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In this paper, I analyze the ritual performance of the Lupercalia in 44 and make two related claims: first, that our sources for this affair draw primarily on Cicero; and second, that the festival had nothing to do with kingship. At this festival, Antony allegedly crowned Caesar with a diadem. This act has been the subject of intense scrutiny since antiquity. It has been seen as a coronation rite engineered by Caesar (e.g., Alföldi 1985) or by Antony alone (following Nicolaus of Damascus fr. 130.71-5), and more recently as a purposeful recusatio regni (Luke 2012).

In the summer of 43 BC Brutus wrote a scathing letter to Atticus about Cicero’s deplorable recent conduct, and then sent a similar missive to Cicero himself (Brut. Cic. ad Brut. 1.17 and 1.16)—or did he? Controversy over these letters’ authenticity has continued unabated since 1745, when Jeremiah Markland, in a spirited but misguided imitation of Bentley’s Dissertation upon the Epistles of Phalaris, condemned the entire Cicero–Brutus Briefwechsel as spurious.

While the removal of a tyrannical figure, historically and in the modern world, is often the portrayed as a formal process, the events that follow, particularly regarding the desecration of public monuments tend to be less ‘formal’ in nature. After the death of Domitian, Suetonius records both the formal decree of abolutio nominis by the Senate in Rome (Domitian, 23) as well as differing responses to the news: the insouciance of the Roman people, the loyal revenge vowed by Domitian’s army, and joyous trashing of his monumental shield and statues by senators.

The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that Pompey was, in fact, elected, not appointed, to his third, sole consulship in 52 B.C.

I propose a historical context for the fragmentary historian Hippias of Erythrae by identifying an allusion in his text to a famous honorary decree of Athens from the late fourth century BCE. By linking Hippias’ historical project to the wider circumstances of the decree, I illuminate the ways in which local historiography could serve the ends of an author and his community while maintaining connections with broader political trends.

In his proem, Thucydides blames both the tellers and the hearers of history for perpetuating errors: while carelessness and apathy perpetuate even innocuous mistakes, the exaggerations of poets and the flattery of logographers are aimed at their audiences’ desire for grandeur, gratification, and affirmation (1.20-1.21).

Within a few years of the Greek victory at Plataea the most conspicuous monument to the Persian Wars, the Serpent Column at Delphi, was quite literally rewritten. Its dedicatory inscription had originally attributed the victory to the Spartan Pausanias, the supreme Greek commander at Plataea and the man charged with overseeing the construction of the monument: “When the leader of the Hellenes destroyed the army of the Medes, / He, Pausanias, dedicated this monument to Phoebus” (Thuc. 1.132.2). Reaction was swift and negative.

At the beginning of Herodotus’ account of the Greek embassy’s visit to Gelon (7.153-164), Herodotus tells how Telines, the ancestor of Gelon and the Deinomenid tyrants, secured the priesthood of the Chthonic goddesses for his descendants: when a stasis broke out in Gela, Telines led the defeated faction back to the city taking with him only the ἱρά of the goddesses (and no manpower) for protection. He restored the exiles to the city on the condition that his descendants would be the ἱροφάνται of the goddesses.

Renowned for dancing away his marriage, Hippokleides is an intriguing, but obscure figure in early Athenian history. There are only two testimonia about him. He was archon when the Greater Panathenaia was established in 566 BCE (Euseb. Chron. 102a-b Helm; Pherykydes FrGrHist 3 F 2), a fact that has been taken to imply his connection to the festival. And of course he stars in Herodotos’ famous “marriage of Agariste” tale (6.126-30) until his disreputable dancing undoes him at the exact moment of triumph.

Did ancient commentaries on philosophical texts influence the ancient transmission of those texts? Specifically, were paraphrases and explanations of commentators in the course of the transmission incorporated into the philosophical texts? In this paper, I explore an intriguing case in which we can see that the words of the commentator Asclepius of Tralles (sixth century AD) found their way into what is now our text of Aristotle’s Metaphysics.