Abstract This article takes the cue from Horace’s ‘Ode to Licinius’ ( Ode 2.10) to theorise a mode of reading Horatian lyric that both concedes to historicism and embraces hermeneutic aporia while keeping attuned to the affective dimensions of poetry. It reads both the ‘Ode to Licinius’ and the second ‘Ode to Virgil’ ( Ode 4.12) as teasing ‘suspicious’ historicist readers into the delusion that historical accounts offer a privileged key to poetic interpretation. Ode 2.10, which invokes historical context only to refuse us the key to access it, becomes a programmatic declaration of poetics and hermeneutics, a poignant meditation on the remits of poetry and history in the Augustan period and beyond.
Abstract From the later fourth century a.d ., public veneration of pagan gods was illegal. Worship of the old gods had to move to private settings. The article presents results from recent excavations in the House of Kybele at Aphrodisias that provide the clearest archaeological evidence so far identified for the continuation of private pagan cult in Late Antiquity and for some of its particular characteristics. Excavation in 2024–25 exposed an elaborate underground complex, in a private part of the house, equipped with surrounding tunnels, pagan cult paraphernalia and a number of small marble figures of Kybele and other gods — iconic, aniconic and of high quality. It is striking that the complex was still in operation in the early seventh century. The exceptional quality of the archaeological evidence and its secure chronology make it possible to examine not only the physical setting of an extensive residential pagan complex, but also some of the ritual practices carried out within it over the course of three centuries, from the early fourth to the early seventh century a.d .
Abstract An argument for locating Palladas’ floruit in the early fourth century, first advanced in 2009, has met with a mixed reception. This article buttresses the argument and continues the work of integrating this evidence into accounts of the early fourth century. The topic is Palladas’ ekphrastic epigrams, which exhibit an original theme of the gods transformed. It is argued here that these reflect Constantine’s widespread confiscation of temple statues, some of which were publicly destroyed while others were erected in Constantinople. The heart of the article considers the one Palladan ekphrasis that has seemed to some to be unrelated to the rest. Anth. Gr . 16.207 describes an Eros who is gentle and kind, but who is also master over land and sea. This statue, it is argued, was one of Constantine’s confiscations that had been erected in Constantinople, where it was transformed into an expression of imperial ideology. The article also considers the art-historical argument that this statue may, in fact, have been Praxiteles’ Parian Eros. This case is one indication among several that the temple statues confiscated under Constantine and erected in Constantinople were palimpsests: their original significance had been erased and they were transformed into something new.
