Basil Dufallo

Disorienting Empire is the first book to examine Republican Latin poetry's recurring interest in characters who become lost. Basil Dufallo explains the prevalence of this theme with reference to the rapid expansion of Rome's empire in the Middle and Late Republic. It was both a threatening and an enticing prospect, Dufallo argues, to imagine the ever-widening spaces of Roman power as a place where one could become disoriented, both in terms of geographical wandering and in a more abstract sense connected with identity and identification, especially as it concerned gender and sexuality. Plautus, Terence, Lucretius, and Catullus, as well as the "triumviral" Horace of Satires, book 1, all reveal an interest in such experiences, particularly in relation to journeys into the Greek world from which these writers drew their source material. Fragmentary authors such as Naevius, Ennius, and Lucilius, as well as prose historians including Polybius and Livy, add depth and context to the discussion. Setting the Republican poets in dialogue with queer theory and postcolonial theory, Dufallo brings to light both anxieties latent in the theme and the exuberance it suggests over new creative possibilities opened up by reorienting oneself toward new horizons, new identifications-by discovering with pleasure that one could be other than one thought. Further, in showing that the Republican poets had been experimenting with such techniques for generations before the Augustan Age, Disorienting Empire offers its close readings as a means of interpreting afresh Aeneas' wandering journey in Vergil's Aeneid.

Republican Latin Poetry's Wanderers

Disorienting Empire

The first book-length treatment of artistic ecphrasis in Roman literature, The Captor's Image challenges pervasive views to argue for it as a site of subtle, ongoing competition between Greek and Roman cultures.

Greek Culture in Roman Ecphrasis

The Captor's Image

In the eyes of posterity, ancient Rome is deeply flawed. The list of censures is long and varied, from political corruption and the practice of slavery, to religious intolerance and sexual immorality, yet for centuries the Romans' "errors" have not only provoked opprobrium, but also inspired wayward and novel forms of thought and representation, themselves errant in the broad sense of the Latin verb. This volume is the first to examine this phenomenon in depth, treating examples from history, philosophy, literature, psychoanalysis, and art history, from antiquity to the present, to examine how the Romans' faults have become the basis for creative experimentation, for rejections of prevailing ideology, even for comedy and delight. In demonstrating that the reception of Rome's missteps and mistakes has been far more complex than simply denouncing them as an exemplum malum to be shunned and avoided, it argues compellingly that these "alternative" receptions are historically important and enduringly relevant in their own right. "Roman error" comes to signify both ancient misstep and something that we may commit when engaging with Roman antiquity, whereby reception may even be conceived as "error" of a kind: while the volume ably addresses popular fascination with a wide range of Roman vices, including violence, imperial domination, and decadence, it also asks us to consider what makes certain receptions matter, how they matter, and why.

Classical Reception and the Problem of Rome's Flaws

Roman Error

"To understand the literary life of the Roman dead, The Ghosts of the Past develops a new perspective on Latin literature's interaction with Roman culture. Drawing on the insights of sociology, anthropology, and performance theory, Basil Dufallo argues that authors of the late Republic and early Principate engage strategically with Roman behaviors centered on the dead and their world in order to address urgent political and social concerns. Republican literature exploits this context for the ends of political competition among the clan-based Roman elite, while early imperial literature seeks to restage the republican practices for a reformed Augustan society." "Calling into question boundaries of genre and literary form, Dufallo's study will revise current understandings of Latin literature as a cultural and performance practice. Works as diverse as Cicero's speeches, Propertian elegy, Horace's epodes and satires, and Vergil's Aeneid appear in a new light as performed texts interacting with other kinds of cultural performance from which they might otherwise seem isolated."--BOOK JACKET.

Latin Literature, the Dead, and Rome's Transition to a Principate

The Ghosts of the Past

Peggy McCracken

From Eurydice to Laura and beyond, dead lovers call forth powerful expressions of grief, sorrow, love, and longing. They occasion mourning and other rituals and seem to be intrinsically bound up with changing ideas of subjecthood itself. Dead Lovers explores the complex attachments to the figure of the dead lover in Western literature, art, and other forms of cultural expression from classical antiquity through the Middle Ages and into the early modern period. By reflecting on the study of dead lovers, these essays also trace the development of themes and claims relating to our own investment in a “dead” but eroticized past that we seek to recover. The collection offers a sustained discussion of how scholarly interest in the representation of loss and erotic bonds raises pressing questions about nostalgia, performance, the role of affect in intellectual work, and the gendered cultural values that script the description and experience of the erotic. In its focus on loss as a site of affect and imagination, Dead Lovers offers an original and provocative contribution to the history of scholarship. Basil Dufallo is Assistant Professor of Greek and Latin and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan. Peggy McCracken is Professor of French and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan.

Basil Dufallo

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