Dr. Rebecca Langlands (UCLA)

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.

Dr. Rebecca Langlands is Senior Lecturer in Classics, with particular interests 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) and Exemplary Ethics in Ancient Rome (CUP forthcoming). She is currently a visiting faculty (2014/15) at UCLA Department of Classics. Dr. Langlands is visiting from the University of Exeter in the UK, where she has been a member of the Department of Classics since 1998.