145

Despite his being perhaps the most prolific Neo-Latin author of the late 19^th and early 20^th century, Arcadius Avellanus’ work has received little or no serious treatment. A Hungarian by birth, Avellanus immigrated to the United States in his twenties and immediately began a career in writing and publishing that lasted four decades. In order to stimulate change in contemporary pedagogy, Avellanus composed a textbook of active Latin.

Theophanes Prokopovich, the right-hand man of the Russian Tsar Peter the Great in reforming the Russian Orthodox Church, had a greater influence on the political and ecclesiastical circles of his day than in education; nevertheless, his earlier pedagogical career in his native Ukraine was important because in his efforts to introduce the youth of his day to the fine points of the Latin language and literature he showed himself a person who looked to the west for the models he wished his students to emulate.

Thomas May's Supplementum Lucani (1640), often sniffed at as little more than a Latin crib of his earlier English Continuation from ten years earlier, is more fruitful when read as a unique volume treating the same subject. May's fidelity to Lucan, once considered his signal virtue, is not unswerving. The tensions between following his model and pursuing the critical concerns of his age, especially in politics, have been noted (Paleit ch. 6 & 7; Norbrook). In this paper I discuss May's sophisticated reconstitution of an early modern Caesar.

It has long been maintained that Psalm 1 is not only introductory to but is also programmatic for the rest of the collection of the Psalms (cf. Dahood 1966). It stands to reason, then, that the same would be true of the versions of Psalm 1 found in the various verse translations of the Psalter that were produced all over Europe in the sixteenth century in an outburst of literary and devotional activity that died away almost as quickly as it had arisen (Gaertner 1956).

Castiglione’s Alcon (1515) and Milton’s Epitaphium Damonis (1638/39) are pastoral laments that, in following Virgil’s second Eclogue in certain aspects of form and content, translate tropes of unrequited desire into those of mourning—though sometimes reluctantly and barely. Their narratives multiply the sense of loss and the absence of the beloved: each speaker—like the author himself—has been away from home when he hears of the death of his friend.

The court of Pope Nicholas V (1447-1455) was a centre of learning and culture, and attracted several key-figures of Italian humanism. Some of them dedicated themselves to Biblical scholarship: the circle around cardinal Bessarion discussed possible corruptions of the Vulgate, and Lorenzo Valla wrote his Annotationes to the New Testament. At the same time, Giannozzo Manetti, Florentine by birth, produced a new Latin version of the New Testament. Given the circumstances, he must have been familiar with Bessarion’s and Valla’s Biblical scholarship.

As research on ancient graffiti presses forward, their complexity and diversity continues to impress. Among the graffiti preserved at Pompeii, the appearance of literary texts has not gone unnoticed (Gigante 1979, Milnor 2009), but research opportunities remain. This paper presents two case studies of Pompeian graffiti that preserve epigrams containing combinations and modifications of verses from Propertius and Ovid.

This paper examines a particular class of religious graffiti from Pompeii and suggests the role these graffiti played in the creation of sacred space within ostensibly mundane public places. Focusing on graffiti that explicitly invoke Venus, the most visible deity at Pompeii, I demonstrate how these informal writings challenge certain notions of the relationship between ex voto texts and sacred space. There are a number of graffiti from public spaces at Pompeii that explicitly invoke Venus.

A small fragment of an amphora with a list scratched on its exterior was discovered in the 2008 excavations of the Athenian Agora. This paper presents a text of this list and outlines its relationships to the object on which it was inscribed, the building in which it was deposited, and similar lists from the same site. These relationships question the distinctions between public and private, official and casual.

Building on studies by James Whitley (1997, 1998, 2001), Paula Perlman (1992), and Alan Johnston (2006), this paper calls attention to graffiti on pottery from Azoria, a site in East Crete with a significant Late Archaic phase. Owner’s inscriptions, dedications, labels, control marks, etc. allow us to appreciate emerging literacy from the 8^th to the early 5^th c. B. C.