On November 2nd of 2024, Bates College hosted the MCA’s Fall Meeting. There were three speakers, a giant bowl of outstanding potato salad, and a seemingly endless supply of coffee. All to say, it was overall a good way to spend one’s Saturday morning.
Our first speaker was Liana Brent, an Assistant Professor of Classical and Medieval Studies at Bates College. Her talk, “In Search of Enslaved Romans: Beyond Disembodied Names and Nameless Bodies in Roman Cemeteries”, focused on how funerary practices can be seen as avenues for non-elite and enslaved people to explore their identity. Dr. Brent walked her audience through her exploration of columbaria from across the city of Rome, totaling around 500 individuals. Around 90% of these individual funerary commemorative sites had epitaphs accompanied by libation holes (infundibula). 77% of these infundibula clearly expressed a relationship between the commemorator and the deceased. Brent also noted that the largest people group represented among these columbaria were of unspecified legal status.
Brent then took her audience outside Rome to Vagnari Cemetery in Southern Italy, where she is a field archaeologist. Here, Brent introduced us to 150 burials, almost exclusively in the form of inhumation. The buried population was made up largely of workers enslaved at the nearby Roman estate. Among the buried individuals, those with libation tubes had more deposited objects and evidence of post-burial interactions and practices.
Brent argued that the inclusion of these infundibula, Latin epitaphs, and libation tubes among majority non-elite/enslaved burial sites highlights a desire among that population for continued relationships beyond death. These tombs invited acts. They were visual, distinct methods for maintaining relationships with the living as well as encouraging veneration from the living. Those individuals who had little to no voice while alive could now have the power to pause visitors and passerbys. Dr. Brent presented to her audience the idea that these graves were a compensation for a lack of legacy and history in the actual lives of the non-elite and enslaved population of Rome. Although, since we spent 30 minutes on a Saturday talking about them and much more time on reading and writing about them, Dr. Brent certainly proved that this idea was more a reality.
Our next speaker was Dr. Sarah Lynch, also an Assistant Professor of Classical and Medieval Studies at Bates College, whose expertise lies in the realm of medieval education. Her talk, “Being a Teacher in the Middle Ages”, brought some sighs of relief to the many educators in the room as well as sympathetic grunts and envious moans. Her overall question was where does education and where do educators lie within the social, political, and administrative cultures of Medieval times as evidenced by the written record. Lynch walked us through first how one became a teacher in the Middle Ages. Although there was less emphasis on licensing, teachers were expected to be effective, which could come about in a variety of ways, including via apprenticeship, degrees, and even by accident. While becoming a teacher might seem relatively easy, actually performing the duties of a teacher brought much more strain, struggle, and even pariahism. In familiar jargon, Lynch elaborated on how teachers in the Middle Ages were differentiated largely on the age and schooling level of their students. Young children and elementary level education were often considered neither honorable nor valuable, the teachers of which might only ever be given room and board for compensation. Teachers affiliated with institutions or even independent teachers had higher chances for more economically secure benefits and statuses. But even among these better cases, the reputation of teachers went largely one of two ways – praised or deplored (cut to the scene of St. Felix being martyred by his pupils). Here, Lynch walked her audience through several examples of this rather extreme spectrum. After the Vandal invasion of Carthage in 439 CE, teachers were picked to help create a new cultural identity in Carthage. On the other hand, in an English grammar exercise book, vilifying statements of teachers were used for practice (cut back to the scene of St. Felix). While it easy to interpret these examples as set cultural views, Lynch pointed to these examples as evidence that the view of teachers is always shifting. She ended by recapping some of the various sentiments expressed in the epistolary evidence by teachers themselves, including one message from an unknown educator “if teachers are neglected, the state is mismanaged”.
Our last speaker was MCA’s very own Ross Shaler, a Latin teacher at Freeport High School, who is currently working on his PhD dissertation for the University of Florida (and is the secretary for MCA). His talk, “A German by any Other Name?: The Creation and Depiction of the Germani in Latin Literature”, was a short summary of the research he has been doing for his dissertation. Inspired by Tacitus’ appreciation for and engagement with Caesar’s Bellum Gallicum, Shaler is working on tracing the development of a historiographic subgenre, devoted to the Germani and Rome’s wars with them. He calls this genre the bellum Germanicum. His goal is to identify and articulate a typology of this genre by means of collated Latin texts, fragments, and testimonia which relate to Germani and any identifying characteristics. Shaler of course gives special attention to Julius Caesar, who is the earliest extant author to use the name Germani and define the region of Germania and on whom later Latin authors based their own Germanic views. Such later authors include Livy, Pliny the Elder, and Tacitus. This last author in particular, as mentioned above, is whom Shaler examines most closely for intertextual echoes of earlier bellum Germanicum literature, which he argues will contribute to articulating his Germani typology. While Shaler’s analytical process of Germani captured his audience, the post-talk questions really highlighted how thought-provoking his work is. The image of Germani in Latin literature that Shaler is re-approaching did not just influence the ancients but also found a home within certain political and nationalist groups of modern Europe. Certain questions arose concerning how Shaler might approach the current bellum Germanicum legacy in relation to white nationalism and Neo-Nazism. Inspired by our first speaker, there was also a question on looking at columbarium inscriptions and seeing if and how Germani identity and characteristics are present in funerary inscriptions and practices. Overall, there was much praise directed towards Shaler for re-analyzing this area of Latin literature.
The MCA will hold its Spring Meeting on Saturday, May 3rd. More detail will be given as we get closer to that date. Mark your calendars – we hope to see you then!