Roger Ulrich (Dartmouth College) – Pulcher in Ligno: Did the Romans Consider Wood Beautiful?
18 June 2026, 16:15-17:30
Old Courtroom, Faculty of Religion, Culture and Society (Oude Boteringestraat 38)
The phrase of St. Thomas Aquinas refers specifically to the wood of the Christian cross, but it raises a simple question: was wood as a substance associated with beauty in antiquity? Or was its primary value one of practical application? The great range of Roman woodworking activities, from harvesting the raw material to creating the finished product, and the ubiquitous nature of wood in every aspect of Roman life, raises the question of how and in what terms wood was valued as an object of beauty by the Romans. Did the use of wood instead of other materials like stone, ivory or metal represent an inferior solution in terms of aesthetics and beauty? Does the fact that wood is a product of a once-living plant imbue it with inherent beauty? This presentation will use both archaeological and literary evidence to explore and define Roman concepts of beauty and consider the relevance of those concepts to Roman woodcraft.
Carole Newlands (University of Colorado Boulder) – Writing with Wood
19 June 2026, 16:15-17:30
Old Courtroom, Faculty of Religion, Culture and Society (Oude Boteringestraat 38)
When talking about the material basis of writing in the ancient Graeco-Roman world, people generally refer to ‘wax tablets,’ overlooking the crucial role of the wood that supports and protects the written word. Wax is highly perishable, wood somewhat less so. Our earliest writing set, hinged with wooden cover and backing, dates to the 14th century BCE, salvaged from what is known as the Uluburun shipwreck off the southern coast of Turkey. There was no trace of wax but the wood was mostly intact. The patterning of the two different woods used in its construction and the ivory of its hinges suggest the value put on wood as both an aesthetic object and a protector of the written word.
My paper will focus on wood in a much later period, the Augustan and imperial ages. I will discuss the use of wood as a material for writing, reading, and compilation, as a vehicle of communication therefore and also of symbolic discourse. In my paper I will discuss the varied uses of the literary medium of wood in the poetry of Virgil, Ovid and Statius. Virgil’s Eclogues, described metaphorically by the poet as ‘silvae,’ provided a provocative basis for Latin poetry’s fascination with writing and the metaphorical possibilities of wood. My overall aim is to show that in a literary context the Romans tended to conceptualise wood not as an inert material but as a creative source of metaphorical discourse with, moreover, mythopoetic agency.