The fall meeting of the New York Classical Club will be held on Saturday, October 19, at 4:00 pm at the Nightingale-Bamford School, East End Student Center, 20 East 92nd Street. Professor Craig Williams, Associate Professor of Classics in Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center, will speak on ÒMartial and the Art of Allusion: Epigrams 2.41Ó; he describes his topic as follows:

Martial 2.41 begins by quoting a line from Ovid and telling us that it is doing so. Tantalizingly, the quoted verse is nowhere to be found in the extant Ovidian corpus, but scholars have argued that it refers to one or possibly two distinct lines from the third book of the Ars amatoria. What are we to make of a self-identified quotation that is apparently no such thing, and that may constitute, moreover, a simultaneous allusion to two different passages? Beginning with the problem of the opening quotation, my discussion then takes the entire epigram as a case study not only in Martial's allusive craft but also in the art of allusion in Roman poetry in general.