ Epidicus, his second-shortest play, has what’s been described as “the ancient world’s most mind-boggling plot.” But its plot isn’t so mind-boggling if we think of it as like a fractal, a mathematical phenomenon built out of recursive, self-similar features at larger and smaller scales. And its […]

Lecture by Amy Russell (Brown University) Women could be citizens of the Roman Republic, and frequently took a visible political role. But that role was usually informal: they did not have the legal right to vote, putting them in an anomalous position. Were they, or were they not, part of the sovereign Roman People? In […]

Lecture by Pierre Destrée (University of Louvain) This paper attempts to reconstruct the main points of the lost Poetics II on comedy. I will argue that there is no reason to think that, contrary to the standard (and anachronistically modern) reading, comedy would be less valuable than tragedy: both genres were considered by Aristotle to […]