An epigram is a brief, interesting, memorable, sometimes surprising or satirical statement. The word derives from the Greek ἐπίγραμμα. This literary device has been practiced for over two millennia.
Dame Winifred Mary Beard, is an English scholar of Ancient Rome. She is a trustee of the British Museum and formerly held a personal professorship of Classics at the University of Cambridge. She is a fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge, and Royal Academy of Arts Professor of Ancient Literature.
Homosexuality in ancient Rome often differs markedly from the contemporary West. Latin lacks words that would precisely translate "homosexual" and "heterosexual". The primary dichotomy of ancient Roman sexuality was active / dominant / masculine and passive / submissive / feminine. Roman society was patriarchal, and the freeborn male citizen possessed political liberty (libertas) and the right to rule both himself and his household (familia). "Virtue" (virtus) was seen as an active quality through which a man (vir) defined himself. The conquest mentality and "cult of virility" shaped same-sex relations. Roman men were free to enjoy sex with other males without a perceived loss of masculinity or social status, as long as they took the dominant or penetrative role. Acceptable male partners were slaves and former slaves, prostitutes, and entertainers, whose lifestyle placed them in the nebulous social realm of infamia, excluded from the normal protections accorded to a citizen even if they were technically free. Although Roman men in general seem to have preferred youths between the ages of 12 and 20 as sexual partners, freeborn male minors were off limits at certain periods in Rome, though professional prostitutes and entertainers might remain sexually available well into adulthood.
A fullo was a Roman fuller or laundry worker, known from many inscriptions from Italy and the western half of the Roman Empire and references in Latin literature, e.g. by Plautus, Martialis and Pliny the Elder. A fullo worked in a fullery or fullonica. There is also evidence that fullones dealt with cloth straight from the loom, though this has been doubted by some modern scholars. In some large farms, fulleries were built where slaves were used to clean the cloth. In several Roman cities, the workshops of fullones, have been found. The most important examples are in Ostia and Pompeii, but fullonicae also have been found in Delos, Florence, Fréjus and near Forlì: in the Archaeological Museum of Forlì, there is an ancient relief with a fullery view. While the small workshops at Delos go back to the 1st century BC, those in Pompeii date from the 1st century AD and the establishments in Ostia and Florence were built during the reign of the Emperors Trajan and Hadrian.
Elaine Fantham was a British-Canadian classicist whose expertise lay particularly in Latin literature, especially comedy, epic poetry and rhetoric, and in the social history of Roman women. Much of her work was concerned with the intersection of literature and Greek and Roman history. She spoke fluent Italian, German and French and presented lectures and conference papers around the world—including in Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Argentina, and Australia.
The Lupanar of Pompeii is the ruins of a brothel in the Ancient Roman city of Pompeii. It is of particular interest for the erotic paintings on its walls. Lupanar is Latin for "brothel". The Pompeii lupanar is also known as Lupanare Grande or the "Purpose-Built Brothel". After becoming a Roman Colony, Pompeii was closely associated with Venus a deity of sex and a mythological figure closely tied to prostitution.
Ancient Roman jokes, as described by Cicero and Quintilian, are best employed as a rhetorical device. Many of them are apparently taken from real-life trials conducted by famous advocates, such as Cicero. Jokes were also found scrawled upon washroom walls of Pompeii as graffiti. Romans sought laughter by attending comic plays and mimes. Jokes from these sources usually depended on sexual themes. Cicero believe that humour ought to be based upon "ambiguity, the unexpected, wordplay, understatement, irony, ridicule, silliness, and pratfalls". Roman jokes also depended on certain stock characters and stereotypes, especially regarding foreigners, as can be seen within Plautus' Poenulus.
Roger Clifford Carrington (1906–1971) was an English classical scholar, archaeologist and teacher. He was headmaster of St. Olave's and St. Saviour's Grammar School for Boys from 1937 to 1970.
In archaeological terms, graffiti is a mark, image or writing scratched or engraved into a surface. There have been numerous examples found on sites of the Roman Empire, including taverns and houses, as well as on pottery of the time. In many cases the graffiti tend toward the rude, with a line etched into the basilica in Pompeii reading "Lucilla made money from her body," phallic images, as well as erotic pictures. Other graffiti took on a more innocent nature, taking the form of simple pictures or games. Although many forms of Roman graffiti are indecipherable, studying the graffiti left behind from the Roman Period can give a better understanding of the daily life and attitudes of the Roman people with conclusions drawn about how everyday Romans talked, where they spent their time, and their interactions within those spaces.
Judith P. Hallett is Professor and Distinguished Scholar-Teacher Emerita of Classics, having formerly been the Graduate Director at the Department of Classics, University of Maryland. Her research focuses on women, the family, and sexuality in ancient Greece and Rome, particularly in Latin literature. She is also an expert on classical education and reception in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Eleanor Winsor Leach was the Ruth N. Halls Professor with the Department of Classical Studies at Indiana University. She was a trustee of the Vergilian Society in 1978–83 and was second and then first vice-president in 1989–92. Leach was the president of the Society of Classical Studies in 2005/6, and the chair of her department (1978–1985). She was very involved with academics and younger scholars – directing 26 dissertations, wrote letters for 200 tenure and promotion cases, and refereed more than 100 books and 200 articles. Leach's research interests included Roman painting, Roman sculpture, and Cicero and Pliny's Letters. She published three books and more than 50 articles. Leach's work had an interdisciplinary focus, reading Latin texts against their social, political, and cultural context. From the 1980s onwards, she combined her work on ancient literature with the study of Roman painting, monuments, and topography.
Jennifer Ingleheart is a British classical scholar, who is known for her work on Ovid, Classical reception, and the influence of Rome on the modern understanding of homosexuality. She is Professor of Latin at the University of Durham.
Fiona Macintosh is Professor of Classical Reception at the University of Oxford, Director of the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama, Curator of the Ioannou Centre, and a Fellow of St Hilda's College, Oxford.
Susan Guettel Cole is Professor Emerita at the University at Buffalo in the Department of Classics. She is known for her work on Ancient Greek Religion and gender.
Ruby Blondell is Professor of Classics, Adjunct Professor of Gender, Women, & Sexuality Studies, and Byron W. and Alice L. Lockwood Professor of Humanities at the University of Washington. Their research and teaching centres on Greek intellectual history, gender studies, and the reception of ancient myth in contemporary culture.
CIL 4.5296 is a poem found graffitied on the wall of a hallway in Pompeii. Discovered in 1888, it is one of the longest and most elaborate surviving graffiti texts from the town, and may be the only known love poem from one woman to another from the Latin world. The poem is nine verses long, breaking off in the middle of the ninth verse; a single line in a different hand is written underneath. It is in the collection of the National Archaeological Museum, Naples.
Steven J. R. Ellis is an Australian classicist and archaeologist, and a professor of classics at the University of Cincinnati. His research focuses on Roman cities and archaeological methodologies, and he is widely known for his archaeological excavations at Pompeii. Ellis won the Rome Prize in 2012-2013. In 2018, Ellis wrote the book called The Roman Retail Revolution, published with Oxford University Press.
Sarah B. Pomeroy is an American Professor of Classics.
Beth Severy-Hoven is Professor of the Classical Mediterranean and Middle East at Macalester College. She is an expert in Roman history and archaeology, and gender and sexuality in antiquity.
Sasha-Mae Eccleston is a classicist and the John Rowe Workman Assistant Professor of Classics at Brown University. She is an expert on reception studies and the works of Apuleius. She is the co-founder of Eos, an academic network which focuses on Africana receptions of Ancient Greece and Rome.
