Kalos-inscriptions identify historical individuals, gods, heroes, even horses, as objects of amorous attention in Athens in the sixth and fifth centuries bce. Missing from catalogues of kalos names is an inscription on a bell-krater attributed to a painter in the Group of Polygnotos and dated to c. 440-430 bce. This vase, now lost to the art market, shows the Return of Hephaistos and includes the misspelled phrase Kappa Alpha Lambda Omicron Sigma Eta Phi Alpha Rho Sigma Tau Omicron Sigma. In this brief article, I re-present this vase and offer possible avenues for its interpretation. I argue that the vase can contribute to discussions of kalos-inscriptions, the characterization of the god Hephaistos, and the relationship between Athens and Hephaistos in the fifth century BCE.
Urban redevelopment creates winners and losers. The monuments of ancient Rome are visually impressive, but they often overlie residential areas. Many Greek and Latin authors eulogize feats of construction, but others express uneasiness about, even hostility to, such works. While the double-edged sword of urban development in contemporary cities continues to be the focus of intense scrutiny, scholarship on the Roman world predominantly emphasizes the positive aspects of monumental architecture - baths, forums, temples, entertainment complexes. Yet what was the impact of these large structures on the people who actually lived around them? What was the opposition to such projects? Questioning the assumption that 'public' buildings necessarily benefit the 'public', this paper examines the harmful side of building activity in antiquity.
This article traces how changes in the depiction of atimia (loss of honour/citizen rights) in Athenian tragedy provide crucial information for understanding how the actual punishment evolved in the fifth century. Scholarship on the term has long agreed that the archaic personal form of atimia differed from the legal version of the fourth century, but has failed to explain why and when that change occurred. The tragedians' discussion of atimia reveals when the punishment took on its legal aspects and how its scope expanded after the restoration of democracy at Athens, when the Four Hundred were declared traitors and atimoi.
I argue that the scenes featuring Briseis and Xanthus in Iliad 19 are closely parallel. Each features a speech from an unexpected source, previously constructed in the epic not as a character but as a valued possession. The audience's brief access to their fresh perspectives is soon curtailed by the recentring of Achilles' corresponding speech and familiar point of view, and the enslaved woman and the horse are subsequently relegated to their former object status. These scenes form part of a broader pattern as a private counterpart to the public exchanges that constitute the Greek assembly. Together, the paired speeches throughout Book 19 produce a significant accumulation of unresolved tensions that underlie the superficial consensus of action and mark the limitations of Achilles' reintegration into the community. It is this dynamic, I suggest, that unifies the book and defines its primary function in the epic.
In Memoriam Ed. ChamplinIn this article, I argue that fictional stories about the Roman emperor are a fruitful avenue for excavating a multifaceted discourse about the sole ruler of the Roman world, who, in this case, is Tiberius. Edward Champlin, who worked on anecdotes about Tiberius in the last decade or so, attributes these negative impressions of the emperors to the pen of a single author (i.e. M. Servilius Nonianus). This argument, I argue, sells the wider meaning of these stories short. The anecdotes themselves are windows into a wider discourse about how the emperor seemed to his subjects. Fictitious or true, such stories inform imaginations about who Tiberius was seen to be, which make these the stories historically relevant. We must both embrace these stories as relevant historical evidence for how Roman emperors were scrutinized and criticized and recognize them as a crucial part of Roman understandings of who the emperor was.
