What if the consistency of the Goddess’s account of the cosmic order according to the opinions of mortals, in the second part of Parmenides’ poem, was the very sign of its own deceitful character? This chapter attempts to show that Parmenides’ use of the terms kosmos and diakosmos refers to the use of these terms and their cognates in epic poetry and that this source is the best one for us to reconstruct the missing steps of the Doxa part of the poem. Parmenides transposes the Homeric vocabulary of dividing and ordering troops, arranging collective occupations, into the field of cosmology in order to illustrate how the words of men are swift to order a beautiful representation of the universe. Parmenides’ goddess delivers the most complete cosmogony and cosmology of the Archaic world, while also stating that it is merely words. The shaping and ordering of the universe are an arrangement of words, given all power to build a world by their own means. They are all the more consistent as they are demiurgical and deceitful.

This chapter investigates the significance that Roman augural practice, as a kindred practice to Greek theôria, held for Roman comedy and tragedy. Central to its arguments are notions of time and space, which ultimately show the broad importance of Aristotelian concepts to the broader Hellenistic world. This piece argues that augury-taking involved sitting in a terrestrial temple while gazing at a specially demarcated zone of sky or a ‘whole-world’ (mundus). This temporarily legible space in which the gods would direct the signifying flight of birds was more than a celestial backdrop; it was also itself a temple (templum caeli), and the technical term for this temple-gazing was contemplatio. The institution of Roman theatre has not generally been associated with practices of auspication, but because of the emphatic insistence on the temporary stage, the conventional ‘unity of time’ and the probable placement of audience seating, there was a suggestive similarity between the Middle Republican audience’s spectation at tragedies and comedies and traditional augural contemplation. The structural echo between augural and theatrical contemplation outlives the Republican temporary stage in Seneca, where it has become a distinctively Roman mode of construing the intersection of the cosmic gaze and philosophical or spectatorial theôria.

In this chapter, Renaud Gagné pursues a chronologically wide-ranging study of how the motion of the heavenly bodies was thought about through the idea of choral dance. This chapter compares various unrelated, self-reflexive usages of the astral chorus metaphor in three genres of poetry and briefly considers how each illuminates the others. Instead of a teleological narrative, a dialogue of commonalities and contrasts is sought in the juxtaposition of comparable case studies. The striking image of the astral chorus was, among many other things, a powerful catalyst for thinking mimesis in action. A vision of the cosmic order is used in all three texts to reflect on the boundaries of poetic representation. The first text is a short epigram from Marcus Argentarius (AP 9.270 = G.-P. XXVI). The second passage is the ecphrasis of Dionysus’s shield in the Dionysica of Nonnus of Panopolis (25.380-572). The third text is another shield ecphrasis, that one from the first stasimon of Euripides’ Electra (432-486). The readings illustrate how a key figure of cosmic harmony was revisited to ponder the limits of poetic representation. Projecting itself on the cosmos, the idea of the choral dance could also reflect the cosmos back on song itself.

Representation of the kosmos is one of the leading themes of Roman decoration. If the evidence for public interest in cosmic representation is generally well known – for instance, at the Pantheon at Rome – it is worth noting that this phenomenon has not been sufficiently studied in the realm of private life. This piece investigates several examples of cosmic architecture and images known through written texts or archaeological monuments, all of them belonging either to aristocratic houses or to imperial palaces: the aviary that M. Terentius Varro built around 80 BCE inside his villa at Casinum; the Teatro Marittimo that the emperor Hadrian erected at his villa in Tivoli (early or mid-second century CE); the the cave of Sperlonga, which formed part of Tiberius’s Praetorium; and the Cenatio Rotunda, which belonged to Nero’s Domus Aurea. Kosmos-representations in the private sphere at Rome are arranged according to the particular point of view of the persons who frequent the place where they are located. Chief inspiration for these decorations would appear to have been the philosophers, especially Plato, but also the Greek astronomers, who fascinated the Roman elite, as demonstrated by the Latin translations of the Phaenomena of Aratus by Cicero and Germanicus.

When did kosmos come to mean ‘world-order’? This chapter ventures a new answer by examining evidence in late doxographies and commentaries often underutilized or dismissed by scholars. Two late doxographical accounts in which Pythagoras is said to be first to call the heavens kosmos (in the anonymous Life of Pythagoras and the fragments of Favorinus) exhibit heurematographical tendencies that place their claims in a dialectic with the early Peripatetics about the first discoverers of the mathematical structure of the universe. Xenophon and Plato refer to ‘wise men’ who nominate kosmos as the object of scientific inquiry into nature as a whole and the cosmic ‘communion’ (koinônia) between all living beings, respectively. But Empedocles is the earliest surviving source to use kosmos to refer to a harmonic ‘world-order’ and to illustrate cosmic ‘communities’ between oppositional pairs, realizing the mutual correspondence in the cycle of love and strife. Thus, if later figures posited Pythagoras as the first to refer to the universal ‘world-order’ as the kosmos, they did so because they believed Empedocles to have been a Pythagorean natural scientist, whose combined focus on cosmology and ethics was thought to exemplify a distinctively Pythagorean approach to philosophy.

Naturalism is a vague label not only in ancient linguistic thought.1 When modern linguists speak of naturalism, they mean a variety of different things. A phonologist might consider a symmetrical vowel system, with the same number of front and back vowels, more natural than a system with gaps. The reason is that in such a symmetrical system a minimal number of features, vowel height and front versus back, suffices for a given number of vowels. Here, naturalness comes close to the concept of efficiency. A morphologist might consider a system natural in which derivational morphemes stand closer to the lexical root than inflectional morphemes. We move from the most central element of a word, its lexical meaning, to its least central element, the function of the word in a given syntactic context. Here, naturalness is akin to clarity. And finally, an etymologist might consider changes in sounds and meaning natural if the sound changes are based on articulatory or acoustic similarities and if the semantic changes involve concepts such as metaphor. Here, naturalness is related to similarity.

‘What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, that he should weep for her?’ (Hamlet 2.2, 536–7), asks Hamlet, watching a player’s tear-filled recital of Hecuba’s sufferings. Priam and Hecuba make a briefer appearance in Varro’s De lingua Latina: while we immediately grasp that lego and legi both express the same action, each at a different time, were one of them expressed as ‘Priamus’ and the other as ‘Hecuba’, they would not additionally signify their unity (8.3). Hence the necessity of inflexion in speech: we could never remember enough words, if they were all different and ‘unrelated’.

One of the key questions in language studies, both ancient and modern, concerns the relationship between language and reality: how has extra-linguistic reality influenced the emergence, development, and structures of language? This question is at the core of several advances in the last century, including the development of theories arguing for the biological regulation of the structures of language (generative grammar) and the pioneering investigation of the neuro-biological mechanisms regulating language use (neurolinguistics). This question is no less productive in ancient thought, both Greek and Roman. Ancient theorists conceived of the question in terms of the relationship between language and nature (physis /natura), and the essays gathered in this volume deal with theories from the Roman world according to which linguistic facts, structures, or behaviours are in some significant sense determined by nature. We refer to such theories as instances of ‘linguistic naturalism’.

The importance of Posidonius of Apamea (c. 135–c. 50 BC) for the Roman intellectual life of the late Republic and the Empire (especially in its first two centuries) can hardly be overestimated. His philosophical and scientific work, of which we now have only fragments, ranged from the traditional fields of Stoicism – natural philosophy, logic, ethics (including moral psychology) – to the painstaking investigation of disciplines which either were considered by the earlier Stoics only in an insignificant way (meteorology, astronomy), or were completely beyond their interests (history, physical, mathematical, and ethnic geography). This encyclopedic approach won for him already during his lifetime and soon after his death the authority of the maximus omnium Stoicorum (Cic. Hort. fr. 50 Grilli = test. 33 E.–K.),1 among both professional philosophers and Roman dilettanti like Pompey. The influence of his innovative work, and the polemical reaction to it (the two often going hand in hand) is found in later centuries in moral philosophy and psychology (Seneca, Galen), natural philosophy, astronomy, and mathematics (Geminus, Seneca, Pliny the Elder, Cleomedes), as well as history and geography, both mathematical and physical (Caesar, Diodorus of Sicily, Strabo).

The Greek rhetorician and historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus was active in Rome at the end of the first century BC.2 His extant works include a history of early Rome, critical letters, and rhetorical treatises with a focus on style: On Composition, On Imitation, On Thucydides, and On the Ancient Orators, including separate essays on Lysias, Isocrates, Isaeus, and Demosthenes. Engaged as he was in the oratory, history, and poetry of the classical Greek past, Dionysius himself lived in the Golden Age of Latin Literature. Born before 55 BC, he was a contemporary of Virgil and Horace. When Dionysius arrived in Rome in 30 BC, Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 BC) had been dead for more than a decade, but Marcus Terentius Varro (116–27 BC) was still alive.

The Academica is a dialogue completed in 45 BC, near the beginning of the second of the two phases in his life when Cicero produced – broadly speaking – philosophical dialogues. The work is devoted to epistemology, and specifically the question of whether there is empirical knowledge as the Stoics defined it, an issue which had been debated by Stoics and Academics since the third century BC. There are speakers for the Stoic side, in particular Stoic epistemology as adopted by Antiochus of Ascalon (previously an Academic sceptic, who then turned to dogmatism), and speakers who represent Academic scepticism. Each side advances arguments for its position, as well as offering a historical account of the Academic tradition as they construe it (only one of them is extant in full). Cicero published the work in two editions, changing the speakers and shifting the fictional date of the dialogue from 62 or 61 BC to a time near the date of composition. Of these, the second book of the first edition in two books and part of the first book of the second edition in four books are extant. While some modification of the material beyond the necessary changes of speakers and scenery is likely, there is little reason to suspect substantial differences in subject matter between the two editions.1

The earliest pronouncements on Latin spoken and written usage come to us from a literary figure in the late second century BC, i.e. the Roman satirist Gaius Lucilius (180 / 168?–103 / 102), who had a pervasive influence on authoritative writers on Latin of the late Republic. Lucilius’ personal poetry – the first of the kind to appear on the Roman stage since Ennius’ experimental miscellaneous saturae – was characterized by an assertive voice delivering views on an unprecedented variety of themes. That language was a favourite theme is evidenced by the significant number of metalinguistic comments in the fragmentary remains of Lucilius’ notoriously large production, which included a systematic treatment (Book 9) of Latin orthography and morphology.