Race in Ancient Rome by Mathias Hanses
Phoenix, 2025
This paper provides a literary analysis of the longest fragment of the mimes of Publilius Syrus (... more This paper provides a literary analysis of the longest fragment of the mimes of Publilius Syrus (fr. 3–18 R = 241–56 Bonaria), understanding it to be expressing the views of a formerly enslaved man during Julius Caesar's dictatorship.
BICS, 2025
This paper examines the complex entanglement of ancient sources and modern concerns in the racist... more This paper examines the complex entanglement of ancient sources and modern concerns in the racist portrayal of Numidians in the 1778 staging of Joseph Addison's Cato at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. The analysis proceeds in three interconnected case studies, all related to the African 'theatre' of the Roman civil war of 49-46 BCE: (1) the racializing presentation of King Juba I and his Numidian cavalry in the Caesarian corpus (especially the pseudo-Caesarian African War); (2) the Numidians' portrayal in Lucan's Pharsalia, and (3) the famous performance during the US-American revolutionary war, which equates Cato with George Washington and, I argue, the Numidians with modern Black, Indigenous, and other People of Colour. Each of the three depictions displays some continuity with its predecessors and successors, but it is most immediately defined by the specific requirement of rationalizing oppression in the relevant writer's or performance's present. This article thus provides evidence for processes of racial formation operating across time and spanning the premodern as well as the early-modern and modern eras.
TAPA, 2024
(co-authored with Hannah Čulík-Baird) Following recent developments in the scholarship on premode... more (co-authored with Hannah Čulík-Baird) Following recent developments in the scholarship on premodern racial formation, the present article examines Cicero’s racializing representations of Sardinian provincials in the Pro Scauro (54 B.C.E.). In this speech, Cicero defends Marcus Aemilius Scaurus, former governor of Sardinia, against charges of provincial mismanagement. In order to secure Scaurus’s acquittal, Cicero portrays the Sardi as a distinct and “deficient” genus, characterized by innate and homogenous somatic, cognitive, and “genetic” qualities. At the same time, Cicero also disparages the Sardinians as a “mixture” of the Africans and the Carthaginians who occupied Sardinia prior to Roman conquest. The result is a juxtaposition between racialized Sardinians and “pure” Romans that is designed to convince the jurors to side with Scaurus, whose participation in the pro- vincials’ dehumanization, murder, and exploitation Cicero presents as morally unproblematic.
Classical Receptions by Mathias Hanses
Ramus, 2023
, the then-thirty-three-year-old Afro-Cuban American artist Harmonia Rosales presented her oil pa... more , the then-thirty-three-year-old Afro-Cuban American artist Harmonia Rosales presented her oil painting Virtuous Woman at her first art gallery exhibition, called 'Black Imaginary To Counter Hegemony (B.I.T.C.H.)', at the Simard Bilodeau Contemporary in downtown Los Angeles. 1 The work is based on Leonardo da Vinci's famous visualization of Vitruvius' description of the homo bene figuratus, that is, of the 'ideal' or 'well-formed' human being on whose symmetry and proportions the construction of temples should be modeled (Vitr. De arch. 3.1; fig. 5.3). 2 Rosales retains the presentation of a nude human figure in an interlocking square and circle on a background covered in handwriting. Yet Rosales' rendition of the lettering is even less easily legible than the Italian paraphrases of, and expansions upon, Vitruvius' Latin that the left-handed Leonardo had written in mirrored script around his sketch. 3 Moreover, Rosales' painting fills not the page of a book, but a large canvas damaged at the edges and marked by red-orange blemishes. Most importantly, the person at the center is no longer the stern and, to a modern viewer, White-presenting man of da Vincian fame. Instead, she is a Black woman (fig. 7.1). In this paper, I explore the reception of Vitruvius' homo bene figuratus, through the intermediary of Leonardo's Vitruvian Man, in Rosales' Virtuous Woman. My aim is to tie together several salient points raised in the essays that precede my own and to add further reflections on the topics of race, gender, and Vitruvius' conscription in White supremacist, anti-Black, and patriarchal discourses to this collection's earlier points about the homo bene figuratus and 'his' afterlife since the early years of the Roman empire. In doing so, I hope to provide an additional and very different example of the Vitruvian Man's iconicity lending itself, as Michele Kennerly and Jennifer K.L. Buchan have emphasized in this issue, either to supporting or to criticizing established values. Combining allusions to Greco-Roman literature and Renaissance art with evocations of I would like to thank Elena Giusti, Erin M. Hanses, and Ramus' anonymous referees for their numerous helpful comments, which have much improved this article. I am also grateful for the stimulating conversations I have had with Giovanna Laterza and all participants in the homo bene figuratus workshop, and to Helen Morales for securing the image rights to Harmonia Rosales' Virtuous Woman.
Above the Veil: Revisiting the Classicism of W. E. B. Du Bois
International Journal of the Classical Tradition
access article here: https://rdcu.be/29bA
Blackwell Companion to Terence, 2013
Historische Zeitschrift, 2011
Drama, Performance by Mathias Hanses
TAPA, 2022
This paper analyzes in-depth a statement frequently made in passing, namely that Statius's Achill... more This paper analyzes in-depth a statement frequently made in passing, namely that Statius's Achilleid alludes to Greek and Roman New Comedy. I argue that Statius sets the island of Scyros apart from the rest of the poem as a world reminiscent of the stage. Here, the experiences of the young Achilles echo tragedy, pantomime, satyr play, and especially the plays of Menander, Plautus, and Terence. The protagonist plays the part of the adulescens amans, Deidamia is the virgo he rapes, Lycomedes the senex he dupes, and Ulysses appears as the servus callidus who brings about a conclusion in marriage.
Classical Journal, 2022
This paper explores the depiction of magic in Amores 3.7, an elegy in which "Ovid" suffers from i... more This paper explores the depiction of magic in Amores 3.7, an elegy in which "Ovid" suffers from impotence and wonders if a witch is to be blamed for his predicament. Adding to existing metapoetic readings, I argue that the poem combines allusions to famous witches from earlier Greco-Roman literature with detailed evocations of actual rites that are familiar to us from the material record, such as the piercing of magic dolls and the casting of binding and separation spells. These acts were meant to cause the same deathlike sensations that Ovid experiences in Am. 3.7, which means that-even though the poem ultimately calls the efficacy of magic into question-it nevertheless provides a "realistic" portrayal of these spells' imagined effects.
Epicurus in Rome: Philosophical Perspectives in the Ciceronian Age, 2022
Throughout, I cite the fragments of Ennius from Goldberg and Manuwald: . I also follow their ... more Throughout, I cite the fragments of Ennius from Goldberg and Manuwald: . I also follow their editorial practice of using the numbering of Skutsch: when referring to the Annals and Manuwald: for the tragedies. Quotations from Lucretius are based on the OCT edition. For all other authors, I follow the Teubner. Translations from the Latin and Greek are my own. My sincere thanks go to Erin M. Hanses and Jason Nethercut for their helpful suggestions and bibliographical assistance, to Katharina Volk for commenting on a much earlier version of this paper and to Sergio Yona and Gregson Davis for including my contribution in this volume.
Classical Philology, 2020
The description of Roman life at Plautus Curculio 462–86 is commonly treated as a straightforward... more The description of Roman life at Plautus Curculio 462–86 is commonly treated as a straightforward guide meant to help the reader or spectator identify buildings and characters in the mid-Republican Forum. Relying on recent scholarship on Roman memory, this article argues instead that the choragus who speaks the monologue creates a contrast between buildings associated with grandiose historical events and comedic characters who flock around the structures in question. The result is a parody that satirizes contemporary Rome as a city that fails to live up to the impressive exempla immortalized in its monuments.
Illinois Classical Studies, 2019
This article examines a sequence of four elegiac couplets and two iambic senarii that was etched ... more This article examines a sequence of four elegiac couplets and two iambic senarii that was etched into the northern wall of the basilica in Pompeii. I argue that this graffito was produced by multiple writers and that it alludes to characters familiar from elegy and Roman comedy. More specifically, the inscription's different blocks of text are attributable to three separate stock types: a lena who recommends locking out the lover who comes without gifts; an exclusus amator who is determined to persevere; and a slave who mocks his owner with the sarcasm he characteristically displays in the fabula palliata.
I. N. Perysinakis and E. Karakasis, eds. Plautine Trends: Studies in Plautine Comedy and Its Reception (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014), 2014
Not unlike Plautus' tragicomic Amphitruo, Ovid's Metamorphoses intersperses genuinely funny passa... more Not unlike Plautus' tragicomic Amphitruo, Ovid's Metamorphoses intersperses genuinely funny passages with unsettling hints at the pains its characters have to endure for the sake of our entertainment. In a sampling of passages ranging from the epic's Birth-of-Hercules episode to its programmatic proem, I will show how Ovid alludes to that original tragicomoedia to achieve this effect. Even as he exploits Plautine humour for comic relief, Ovid recreates the play's tension between comic and tragic elements. The true bleakness of his worldview comes into focus if we realise that where his Plautine model (in spite of all darkness) preferred a last-minute happy ending, Ovid's resolutions tend to embrace tragedy more fully.
Wordplay by Mathias Hanses
Metamorphic Readings: Transformation, Language, and Gender in the Interpretation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, 2020
Classical Quarterly 64.2, 2014
This paper argues that Ovid deliberately arranged lines 3.507–10 of the Ars Amatoria to have the ... more This paper argues that Ovid deliberately arranged lines 3.507–10 of the Ars Amatoria to have the letters at line end spell out AMOR when read vertically. Together with the last word of the passage, which is itself Amor, this telestich produces a shape that recalls a famous Γ-acrostic in Aratus. Since the relevant Ovidian lines discuss mirrors, they also constitute an invitation to read AMOR backwards as ROMA. The telestich thus emerges as engaging intertextually with a variety of plays on the city's name, including the famous AMOR-ROMA word squares that are preserved in Imperial Roman graffiti. Within the mildly subversive genre of elegy, Ovid's palindromic word play creates a contrast between traditional expressions of Roman military valor—familiar from works like the Aeneid, where an acrostic significantly spells out MARS—and his own world, where the city of ROMA has come to be dominated by AMOR.
Roman historiography by Mathias Hanses
Rheinisches Museum für Philologie, 2011
Book Reviews by Mathias Hanses
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Race in Ancient Rome by Mathias Hanses
Classical Receptions by Mathias Hanses
Drama, Performance by Mathias Hanses
Wordplay by Mathias Hanses
Roman historiography by Mathias Hanses
Book Reviews by Mathias Hanses