145

The Phaeacians’ appearance in Apollonius Rhodius’ Argonautica (Argo.4.538-551, 992-1223) is their second longest in Greek literature, surpassed only by Odyssey. The length of this treatment and Apollonius’ well-known practice of alluding to Homeric poetry have led scholars such as West (2005) and Dyck (1989) to conclude that Apollonius’ Phaeacians are simply a calque of Homer’s.

This paper presents a critical reconsideration of the Latin term arcanus in the works of Tacitus, in order to offer some new insights into the historian's attitude towards the Principate as a mode of government. It will focus in particular on the four occasions where the neuter substantive “arcana” is used by Tacitus to refer to secrets related either to the state or to imperial government (Hist. 1.4.2; Ann.

The Georgics is a key text in the development at Rome of a discourse about security that deserves greater philological attention than it has yet received. While securitas first appears as psychological tranquility in Cicero, by Velleius Paterculus the word’s meaning approaches our “national security” (spem… perpetuae securitatis aeternitatisque Romani imperii, 2.103.4) (Instinsky). The interval marks the transition from republic to empire.

This paper uses a close reading of an Athenian inscription (“Athens Aids Eretria” = Tod 154 = IG II² 125) to challenge long-held assumptions about Greek mercenary service and its relationship to the “decline” of the fourth century polis.

Debates over the relationship between an armed citizen body and the possibility of government tyranny dominate current American political discourse. The rhetoric on both sides of the issue often centers on the Second Amendment and the intentions and political philosophies of the framers of the Constitution. The founding fathers’ political theories, however, were greatly influenced by their interpretations of ancient Greek and Roman history (Wiltshire 1992; Richard 1994), especially the frequency and intensity of stasis in Greek city-states (e.g.

Athenian lawsuits against laws and decrees are often treated as ancient parallels to the modern remedies against unconstitutional measures: the graphai against unlawful decrees (παρανόμων) and against making law that is “unfitting” (νόμον μὴ ἐπιτήδειον θεῖναι) defended the politeia much as the US federal courts deal with laws and decisions at odds with the Constitution.

Strattis’ comedy Phoenician Women was a spectacular Euripidean parody including Dionysus as a deus ex machina complaining of being dragged on stage yet again to solve other people’s problems, Jocaste simultaneously delivering cooking advice to her sons and encapsulating the art of Old Comic parody, obscene jokes about the Boeotian dialect, and the first extant use of the word “paratragedy.” In this paper I use Phoenician Women to explore the parodic practices of Strattis, a younger contemporary of Aristophanes who presented himself as an expert in Euripidean poetr

The idea that Aristophanes acted in his own plays has been accepted and rejected a number of times since it was first proposed over a century ago. Neither side, however, has offered an argument based on a full examination of the evidence. This paper seeks to fill that gap and ultimately rejects the theory.

This paper explores a new, historicizing reading of a major theme in Aristophanes’ Ecclesiazusae. The term soteria (broadly ‘deliverance’; for its semantic range: Faraone 1997:56-7) occurs more times in this play than anywhere else in Aristophanes, but the absence of a sufficiently heightened sense of crisis in the period of the play’s production (probably between 393 and 390: Ussher 1973:xx-xxv; Seager 1967:107n.110; cf. Sommerstein 1998:5-7) and the its vagueness about the reason for the need for soteria (cf.

Memorably described by Gilbert Murray in 1933 as the ‘literature of fatigue,’ Ecclesiazusae has commonly been presented as lacking the political cutting edge of its predecessors. Viewed as a product of Aristophanes’ declining powers and performed at a time when interest in political ‘Old Comedy’ was supposedly on the wane, Ecclesiazusae’s engagement with the political questions of post-war Athens has been largely ignored.