could you say more about your mphil thesis 😳
hrgghg it was about thee battle of pharsalus in lucan as a point where time stops working properly and starts getting really haunted. a lot of it was looking at lucan’s references to the insufficiency of the consular fasti during caesar’s civil war and after / ‘black days’ in the roman calendar and the dies alliensis as an archetypal ‘defeat so doomed and terrible it ended up in the calendar’. and then contrasting that with julius caesar’s calendar reforms (did you know some italian fasti do record pharsalus, and as an uncomplicated victory? and there are a few calendars in the greek east that start new calendrical eras counting from caesar’s victory at pharsalus?) then there was a bit at the end speculating about whether lucan’s de incendio urbis made a point out of the great fire of rome occurring on the anniversary of the dies alliensis that is like. well we can’t know unless they find de incendio urbis in the villa of the papyri but based on lucan’s other references to the gallic sack i am inclined to say yes.
there are a lot of things i would do differently now and i did leave a lot of it quite last minute 😭😭😭 but it did slay at least a little bit. although i am convinced i only got distinction because of my awesome section titles
