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The aim of this paper is to present the results of a recent field study of the archaeological context of the rock inscriptions from ancient Thera. Dating back to the 7th and 6th century B.C., they are amongst the earliest testimonies of alphabetic writing in Greece (Jeffery 1991). Personal names, invocations to the gods and records of erotic achievements were carved in the ancient town -and are still clearly visible to the modern visitor- on the rocks around the temple of Apolo Karneios, the Agora of the Gods and the gymnasium, offering a vivid image of civic life in archaic Thera.

Dating c. 500 AD, Aristainetos’ fictive amatory letters draw extensively upon the erotic topoi of Greek literature, and comedy features among the author’s most important models. Scholars have begun to investigate Aristainetos’ borrowings from the Greek comic tradition (cf. Arnott 1973, 1975, 1982, Magrini, Zanetto, Drago, Höschele), though the full extent of his appropriation remains to be discovered.

Studies of the theatrical element in Statius’ Achilleid have so far focused mainly on tragic intertexts (e.g. Heslin 2005; Fantuzzi 2013). In this paper, I posit that—as the Second Sophistic’s revived interest in Menander reached Rome—the Latin poet alluded extensively to Greek New Comedy as well. He did so to create an alternate, “Menandrian” world on his island of Scyros, where a costumed Achilles is allowed to hide from the Achilleid’s main and much grimmer “epic” narrative.

Favorinus of Arles is described in sources both hostile and friendly as a eunuch or hermaphrodite who was nonetheless accused of adultery with the wife of a consular; the philosopher-sophist himself even reportedly acknowledged the allegation as one of his “three paradoxes” (Philostr. VS 489; Polem. Phgn. 161.9-163.16 Foerster; Luc. Eun. 7, 10).

It is undeniable that the theater scene in the imperial period included the increasingly popular genres of mime and pantomime (Webb 2008) as well as the reprisal of scenes from Greek tragedy (Jones 1993, Gildenhard / Revermann 2010). Notably absent from this picture is comedy, with few challenging the assumption that productions of comedy fell by the wayside in the centuries following the success of Plautus and Terence.

Unlike Aristophanes’ plays, Menander’s comedies enjoyed a long and successful re-performance tradition. Some thirty years after Menander’s death, his plays were already being re-staged as ‘old’ comedies (SEG XXVI 208) and continued being re-performed for Hellenistic audiences in and out of Athens. In the Greek East as in the Roman West, they also entered the repertory of imperial actors such as an anonymous performer celebrated in the Palatine Anthology (9.513); Straton (IG II212664) and probably Demetrius and Statocles (Quint. Inst.

Roman philosophers have consistently been brought into broad philosophical debates about hybridity and animality (e.g. Sorabji 1993; Tutrone 2012) and are well represented in collections of sources about animals in antiquity (e.g. Newmayer 2011). Nonetheless, there has been little discussion of there being a focused dialogue between Roman philosophers on these related topics.

Recent work at the intersection of philosophy and the life sciences has pointed to a “naturalistic turn in the human image” as the neural mechanisms of cognition are identified (Metzinger 2009: 3, 214-17, 233-40). Empathy has been redescribed in light of the discovery of the mirror neuron system as a “mandatory, automatic, nonconscious, prerational, nonintrospectionist process” (Gallese in Metzinger 2009: 176), rather than an inferential reconstruction of intentions in a two-stage process of observation and reflection.

In this paper, I argue that a reconsideration of Aristotle’s teleological approach to human and non-human phenomena alike may be useful for the contemporary turn to concepts of the posthuman and nonhuman. In particular, the renewed interest in matter and “materialism” on the part of feminist scholars (see, e.g., Alaimo and Hekman, 2008) may be enriched by an in-depth consideration of the notion of hulê as material cause in Aristotle’s philosophical and biological writings.

This paper considers objects in the Iliad as an important but often overlooked category of the nonhuman, drawing on recent theoretical work in the field of New or Vibrant Materialism. Vibrant Materialism has stressed the autonomy and agency of the material world and seeks to demolish the binary of human agent vs. inert object in favor of a more co-operative and dynamic interaction between nonhuman and human.