“Hosted by the Humanities Center and faculty fellow Marcie Persyn. Respondents include Siobhán McElduff (UBC) and Lydia Spielberg (UCLA). This event will be hybrid, so you can attend it either in person in 602 CL or via Zoom as you prefer.

In the late second century BCE, Rome was undergoing massive intellectual, cultural, and political shifts: alongside military expansion, violent colonization, and internal power struggles, the emerging Mediterranean power was also fostering an increasingly diverse citizenship, a rise in globalizing economics and intellectual traditions, and new iterations of Roman art and literature. In this time period, the first Latin verse satire was composed: the only genre that later Roman poets would claim to be native to and proprietary of Rome. It was first shaped by the poet Gaius Lucilius, whose verse experimentations numbered originally in the thousands of lines: only some fifteen hundred remain, and yet these scraps of poems are not evenly distributed, but rather reflect the mining and stripping of data from his original corpus, reflective of much later intellectual traditions. The breakdown of Lucilius’ Satires, however, may not be so random or so frustratingly disparate as has been previously supposed: in this paper, by assessing the remains of Lucilius’ earliest fragments, I aim to assess anew what can be understood of the reading culture of Rome in the second century BCE and its aftermath, but also what can be made of the surviving corpus of Rome’s first satirist.

The precirculated paper for this colloquium is available here."