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Aristotle’s stance on the usefulness of liberal education, specifically music (mousikē), is a contested issue. Some argue that Aristotle locates music’s usefulness in civic or moral improvement (e.g., Lord 1982), others are more inclined to take Aristotle at his word that such education is for the sake of leisure rather than use (e.g., Nightingale 2001, Demont 1993). Aristotle himself is ambiguous, at first separating music from ‘useful’ types of education and then proceeding to enumerate music’s benefits (‘paradoxically’ as Nightingale 2001, 155 suggests).

Aristotle’s reference to “man with arms” at Politics 1.2.1253a34 has usually been taken as metaphorical. I shall argue that it is best understood literally.

“For as man is the best of all animals when he has reached his full development, so he is worst of all when divorced from law and justice. Injustice armed is at its harshest; man is born with weapons to support practical wisdom and virtue, which are all too easy to use for the opposite purposes.” So Saunders, who comments, “The identity of the ‘weapons’ is obscure.”

Scholars writing on Xenophon’s Hieron have usually grappled with the author’s choice of interlocutors: the tyrant Hieron I of Syracuse and the poet Simonides. Leo Strauss, by far the most influential reader of the Hieron in the twentieth century, points to Hieron’s claim that Simonides is a “wise man” (σοφὸς ἀνήρ, 1.1) and all but equates the poet with Socrates.

This paper contextualizes one of the projects of a shadowy set of later-fifth-century musical theorists identified by Aristoxenus as “harmonikoi:” the attempt to identify the smallest audible musical interval. According to Aristoxenus, this smallest audible interval provided a basic measure for constructing a diagram of harmonic space: from this diagram, one could plot and interrelate the many different musical tunings or scales in use in Greek art music.

In this presentation, I will examine the Iliad and the Odyssey for heretofore unrecognized instances of incense offerings. Telemachus' sea voyage, accompanied by religious activities described with the verbal roots thýō and spendeîn in Od. 15.256-264, offers us a rare glimpse into early Greek seafaring ritual. By misinterpreting the Homeric evidence concerning the root thy- and its associated words, scholars have often wrongly assumed that Telemachus was offering animals upon the shore.

In Books 19-20 of the Odyssey, Penelope twice invokes the daughters of Pandareos in relation to herself, first in a simile and then in a prayer. These references are in fact the only two mythological exempla that Penelope employs in the entire epic (McDonald 1997, 3); this suggests their crucial importance to interpreting Penelope’s self-presentation. Focusing on the second passage, I read the Pandareids as mythical models invoked by and for Penelope to compete with other mythical paradigms foisted upon her by male characters and the external narrator.

The Catalogue of Heroines in Odyssey 11 is one of the most fascinating and complex texts of early hexameter poetry. 19^th- and 20^th- century scholars often dismissed it as a later addition (Wilamowitz 1884, 147-51, Focke 1943, 217-22), as irrelevant to the rest of the Nekyia (Bowra 1962, 45-46) or as a ‘mere’ imitation of the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women (Page 1955, 35-39, Kirk 1962, 237). However, more recent scholars recognize that it has an important function within the wider narrative of Odysseus’ homecoming.

This paper explains why Odysseus compares Nausicaa to the sacred palm he visited on Delos at Od. 6.160-169. With the speech Odysseus extricates himself from a delicate position, wins Nausicaa’s sympathies, and takes an important step toward achieving his homecoming. Odysseus’ pious story quashes the sexual tension that the narrator has sown in the scene before Odysseus starts speaking and its imagery evokes epithalamic motifs that praise Nausicaa’s grace and beauty without implying any sexual threat.

This paper argues for the significance of a particular formulaic tendency in the Odyssey, namely that Odysseus is an implied referent whenever a verb of remembering, e.g. mimnêskō, occurs at the beginning of the hexameter line. Kahane (1992; 1994, 43-79) makes a similar argument for the co-occurrence of the word andra and line-initial position. This patterning, which Kahane refers to as 'pattern deixis,' anaphorically refers to Odysseus even when andra may have other, more immediate referents.

This paper investigates the literary techniques of an epigrammatic text by the Empress Eudocia that was found in the baths of Hammat Gader (SEG 35:1502; first edition: Green/Tsafrir 1982). The bath complex, one of the most celebrated in Late Antiquity, second only to Baiae, was visited by the Empress around the middle of the 5^th century. The epigram consists of 16 lines and tells of the miraculous healing powers and the elaborate canal system of the baths.