Qualis artifex pereo! : Nero the Great Contriver

In 2009, a team of French archaeologists found and excavated what remains of Nero’s revolving dining room. In this lecture, I draw on recent work in kinetic architecture to investigate how guests might have experienced this extraordinary space and what the emperor wished to communicate with it. My presentation is part of larger book project that explores the political significance of Julio-Claudian emperors’ professions of interest and investments in science and technology.

About the Speaker:

Serena Connolly is Professor of Classics at Rutgers – New Brunswick. Her first book, Lives Behind the Laws: The World of the Codex Hermogenianus, considered late Roman emperors’ responses to the legal problems of their ordinary subjects through the lens of social history. In her second book, Wisdom from Rome: Reading Roman Society and European Education in the Distichs of Cato, her interests shifted to the most influential text you have probably never heard of, though you should: for about one thousand years, the Distichs were the first Latin text of every student across Europe and latterly the Americas. She is currently wrapping up work on a new book, in which she’ll argue that science and technology as subjects of sustained and purposeful cultivation were a source of power to Julio-Claudian emperors.

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