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Basil Dufallo

University of Michigan, Classical Studies, Faculty Member

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Areas of research: Latin Literature; Roman Culture; Queer Theory; Postcolonial Theory; New Materialisms; Text and Image; Classical Reception.

Basil Dufallo received the Ph.D. in Classics from UCLA in 1999 and has been teaching at the University of Michigan since 2001. He is the author of Disorienting Empire: Republican Latin Poetry's Wanderers (Oxford University Press, 2021), The Captor’s Image: Greek Culture in Roman Ecphrasis (Oxford University Press, 2013), and The Ghosts of the Past: Latin Literature, the Dead, and Rome’s Transition to a Principate (The Ohio State University Press, 2007) and has edited Roman Error: Classical Reception and the Problem of Rome's Flaws (Oxford University Press, 2018) as well as, with Riemer Faber, Comparing Roman Hellenisms in Italy (University of Michigan Press, 2023) and, with Peggy McCracken, Dead Lovers: Erotic Bonds and the Study of Premodern Europe (University of Michigan Press, 2006). Additional publications include articles and book chapters on Latin literature, Roman culture, and their modern reception. He is the recipient of a Visiting International Fellowship at the Institute of Advanced Study, University of Warwick (2018) and a Faculty Fellowship at U-M’s Institute for the Humanities (2010-11) and is active in the Society for Classical Studies and the Classical Association of the Middle West and South. Ongoing projects include a book on Hercules in Latin poetry and an introductory guide to Virgil's Aeneid for the Core Knowledge series at Columbia University Press. Teaching interests include undergraduate courses on Greek and Roman civilization and Great Books and undergraduate and graduate courses at all levels on Latin literature.

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Papers by Basil Dufallo

Appius' Indignation: Gossip, Tradition, and Performance in Republican Rome

Transactions of the American Philological Association, 2001

Review of Rethinking Roman Alliance: A Study in Poetics and Society by Bill Gladhill

Phoenix, 2017

Roman Error: Classical Reception and the Problem of Rome's Flaws, Introduction

In the introduction Dufallo lays out the volume's main arguments, brie y summarizes its contents,... more In the introduction Dufallo lays out the volume's main arguments, brie y summarizes its contents, explains its relation to recent work in classical reception studies, and advances its theoretical claim in response to the poststructuralist view of classical reception advanced especially by Charles Martindale. All reception could be considered "error" insofar as it involves "misreading" in the sense elaborated by Harold Bloom. But the essays in this volume reveal speci c ways in which reception's transgressive content may relate to its transgressive form or style because of the investments of receivers in a future that will view that content di erently: the particular social, cultural, or political projects in which authors, artists, etc. participate as they set in motion the in nite malleability of signs. This foregrounds a pair of issues that have gured centrally in recent debates over classical reception: its relation to collective, as opposed to individual, receivers and to the future. What draws us, time and again, to the Romans' worst failings? Why turn to them once more in a volume of collected essays? Many, of course, have decried them over the centuries. From religious intolerance to imperial domination, from corruption and immorality to an embrace of spectacular violence, from the "collapse of the republic" to the "decline and fall of the Roman Empire," generation after generation has found much to lament, much to deplore in the Romans and their behavior. This volume by no means seeks to deny the good reasons why we have identi ed certain elements of Roman culture and society as unacceptable within our present worldview (nor to dismiss, say, the horri ed fascination that Rome might exert at a so-called "end of the empire" moment in the modern U.S.). Yet it endeavors, nonetheless, to tell a di erent story about what makes Rome's most problematic features attract the attention of Rome's inheritors again and again. In this book, we use the phrase "Roman error" in a marked sense to denote, on the one hand, a set of things the Romans did "wrong" in the judgment of posterity and, on the other hand, a variety of wayward, novel, errant forms of thought and representation that these aws have inspired, receptions for whose historical importance and continued relevance this volume argues. "Roman error," as we use it here, is both something that the Romans did and something that their heirs (including ourselves) do, when Roman faults become the basis of intense artistic and literary experimentation, rejections of prevailing ideology, revolutionary departures from received opinion, even comedy and delight, so as to reveal a close link between reception's transgressive content ("error" as an object of reception) and its transgressive form (one that highlights reception as "error" in some way). While referring in some cases to things understandably viewed as distasteful or abhorrent, "Roman error," when seen like this, can nevertheless help us better explain the widespread attraction of Rome's aws. Those who reinvent the Romans' deviance,

The Captor's Image: Greek Culture in Roman Ecphrasis, Introduction

Ἔ κφρασις is a Greek rhetorical term originally meaning "description" in a broad sense. By late a... more Ἔ κφρασις is a Greek rhetorical term originally meaning "description" in a broad sense. By late antiquity, descriptions of works of art (ἐ κφράσεις ἀ γαλμάτων) were recognized formally as a subcategory, if not a full-fl edged genre, and the term "ecphrasis" has been used in modernity with this exclusive sense. For helpful overviews, see Becker 1995: 2n1; Zanker 2004: 6-7; Gurd 2007: 306n6; and for the development of the modern notion, Webb 1999. Recently Webb has called renewed att ention to the breadth of the ancient trope (as also directed, that is, at objects other than visual art) and its particular meaning in the Progymnasmata (a series of beginning rhetorical exercises dating from the fi rst to the fi ft h century CE) and other rhetorical handbooks (Webb 2009). Although I agree with Webb about the trope's essentially rhetorical nature in the ancient context (cf. below, n25) as well as about the importance of not confusing the ancient and modern defi nitions of the term, I nevertheless fi nd the modern term useful to name a recognizably distinct type of ancient

Disorienting Empire: Republican Latin Poetry's Wanderers, Introduction

Reception and Receptivity in Catullus 64

Cultural Critique, 2010

Cl assical reception implies two interrelated sets of cultural practices. One is the use of speci... more Cl assical reception implies two interrelated sets of cultural practices. One is the use of speciWc classical sources in literary works, paintings, systems of thought, "cultural events," and other forms of cultural production, the whole gamut of citational techniques constituting what is usually addressed by "classical reception studies." Another-often harder to identify with speciWc ancient sources-is the staging of receptivity to the classical past, a notionally passive state but very much dependent on active behaviors and tied, like the Wrst kind, to the occupation of certain social, cultural, and political roles within a given society. Displaying receptivity to the ancient world is intermingled with citation as a guarantee of its collective import, even as such display divides those who are receptive in the same way from those who are not. Indeed, any act of classical reception both invites and excludes other participants. Invitation and exclusion can occur in the same gesture, even with the same audience as their target. When Keats, for example, hears and allows us to hear his Grecian Urn declare, "Beauty is truth, truth beauty," he makes a statement about receptivity to ancient Greece over which learned debate, a sense of not quite being "in" on the meaning of this ultimately cryptic pronouncement, has long continued. 1 Staging receptivity to antiquity is a political practice with a complex history extending back to our classical sources themselves, and so forms a natural complement to the study of reception within a volume such as this one. To underscore this idea, I have chosen to concentrate on a culture among the earliest receivers of the Greek classics, ancient Rome, and, further, on a series of Wctive objects existing in the imagination of an ancient poet and his audience: the Argo, the royal palace of Peleus, and an embroidered coverlet depicting the story of Ariadne, all as described by Catullus in his famous "epyllion" on the

Appius' Indignation: Gossip, Tradition, Performance

TAPA 131 , 2001

Satis/Satura: Reconsidering the "Programmatic Intent" of Horace's Satires 1.1

The Classical World, 2000

Recent readings of Horace's Satires 1.1 have redeemed as programmatic a poem once censured on phi... more

The Comedy of Plunder: Art and Appropriation in Plautus’ Menaechmi

In M. P. Loar, C. MacDonald, and D.-E. Padilla Peralta, eds., Rome, Empire of Plunder: The Dynamics of Cultural Appropriation. Cambridge., 2017

Propertian Elegy as "Restored Behavior": Evoking Cynthia and Cornelia

Helios a Journal Devoted to Critical and Methodological Studies of Classical Culture Literature and Society, Sep 22, 2003

Review of ART AND RHETORIC. J. Elsner, M. Meyer (edd.) Art and Rhetoric in Roman Culture. Pp. xxii + 504, ills. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Cased, £75, US$115. ISBN: 978-1-107-00071-1

The Classical Review, 2015

Words Born and Made: Horace's Defense of Neologisms and the Cultural Poetics of Latin

The Roman Elegist's Dead Lover or The Drama of the Desiring Subject

Reception and Receptivity in Catullus 64

Ecphrasis and Cultural Identification in Petronius' Art Gallery

Publicizing Political Authority in Horace's Satires Book 1: The Sacral and the Demystified

The political significance of Horace's Satires, book 1 has captured the growing attention of scho... more The political significance of Horace's Satires, book 1 has captured the growing attention of scholars in the last thirty years, and a set of predominant ideas on this subject has now emerged. In this perspective , these seemingly " apolitical " poems in fact do important political work, namely, the careful defense of Octavian's and Maecenas' circle against critics, and the subtle articulation of its professed values of moderation, tact, refinement , and friendship through a muted, less vitriolic version of satire. They approach this task, we are now keenly aware, through obfuscation and indirection, concealing such aims beneath a humble façade, and not sparing the regime itself from some of the criticisms launched at its adversaries. Yet in spite of all that has been said on this topic, we still lack a complete picture of how this strikingly unstable and ambiguous poetry responds to what must have been a pressing desire of many romans in this period: the desire for political effectiveness and stability amid ongoing civil conflict and uncertainty. While I agree with the current political reading of Satires 1 as veiled verbal aggression, and as a defensive gesture nevertheless offering tactfully reconfigured notions of libertas, amicitia, and so on, along with a posture of self-seclusion from politics, I believe it does not go far enough in explaining the book's potential appeal to this desire on the part of Horace's audience. In this paper I argue that another political "message" of Satires 1 has yet to be fully recognized: the suggestion that Octavian and his circle can tolerate the satiric demystification of their ties to the sacral realm of state-sponsored cult, including the recently founded cult of the divinized Julius Caesar, and, what is more, understand the importance of maintaining a balance between the sacral and the demystified when publicizing their own authority to a wider audience.

Books by Basil Dufallo

The Ghosts of the Past: Latin Literature, the Dead, and Rome's Transition to a Principate

The Ohio State University Press, 2007

Dead lovers: Erotic Bonds and the Study of Premodern Europe / Basil Dufallo and Peggy McCracken, editors