This article combines allegorical, symbolic and metaphorical readings with modern theoretical approaches (primarily, affect theory) to explore the representations of objects and bodies within Peristephanon 9. In Prudentius’ poem, the tortured body of Cassian overlaps with the tormented soul of the poet; the written text is both a co-actor in Cassian’s death and a vehicle for the perpetuation of his extra-textual memory. Figurative language provides words and concepts with new meanings so that a pen can transform into a sword, writing into torture. Through a process of materialization and resemantization, the physical objects become agents in the narrative construction.

This article investigates honour and recognition dynamics involving babies. By drawing on modern theories and experimental studies of infants’ psychology, selected case studies from Classical Greek literature and philosophical accounts will be interpreted in terms of basic intersubjective mechanisms. Case studies from Herodotus and Menander show that babies were intuitively perceived as agents capable of putting forth implicit demands to recognition and respect. Passages from Plato reveal that babies were regarded as possessing embryonic forms of a sense of dignity and entitlement. The article thus demonstrates that babies were involved in basic dynamics of honour and recognition. Overall, these mechanisms can be seen as the psychological and social foundation of the fully fledged version of timê, the Greek notion that captures the range of bidirectional dynamics of honour, recognition and respect which stand at the basis of human interaction and sociality.

Alexandrian poetry is mostly characterized by the metrical forms of the hexameter and the elegiac distich, but also provides evidence of experimental attempts to innovate formal aspects of rhythm and metre. Taking inspiration from the archaic tradition of monody and song-making, especially in the third century b.c. poets toyed with verse forms that allowed them to ‘widen the repertory’ of metres available for the composition of literary poems,1 using them in stichic forms, as markers of poetic expertise. This article explores some of these experiments and aims at unveiling the Hellenistic reuse of metres from the archaic tradition of lyric poetry (such as the greater asclepiad and the pherecratean) to evoke specific narrative tropes, thus generating literary associations through metre.

In Plato’s Statesman , the stranger compares the statesman to a weaver. The modern reader does not know a priori how the statesman and the weaver resemble one another and therefore could be compared, but Socrates the younger reacts as if the comparison is natural. This note suggests, with reference to the gender division of labour in ancient Greece, that the male ‘weaver’ did not do much weaving but was a supervisor, which means that the fundamental similarity between a statesman and a weaver is that both managed subordinates. This cultural knowledge explains why the comparison seems natural to Socrates the younger.

This article argues that the Virgilian narrator’s account of Juno’s anger at the outcome of the Judgement of Paris at Aen. 1.25–7 contains an allusion, which seems to have gone unnoticed, to a prologue transmitted in some manuscripts of the Rhesus attributed to Euripides. It also discusses the problem of the origin of this prologue. Finally, it suggests some interpretative possibilities arising from recognition of the allusion.

This article reassesses the contribution of the late Renaissance scholar and teacher Petrus Victorius (Pier Vettori) to the reconstruction of the text of Aristotle's Eudemian Ethics, which has come down to us in what is often a highly corrupt form. It proposes an interpretation of certain abbreviations in the marginalia in one of Victorius's copies of the Aldine Eudemian Ethics which reveals them as recommending readings rather than recording them; it proposes that many more of those readings constitute his own conjectures than previously thought. The article goes on to suggest why Victorius never produced an edition of the Eudemian Ethics as he did of other Aristotelian works, despite returning repeatedly, over much of his life, to the task of improving this particular text. Victorius is revealed nonetheless as a highly creative—but also highly disciplined—textual critic, at least the equal of his nineteenth- and twentieth-century successors.

The lion’s share of attention given to the Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas has focussed—not unreasonably—on Perpetua, the eponymous heroine, and on the ways in which her voice and character have been manipulated. But she is not the only figure in this text who is made to sing a tune. This article concentrates on the two military characters mentioned in the Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas—Pudens, optio carceris, and the unnamed tribunus—to suggest that we should pay more attention to the deployment and characterization of minor martyrological characters. An examination of Pudens and the tribune reveals previously understudied facets of the text, such as the anonymous Editor’s hand in attempting to stitch together Perpetua’s diary with his own concluding narrative, and the anxiety of the Carthaginian Christian community to be positively recognized by Roman authority figures. Finally, this examination contributes to previous debates over the text’s original language and date of composition, suggesting that the Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas was written in Latin in the early third century—against a recent charge that the text is a late antique forgery.

This article proposes a new emendation to a problematic passage from the pseudo-Aristotelian Problêmata, section 19. It surveys prior editors’ strategies for emending the passage and explains why the new proposal is preferable. This emendation also is supported by the Latin manuscript tradition, as a concluding discussion of Bartholomew of Messina’s Latin translation reveals.

This article argues that a joke about the demagogue Hyperbolus in Aristophanes’ Peace (685–7) can be illuminated by a reconsideration of the meaning of the little-attested word περιζωσάμενος in the Aristotelian Constitution of the Athenians (Athênaiôn Politeia 28.3), where it describes how Cleon dressed in an unconventional manner when appearing before the assembly. In recent translation of and commentary on the Aristotelian text there appears to have been no investigation of the meaning of περιζωσάμενος in Greek comedy: readers are informed that Cleon either hitched up his (unspecified) clothing or somehow fastened his cloak to allow him to make gestures with both hands. However, the philological and material-cultural evidence presented here points to something more specific and more dramatic. Elsewhere in classical and later Greek the word περιζώννυσθαι means belting or knotting something around the waist and is most frequently found in contexts of manual labour. Here, it is argued that the import of Athênaiôn Politeia 28.3 is that Cleon spoke to the assembly dressed for work in his family’s tannery—a powerful symbol of his allegiance to the manual-labouring demos and his antagonism towards the aristocratic elite. It is to his unconventional self-fashioning that Aristophanes alludes in Peace when he jokes that after Cleon’s death the naked demos has wrapped itself (περιεζώσατο) in Hyperbolus, the new leader of the people.

Nemesianus’ eclogues are an important witness to the development of classical culture, being the last extant collection of bucolic poems before the dramatic socio-political shifts of the fourth century. Within his reuse of Virgilian and Calpurnian characters, tropes and narrative structures, however, resides a consciousness of contemporary issues political, societal and cultural. In none of the third-century poet’s four eclogues is this more apparent than in his programmatic first. This article reads Nemesianus’ inaugural eclogue as a fictionalization of such concerns, analysing its thematic structure with a view to the poet’s historical context. Amidst the preoccupation with loss, senectitude and nostalgia, it becomes clear that Nemesianus intended his eclogues—with the first as its primary expression—to be a poetic response to the crises of his era, one which finds recourse not in hoping for a new political Golden Age but in the consolatory and preservative power of a poetry oriented towards—and reverent of—the past.

Proba’s Cento Vergilianus contains a corruption at line 42, sometimes printed as two half-lines separated by a lacuna (42a–b). Previous attempts to emend the passage based upon the four classical elements have met with limited success. This article argues for a novel reconstruction of the passage based upon the six days of the biblical creation, summarized in reverse. Two possible variants of the reconstruction are presented and evaluated on textual, metrical, compositional and contextual grounds.

This note argues that the second line of the oracle in Apuleius’ Cupid and Psyche (Met. 4.33.1) alludes to Ovid’s Am. 1.1.2. Like its Ovidian model, Apuleius’ line marks a shift in genre, and offers a further hint of the role Cupid will play in the rest of the story.

Sardismos is the name, in several Latin works of literary criticism, for a combination of more than one language or dialect in a sentence. Quintilian (first century c.e.) uses the term disparagingly; the Christian author Cassiodorus (sixth century c.e.) uses it positively. A similar term, sardîstôn, is found in the rabbinic work Exodus Rabbah 2, created in the sixth-century Byzantine empire. This article is a short study of this term, the history of its misinterpretation and reinterpretation, its meaning in context, and its relationship to sardismos.

In the hymn to Bacchus (Tristia 5.3), Ovid looks from Tomis back to Rome, where the chorus of poets gathers for the Liberalia. This article argues that Ovid fashions in Tristia 5.3 a poetic rebirth out of Tomis, deploying in this elegy themes and motifs from the god’s mysteries to bolster the pervasive message of persistence in the Tristia. This Bacchic mystic tone is accomplished through the hymn’s ritual elements and dithyrambic strategies, which reflect on both Ovid’s death-like position in exile and his poetic activity there. Furthermore, this article argues that Ovid encodes his mystic dithyrambic strategies in a hitherto unnoticed bilingual acrostic. Through ritual and dithyrambic strategies, Ovid merges three loci of time and space—past Rome, present Rome and present Tomis—and thus reintegrates himself into Rome, rearticulating his Roman citizenship as a literary one.

Anth. Pal. 11.418 is traditionally attributed to Trajan. The distich mocks a man’s large nose and is a typical example of a scoptic epigram. Even though the attribution to Trajan looks suspicious, scholarship has been inclined to accept his authorship. However, it is possible that the poem was written about the emperor instead, which would also explain the misattribution. This hypothesis, if correct, sheds light on the surprising opening anecdote of Plutarch’s Regum et imperatorum apophthegmata (172E), which is dedicated to Trajan.

This article supports Livineius’ deletion of τϵ καὶ ϕλέγϵι in Soph. Aj. 714 πάνθ’ ὁ μέγας χρόνος μαραίνϵι by means of a comparative examination of tragic quotations in Stobaeus’ Anthology, where Aj. 714 is quoted without τϵ καὶ ϕλέγϵι (1.8.24).

This paper argues that the unknown editor of Ad M. Caesarem et inuicem arranged the letters in their non-chronological order so as to create a work that is essentially historical fiction, providing the reader with a romanticized version of the early life of Marcus Aurelius, a Marcopaedia of sorts or even a quasi-prequel to the Meditations. The paper demonstrates that the anomalous Book 5—full of shorter, less elaborate letters—can be read not only as an appendix composed of leftover letters but also as a part of the broader narrative. Book 5 creates a sense of closure to the epistolary fiction created by the editor. In particular, this article focusses on the recurrent motif of Fronto’s health; the frequent references to Fronto’s illness work in a metaliterary fashion to signal the impending conclusion of the work, creating a sense of resolution for the health/sickness letters appearing in Books 1–4. The sickness/health topic also connects to certain philosophical topoi regarding death, illness and consolation—a connection that is appropriate in light of the young Marcus’ burgeoning interest in philosophy.

This article contributes to our understanding of women in the Epicurean school. Focussing on the second- and first-century b.c.e. philosophers Zeno of Sidon and Philodemus of Gadara, it examines some neglected textual evidence and argues that a misogynist position can be traced back to Zeno. While Epicureanism contains many progressive ideas on women and early Epicureans admitted women in their communities, Zeno was much more dismissive of women than other Epicureans. This points to a significant doctrinal development in the Epicurean school.