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Gan Yang, an outspoken and charismatic advocate of the study of Greco-Roman classics in contemporary Chinese higher education, also argues that the construction of a “Confucian-Socialist republic” provides the best hope for China, after more than a century of sociopolitical and cultural turmoil, to rebuild its civilization by synthesizing the major traditions that had left indelible marks on Chinese history.

There has been an increasing tendency toward an alliance, though still tentative and critical, with nationalism in the reception of Plato in contemporary China: besides Leo Strauss, Plato in China is also read alongside with Carl Schmitt, Confucius and Mao in an articulated accentuation of the “Chinese-ness” in the Confucian political tradition and in the historicity of the Maoist era as well as a strategical necessity to resist globalization in this modern age. Hence arises one question.

‘I prefer to speak from the depths of my tomb’ (Chateaubriand, Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe)

Ennius occupies a foundational yet anomalous position in the history of authorial portraiture in Rome. The story that a statue of the poet was placed in the tomb of the Scipiones is a departure from the standard tropes of authorial depiction: it locates the poet’s statue not in a public space (e.g. a library) nor in his own tomb, but in a tomb belonging to his ‘patrons’ – who thereby thank him for the fame he has granted them.

The Hellenistic period witnessed the development of a rich literary tradition of funerary epigrams dedicated to poets (Gabathuler, 1937) which not only continued to be written in the Roman period, when Varro, for example, collected epigrams on the poets Plautus, Naevius and Pacuvius in his De Poetis (Gellius 1.24.), but also influenced the development of the Latin sphragis (e.g. Ennius, Ep. 2; Horace, C. 3.30; Propertius 1.22; Ovid, Met. 15 and see Keith, 2011). While some were transmitted in biographies of poets (e.g.

This paper argues that the treatment of poets’ tombs in Pausanias’ Description of Greece (2^nd c.CE) exemplifies a tradition that saw graves as sites for connecting and communing with dead poets. It also argues that Pausanias’ narrative serves to write the poets whose graves he mentions into the very mythical worlds which they had created, thereby casting the poets as part of the mythical history that for Pausanias is embodied – and entombed – in what for him is the Greek sacred landscape (Alcock; Elsner; Porter).

Poets’ tombs, whether real or imagined, mark the physical presence of authors’ mortal remains. In ancient Greece, they were sources of civic pride, sites of literary pilgrimage, even the focus of cultic honors, and drew particular attention from the third century BCE, when local historiographical practices coincided with the formation of a Greek literary canon and an intensely creative engagement with the poetic past (Hunter; Acosta-Hughes).

The Later Roman state is often regarded as a repressive, if not “feudal,” regime. The administrative, social and economic structures of the empire are reckoned to have undergone a systemic change owing to political instability during the third century. The public administration system was fully reorganised by limiting the responsibilities of existing administrative units on supra-regional, regional and local levels, while simultaneously increasing their number. Members of most classes had to fulfil specific public tasks and services in the capacity of liturgical “part-time” officials.

This paper opens the assessment of the impact of government by discussing resource extraction (taxes and labor) in the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian empires of the Late Iron Age. The case put forward is that administrations of the Near East in this period made ample use of mediated resource extraction through entrepreneurial (or quasi-‘liturgical’) middlemen in their core areas, and through local patrimonial elites in the imperial periphery. This practice imposed considerable limitations on the role and reach of centralized bureaucratic administration.

In contrast to the situations discussed by the two previous papers (Orality and Literacy in Early Islamic Administrative Practice; Neo-Assyrian Letters and Administration), during the Greek, Roman and Late Roman periods there is no cause to question the reliance of the state and its administration on letters; generally speaking, documentation in writing is a practice that can be taken for granted.