Roman Diversity: Previews of my book for Princeton by Nandini Pandey
Hyperallergic, 2021
We can see the Atlanta shootings within an even longer history of desiring, dehumanizing, and dis... more We can see the Atlanta shootings within an even longer history of desiring, dehumanizing, and discarding foreign women that goes back to Roman imperial times.
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The Berlin Journal, 2020
With many thanks to Dr Sophie Hay for the beautiful photo, Dr Eric Orlin for comments that improv... more With many thanks to Dr Sophie Hay for the beautiful photo, Dr Eric Orlin for comments that improved the piece, and R Jay Magill for his sensitive edits. Any errors that remain are mine alone!
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American Academy in Berlin, 2021
Recording of a general-audience talk at the American Academy in Berlin on 23 February 2021, intro... more Recording of a general-audience talk at the American Academy in Berlin on 23 February 2021, introduced by Michèle Lowrie and Daniel Benjamin, followed by Q&A. Abstract: "How did ancient Romans negotiate their empire’s remarkable ethnic variety? Better than many modern nation-states, actually. Romans understood the pragmatic benefit of providing opportunity to constituent peoples regardless of race. On the other hand, Roman diversity was grounded in violent conquest, exploitation, and slavery. Many Romans experienced this diversity via tokens: representative humans and goods from all over the known world were assembled within local spaces such as gardens, galleries, dining rooms, bedrooms, and circuses. In this talk, Nandini Pandey explored the literary and material remnants of Roman diversity, suggesting that the spaces in which it appeared became “heterotopias,” wherein Romans learned to admire their empire’s ethnic array, manipulate it, and, ultimately, commodify it. Her exploration of these ancient practices aims at encouraging a critical reexamination of modern diversity policies."
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Eidolon, 2018
Inaugural issue of my Eidolon column, "Romans Go Home" -- about classics, culture, identity, and ... more Inaugural issue of my Eidolon column, "Romans Go Home" -- about classics, culture, identity, and appropriation.
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Handout for keynote at "The Spatial Turn in Roman Studies," Auckland, 22 January 2020.
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Handout for talk at NYU, originating with a paper for the Roman Law and Literature conference at ... more Handout for talk at NYU, originating with a paper for the Roman Law and Literature conference at Durham University, organized by Ioannis Ziogas and Erica Bexley (with planned volume).
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Slides for a paper delivered at CAMWS (Lincoln, Nebraska, 6 April 2019).
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Books by Nandini Pandey
Augustus’ success in implementing monarchical rule at Rome is often attributed to innovations in ... more Augustus’ success in implementing monarchical rule at Rome is often attributed to innovations in the symbolic language of power, from the star marking Julius Caesar’s deification to buildings like the Palatine complex and Forum Augustum to rituals like triumphs and funerals. This book illumines Roman subjects’ vital role in creating and critiquing these images, in keeping with the Augustan poets’ sustained exploration of audiences’ role in constructing verbal and visual meaning. From Vergil to Ovid, these poets publicly interpret, debate, and disrupt Rome’s evolving political iconography, reclaiming it as the common property of an imagined republic of readers. In showing how these poets used reading as a metaphor for the mutual constitution of Augustan authority and a means of exercising interpretive libertas under the principate, this book offers a holistic new vision of Roman imperial power and its representation that will stimulate scholars and students alike. (forthcoming with Cambridge University Press, spring 2018)
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Papers by Nandini Pandey
The Poetics of Power in Augustan Rome
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The Poetics of Power in Augustan Rome
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Course Number (circle one) 199 299 399 499 Other_____________________ Number of credits _________... more Course Number (circle one) 199 299 399 499 Other_____________________ Number of credits _________ Semester______________________________________ Year____________________________ Project Advisor________________________________ Title of Project__________________________________________________________________ Estimated hours per week student will spend on project_______________________ Estimated Project Advisor/Student contact hours per week_____________________ Brief description of project, including anticipated product: (attach additional page if necessary) _____________________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________________________ ___...
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Cambridge University Press eBooks, Oct 1, 2018
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Vergil and Elegy, 2023
Vergil, we all know, was an epic poet. But he is an elegiac one. Latin’s foremost
epic author has... more Vergil, we all know, was an epic poet. But he is an elegiac one. Latin’s foremost
epic author has cut an elegiac profile since antiquity: in the circumstances of
his death, the stories and pseudepigraphia that construct his remembered self,
and the material contexts in which readers encounter his work. These include
the prefatory epigrams that stand epitaphically over his book rolls, much like
the grave inscription standing over his cenotaph in Naples. These posthumous
accretions reify the elegiac sensibility that Vergil evinced in life when he imagined
his voice receding into the perennial, yet perennially past-tense, world of
his texts – beginning with the imperfect canebam and self-quotation from the
Bucolics that close the Georgics (4.559–66). This paper inspects the paratextual
palimpsest that encircles Vergil’s poems like a winding-sheet, constructing his
epic corpus as a kind of elegiac corpse that arrives to us today only through the
interventions of countless undertakers. 1
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Vergilius, 2021
The Aeneid rarely credits women for their essential role in preserving and sustaining the peoples... more The Aeneid rarely credits women for their essential role in preserving and sustaining the peoples who would become Rome. This Irigaray-inspired reading, however, glimpses fleeting acknowledgment in the gender-bending sexual interaction between Venus and Vulcan at Aeneid 8.370-406, followed by the god's comparison to a Roman housewife as he produces weapons for Aeneas in a uterine cave (8.407-53). As a metaliterary representation of the epic and Roman history, Aeneas' shield reproduces similar phallocentric biases as the Aeneid. Yet its narrative 'birth' from a commingling of feminine and masculine energies and elements alludes to women's foundational role in creating Rome and the conditions for historical action, even as it colludes in their erasure from masculine versions of truth. Women's Work in the Aeneid What positive role, if any, does the Aeneid afford women in the great effort of founding the Roman people (tantae molis erat Romanam condere gentem, 1.33)? Compared to the Homeric epics, and even Vergil's other poems,2 the Aeneid gives little thought to the women who cooked, cleaned, cared for children and elders, and otherwise carried their culture through crisis as Aeneas performs the narratively better-compensated work of navigating to Italy.3 Dido's accomplishments in relocating, governing, and building a city for her people, far advanced over
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Roman Law and Latin Literature, 2022
Could we set a play like Heidi Schreck’s 2017 "What the Constitution Means to Me" in or around Ro... more Could we set a play like Heidi Schreck’s 2017 "What the Constitution Means to Me" in or around Rome? Rome, of course, had
no single written constitution to fetishize as in the United States. There are
attempts to codify prior practices or statutes, from the Twelve Tables to Gaius’
Institutes to the Theodosian and Justinian codes and the Digest. But what Rome
had, more loosely, was a con-stitution: a way of standing together. As Michèle
Lowrie notes in Chapter 2 of this book, Roman history, precedents, even
stories play important roles in forming the law. Legal precedent was already
vividly built into social and civic lives, even the material and ritual landscape of
the city. And literature gives us special insight into law’s consequences for
Roman lives both personal and civic. From Plautus to Polybius, from Livy to
Aulus Gellius, R
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The Social Dynamics of Roman Imperial Imagery, 2020
This volume’s kaleidoscopic examination of Romans’ and others’ active
role in constructing imperi... more This volume’s kaleidoscopic examination of Romans’ and others’ active
role in constructing imperial imagery challenges traditional notions of
what ideology is, whom it serves, and where it originates – even whether
images of power were understood in consistent or political ways by their
heterogeneous audiences. Such images find meaning in their consumption
as much as production, meaning that ultimately resides where Dio’s
Maecenas would locate imperial divinity: in the hearts, minds, and practices
of the people.1 Yet the thoughts of individual subjects as they interacted
with imperial ideology and its material instantiations remain
tantalisingly elusive. This chapter explores individual reception, that crucial
yet ephemeral final stage in the formation of meaning, by turning to
Ovid’s Epistulae ex Ponto 2.8. In purporting to elaborate the exiled poet’s
thought process upon receiving silver images of the Caesars from Rome,2
this elegiac letter simultaneously deconstructs Romans’ self-subjugating
fetishisation of imperial iconography and highlights their agency in vesting it with value. This literary source elucidates possibilities for the affective
and cognitive processes that were constantly if invisibly unfolding around
the various social, political, and material constructions of ideology
examined throughout this collection. To many Roman subjects, the
emperors lived in and through their material representations as publica
numina (Pont. 2.8.67) who belonged to Rome as much as Rome
belonged to them. Responding to these figures – whether in the public
form of poetry or the private realm of their own thoughts – was
therefore a crucial mode of political activity under empire, indeed one
of the few available to all regardless of socio-economic status, gender, or
distance from Rome.
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Classical Philology, 2018
THE LAUREL REMAINS an enduring and, on the face of it, straightforward icon of Graeco-Roman glory... more THE LAUREL REMAINS an enduring and, on the face of it, straightforward icon of Graeco-Roman glory. With its evergreen leaves, purgatory properties, and association with athletic and military victory since Apollo’s defeat of the Python, the laurus symbolically transmuted violence into cultural capital, or laus. This tree featured prominently in the iconography of the principate since Augustus’ foundational “return” of the res publica to the senate and people in 27 BCE in exchange for their gifts of laurels, an oak crown, a “shield of virtue,” and his honorific name. These signs helped convert Augustan potestas into auctoritas, dominion gained through civic violence into more fungible, evidently consensual sociopolitical currency. As displayed onAugustus’ Palatine doorposts and elsewhere in visual culture, the laurels of victory and the oak corona civica signifying “citizens saved” formed a meaningfully balanced tableau—perhaps even, with the clupeus virtutis, a mirror for princes. These arboreal signs are literally two sides of the same aureus at figure 1; in the type at figure 2, the auctoritas of Augustus’ obverse portrait seems to rest on the values encoded by the laurel/oak mise-en-scène on the reverse. The laurels not only rationalized and sanctifiedAugustus’ power during his lifetime, but posthumously featured prominently in the imperial cult, if not as cultic objects in their own right. The laurels’ symbolic service to power was no doubt clear to contemporary observers. In my view, however, Vergil and Ovid reverse these trees’ discursive transformation, peeling back their leaves to reexamine the bloodshed at their roots, in two texts that have not yet been connected: the stories of Pyr-
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The Classical Journal, 2018
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Roman Diversity: Previews of my book for Princeton by Nandini Pandey
Books by Nandini Pandey
Papers by Nandini Pandey
epic author has cut an elegiac profile since antiquity: in the circumstances of
his death, the stories and pseudepigraphia that construct his remembered self,
and the material contexts in which readers encounter his work. These include
the prefatory epigrams that stand epitaphically over his book rolls, much like
the grave inscription standing over his cenotaph in Naples. These posthumous
accretions reify the elegiac sensibility that Vergil evinced in life when he imagined
his voice receding into the perennial, yet perennially past-tense, world of
his texts – beginning with the imperfect canebam and self-quotation from the
Bucolics that close the Georgics (4.559–66). This paper inspects the paratextual
palimpsest that encircles Vergil’s poems like a winding-sheet, constructing his
epic corpus as a kind of elegiac corpse that arrives to us today only through the
interventions of countless undertakers. 1
no single written constitution to fetishize as in the United States. There are
attempts to codify prior practices or statutes, from the Twelve Tables to Gaius’
Institutes to the Theodosian and Justinian codes and the Digest. But what Rome
had, more loosely, was a con-stitution: a way of standing together. As Michèle
Lowrie notes in Chapter 2 of this book, Roman history, precedents, even
stories play important roles in forming the law. Legal precedent was already
vividly built into social and civic lives, even the material and ritual landscape of
the city. And literature gives us special insight into law’s consequences for
Roman lives both personal and civic. From Plautus to Polybius, from Livy to
Aulus Gellius, R
role in constructing imperial imagery challenges traditional notions of
what ideology is, whom it serves, and where it originates – even whether
images of power were understood in consistent or political ways by their
heterogeneous audiences. Such images find meaning in their consumption
as much as production, meaning that ultimately resides where Dio’s
Maecenas would locate imperial divinity: in the hearts, minds, and practices
of the people.1 Yet the thoughts of individual subjects as they interacted
with imperial ideology and its material instantiations remain
tantalisingly elusive. This chapter explores individual reception, that crucial
yet ephemeral final stage in the formation of meaning, by turning to
Ovid’s Epistulae ex Ponto 2.8. In purporting to elaborate the exiled poet’s
thought process upon receiving silver images of the Caesars from Rome,2
this elegiac letter simultaneously deconstructs Romans’ self-subjugating
fetishisation of imperial iconography and highlights their agency in vesting it with value. This literary source elucidates possibilities for the affective
and cognitive processes that were constantly if invisibly unfolding around
the various social, political, and material constructions of ideology
examined throughout this collection. To many Roman subjects, the
emperors lived in and through their material representations as publica
numina (Pont. 2.8.67) who belonged to Rome as much as Rome
belonged to them. Responding to these figures – whether in the public
form of poetry or the private realm of their own thoughts – was
therefore a crucial mode of political activity under empire, indeed one
of the few available to all regardless of socio-economic status, gender, or
distance from Rome.
epic author has cut an elegiac profile since antiquity: in the circumstances of
his death, the stories and pseudepigraphia that construct his remembered self,
and the material contexts in which readers encounter his work. These include
the prefatory epigrams that stand epitaphically over his book rolls, much like
the grave inscription standing over his cenotaph in Naples. These posthumous
accretions reify the elegiac sensibility that Vergil evinced in life when he imagined
his voice receding into the perennial, yet perennially past-tense, world of
his texts – beginning with the imperfect canebam and self-quotation from the
Bucolics that close the Georgics (4.559–66). This paper inspects the paratextual
palimpsest that encircles Vergil’s poems like a winding-sheet, constructing his
epic corpus as a kind of elegiac corpse that arrives to us today only through the
interventions of countless undertakers. 1
no single written constitution to fetishize as in the United States. There are
attempts to codify prior practices or statutes, from the Twelve Tables to Gaius’
Institutes to the Theodosian and Justinian codes and the Digest. But what Rome
had, more loosely, was a con-stitution: a way of standing together. As Michèle
Lowrie notes in Chapter 2 of this book, Roman history, precedents, even
stories play important roles in forming the law. Legal precedent was already
vividly built into social and civic lives, even the material and ritual landscape of
the city. And literature gives us special insight into law’s consequences for
Roman lives both personal and civic. From Plautus to Polybius, from Livy to
Aulus Gellius, R
role in constructing imperial imagery challenges traditional notions of
what ideology is, whom it serves, and where it originates – even whether
images of power were understood in consistent or political ways by their
heterogeneous audiences. Such images find meaning in their consumption
as much as production, meaning that ultimately resides where Dio’s
Maecenas would locate imperial divinity: in the hearts, minds, and practices
of the people.1 Yet the thoughts of individual subjects as they interacted
with imperial ideology and its material instantiations remain
tantalisingly elusive. This chapter explores individual reception, that crucial
yet ephemeral final stage in the formation of meaning, by turning to
Ovid’s Epistulae ex Ponto 2.8. In purporting to elaborate the exiled poet’s
thought process upon receiving silver images of the Caesars from Rome,2
this elegiac letter simultaneously deconstructs Romans’ self-subjugating
fetishisation of imperial iconography and highlights their agency in vesting it with value. This literary source elucidates possibilities for the affective
and cognitive processes that were constantly if invisibly unfolding around
the various social, political, and material constructions of ideology
examined throughout this collection. To many Roman subjects, the
emperors lived in and through their material representations as publica
numina (Pont. 2.8.67) who belonged to Rome as much as Rome
belonged to them. Responding to these figures – whether in the public
form of poetry or the private realm of their own thoughts – was
therefore a crucial mode of political activity under empire, indeed one
of the few available to all regardless of socio-economic status, gender, or
distance from Rome.
With that in mind, I recently Skyped with three graduate students finishing their PhDs in the department of Classical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies here at the University of Wisconsin-Madison: Rebecca Moorman, Amy Hendricks, and Ximing Lu.
That’s what Ovid’s exile poems teach us: the consolation not of philosophy, but of poetry, in its original, almost magical sense of making. I add some practical tips below on finding a process that works for you amidst the current corona-constraints, whatever your career stage.