About

Sander Goldberg is a UCLA Distinguished Research Professor specializing in Roman literature and its relationship to Roman life. His scholarly work includes a new edition of the Republican poet Ennius for the Loeb series, prepared in partnership with Gesine Manuwald, which was published in 2018. He authored a monograph on Terence’s Andria for Bloomsbury in 2019 and a Cambridge Green and Yellow commentary on Andria in 2022. His forthcoming projects include chapters on epic diction for a volume on early Latin and on the role of fragmentary texts in literary history for volumes edited by Jim Adams, Anna Chahoud, Giuseppe Pezzini, Henry Spellman, and Giacomo Fedeli. Current research also involves chapters on stage performance and related genres from the Greek fourth century to the Roman first century for a new Oxford history of classical literature, as well as an inquiry into the life and death of Usher Gahagan, the only editor of Latin texts ever hanged at Tyburn. In addition to his research, Goldberg continues to teach graduate and undergraduate Latin courses and advises students interested in Roman literature of the Republic and its legacy. His projects include exploring Roman oratory through a series of experiments in the performance of Ciceronian speeches, aiming to identify parameters of Roman rhetorical performance beyond recreating authentic ancient delivery. Goldberg also played a key role in transitioning the Oxford Classical Dictionary into a digital research tool, expanding its scope and updating its content to reflect modern scholarly needs, now accessible through online platforms.

Research topics

• Art
• Literature
• Theology
• Aesthetics
• Philosophy
• Political Science
• Computer Science
• Classics
• Law
• Psychology
• History
• Visual arts
• Art history

Selected publications

• Jochen Schultheiß (Hg.): Tragicorum Romanorum Fragmenta. Vol. IV. Accius.

  Gnomon · 2026-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Writing Literary History in the Greek and Roman World

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2024 · 13 citations

  • Computer Science
  • Literature
  • History

  Covering a wide variety of Greek and Latin texts that span from the Archaic period down to Late Antiquity, this volume represents the first concerted attempt to understand ancient literary history in its full complexity and on its own terms. Abandoning long-standing misconceptions derived from the misleading application of modern assumptions and standards, the volume rehabilitates an often neglected but fundamentally important subject: the Greeks' and Romans' representations of the origins and development of their own literary traditions. The fifteen contributors to this volume evince the pervasiveness and diversity of ancient literary history as well as the manifold connections between its manifestations in a variety of texts. Taken as a whole, this volume argues that studying ancient literary history should not only provide insight into the Greek and Roman world but also provoke us to think reflexively about how we go about writing the history of ancient literature today.

  PublisherDOI

• Aristophanes: Cavalry

  Bloomsbury Publishing Plc eBooks · 2023-11-21 · 1 citations

  bookSenior author

  <JATS1:p>Offering for the first time a student introduction to Aristophanes’ most explosive political satire, this volume is an essential guide to the context, themes and later reception of Cavalry. The ancient comedy is a fascinating insight into demagoguery and political rhetoric in classical Athens. These are subjects that resonate with a modern audience more now than ever before.</JATS1:p> <JATS1:p>Originally performed in 424 bce, Cavalry was the first play Aristophanes directed himself and it was awarded first prize. It targets the Athenian demagogue, Cleon, who had risen to prominence since the death of Pericles and to pre-eminence after an audacious victory over Sparta in 425 bce. In Cavalry, Aristophanes attacks Cleon’s popularity with the masses, but also criticises the democracy itself as guilty of gullibility, self-interest and political shortsightedness. As the play shows, the only hope of escape from the crisis is for Athens to find a leader even more popular Cleon. And who better to be more foul-mouthed, depraved and shameless than a sausage-seller, if only because he turns out in the end to have a good heart and a true love of traditional Athenian values?</JATS1:p>

  PublisherDOI

• Plautus: Trinummus

  Bloomsbury Academic eBooks · 2023-01-01 · 1 citations

  bookSenior author

  Plautus’ Trinummus brings to the stage a story of buried treasure, deception, an unlikely betrothal, and a surprise homecoming from a perilous voyage, just in the nick of time. And yet, for all this potential, scholars and critics over the years have repeatedly panned Trinummus as the least representative sample of Plautus’ style and too boring for popular enjoyment. However, as is the case with many so-called delinquents, I maintain that Trinummus is just misunderstood. In this volume, I set out to provide the extra context and analysis necessary for readers to appreciate just how clever, and humorous, Trinummus really is. Each chapter tackles one or two important questions for the study of Roman comedy generally, followed by analysis and close readings from Trinummus that explore these questions in more detail. Topics include stock characters and typical plots, adaptation from Greek originals, the social and historical context for Plautine drama, theater at religious festivals, moralizing in Roman comedy, and the reception of Trinummus over the years. Along the way, we will make frequent stops to imagine the vibrancy of the play in performance, and hopefully get a few laughs in too. In addition to old-fashioned slapstick and fanciful wordplay, much of the laughter in Trinummus wells up from the deep waters of anxiety, deprivation, and subjugation shared between the performers and many of the everyday Romans in the audience. Laughter relieves and critiques, but also flashes glimpses of how life could be different—a message that still resonates today.

  PublisherDOI

• The Language of Early Latin Epic

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2023-07-27

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  A calculated use of language for deliberate stylistic effects, intended to distinguish epic diction from contemporary speech, characterised formal Latin poetry from the very beginning. This review of early epic language aims to explore the main sources, mechanisms and effects of these first experiments in the creation of a Latin epic style. It is a fact that the epic poets’ record of achievement is obscured by its survival in merely fragmentary form, by the close congruence of epic and tragic styles, and by our own uncertainty about the relative popularity of those two genres and their contemporary influence. Consequently, this study deals less with specifics of epic language than with the process that generated it, as poets experimented with archaisms, calques and neologisms, built upon the practice of their Greek models, and responded to the example of their Latin compatriots. In striving to develop a style worthy of epic, they brought to the task the same confident, competitive spirit that typified all their endeavours, building consciously on the achievement of their predecessors, and in the process leaving something of great value to a wide range of successors.

  PublisherDOI

• Plautus: Menaechmi

  2022 · 3 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Literature
  • Art

  This new volume in the Bloomsbury Ancient Comedy Companions series is perfect for students coming to one of Plautus’ most whimsical, provocative, and influential plays for the first time, and a useful first point of reference for scholars less familiar with Roman comedy. Menaechmi is a tale of identical twin brothers who are separated as young children and reconnect as adults following a series of misadventures due to mistaken identity. A gluttonous parasite, manipulative courtesan, shrewish wife, crotchety father-in-law, bumbling cook, saucy handmaid, quack doctor, and band of thugs comprise the colourful cast of characters. Each encounter with a misidentified twin destabilizes the status quo and provides valuable insight into Roman domestic and social relationships.

  PublisherDOI

• Aristophanes: Lysistrata

  Bloomsbury Academic eBooks · 2022-01-01 · 1 citations

  bookSenior author

  &lt;i&gt;Lysistrata&lt;/i&gt; is the most notorious of Aristophanes' comedies. First staged in 411 BCE, its action famously revolves around a sex strike launched by the women of Greece in an attempt to force their husbands to end the war. With its risqué humour, vibrant battle of the sexes, and themes of war and peace, &lt;i&gt;Lysistrata&lt;/i&gt; remains as daring and thought-provoking today as it would have been for its original audience in Classical Athens.&#13;\n&#13;\n&lt;i&gt;Aristophanes: Lysistrata&lt;/i&gt; is a lively and engaging introduction to this play aimed at students and scholars of classical drama alike. It sets &lt;i&gt;Lysistrata&lt;/i&gt; in its social and historical context, looking at key themes such as politics, religion and its provocative portrayal of women, as well as the play's language, humour and personalities, including the formidable and trailblazing Lysistrata herself. &lt;i&gt;Lysistrata&lt;/i&gt; has often been translated, adapted and performed in the modern era and this book also traces the ways in which it has been re-imagined and re-presented to new audiences. As this reception history reveals, &lt;i&gt;Lysistrata's&lt;/i&gt; appeal in the modern world lies not only in its racy subject matter, but also in its potential to be recast as a feminist, pacifist or otherwise subversive play that openly challenges the political and social status quo.

  PublisherDOI

• Plautus: Mostellaria

  Bloomsbury Publishing Plc eBooks · 2022-01-01 · 2 citations

  bookSenior author

  <JATS1:p>Plautus’ Mostellaria is one of ancient Rome’s most breezy and amusing comedies. The plot is ridiculously simple: when a father returns home after three years abroad, a clever slave named Tranio devises deceptions to conceal that the son has squandered a fortune partying with pals and purchasing his prized prostitute’s freedom. Tranio convinces the gullible father that his house is haunted, that his son has purchased the neighbor’s house, and that he must repay a moneylender. Plautus animates this skeletal plot with farcical scenes of Tranio’s slapstick abuse of a rustic slave, the young lover’s maudlin song lamenting his prodigality, a cross-gender dressing routine, a drunken party, a flustered moneylender, spirited slaves rebuffing the father, and Tranio hoodwinking father and neighbor simultaneously.</JATS1:p> <JATS1:p>This is the first book-length study of Mostellaria in its literary and historical contexts. It aims to help readers and theater practitioners appreciate the script as both cultural document and performed comedy. As a cultural document, the play portrays a range of Roman preoccupations, including male ideologies of the acquisition, use and abuse of property, relations between owners and enslaved persons, the traffic in women, tensions between city and country, the appropriation and adaptation of Greek culture, and the specters of ancestry and surveillance. As a performed comedy, the play celebrates the power of creativity, improvisation and metatheater. In Mostellaria’s farce, sleek simplicity replaces complexity as Plautus aggrandizes his comic hero by stripping plot to the minimum and leaving Tranio to operate alone with no resources other than his quick wit. A chapter on Mostellaria’s reception considers modernity’s continuing fascination with Plautine farce and trickery.</JATS1:p>

  PublisherDOI

• From Homer’s Banquet to Fauchois’ Feast

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2021-04-17

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  The tragedian Aeschylus is said to have called his plays slices from Homer’s banquet, by which he presumably meant slices from what Homer had left behind on the table.1 It is much easier, as Aeschylus knew (and so famously did), to develop stories that Homer probably knew but did not tell or (as Roman poets eventually did) to weave new stories using Homeric techniques than it is to rework in an artistically effective way what Homer had already done in the Iliad and Odyssey. A change of genre may certainly make that task easier, and the aim of this essay is to look specifically at what happens when a slice from Homer’s own platter becomes a libretto and then, in turn, a performable opera. The specific process in question involves the self-styled poème lyrique of the prolific dramatist, librettist, and actor René Fauchois and Pénélope, the opera made from it by Gabriel Fauré.

  PublisherDOI

• <i>Ennius and the</i>fata librorum

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2020-04-09

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  If readers determine the fate of books, we might think the Annals of Quintus Ennius enjoyed but ephemeral success. Its fragments are few, its original audience and intent unclear. In this paper I ask how so vast a monument became such a ruin, and what the evidence of its survival reveals about the process of its destruction. Those who knew the poem best are among that handful of Romans – Cicero and Vergil prominent among them – whom we know best. What did "ordinary" Romans know, pretend to know, or could they be expected to know of it? Close attention to the poem's reception suggests that it was best known through favored extracts and that the idea of the Annals was more firmly fixed in the Roman literary consciousness than the poem itself.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Ian C. Storey

  12 shared

• David Christenson

  University of Arizona

  12 shared

• T. H. M. Gellar-Goad

  6 shared

• Viola Klein

  5 shared

• Matthew Wright

  5 shared

• Alan H. Sommerstein

  5 shared

• George Fredric Franko

  4 shared

• A. J. Woodman

  4 shared