CAQ

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Transplanting kingship

Once upon a time in Paphos, so tells Plutarch (Mor. 340d), Alexander the Great decided that  the reigning king was unjust and wicked, and removed him from his throne.…

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Why Objects Speak

This text is identified as my own by the name placed above it, which seems sensible enough. Marking ownership was one of the earliest uses to which the ancient Greeks put their alphabet—which was to spawn among others the alphabet in which this text is written—but they had a strikingly different way of doing so. ‘I am the kylix of Korax’, declares an eighth-century BCE wine-drinking cup from Rhodes; ‘I am the lekythos of Tataie—whosoever steals me will go blind’, threatens a seventh-century oil flask from Cumae; ‘I am the remembrance of Ergotimos’, announces a shelf of Attic rock from the sixth century.

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Circe’s Etruscan Drugs

When only four words of a poet’s entire output in a specific genre survive to the present day, is there really anything of substance that we can say about this poetry on the basis of such slender remains?…

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Socrates and the Beautiful Girl

What is the Beautiful? In Plato’s Hippias Major, Socrates and the sophist Hippias set out to answer this question. Along the way, they evaluate such answers as ‘the appropriate’, ‘the beneficial’, ‘gold’, and even ‘burying your parents’.…

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