This article argues that the Parthenon frieze was conceived as a choreographed sequences designed to be experienced though ambulatory viewing rather than a static composition. Building on well-established work demonstrating the frieze required oblique viewing through the colonnade, that viewing was conceptually positive, and such viewing was practically achievable, this article asks what the designers gained from these viewing conditions rather than what was lost. To develop this argument, the analysis employs the zoetrope as a heuristic framework-not suggesting the frieze functions literally as a proto-cinematic or cinematic device, but using these principles to illuminate how architectural sculpture engages the moving body and constructs narrative through sequential visual experience, utilizing five structural principles: sequentially, kinetic activation, rhythmic structuring, compressed duration, and embodied spectatorship. Drawing on phenomenological approaches to ancient art, embodied cognition, and the archaeology of the senses, the article offers a new reading of the peplos scene, the compositional rhythm of the cavalcade, and the temporal structure of the frieze as a whole, demonstrating how the frieze's restricted visibility and fragmented sightlines are not obstacles to comprehension but features integral to its design.
This article argues that, in imperial Roman epigraphy, natio functions as an intermediate register of belonging, positioned between civic membership (civitas) and the local language of birthplace and origin (origo, domo). Working from inscriptions that label individuals natione Afer/Afra/Hafra, Maurus, Libycus, and Punica, the discussion shows that this natione + ethnonym formula is rarely an internal descriptor within Roman North Africa, but becomes visible in contexts of mobility, especially among soldiers and naval personnel commemorated in Italy and other provinces. The formula is best understood as identity vocabulary activated in geographical displacement: it can coexist with Roman citizenship, city-based origo, and occupational identifiers, without collapsing into any one of them. A comparative section on natione Sardus clarifies both the wider epigraphic strategy and the specific explanatory power of African ethnonyms. The article closes by situating natio within debates on provincial identity, iura gentis, and imperial universality.
The epirrhema of Frogs has been understood, almost unanimously, as eschewing jokes in favour of serious, practicable advice, earnestly endorsed by the poet. All sigma pi omicron upsilon delta alpha iota alpha, no gamma epsilon lambda omicron iota alpha. But such a reading makes the passage anomalous in all of Aristophanes. This article argues that the passage is not uniquely humourless, but rather consistently parodies the oligarchic sympathies and disdain for change held by a faction of Athenian society. After surveying the state of the debate surrounding Aristophanes' politics and discussing the political context in which Frogs was produced, this article carries out a close chronological reading to demonstrate how the chorus-leader continually undermines himself with patently manipulative and inconsistent rhetoric, which constitutes a parody of a conservative elite viewpoint. Finally, this article considers the play's reception, and argues that there we can observe the widespread tendency to interpret political satire in various ways and to overestimate its effects.
Following the reign of Constantine I, a new expectation arose surrounding the behaviour of the emperor towards the Church, and his sons were expected to follow their father's lead both in imperial policy as well as their own Christology. For Greek ecclesiastical writers during and after this period, the emperors' Christology and dynastic legitimacy was, however, a malleable construction, especially for the characterization of Constantius II as divergent from his family in both Christology and dynastic legitimacy. This article therefore argues that this divergence was weaponized by these ecclesiastical writers to underscore the divergence of Constantius II from both the 'orthodox' faith, and the stance of his family. Ultimately, it will be demonstrated that within the tradition of the Greek ecclesiastical writers, it was not possible to separate perceptions of imperial behaviour and doctrinal subscription and that these ideas were ultimately bound up together, and could be exploited for different narrative purposes.
Despite significant continuity, there are serious impediments to envisaging noble dynasties of the Republic as precursors to the autocratic dynasty that developed under Augustus. The main aims of this paper, therefore, are (i) to describe leading features of the aristocratic dynasties of the Republic, (ii) to discuss reasons why these aristocratic dynasties were by no means simple forerunners to the autocratic dynasty established by Augustus, and (iii) to highlight several extraordinary developments that were needed to achieve the transformation from multiple noble dynasties to a single imperial dynasty. It emerges that there were significant limits to the power and influence of noble dynasties under the Republic, including (inter alia) antipathy to kingship, the sovereignty of the Roman people, the checks on republican magistracies, the fluidity of composition of the nobility, and the absence of anything resembling an office of state or throne.
Human beings' engagement with the world forms the basis to their understanding of it, and the elements of their daily life influence their sense of place. There is a complex dimension to the notion of environment that involves experiencing and understanding oneself in the world. The first part of this article is concerned with current concepts of cognitive geography and the second part considers some comic fragments from the perspective of these concepts. This article proposes that the enactivist study of the representation of geographical space, landscape, and place in Greek comic fragments is key to the interpretation of fragmentary texts that contain geographical data but lack context and additional information.
What can comic fragments teach us that our better-preserved plays cannot? In this chapter, I suggest that the same uncertainties that render fragmentary passages so difficult to understand and interpret are in fact the very features that render them uniquely valuable tools for challenging our assumptions about comic drama. When it comes to assessing the representation of minoritized and/or marginalized figures, fragmentary passages can help to suggest and develop paradigms and approaches that diverge, or break entirely, from mainstream scholarly consensus. But first it is necessary to recognize how certain cognitive biases produced by, inter alia, scholars' deep familiarity with canonical texts and the habits of academic citation and amplification can artificially limit or distort our understanding of abstruse and often decontextualized passages transmitted in fragmentary form. In part 1 of this article, I detail some forms of cognitive bias that shape modern scholarly approaches to ancient texts in general, and which prove particularly tenacious in the face of fragmentary texts. In parts 2-5, I examine how the fragmentary comic corpus represents one traditionally marginalized figure, that of the female sex worker or hetaira, with a particular focus on the famed fourth-century Athenian hetaira Gnathaena. Through a series of deliberately non-traditional interpretations of the characterization of sex workers in a variety of comic fragments, I suggest that certain fragments can be interpreted as part of a positive representation of sex workers, both individually and collectively. This alternative perspective is but one example of how a conscious eschewing of established approaches and familiar patterns of 'major' works can open out new avenues of scholarly understanding, especially when it comes to fragmentary texts.
This article offers a re-reading of concordia by noticing references to, and descriptions of, domestic and family violence (DVF), including intimate partner, sibling, child and elder abuse within the Julio-Claudian dynasty. My argument concerns both history and historiography and seeks to contribute to our understanding of both the history of domestic abuse and family violence and its representation. Dynasty mattered in both of these contexts: history and historiography. Domestic abuse and family violence certainly existed in Rome before the Principate, but imperial dynasticism, in important ways, amplified conditions conducive to DVF. This is, in part, because dynasticism (rather than simply autocracy or one-man-rule) relies on the existence of the family -of heirs and heir-bearers -and because Julio-Claudian dynasticism both placed pressures on members of the family (to marry among themselves (endogamy), to produce heirs, to model or exemplify behaviours and ideals) and exposed those members to unprecedented scrutiny. The end of civil war, represented as the end of discordia and the return of concordia, ushered in dynasty. For members of the dynasty-the princeps, his wife/wives, children, enslaved and freed household members, concordia was fleeting and discordia never came to an end.
People sometimes talk about the screen as though it is a paradigmatically postmodern technology that provokes a paradigmatically postmodern crisis-whereby representations of the world come to supplant because they seem, if not more real, then at least more 'engaging' than the world itself. The insistently presentist character of the discourse surrounding this 'screen crisis' has provoked some media theorists to ask what we can say about the history of the screen, where we should locate its origin, and what that origin might tell us about the screens of today. In what follows, I am going to try to address that inquiry in a different way than media theorists usually do. I will be rooting the history of the screen in water, a natural medium, rather than in human technics. What I am aiming to show is, first, that the surface of water as Roman writers describe it really does function like a screen, and second, that this functionality brings about a different kind of 'screen crisis'-this one arising from the difficulty of distinguishing screen from non-screen-that invites us to reconsider our own relationship with screens.
This article analyses two Selinountine legal curse tablets (or defixiones iudiciariae): BETTARINI 15 (late sixth century Bce) and 20 (early fifth century Bce). The former preserves the earliest known instance of a woman being targeted in a Greek legal curse, while the latter expands the picture by situating women alongside male adversaries within elite networks of xenia. A combined philological, onomastic, and socio-political approach shows that these texts were instruments of litigation in which gender, 'class', and ethnicity intersected in recognizable ways. Their sophisticated language, applied equally to men and women, demonstrates that women could act as visible participants in trials. Commissioned by elite litigants and crafted by 'specialists', these curses reflect the extent to which women's social and political capital made them legitimate threats in the courtroom and, for that very reason, potential targets of curses.
This essay illuminates the key intersection between female socio-economic agency, euergetic behaviour in a semi-private setting, and the phenomenon of professional associations in a polis of Roman Asia, Hierapolis of Phrygia. Professional associations are excellently represented in its municipal epigraphic dossier, serving as a starting point for evaluating women's donations and their socio-economic significance. After analysing the fundamental role and limits of epigraphic texts for assessing issues of autonomous socio-economic agency, the article examines the Hierapolitan benefactresses' funerary bequests, their relationship with the collegia, and similarities and differences with their male counterparts. By parsing which information the benefactresses wanted to convey through their inscribed donations, this essay proves that although benefactresses are quantitatively less represented in bequest documents, their behaviour is qualitatively part and parcel of the same euergetic ideology and practice underpinning male benefactions.
This article uses Pierre Bourdieu's model of capital to examine the social contexts of women's legal petitions that invoke episodes of violence in late antique Egypt. Challenging notions of victimhood and that women's agency must always be seen within a paradigm of challenging gendered hierarchies, it argues that high(er) status women used their capital to negotiate patriarchal systems, rather than try to subvert them. It therefore offers a more nuanced understanding of women's agency in late antiquity and the intersectional nature of power.
In this essay, I am going to examine the material dimensions of hair, both human and animal. The question at stake is, 'why does hair matter?' Why, for example, does Orestes leave a lock of his hair at Agamemnon's tomb in each version of this scene, as staged by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, respectively? Instead of focusing on the ritual and/or symbolic significance of such hair-offerings, I propose that at least part of the answer to why hair matters consists in its unique material properties. Most notably, hair is unlike most of the rest of the human body in that it can be detached without causing bodily harm, but close attention to the physical specificities of hair will also reveal the other features that make hair unique and therefore uniquely suited for Orestes' purpose in offering it to his dead father. Hair, I will argue, is radically indeterminate: it is both a part and not a part of its human source, it is both human and animal, and it is both a sign of human vitality as well as in possession of a vitality of its own.
Although gems were experienced primarily through sight in antiquity, as today, they also stimulated other senses: touch, obviously, but also occasionally hearing, taste, and even smell, not only for the craftsmen who fashioned them but also for those who owned, used, and wore them on their bodies. This essay explores diverse sensory experiences aroused by Greek and Roman gems, utilizing the thirty-seventh book of Pliny the Elder's Natural History and other ancient sources. It also addresses non-canonical senses-such as scale, memory, time, place, movement, rhythm, well-being, and wonder-that were stimulated by these marvellous miniature objects in diverse contexts.
This article investigates the Emperor Julian's relations with three of his female relatives: with his mother Basilina, with the wife of his cousin Constantius II, Eusebia, and with his own wife, Helena the Younger, also the sister of Constantius II. I argue that the relationships with these women not only shaped Julian's agency and ultimately his ability to become Roman emperor, but that he also carefully incorporated these relationships into his imperial self-image, even or particularly after these women's death. Using a combination of legal, literary and material sources, I cast a light especially on Julian's mother and on his wife, widely ignored by modern scholarship on Julian. The article invites us to consider the power that flowed through ancient men's domestic ties created by women, as well as imperial men's acute awareness of this power.
Our view of fragments as pieces on a page, torn from one or another whole, arises from the biological organicism of philosophers, especially Plato and Aristotle. This article turns instead to modern analogues (e.g. Marcel Duchamp's 'readymades') for new ways of conceptualizing the fragment. The investigation centres on a cognitive device that has not garnered sufficient attention: 'pre-quotation', a conscious shaping of their talk by the original authorizing speakers that aims from the start at being excerpted, repeated, and merged into a broader stream of discourse. The device relies in turn on the principle of 'memorability', which has been the subject of recent work in cognitive literary studies. A close reading of Menandrian 'monostikhoi' in combination with analysis of that comic poet's Aspis and of related dramas by Aristophanes and Euripides results in a proposed genealogy of 'fragmentation' and an evaluation of the habit within a variety of social contexts.
This article examines the roles and positions of women in ancient northwestern Greece through a comparative analysis of two categories of inscriptions: formal (manumission contracts from Dodona and Bouthrotos) and personal (oracular tablets from Dodona). Manumission inscriptions reveal women's involvement in property ownership and family decision-making, while also illuminating the complex ties between enslaved and free household members and the potential for social mobility after manumission. Oracular tablets complement this by presenting women as active petitioners in matters of inheritance, marriage, and finance; where enslaved women can be identified, they frequently appear in contexts that expose sexual, reproductive, and quasi-familial ties to those consulting the oracle, underscoring both their vulnerability and their significance within household dynamics. Juxtaposing these corpora reveals broader patterns of female agency, legal capacity, and economic participation, highlighting circumstances in which women conformed to or exceeded traditional constraints of the Greek world between the fourth and second centuries Bce.
It has long been remarked that the classical Latin poets avoided putting a short final vowel before words beginning with sc sp sq st. Although various theories have been put forward to account for this tendency, the few exceptions to it have received less attention, and many remain only partially explained. The object of this paper is to show that by eliminating textually dubious cases of lengthening and non-lengthening before s impure, and thus whittling down the range of authors who allow it to a kindred few, the literary and generic affiliations of this feature can be more clearly discerned and appreciated. New conjectures are offered on the text of Enn. Ann. 91 Skutsch (stabilitaque regni); Catul. 4.18 (impotentias freti), 17.24 (potis stolidum), 22.12 (modo aut scurra), 44.18 (nefarias chartas), 63.53 (gelida ad stabula); Prop. 3.11.67 (Scipiadae classes ubi nunc), 3.19.21 (data uenum), 4.1.41 (spondebant bene iam); Ov. Her. 7.152 (sceptra superba); Manil. 3.364 (ac leuem); Sen. HF 950 (frigida in spatio); Sil. Pun. 9.575 (iam magnum or astridens), 12.209 (quae); Stat. Theb. 6.551 (agile his studium); Mart. 2.66.7-8 (the athetesis thereof), 5.69.3 (nostrorum); and many forgotten suggestions are newly defended.
This article argues that a cognitive approach to interpreting humour in Greek comedy can significantly enhance our understanding of comic fragments. Building on insights from multiple fields, I outline two aspects of humour comprehension that are especially fruitful for Classicists, namely memory and character. As I demonstrate, comedians manipulate audiences' expectations by recruiting information from their memory and comic characters can re-enforce or challenge audience's assumptions. As a test case I use Anaxippus fragment 3 to demonstrate how paying attention to character and audience knowledge allows us to understand comic fragments in a new light. The two subsequent sections elucidate two areas where a cognitive approach to humour permits us to understand these fragments afresh: comic references and running jokes. Analysing fragments of Greek comedy, I argue, reveals how humour functioned as a cultural force in antiquity.
While the abduction of Ganymede was traditionally associated with Zeus' erotic desire and with the boy's subsequent role as cupbearer to the gods, Virgil's treatment of the episode in the Aeneid leaves these elements unstated. This article argues that such silence might respond to a set of pressures already present in ancient engagements with this myth. By situating Virgil's account against its Homeric background, post-Homeric literary developments, philosophical critiques in authors such as Plato, Xenophon, and Cicero, and ancient philological debates on the text of the Iliad, the study reconstructs the range of meanings that may have been available to Virgil and his contemporary readers. His approach thus emerges as a strategic response to the theological and genealogical stakes involved in this myth, particularly their implications for Aeneas and Roman origins.
