In October of 2016, less than two weeks before the election of Donald J. Trump to the White House, Saturday Night Live (SNL) aired a stunning installment of ‘Black Jeopardy!’, a recurring sketch hosted by Kenan Thompson as Darnell Hayes. In this episode, Keeley (Sasheer Zamata) and Shanice (Leslie Jones), two Black women, were joined by Tom Hanks as Doug, a white man and MAGA-hat wearing Trump supporter. Though Darnell is initially skeptical that Doug is prepared to play ‘Black Jeopardy!’ the four bond over their shared appreciation for ‘big girls’, lottery tickets, and Tyler Perry movies, and their aversion to dogs, corporations, and the government. At one point, Darnell approaches Doug for a handshake; at first taken aback (and literally stepping back), Doug then gratefully clasps the other man's hand. The sketch ends when a new category is announced, ‘Lives That Matter’, and the fragile bonds between Doug, Darnell, and the other contestants begin to fray. Doug announces that he ‘has a lot to say’ about the category. ‘Well, it was good while it lasted’, Darnell replies.

The mutability of Philokleon's generational identity in Aristophanes’ Wasps is well established. Critics routinely write of his ‘rejuvenation’ in the second half of the play, and it is in the scene with the αὐλητρίϲ (‘aulos-girl’), Dardanis, that the old man most explicitly plays the part of an irresponsible youth waiting for his son (in the role of father) to die. However, inversions and perversions of generational identity pervade the whole play. Even before Philokleon has undergone his liberating transformation at the symposion, the educational roles of father and son are reversed as Bdelykleon schools him in the proper way to behave in polite society. More subtly and extensively, Bowie has shown how the three agones in which Philokleon unsuccessfully engages during the first half of the play correspond to the three stages of an Athenian male citizen's life: ephebeia, maturity in the hoplite phalanx, and old age in the jury. However, critics have not observed that Philokleon goes through another, parallel journey from youth through maturity to old age in the three ‘iambic scenes’ where he is confronted by the victims of his outrageous behaviour on his way home from the symposion. This article will show how Aristophanes constructs this third lifecycle (counting Bowie's agones and his literal maturation before the play's action begins) before considering its implications for the wider characterization of Philokleon and in particular the final scene.

In the prologue of Callimachus’ Aetia, every single word opens up a wide, virtually boundless spectrum of suggestions, intimations, and evocations. In this paper, I heed Callimachus’ formal intricacies, joining the decoding game that has vexed and entertained ancient and modern readers by homing in on the para-etymological potentialities of the verb ἀείδω (‘I sing’). I wish to explore the possibility that, in this architext of Callimachean programmatics, ‘singing’ may amount to a sort of aesthetic satisfaction in self-deprivation, with formal elements mobilizing a spiral of eating and non-eating. This exploration offers the opportunity to think about Callimachean ‘singing’ as a challenge to conventional notions of human subjectivity and to the very idea of poetic immortality, expressing something like the wish of a poète maudit not for monumental permanence, but for a looping insistence. We may then see Callimachean aesthetics as less rarefied, aristocratic, and decorous than it is usually made out to be. In the recalcitrance, the unruly looping of poetic form, we may glimpse an aesthetic sense that is more subversive, shaped by temporal stuckness, a rejection of fulfillment, and a hunger that rejects the lack that is satisfaction. I first locate the possibility of an alternative para-etymologizing of ἀείδω within the prologue's discourse of corporeality, in its precarious opposition of thinness and fatness. I then search the epigram dedicated to Heraclitus and the Hymn to Demeter for traces of the restless aesthetics inherent in this para-etymologizing, which I will ultimately connect with queer temporality. The Callimachean hymn invites us to see the poetic persona of the Aetia's proem in a new light—as a counterpart of the starving binge eater Erysichthon, Demeter's enemy, who is barely distinguishable from the goddess herself.

Writing on Poenulus and Plautus’ genre, Henderson has proposed that the extant Plautine plays are ‘emphatically heterogeneous’, such that ‘no one play typifies the oeuvre.’ His argument counters a charge often leveled against Roman Comedy, that the plays are all the same, or at least that they all amount to the same thing. Henderson was right that they are not and do not, but the fact remains that Plautus’ plays have a certain predictability. Their formulaic nature is what promises, in the face of manifold obstacles, a happy ending. It is what indicates that the fragments of Vidularia once added up to a recognition play—and what defines ‘recognition plays’ as a group. It is what prompts claims that Captiui is ‘unusual’, filled with ‘oddities’ and ‘mistakes’.

In these two excerpts, Grace Hadley Beardsley and Frank M. Snowden, Jr., discuss the appearance of the word Aethiops (‘Aethiopian’) in Cicero's Post reditum in senatu 14. Beardsley, whose intellectual project was motivated, as Maghan Keita and, more recently, Najee Olya have discussed, by racial animus and who sought to find evidence of Greco-Roman anti-Blackness that was both consistent with, and therefore a legitimizing exemplum for, contemporary anti-Blackness in 20th-century America, took Cicero's words as ‘the earliest passage in which [Aethiopians] are spoken of slightingly’ at Rome—doing so cautiously, given the fact that most editors had deleted it from the text. Frank M. Snowden, Jr.—whose own work W.E.B. Du Bois explicitly contrasted with Beardsley—responded to Beardsley's assertion that Post reditum in senatu contained evidence of anti-Blackness with scepticism, ultimately doubting the legitimate textual presence of the term and interpreting its presence instead as an artefact of hostile scribal intervention. Indeed, both Beardsley and Snowden discuss the fact that Aethiope does not occur in all of the Cicero manuscripts. While it is true that none of the authoritative textual editions print Aethiope at Post reditum in senatu 14, the textual apparatus nonetheless demonstrates clearly that the term appears in the manuscript tradition more often than it does not:

The plague that closes Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura is a spectacle of disgust. Throats sweat with blood (6.47f.); tongues drip with gore (6.1149); breath reeks like rotten cadavers (6.1154f.); drinking water is contaminated when the sick dive into it (6.1174f.); black discharge pours from stomachs (6.1200); foul blood seeps from noses (6.1203); the sick slice off their own hands, feet, and genitals (6.1209f.); dead bodies are entombed by ulcers (6.1271). Again and again Lucretius hits upon domains that have been identified as key disgust elicitors. In Book 6, more than in any other book of the epic, we encounter what is taeter, ‘disgusting’. This adjective appears nine times in the final book (22, 217, 787, 807, 976, 1154, 1200, 1205, and 1266) after showing up one time each in Books 1 (936), 3 (581), and 5 (1126); six times in Book 2 (400, 415, 476, 510, 705, 872); and five times in Book 4 (11, 124, 172, 685, 1176). The vast majority of these instances describe disgust working upon our senses of taste, smell, sight, and even hearing (OLD s.v. 1); that is, ‘primary’ or ‘core’ disgust. At 2.510f., for instance, Lucretius speaks of a substance that is taetrius… / naribus auribus atque oculis orisque sapori (‘more disgusting to noses, ears, eyes, and the taste of the mouth’). But the word can also carry an ethical or moral nuance (OLD s.v. 2), suggesting ‘secondary’ disgust. At 5.1126, for example, the word describes Tartarus, into which thunderbolts ‘scornfully’ hurl sinners (contemptim in Tartara taetra). Here, Lucretius wants his reader to feel a sense of moral aversion to the idea of the Underworld, which throughout the epic he is at pains to prove is nothing but a poetic fiction.

Figures of intersexed individuals perhaps representing the minor Greek deity Hermaphroditus became, for reasons that are not entirely clear, strikingly popular in Roman sculpture and wall painting in the latter half of the first century CE. Depicting a fully bisexed human body, these figures have resulted in competing interpretations regarding their purpose, meaning, and effect. As it happens, we also have a text from the Augustan period that purports to explain not only the origin of the intersexed Hermaphroditus, but the production of future bisexed individuals, in Ovid's Metamorphoses Book 4. When discussing the sculptures and wall paintings of Hermaphroditus, as a result, scholars have been inevitably drawn to Ovid's narrative. The pull of Ovid is admittedly almost irresistible, and his reputation as a poet who challenges norms, conventions, and genres makes it attractive to see him as creating room for modern notions of gender fluidity. As Georgia Nugent argued more than thirty years ago, however, Ovid's narrative is, in curious ways, a reductive version of the myth, ‘a paradigmatic example of how what is sexually threatening may be textually recuperated and stabilized’. I wish to reanimate Nugent's arguments here, and to suggest that scholars’ regular invocation of Ovid when interpreting the products of Roman art is a mistake, for two reasons: first, the figure Ovid describes is, in fact, not typical of what we see in Roman sculptures and wall paintings; and second, Ovid presents a version of Hermaphroditus’ gender identity that is deliberately less challenging to the stability of sexual binarism—and to traditional gender roles—than are those material depictions. For those of us who wish to advocate for the rights of intersexed individuals, in other words, Ovid is the wrong champion.

Finagling an inheritance is one time-tested way of resolving a money shortage: just flatter your way into the good graces of the aged and rich. In Satires 2.5 Horace parodies the Roman version of this vice, known as captatio or ‘legacy-hunting’; with baroque imagination, he presents Odysseus, the mythological hero, consulting the prophet Tiresias in the Underworld and learning how to increase his fortune by amassing inheritances. Odysseus asks: tu protinus, unde | diuitias aerisque ruam, dic, augur, aceruos (‘tell me forthwith, prophet, where I can dig up riches and heaps of money’, 21f.). Tiresias responds: captes astutus ubique | testamenta senum (‘cleverly snatch on all sides the testaments of old men’, 23f.). Social critique naturally looms large in this poem about venal dishonesty. In major studies, Niall Rudd and Klaus Sallmann have examined the poem's criticism of contemporary Roman society, and later scholars have taken a similar line, often reading the poem as a send-up of flattery. All true, but there is more to say. Even as it treats of wills, money, and flattery, the satire also shows a quiet concern with aesthetic issues, especially the state of contemporary poetry.

Lauren Groff's Fates and Furies thoroughly unravels its own ‘marriage plot’. Narrating the romance of the golden Lancelot (‘Lotto’) and the mysterious Mathilde from each protagonist's perspective in turn, Groff's novel exposes countless cracks in the decades-long relationship between a pair of twenty-first-century college sweethearts. The second half of the novel is particularly haunted by a sadomasochistic and dubiously consensual relationship between Mathilde and a wealthy older man upon whom she has become financially dependent, a subplot that includes vivid and erotic descriptions of sexual humiliation and subjugation. Groff is certainly not the only modern author to explicitly and self-consciously interrogate the terms of the romantic novel as such: Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot announces its generic play in its title.

‘How tough it is for outlaws’ (quam male est extra legem uiuentibus, Sat. 125.4), laments Encolpius, the petty-criminal narrator of Petronius’ Satyrica, as he frets about whether he and his buddies will be found out as they engage in a scheme to fleece the legacy hunters of Croton. But Encolpius and his crew are outlaws in more senses than one. Having forgotten, or simply disregarded, marital-reproductive household arrangements, they engage in novel forms of relationality that their cultural lexicon can barely cover as they quest after sex, feasts, money, or simply subsistence. Much Petronian scholarship, promoting a reading that looks down on the characters, views these forms of relationality as parodic and ‘purely comic’, ludicrously failed attempts by low, satirized characters to appropriate sublime Roman social institutions like fraternal pietas. In this article, taking as my primary example the reformulation of brotherhood and the use of the kin term frater by Encolpius, Ascyltos, and Giton, I read these forms of sociality as queer: that is to say, potentially challenging to normativity rather than simply inadequate to meet its demands. Petronian brotherhood, read in this light, appears richly shaded and contested, not merely a one-dimensional misappropriation composed for the benefit of a ‘superior’ elite audience. What exactly it means to be a ‘brother’ in this postlapsarian world is always an active question in the scenes involving the trio. I offer in this article a more detailed close reading of Petronian brotherhood than has been possible in other, briefer scholarly accounts, focusing in particular on the competing conceptualizations of ‘brotherhood’ by different characters, from Encolpius’ exclusive use of the term as something like ‘boyfriend’ to Ascyltos’ more capacious use of the word.

Among Latin rhetorical treatises and imperial writers on technical subjects, the Institutio Oratoria stands out for the sheer number of quotations of poetry that Quintilian incorporates into his discussion. Whereas Cicero's De Inuentione has 13 quotations of poetry and the Rhetorica ad Herennium 16, the index locorum in Russell's Loeb edition of the Institutio records 320 quotations from Greek and Latin poets. Despite the distinctive scale of Quintilian's engagement with poetry, scholars have not taken much interest in it, perhaps under the influence of the persistent belief that in the imperial period ‘the introduction of poetry into orations as an ornament of style’ was ‘often a useless affectation’ or that such quotations constitute mere ‘window dressing’. Early twentieth-century treatments such as that of Cole, who evaluated Quintilian's citations of poets for their ‘textual accuracy’, and Odgers, who used the relative infrequency of Quintilian's quotation of Greek literature to establish the limits of Quintilian's knowledge of Greek, set a tone of dismissiveness in relation to any question of how and why Quintilian quotes poetry as he does: Cole and Odgers attribute any ‘discrepancies’ between Quintilian's quotations and those found in the manuscripts of the poets he quoted to a (presumed) tendency to quote from memory that made him ‘rather liable to errors’. Later critics have extrapolated from their findings to attribute to Quintilian the ‘grave deficiency’ of ‘know[ing] little directly of the major Greek writers’ and to diagnose ‘intellectual stagnation’ in his engagement with Latin literature. These negative judgements are, of course, in line with the traditional assessment of Quintilian as ‘neither a great writer nor a great thinker’, one who is ‘more often belittled than understood’.

In The Death of Camilla (1964), Black American painter Bob Thompson fascinates, disturbs, and provokes enduring questions about race in the United States. In this painting (Figure 1), multicolored nudes clash in battle around two figures frozen in a moment of anguish: a light-skinned female warrioress dying in the arms of a dark-hued male opponent. The power of this painting lies not only in its raw emotion, symbolism, and color, but also in Thompson's daring signification upon the story of Camilla from Vergil's Aeneid and on a seventeenth-century drawing by Nicolas Poussin. While a relatively ‘underknown’ artist, during his life Robert Louis Thompson (1937–1966) received extensive recognition for his compelling reconfigurations of the European old masters and their Classical (Greco-Roman) subjects. Thompson, according to his early biographer, Judith Wilson, may also be ‘the first American artist to put the nation's interracial sex life/sex fantasies on public view.’ In many of his works of reception, Thompson combines these two artistic preoccupations into compelling pieces that foreground tragic contradictions around interraciality in the United States. In his The Death of Camilla painting, I argue, Thompson expands upon the symbolic trajectory of Vergil's story and ‘colors’ Poussin in such a way as to re-present Camilla as collateral damage of the sort of nation building that necessitates interracial conflict.