Virgil Society meetings 2023-2024
All are very welcome to attend. Meetings will be held in person in Room G35, South Block, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU (all timings given below refer to UK time). Once again, the Virgil Society is very grateful to the Institute of Classical Studies, University of London, for its generous support and assistance.
It will also be possible to attend meetings via Zoom: please see here for details on how to register for online attendance. Links to the meetings will appear in due course. The Society thanks the Department of Greek and Latin at University College London for its continuing help with making lectures available online.
For more on the Virgil Society, including digital access to past issues of Proceedings of the Virgil Society (PVS), please visit the website.
Saturday 11 May 2024
11:00 am Dr Donncha O’Rourke (University of Edinburgh)
“It takes one to know one: The ‘Roman Callimachus’ reads Virgil”
This lecture explores how Propertius, the self-proclaimed Callimachus Romanus, received Virgil as a poet with a rival claim to that title. Consideration will be given to both poets’ engagement with the text of Callimachus as well as to Propertius’ recognition of a number of Callimachean strategies in the work of his older contemporary.
2:30 pm Annual General Meeting for 2023/24
3:15 pm Dr Bobby Xinyue (King’s College London)
“Status and Power in the Moretum”
The pseudo-Virgilian Moretum has long been read as a playful mock-epic, with the poem’s protagonist, the smallholder Simulus, starring as the parodic epic hero. It is also well acknowledged that the Moretum appears to be in dialogue with Virgil’s Georgics, but presents a very different picture of rural life. Whereas the Georgics’ sentimentalized vision of the countryside curiously lacks any real acknowledgement of the labour which underpins the economic productivity of the land, or of the people who perform that labour — slaves and other categories of workers exploited by the landowning classes — the pseudo-Virgilian Moretum offers something of a correction to this picture. The poem takes us inside a rural smallholding and spotlights the physical and economic toil demanded by even the smallest act of agricultural production, in this case producing a pesto for lunch. This paper examines the ways in which the Moretum depicts the social status of its central characters, and suggests that the poem may be seen as a deliberately evasive, not-so-light-hearted, exploration of systems of power in the domestic, agricultural world. In particular, I will consider how the poet denies readerly attempts to pin down the exact status of and relationship between Simulus and Scybale; and as such, the Moretum may be seen to ask some difficult questions about class and socio-economics in the Roman (literary) world.
All are very welcome to attend. It will be possible to join any or all parts of the programme via Zoom: those wishing to attend online are asked to request the Zoom link in advance by writing to virgilsociety1943@gmail.com. A Zoom link will then be sent out a short time before the talk.