Naldiin
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July, 2022 Research Update
🕑 Added 2022-08-05 18:42:04 +0000 UTCAmici, it is now August (fifth!).
Apologies for this coming late, but as you may recall from last month we've been moving house. Which has now happened! My office is more or less set up (my book aren't all unpacked yet, but since this was late I figured I ought to write it first). The cats are beginning to settle in as well after a difficult first few days. This is the first time they've been anywhere with stairs, so that was a learning experience, but the stairs have now been mastered.
Moving has also meant that this past month hasn't been as productive as I might have liked, but there are still things to report. My main focus beyond ACOUP has been on the book project. My goal is to get as much of it revised and ready as possible to try to pitch to publishers when Big Annual Conference season rolls around in January. I'm using L. Portwood-Stacer, The Book Proposal Book (2021) as my guide but of course also have quite a few mentors who have written academic books to guide me through the process.
More on that as the process advances.
Speaking of conference season, back in March I was one of the papers on a proposal joint SCS-AIA panel at the Society for Classical Studies / Archaeological Institute of America annual meeting in January, organized by Sally Mubarak and Jeremy Armstrong, which was accepted and so we'll present that panel in January. It's a 'joint' panel; the SCS and the AIA have always had their annual meetings together but they run parallel programs (in the same place, at the same time, with the same registration, but they organize their own panels) with a handful of panels being 'joint' panels accepted onto the program by both organizations. Joint panels tend to make a bit of a bigger splash, so that's exciting and it's a lot of credit to Sally and Jeremy for pulling it all and us all together.
My paper there is going to be on the structure of the Roman alliance system in the third and early second century and how Rome's lack of coercive mechanisms forced it to rely on what I term 'willing compliance' in recruiting from those allies, which was in turn facilitated by framing the system as being something like patron-client relationships (clientela or patrocinium), which made it more palatable to the allies. That's a fairly key argument in my book so this is a chance to 'test run' that part of my argument and get feedback. Conference papers are a great, lower-stakes way to get feedback on academic ideas, since you aren't publishing them (usually).
There are a number of other spinning plates now too. I have my page proofs for Article II (which I need to check over and return in just a couple of days so no rest for the pedantic); the article itself is to appear in this year's Chiron volume (which typically comes out in November/December). I also have a few podcast appearances recorded or scheduled, which I'll announce when they appear. In addition to that of course I am getting ready for my talk at PDXCon early in September.
And that was the month. In all that's going on, I don't have a musing for you all this month, so I'm going to just throw up extra cat pictures in the hope that the distraction means no one will notice while I slip out the back and try to get my books reshelved.
Percy (back) and Ollie (front), blending in with their habitat.
Percy having discovered his new spot by my computer.
Meanwhile Ollie has discovered his new nemesis, the Washing Machine (we did not have one in our last apartment so this is a new discovery for him).
On to August!
Comments
You know, I just kind of scanned that long post in re: Noah Smith. It probably is an indication of something or other that you're getting attention from him, but IDK if it deserves as much of your attention as that. He seems pretty clearly to be a gadfly and not a serious good-faith interlocutor. Very possibly he *is* confused on the topic of the plurality of useful epistemologies, thinking that there is a single correct one that he, Noah Smith, is facile with and that you are... not so facile. Anyway, Noah Smith does not deserve large rent-free quarters in your head. In my humble opinion.
Naldiin
So Livy - who admittedly is writing in the first century - gives an account of a (quasi-legendary) sexual assault perpetrated by Sextus Tarquinius against Lucretia and the pathos of the scene is definitely in her feelings, culminating in her demanding that the assault be avenged by her kinsman ('and, if you are men, fatal to him'), before she commits suicide to clear her honor (though Livy has her male relatives insist "et unde consilium afuerit, culpam abesse' - 'from where there was no consent, there is no guilt' - meaning that an assaulted woman carried no guilt for her assault). I think that speaks to some significant feeling for the victim in such a crime, not merely her male relatives. At some point, we'll need to talk about the structure of Roman law, but by and large Roman law concerns relations between male heads of household (the pater familias) and understands almost all disputes in that form, in turn giving those men functionally total legal control over their dependents.
Question for you from the fireside today. You said: "sexual assault was a capital offense in Roman law (but as a property crime against the male guardian because Roman patriarchy)" Do you have a sense for whether a Roman would feel for the woman in such a crime? IOW, was the patriarchy bit to mean "Romans didn't care about women as people; their value was only as property" or "Romans cared, but had no legal means of codifying women's rights except as property"
