About

Anthony Corbeill is a faculty member in the Department of Classics at the University of Virginia. His research focuses on various aspects of ancient Roman culture, including gestures, political humor, religious prodigies, and oratory. Corbeill has authored several books, such as 'Sexing the World: Grammatical Gender and Biological Sex in Ancient Rome,' 'Nature Embodied: Gesture in Ancient Rome,' and 'Controlling Laughter: Political Humor in the Late Roman Republic,' which explore the cultural meanings of Roman gestures, the intersection of language and biological sex, and the role of humor in political contexts. His scholarly work also includes detailed analyses of Roman rhetoric, invective, and religious phenomena, such as prodigies and divine responses, with a particular interest in how these elements reflect and influence Roman societal and political life. Corbeill's research extends to the study of Roman oratory, religious practices, and the cultural significance of gestures and symbols, contributing to a deeper understanding of the social and political fabric of ancient Rome.

Research topics

• Art
• Political Science
• Linguistics
• History
• Law
• Philosophy
• Literature

Selected publications

• Hearing the Earth Speak: Paralinguistic Mutterings in Cicero, De haruspicum responsis

  2023-12-18

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  During the Roman Republic, prodigies provided a means for extralinguistic communication between divine and human realms: these phenomena were regularly debated in the senate to determine what, if anything, they may connote. In 56 BC, rumblings in northern Latium prompted the senate to elicit a written response from the Etruscan haruspices to explain what these noises were saying. This response provides the occasion for Cicero's De haruspicum responsis. Given the speech's subject matter, Cicero exploits paralinguistic phenomena throughout as a way of demonstrating the connection between his own words and the external world. I focus on three features in particular: the manipulation of grammatical gender; prose rhythm; and the use of alliteration, homoioteleuton, and hiatus in describing the prodigy under discussion. Through these rhetorical and stylistic features Cicero underscores the relationship upon which the system of Roman prodigies depends: the intersection and interaction of language, nature, and morality.

  PublisherDOI

• Reseñas de libros

  Exemplaria Classica · 2023

  • Art

  some ancient and modern scholars') as a rather negligible position, labelling it 'unlikely, if not impossible'. 12This is too unbalanced; both is possible.ad 425: Schein points out the parallel between the eleven-days interval of the gods' absence from Olympos and the same interval during which the gods supporting the Greeks refuse the burial of Hector's dead body in 24.23-32.This is surely right and fits the general pattern of similarities between Book 1 and Book 24. 13 But there is a caveat, which Schein does not mention: The interval of eleven days is convenient in the Homeric formula-system; there is even another one in Book 24: the truce for Hector's burial envisaged by his father Priam (24.667).This makes the proposed parallel less likely. 14 But these are minor criticisms.Overall, Schein has produced a reliable companion for reading the first Book of the Iliad, which in the future will not be missing from any desk on which Homer is studied.The extensive bibliography provides an excellent starting point for anyone wishing to delve into the relevant topics; the division into editions, commentaries and translations on the one hand and books and articles on the other seems to be more of a hindrance than helpful, especially since the former does not only contain books specific to Homer.Two excellent indices facilitate the accessibility.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• L

  2023-05-25

  other
  PublisherDOI

• Creating Roman Memories of Plautus

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2023-04-27 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  While researching the significance of the various ways in which Latin speakers interpreted the phenomenon of grammatical gender, I spent a substantial amount of time examining ancient Roman scholars, in particular the Latin grammarians.1 Even a cursory reading of the accounts that these scholars have compiled about the masculine, feminine, and neuter soon reveals how they credit different poets with varying degrees of authority in the use and treatment of grammatical gender, even when that treatment may seem inconsequential to modern eyes. As one might expect, the grammarians regularly consider Vergil’s linguistic finesse indisputable, whereas they deem other poets, Lucan for example, to possess ‘lesser authority’ (minor … auctoritas).2 Evaluative remarks such as these prompted me to wonder what characteristics were thought to constitute the ‘poetic authority’ that informed scholars from antiquity in the evaluation and ranking of poets and whether these criteria affected the ways in which poetry was read and evaluated by ancient readers other than grammarians and other scholars.

  PublisherDOI

• D

  2023-05-25

  other
  PublisherDOI

• Physical Excess as a Marker of Genre in the Elder Seneca

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2020 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Literature
  • Art
  • History

  This chapter stems from the observation that physical eloquence is often relegated to lesser importance than its linguistic counterpart in Senecan declamation, especially when compared to the wealth of information we have on Cicero’s use of gesture. However, <italic>actio</italic> remains a pivotal element of Roman declamation. To draw attention to this element, this chapter outlines several types of bodily movement and vocal modulation which Seneca attributes to his declaimers in the <italic>Controversiae</italic> and <italic>Suasoriae</italic>. In so doing, it not only describes the practice and function of these actions but also explores how they build into the characteristics of Senecan declamation, which range from the use of <italic>personae</italic> and <italic>sententiae</italic> to prose rhythm and the figure of the ideal orator. The analysis ultimately explains why declaimers’ gestures, which are often dismissed as ‘excessive’ by modern readers, acted as effective tools for communication within their original context.

  PublisherDOI

• DINING DEVIANTS IN ROMAN POLITICAL INVECTIVE

  Princeton University Press eBooks · 2020 · 17 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Political Science
  • Law
  PublisherDOI

• Nature Embodied

  Princeton University Press eBooks · 2018-06-05

  book1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• GESTURE IN EARLY ROMAN LAW:

  2018-05-14 · 25 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Clodius’<i>Contio de haruspicum responsis</i>

  2018-02-22 · 46 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This chapter has two parts. The first offers an imaginative reconstruction, in English, of a no longer extant contional speech by Publius Clodius Pulcher, delivered prior to Cicero’s own surviving speech De haruspicum responsis (‘On the responses of the haruspices,’ Spring 56 bc). This reconstruction is based on fragments derived from the Ciceronian oration, supplemented by examples of anti-Ciceronian invective drawn from other ancient sources. The second part offers a detailed analysis of the language and rhetoric of the Clodian fragments of the speech, situating each into a hypothetical line of reasoning based on Cicero’s own argument and on recent political and religious events. At least seven fragments from Clodius’s contio are identified, none of which appears in Malcovati’s Oratorum Romanorum Fragmenta Liberae Rei Publicae.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Luca Grillo

  University of Fribourg

  10 shared

• Catherine Steel

  Hong Kong Jockey Club

  5 shared

• Christopher B. Krebs

  Stanford University

  4 shared

• Ruth Morello

  3 shared

• Giuseppe Pezzini

  Corpus Christi College

  2 shared

• Debra L. Nousek

  Western University

  2 shared

• Henriette van der Blom

  2 shared

• Sergio Casali

  2 shared

Labs

• University of Virginia - ClassicsPI

Awards & honors

• Charles J. Goodwin Award of Merit (2016)