Abstract: In this paper, I argue that nectar and ambrosia are imagined in archaic hexameter poetry as the divine equivalents of fruits, both in their status as markers of inclusion in an elite group, and in their association with freedom from aging and decay. Drawing on archaeobotanical evidence, I analyze three passages about fruits in books 7, 11, and 24 of the Odyssey , showing that fruit stands for a privileged position in a system of exploitation, a privilege echoed by the divine privilege of access to a sweet food that grants agelessness and requires no labor.
Abstract: This essay offers a detailed analysis of a challenging section of the Periclean Funeral Oration in Thucydides, in which Pericles argues that the Athenians make friends by bestowing benefits (II. 40. 4–5). Contrary to what has been suggested, the entire passage—not just parts of it—presents a coherent, well-organized argument about basic principles of reciprocity and the sociopsychological factors that shape them, and addresses relationships within Athenian society rather than interstate dynamics. Its central message is that the Athenians, unlike other Greeks, exchanged gifts and favors without calculating costs and profits, and that this practice fostered friendship among the recipients. Drawing on scholarship on Greek gift-exchange and anthropological literature, the article demonstrates that the passage is consistent with Greek understandings of reciprocity as well as the social practices of other gift-giving cultures.
This article examines Plutarch's concept of love of power (philarchia) as a vice and its implications for his political and ethical thinking. First, the analysis of its occurrences in the Lives and Moralia demonstrates that Plutarch systematically presents philarchia as a negative form of love of honor (philotimia), undermining the stability of kingdoms and empires. Next, the article situates philarchia as a vice within the framework of Plutarch's Seelenheilung treatises: a close reading of Ad principem ineruditum 779D-F reveals that Plutarch conceptualizes philarchia as a moral disease, subject to the same therapeutic strategies that he applies to other vices.
The titles that precede all surviving Latin controversiae are known for their brevity. This article looks at their form and makes a threefold claim: that Latin declamatory titles share a distinctive style; that their form is indicative of their function(s) in context; and that they are decisively different from what might have been thought a close parallel-entries in tables of contents. The titles' and relationship to the text that they precede suggests that these titles were used as a didactic tool to train students in compression and expansion and that they therefore served as a "shorthand language" of declamation. A comparison with tables of contents in other Latin texts, which have no similar instructional functions, further confirms the uniqueness of declamatory titles. Because of their practicality, it was these titles, and not tables of contents, that were among the earliest examples of sustained paratext to be used in the Latin book.
This paper draws attention to the remarkable composition and effects of and Eurysaces each perform an expressive, character-driven silence through a different type of dramaturgical silence, showcasing the technical creativity of the poet. Sophocles positions these three mute figures to resist the closural suggestions promoted by the three speaking actors playing Agamemnon, Teucer, and Odysseus, and to complement other subtle disruptions of the exodos.
Declamation, a genre famous for its sometimes extravagant fictions, has lately been approached as a vehicle for declaimers to reflect on realities familiar to them and their audiences. Reading Libanius' rarely discussed Declamation 30 in just such a self-reflective key, I argue that it explores the mindset of the phthoneros, the "envious man," as a way to make sense of risks posed by unscrupulous rivals. To shed light on this sense-making, I analyze High-and Late-Imperial emotion scripts foregrounding envy's power to catalyze the formation of dysfunctional networks within and around competitive situations.
This paper argues that Ajax's and Ulysses' discussions of their family histories (Met. 13.22-34, 140-58) echo crucial scenes of Sophocles' Ajax and Philoctetes. The allusions to the Sophoclean plays are instrumental to Ovid's metaliterary goals: the tragic insistence on father-son bonds (Telamon and Ajax, Ajax and Eurysaces, Neoptolemus and Achilles, Odysseus and Sisyphus) allows Ovid to establish himself as the recipient of a poetic legacy in his own right. While the two heroes digress on their ancestors, tragedy metamorphosizes into a meta-poetic medium that continues engaging with heirs (as it did with the Athenian war orphans attending the Great Dionysia).
This article examines the origins and early development of Roman law within the context of recent scholarship showing that early Rome was not founded as a single unified state as its literary tradition suggests, but instead was a multi-focal state in which several separate, heterarchical groups gradually merged into a single state. The article argues that different groups in early Rome exercised different types of control over public affairs, and that this distribution of roles continued to exist as Roman law developed. Rather than being a single system created by a single government, therefore, Roman law was an amalgamation of different legal systems that never quite merged even into the late Republic. The expansion of the praetorship to include urban judicial responsibilities in the 3rd century B.C.E. was a critical innovation that accelerated the development of legal proceedings, but the original distribution of authority remained a unique characteristic of Roman law in the later Republic, and one that could be manipulated by politicians such as the Gracchi and Julius Caesar.
This article focuses on Aequumfaliscum, an unknown location in the ager Faliscus. I propose here that Aequumfaliscum was not, as ancient sources suggest, the name of a thriving town. Rather, it was the name of a ruin, a negative space where the town of Falerii had once been before it was destroyed by the Romans in 241 B.C.E. This article traces how the name became attached to the site. Ultimately, Aequumfaliscum provides insight into the experience of Roman conquest and the ways in which the memory of that conquest was continually negotiated and understood by the many diverse communities living in Central Italy.
While scholars have long acknowledged the central role of Aeschylus fr. 44 Radt in reconstructing Aeschylus' lost Danaid trilogy, they have often taken for granted its praise of er & omacr;s as a cosmological force of attraction and generation. Yet this understanding of er & omacr;s is a peculiar one, with no precise parallels either in earlier texts or in the surviving Aeschylean corpus. I argue that, in thematizing er & omacr;s in the Danaid trilogy, Aeschylus directly engages with contemporary developments in the philosophical understanding of er & omacr;s as a universal principle and is thus himself an important figure for the introduction and development of this tradition in classical Athens.
This article reinterprets a famous Homeric allusion in tragedy, the family scene in the Ajax, by placing it within a larger framework of allusions to the Iliad and the Odyssey throughout the play. While previous scholarship has focused on the relationship between the Ajax and the Iliad, the Odyssey also provides an essential model. In alluding to these two different epic presentations of Ajax, Sophocles presents his own version of the character as he changes from the cooperative warrior of the Iliad to the silent enemy of the Odyssey. The duality of the Homeric tradition shapes its reception in this deeply Homeric play.
This article uses the framework of the multiverse to analyze the interplay between the iterations of Helen in Euripides' Helen and Orestes. It demonstrates that Euripides' Atreidai plays (Electra, IT, Helen, Orestes, IA) exhibit key characteristics of multiverse narratives, thus justifying this approach. Then, analyzing Helen and Orestes as plots within this "multiverse," it argues that Helen in Orestes is an additional eidolon that eventually merges the "real" heroine of Helen and her phantom. Through the flexibility of a multiverse-like narrative, Euripides resolves lingering questions and embodies Helen's multiplicity in a manner that a linear narrative could not.
In this paper I examine the first two poems of a collection of Latin epigrams by Jos & eacute; de Villerias y Roelas (1695-1728), one of the most intriguing Latin authors of colonial Mexico. My discussion situates these texts in the socio-cultural context of the 18th-century Spanish Americas and explores their metapoetic function as part of the author's strategies of poetic self-presentation. Furthermore, I aim to show how Viller & iacute;as combines a refashioning of literary models in these poems to create a sense of regional belonging and (ironically) identify as a Mexican barbarus writing in Latin.
This paper proposes a new interpretative model to understand classical Greek epideixeis or "public performances" as a cultural phenomenon, rather than as a self-contained genre (genos epideiktikon), as in Aristotle's classification. I argue that epideixeis were part of a pervasive and transdisciplinary mode of performance and thought-antilogy, or the uninterrupted delivery of opposed speeches before an audience. Antilogic thought aimed less at the crystallization of authoritative doxai ("doctrines") than at a restless challenge to doxa ("common sense"). This distinctive mode of intellectual inquiry, still largely neglected by scholars, also informed the antagonistic texture of works commonly labeled as treatises (e.g., Gorgias' On Not-Being, Xenophon's Lakedaimoni & omacr;n Politeia).
In this paper, I read Euripides' Medea and Alexandros Papadiamantis' The Murderess as what Sara Ahmed calls "unhappy archives"-namely, as texts that challenge the history of happiness by considering those who are alienated from its promise. I suggest that Medea is deeply concerned with how and by whom happiness is defined and can thus be viewed as a resource that enables us to think against the androcentric tradition of happiness, established by classical models (e.g., from Herodotus to Aristotle). Similarly, the central figure of The Murderess, Frankojannou, who bears notable similarities to the Euripidean heroine, offers a radical redefinition of happiness, determining that "nothing is exactly what it seems." Ultimately, both texts put on center stage the struggle against the family as the "happy object," questioning the pleasure arising from our proximity to what has been traditionally deemed a constituent element of "the good life."
