"Would That Never" II: Ships, Shipwrecks, and Sea Travel in Classical Literature
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Pirates--the Anti-Rome: The Role of the Sea in the Corrupt Governorship of Gaius Verres. Claudia Arno, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
In the Verrine Orations, Cicero played on the Romans’ visceral reaction to piracy as the opposite of Romanness in order to convict the Roman governor of Sicily under the statute de rebus repetundis; he also promoted his own view of what Romanness should be.
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Imagining Insurance: Safety at Sea and the Samothracian Rites. Sandra Blakely, Emory University
Safe travel at sea was the most famous benefit of initiation into the Samothracian mysteries. Abundant literary sources attribute this to the Dioskouroi, imagined as St. Elmo’s fire; iconographic evidence is more slender, but detectable in aniconic, archaising epigraphic images.
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The Pirate and the Sage: Imperial Justice in Philostratus' Life of Apollonius of Tyana. Saundra Schwartz, University of Hawai'i, Manoa
On pilgrimage to gurus in the mountains of India, a Greek holy man tells of his past life as an Egyptian ship captain, a tale that introduces readers to competing notions of justice in the multicultural Roman Empire.
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