Associate Professor of Classics Jesse Weiner is the co-editor of 
Searching for the Cinaedus in Ancient Rome, published recently by Brill. The book is part of the Mnemosyne Supplements series, which, according to Brill’s website, has now published “almost 400 scholarly works on all aspects of the Ancient World.”
Weiner says the peer-reviewed volume “investigates male homoeroticism and ‘deviant’ masculinity in antiquity.” He notes that the term cinaedus is complicated because it registers a diverse array of meanings over the course of a thousand or more years and “because we have no record of individuals claiming the identity as their own.”
In addition to Weiner’s contributions of the introduction and an essay on the cinaedus in Plautus’ Roman comedies, the book includes an article on the cinaedus in a poem of Catullus provided by Professor of Classics Emerita Barbara Gold. It also contains a piece about the afterlife of the cinaedus in Byzantine rhetoric, written by former Hamilton visiting professor Mark Masterson, who now teaches in New Zealand at Victoria University of Wellington.
Earlier this month, Weiner presented a paper at the Classical Association of the Atlantic States (CAAS) annual meeting in Philadelphia. His talk, “Reimagining Ruins in Lucan’s Bellum Civile,” examined the reception of material culture in Lucan’s epic poem about the civil war between Caesar and Pompey that effectively ended the Roman Republic. Weiner is also a member of the CAAS program committee.
