The Introduction first defines the book’s understanding of “becoming lost” and identifies some Latin words that assist in isolating the motif in Republican verse (error/errare, vagus/vagari, etc.). It then turns to the fragmentary Latin poets before Plautus in whose work the theme occurs, namely, Livius Andronicus and Naevius, to show that one can trace the poetic figuration of becoming lost in the geographical regions of Roman power back to the earliest surviving Latin verse and the earliest moments of Roman overseas expansion. Next, in place of the usual chapter-by-chapter summary, the introduction outlines a series of precedents in Greek myth and literature, as well as in actual lived experience, for the poetic narratives that the individual chapters treat in more detail. Finally, the chapter lays out the modern theoretical assumptions with which the whole book is in dialogue. For the terms “disorientation,” “queerness,” and indeed the phrase “getting lost,” the whole book is indebted above all to Sarah Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. For Ahmed, queerness is an effect of disorientation understood in terms of empire, as empire bears upon the construction of sexuality and other aspects of identity. Ahmed’s work, in turn, draws upon a strain of postcolonial theory that has become important (and contested) within historical, archaeological, and literary Roman-empire studies since the turn of the twenty-first century. The Introduction thus concludes by articulating pertinent connections between Ahmed, postcolonial theory, and the scholarship on Rome.
Enfolding the Hand, Entrancing the Eye: Erica Baum’s Dog Ear