Upcoming Events

In lieu of the weekly Thursday Classics Table, Classics Majors and MMUF Fellows, Sophia Ying '26 and Zoe Roettger '27, will be previewing their 2025 MMUF Midwestern Regional Conference talks. Pizza and sparkling water will be provided by the Classics Department.

Sophia Ying '26 will present the following:

Title: From Argead Legacies to Hellenistic Identities: A Numismatic Study

Keywords: numismatics, Macedon, Hellenistic World

Abstract: This paper analyzes coinage from the Hellenistic kingdoms from the 4th to 2nd centuries BCE to understand their identity and their relationship to their shared Macedonian predecessors. When Alexander the Great died without an heir in 323 BCE, this was the end of the Argead line that had been ruling Macedon for three centuries. Alexander’s generals competed to take his empire, which spanned from Greece, to Egypt and as far as India. During this time, his generals continued to mint coins in the style of the 4th-century Argead rulers. After a period of conflict, they made three new kingdoms: the Antigonids in Macedon, the Seleucids in Babylon, and the Ptolemies in Egypt. As Alexander’s generals declared themselves kings in their own right, the imagery of their coinage diverged.

Analysis of the imagery on coins can tell us a lot about identity. I argue that Demetrios, Antigonous and Seleukos continued to mint coins in the Arged style. Once the kingdoms diverged, however, the coinage of the Ptolemies developed a distinct style of iconography. I argue that this point of divergence, with the strong identity on their coinage, predicts how this dynasty will last for three centuries. Ptolemy managed to make a model separate from the contemporary coin imagery that his descendants would continue to mint for centuries. Close analysis of the iconography on Ptolemy’s coinage is the key to discovering how the Ptolemaic dynasty of Egypt would outlast the other Hellenistic kingdoms.

Zoe Roettger '27 will present the following:

Title: Fuisse Ferar: The Temporal Nature of Fama in [Tibullus] 3.13

Abstract: Found in Tibullus Book 3 are six love elegies, commonly credited to a poet who calls herself Sulpicia. She writes in the counter-cultural genre of Roman elegy, whose conventions are defined by masculine experiences. She does so amidst the growing restrictions on feminine sexuality and speech imposed by Augustus’ legislation in the late 1st century BCE. In this presentation, I concentrate on the first of her elegies [3.13], a 10-line poem in which she celebrates the start of her romantic relationship with a man whom she calls Cerinthus. By engaging with past scholarship pertaining to this work, I highlight the ways in which Sulpicia focuses on fama and its multiple shades of meaning (report, rumor, renown, reputation). I apply Barbara Flaschenriem’s analysis of Sulpicia’s paradoxically candid yet reticent voice (1999), along with Maria Wyke and Allison Sharrock’s discussion on the role, or lack thereof, that Sulpicia’s male beloved Cerinthus plays in her text (2006). These sources demonstrate how she manipulates generic tropes and expectations by fully claiming the active role of the poet, rather than the typically feminine role of the passive beloved. I build upon this work by examining the poem’s morphological and syntactic structures to argue that her usage of ‘completed’ and ‘continuous’ tenses relates to the various meanings of fama, revealing another way in which she demonstrates control in and over the text. Through this discussion, I explore how nontypical speakers and voices may gain power in settings that were not designed to accommodate them.

from Classics