This conference, which follows up from a panel at the Classical Association conference in Swansea this past April, gathers a group of scholars interested in less commonly valorized states of aesthetic experience in Roman culture: exhaustion, stupidity, anxiety, illness, hunger, and more.

Our conversations aim to identify and illuminate the role of the abject and small, the mean, ugly and weak, poverty and lack in Latin aesthetics. How can centering ugliness and other depleted affects disrupt dominant readings of Latin texts? How can the exploration of aesthetic marginality grant insight into subaltern identities of class, race and ethnicity, gender, sexuality, etc. in Roman culture?