Matthew Loar ’07 Authors Paper in the Peer-Reviewed Classical Quarterly The director of fellowships and student research dissects and expands upon possible allusion in Virgil’s “Aeneid.”

By Lily Caldwell
October 22, 2024

Matthew Loar ’07, director of fellowships and student research at Washington and Lee University, recently authored a paper published in The Classical Quarterly, a peer-reviewed journal centered around the Greek and Latin language.

Loar’s article, titled “An Allusion to the Binding of Appius Claudius Caecus in Aeneid Book 8?” examines the story of the hero Hercules’ mythic battle with the monster Cacus in book eight of Virgil’s “Aeneid.” The article contends that through wordplay, semantic associations and references to sight and Cacus’ eyes, Virgil invokes the memory of the fourth-century B.C.E, censor Appius Claudius Caecus, who was allegedly blinded by Hercules after enraging the god. Thus, the allusion in Virgil’s poem helps to underpin the cautionary theme of properly observing religious rituals.

“My scholarly work examines literary and artistic depictions of Roman myths of Hercules during the first century B.C.E.,” said Loar. “This was a time of dramatic social and political upheaval in Italy, and I’m especially interested in the ways that writers and artists of this period invoked these myths to navigate Rome’s violent transition from Republic to Empire. This particular project emerged out of a throwaway comment I made at the end of a keynote lecture I delivered at a Princeton University conference several years ago, and it’s gratifying to have it finally seeing the light of day after so many years of chipping away at it.”

Loar is in his sixth year as a staff member at W&L and is also the director of the Beinecke Scholarship Program. He previously worked at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln as a professor of classics. Loar earned a Bachelor of Arts in classics from W&L, a Master of Studies in women’s studies from Kellogg College at the University of Oxford (U.K.) and a Ph.D. in classics from Stanford University. Along with this publication, he has also co-edited two volumes with Cambridge University Press and has been published in Histos, Classical World and Classical Philology.

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