Elena Giusti
Biographic Data
| ID | 5626850 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Elena Giusti |
| GIVEN NAMES | Elena |
| FAMILY NAME | Giusti |
| SIGNATURE | GIUSTI E |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Cambridge |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7141-6087 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 12 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 2 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 10 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2014 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Ethnographic Discourses: Rome’s Racialized Africa
In 1988, Congolese philosopher Valentin-Yves Mudimbe called for a study of the influence of Graeco-Roman literature on the European invention of Africa. Whether or not Graeco-Roman literature presents a coherent picture of Africa as a geography and ethnography of alterity, early modern European writings made use of these descriptions to justify European superiority and colonial expansion into African territories. While the aims and contexts of th…
The Cambridge Companion to Classics and Race
Race as a concept has had a fraught role in the history of Classics, woven into its formation as an academic discipline. While the texts and artefacts of the ancient Mediterranean world provide complex understandings of what race might mean and how it might operate, they have also provided fodder for modern racial ideologies. This Companion offers a wide-ranging and groundbreaking overview of 'race' and 'racism' in ancient Mediterranean cultures …
Virgilian Criticism and the Intertextual Aeneid
This review article of Joseph Farrell’s 2021 monograph on Virgil’s Aeneid ( Juno’s Aeneid: A Battle for Heroic Identity , Princeton and Oxford) takes the cue from Farrell’s analysis of Virgil’s intertextuality with the Homeric epics and provides a methodological re-assessment of intertextuality in Virgilian studies and Latin literature more broadly. It attempts to retrace the theoretical history and some of the main applications of Latin intertex…
Africa and the making of Classical literature: On decolonizing Greco-Roman literature syllabi
This article presents the author’s development and teaching of a year-long module on Africa in Greco-Roman literature and its receptions, and the challenges of imagining a decolonized pedagogy in Classics, and specifically in the subfield of Greco-Roman literature. It argues that the equivalence of curriculum ‘diversification’ with ‘decolonization’ can be pernicious in its tokenizing effects, and that a committed practice of decolonizing pedagogy…
Unspoken Rome: Absence in Latin Literature and its Reception
Latin literature is a hotbed of holes and erasures. Its sensitivity to politics leaves it ripe for repression of all sorts of names, places and historical events, while its dense allusivity appears to hide interpretative clues in a network of texts that only the reader's consciousness can make present. This volume showcases innovative approaches to the field of Latin literature, all of which are refracted through this prism of absence, which func…
Casta Diva: Juno’s “Unexpected Pain” in Statius’ Thebaid
The innovative character of Juno in Statius’ Thebaid seems to challenge and correct the previous portrayals of the goddess in Virgil’s Aeneid and Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The present article argues that Statius goes further in this challenge than has so far been recognised, by making both Juno’s ineffective speech and her speechlessness and inaction indicative of the gender imbalance that has long caused her suffering, and her vindictive features, i…
Carthage in Virgil's Aeneid: Staging the Enemy under Augustus
Founded upon more than a century of civil bloodshed, the first imperial regime of ancient Rome, the Principate of Caesar Augustus, looked at Rome's distant and glorious past in order to justify and promote its existence under the disguise of a restoration of the old Republic. In doing so, it used and revisited the history and myth of Rome's major success against external enemies: the wars against Carthage. This book explores the ideological use o…
The Metapoetics of Liber-ty. Horace’s Bacchic Ship in Seneca’s De Tranquillitate Animi
Dithyrambic Iambics
This chapter focuses on Dionysiac themes in Epode 9 and also touches upon the socio-political dimensions of Horace’s Epodes. The author argues that Epode 9 should be acknowledged as the forerunner of Horace’s ‘Bacchic/Dionysiac Poetics’ in the Odes. Dionysus, Giusti observes, is a god ‘defined by his ability to dissolve boundaries and engender confusion’. As such, this chapter suggests that the Bacchic sympotic frame of Epode 9 serves to accentua…
My Enemy’s Enemy is My Enemy
Carthage in Virgil’s Aeneid simultaneously telescopes alterity and sameness: its barbaric and orientalizing traits, highlighted by allusions to Euripides’ Medea and Bacchae and Aeschylus’ Persae, are counterbalanced by the presentation of Dido and her city as a mirroring image of Aeneas and Rome. This chapter argues that the barbaric traits of Carthage create continuity between the Persian Wars, the Punic Wars, and Augustus’ proposed wars against…
Caesar Criss-Crossing the Rubicon: A Palindromic Acrostic in Lucan (1.218–22)
Lucan's account of Caesar crossing the Rubicon (1.213–22) is dense with metapoetic allusion. Although the river has been specified as a small stream at Caesar's arrival ( ut uentum est parui Rubiconis ad undas , 1.185), it becomes swollen, tumidus , as soon as Caesar ‘breaks the delay of war’ and ‘carries his standards in haste over the [now] swollen river’ ( inde moras soluit belli tumidum que per amnem | signa tulit propere , 1.204-5). This has…
Virgil's Carthaginians at Aen . 1.430–6: Cyclopes in Bees’ Clothing
Virgil's poetry has long been recognised as delving into a poetics of comparison which employs sudden shifts from the miniature to the gigantic. So too have Virgilian similes long been singled out as a privileged locus where complex inter- and intra-textual allusions serve to highlight the primary role that these similes play in the narrative and poetic context of Virgil's work. Along these lines, this paper addresses one such simile at Aene.d 1.…
Caesar Criss-Crossing the Rubicon: A Palindromic Acrostic in Lucan (1.218–22)
Lucan's account of Caesar crossing the Rubicon (1.213–22) is dense with metapoetic allusion. Although the river has been specified as a small stream at Caesar's arrival ( ut uentum est parui Rubiconis ad undas , 1.185), it becomes swollen, tumidus , as soon as Caesar ‘breaks the delay of war’ and ‘carries his standards in haste over the [now] swollen river’ ( inde moras soluit belli tumidum que per amnem | signa tulit propere , 1.204-5). This has…
Virgil's Carthaginians at Aen . 1.430–6: Cyclopes in Bees’ Clothing
Virgil's poetry has long been recognised as delving into a poetics of comparison which employs sudden shifts from the miniature to the gigantic. So too have Virgilian similes long been singled out as a privileged locus where complex inter- and intra-textual allusions serve to highlight the primary role that these similes play in the narrative and poetic context of Virgil's work. Along these lines, this paper addresses one such simile at Aene.d 1.…
Caesar Criss-Crossing the Rubicon: A Palindromic Acrostic in Lucan (1.218–22)
Lucan's account of Caesar crossing the Rubicon (1.213–22) is dense with metapoetic allusion. Although the river has been specified as a small stream at Caesar's arrival ( ut uentum est parui Rubiconis ad undas , 1.185), it becomes swollen, tumidus , as soon as Caesar ‘breaks the delay of war’ and ‘carries his standards in haste over the [now] swollen river’ ( inde moras soluit belli tumidum que per amnem | signa tulit propere , 1.204-5). This has…
Dithyrambic Iambics
This chapter focuses on Dionysiac themes in Epode 9 and also touches upon the socio-political dimensions of Horace’s Epodes. The author argues that Epode 9 should be acknowledged as the forerunner of Horace’s ‘Bacchic/Dionysiac Poetics’ in the Odes. Dionysus, Giusti observes, is a god ‘defined by his ability to dissolve boundaries and engender confusion’. As such, this chapter suggests that the Bacchic sympotic frame of Epode 9 serves to accentua…
My Enemy’s Enemy is My Enemy
Carthage in Virgil’s Aeneid simultaneously telescopes alterity and sameness: its barbaric and orientalizing traits, highlighted by allusions to Euripides’ Medea and Bacchae and Aeschylus’ Persae, are counterbalanced by the presentation of Dido and her city as a mirroring image of Aeneas and Rome. This chapter argues that the barbaric traits of Carthage create continuity between the Persian Wars, the Punic Wars, and Augustus’ proposed wars against…
The Metapoetics of Liber-ty. Horace’s Bacchic Ship in Seneca’s De Tranquillitate Animi
Carthage in Virgil's Aeneid: Staging the Enemy under Augustus
Founded upon more than a century of civil bloodshed, the first imperial regime of ancient Rome, the Principate of Caesar Augustus, looked at Rome's distant and glorious past in order to justify and promote its existence under the disguise of a restoration of the old Republic. In doing so, it used and revisited the history and myth of Rome's major success against external enemies: the wars against Carthage. This book explores the ideological use o…
Casta Diva: Juno’s “Unexpected Pain” in Statius’ Thebaid
The innovative character of Juno in Statius’ Thebaid seems to challenge and correct the previous portrayals of the goddess in Virgil’s Aeneid and Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The present article argues that Statius goes further in this challenge than has so far been recognised, by making both Juno’s ineffective speech and her speechlessness and inaction indicative of the gender imbalance that has long caused her suffering, and her vindictive features, i…
Unspoken Rome: Absence in Latin Literature and its Reception
Latin literature is a hotbed of holes and erasures. Its sensitivity to politics leaves it ripe for repression of all sorts of names, places and historical events, while its dense allusivity appears to hide interpretative clues in a network of texts that only the reader's consciousness can make present. This volume showcases innovative approaches to the field of Latin literature, all of which are refracted through this prism of absence, which func…
Africa and the making of Classical literature: On decolonizing Greco-Roman literature syllabi
This article presents the author’s development and teaching of a year-long module on Africa in Greco-Roman literature and its receptions, and the challenges of imagining a decolonized pedagogy in Classics, and specifically in the subfield of Greco-Roman literature. It argues that the equivalence of curriculum ‘diversification’ with ‘decolonization’ can be pernicious in its tokenizing effects, and that a committed practice of decolonizing pedagogy…
Virgilian Criticism and the Intertextual Aeneid
This review article of Joseph Farrell’s 2021 monograph on Virgil’s Aeneid ( Juno’s Aeneid: A Battle for Heroic Identity , Princeton and Oxford) takes the cue from Farrell’s analysis of Virgil’s intertextuality with the Homeric epics and provides a methodological re-assessment of intertextuality in Virgilian studies and Latin literature more broadly. It attempts to retrace the theoretical history and some of the main applications of Latin intertex…
Ethnographic Discourses: Rome’s Racialized Africa
In 1988, Congolese philosopher Valentin-Yves Mudimbe called for a study of the influence of Graeco-Roman literature on the European invention of Africa. Whether or not Graeco-Roman literature presents a coherent picture of Africa as a geography and ethnography of alterity, early modern European writings made use of these descriptions to justify European superiority and colonial expansion into African territories. While the aims and contexts of th…
The Cambridge Companion to Classics and Race
Race as a concept has had a fraught role in the history of Classics, woven into its formation as an academic discipline. While the texts and artefacts of the ancient Mediterranean world provide complex understandings of what race might mean and how it might operate, they have also provided fodder for modern racial ideologies. This Companion offers a wide-ranging and groundbreaking overview of 'race' and 'racism' in ancient Mediterranean cultures …
Classical Antiquity Studies (10 works) · Art (8 works) · History (7 works) · Literature (6 works) · Philosophy (6 works) · Organic Chemistry Synthesis Methods (4 works) · Political science (4 works) · Politics (4 works) · Law (3 works) · Poetry (3 works)