Cargo Culture: Literary and Material Appropriative Practices in Rome

One of this conference’s primary goals is to highlight significant points of contact and divergence between Rome’s various appropriative activities: how is quotation like/unlike spoliation, or evocatio like/unlike commercial importation? More importantly, what are the heuristic possibilities of treating appropriation in Rome as a foundational practice through which Roman culture made and remade itself? In other words, how does the importation, incorporation, and even worship of various kinds of literary and material cargo—a veritable “cult” of cargo—texture Roman culture? 

For questions about the conference, please email mloar [at] stanford.edu (subject: Cargo%20Culture) (Matthew Loar).

Friday, March 7

1:00-1:15pm Welcome

1:15-3:45pm Session A: “How to Make Rome: Appropriate (An)Other” (Respondent: S. Hinds, UWash)
1. Learning Greek, Making Rome: The Imperial Pleasures of Roman Fandom (J. Connolly, NYU)
2. Talking Cargo Blues: The Barbarian Turn in the Palliata (A. Richlin, UCLA)
3. The Comedy of Plunder: Art and Appropriation in Plautus’ Menaechmi (B. Dufallo, UMich)
4. Staging Plagiarism in Terence (S. McGill, Rice)

3:45-4:15pm Break

4:15-6:15pm Session B: “Empires of Appropriation: World Makes, Rome Takes” (Respondent: M. Loar, Stanford)
1. Annexing a Shared Past: Roman Appropriations of Hercules-Melqart in the Conquest of Hispania (M. Daniels, Stanford)
2. Lost in Appropriation: Shipwrecks and Luxury Imports in the Late Republic (C. Fulton, Cornell)
3. Rome’s Paradigmatic Appropriation of Greek Painting (N. Jones, Washington University in Saint Louis)

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Saturday March 8

7:45-8:30am Light Breakfast

8:30-10:00am Session C: “Rome in Egypt, Egypt in Rome” (Respondent: S. Stephens, Stanford)

1. Import/Export: Empire and Appropriation in the Gallus-Papyrus from Qasr Ibrîm (M. Myers, Kenyon College)
2. Appropriation and its Discontents: Case Studies from Egypt (G. Parker, Stanford)

10:00-10:30am Break

10:30-12:30pm Session D: “Ouroboros Culture I: How to Remake Rome” (Respondent: J. Trimble, Stanford)
1. A Second First Punic War: (Re)spoliation of Republican Naval Monuments in the Urban and Poetic Landscapes of Augustan Rome (T. Biggs, Yale)
2. Buried Treasures, Hidden Verses: (Re)appropriating the Gauls of Pergamon in Flavian
Culture (S. Rebeggiani, NYU)
3. Renovation as Appropriation: Naturalizing Papal Authority at S. Paolo fuori le Mura. (A. Yasin, USC)

12:30-2:00pm Lunch

2:00-3:30pm Session E: “Ouroboros Culture II: Roman Self-Appropriation” (Respondent: D. Padilla Peralta, Stanford)

1. Citation, Spoliation, and the Appropriation of the Past in Livy’s AUC (A. Haimson Lushkov, UT Austin)
2. Ancient Etymology as Appropriative Practice: ‘Digging up’ Origins for the Early Roman Landscape (C. Simon, Yale)

3:30-4:00pm Break

4:00-6:00pm Session F: “The Self-Conscious Muse: Rome Reflects on Appropriation” (Respondent: C. MacDonald, Stanford)
1. Getting Literary History: Cicero’s Brutus and the Culture Appropriation Wars of the Late Republic (C. van den Berg, Amherst College)
2. Against Cargo Culture: Pliny the Elder’s History of Painting and Martial’s Xenia (I. Köster, Washington and Lee University)
3. No more Greek Libraries? The Dynamics of Appropriation in Cicero’s Dialogues (W. Stull, Colgate University)

6:00-6:45pm Drinks

6:45pm Dinner (Catered, for all participants)