Rebecca Langlands (Univ. of Exeter) "Roman Exemplary Heroes and Cultural Memory"

The heroic, blood-soaked tales of their ancestors intoxicated the youth of ancient Rome, revealing moral truths and inflaming them with desire for virtue. This lecture will show how Roman exempla constituted a national story-telling tradition that was a powerful medium of cultural memory and moral teaching, balancing communal consensus with interpretative indeterminacy, stability with innovation, conformity with transgression.
"Rebecca Langlands is currently the Joan Palevsky Visiting Professor in Classics at UCLA (2014-2015) and is visiting from the University of Exeter in the UK, where she is Senior Lecturer in Classics. Her research interests are in Latin literature and Roman culture, ethics, the history of sexuality and Classical Reception. She is the author of Sexual Morality in Ancient Rome (CUP 2006), Sex, Knowledge, and the Reception of the Past (forthcoming OUP) and Exemplary Ethics in Ancient Rome (CUP forthcoming).