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Why, in his discussion of gemstones in Book 37 of the Natural History, does Pliny the Elder utilize the term candidus over three times as often as the term albus? Why does he describe red stones as ruber only once, but as sanguineus twelve times? In this paper I situate the peculiarities of Pliny’s use of color terms in Book 37 within the framework of anthropological scholarship on color terminology, and I will present and interpret the peculiarities of Pliny’s language.

Stephens 2003 and others have shown the ability of Ptolemaic court poets to "see double" by manipulating the symbols and narratives from classical Egyptian ideology of kingship to portray the bicephalous Ptolemaic monarchy. Natural scientists also dedicated treatises to Ptolemaic rulers and participated in the discourses of the court. Among them was Eratosthenes of Cyrene, who produced both poetry and scientific texts for Ptolemy III Euergetes.

The purpose of Euclid’s Optics is not primarily to explain false appearances or to provide an account of sight, as is often claimed. Rather, the text has a far less defined or unified goal; it simply inscribes vision and a few related phenomena into a set of mathematical practices.

The vast majority of Lucian’s works were composed primarily with a live audience in mind. The author’s frequent and skilled employment of deixis, which I shall define as the use of ‘here and now’ and ‘this and that’ expressions, attests to this. It also shows how this intended live audience shaped the composition of Lucian’s epideictic speeches and his comic dialogues. In this paper I will compare Lucian’s usage of deictics between these two genres, which together supply almost the entire corpus.

Eusebian and Lactantian narratives of Constantine’s victory at the Milvian Bridge have long provided historians and literary critics alike with a dominant script for this watershed event (Burkhardt 1853, Barnes 1981, Cameron 1983). Recent studies, however, have focused on neglected memories of Constantine’s victory in the Panegyrici Latini and other non-Christian texts (Humphries 2008, Van Dam 2012). I argue that Panegyric 12(9) deploys a range of genealogical fictions to legitimize and re-enact Constantine’s victory over Maxentius.

The venom with which Demosthenes lambasts Meidias suits both the circumstance of their private quarrel as well as the contemporary Athenian political climate. This paper will reevaluate Demonsthenes’ vitriol in his Against Meidias to show that the characterization of his opponent plays off Athenian fears specific to tyrannical individuals. With the political machinations of Philip II and Mausolos as background, I argue that Demosthenes spins his chief criticisms of Meidias into tyrannical attributes, an effective means of securing conviction in a fourth century Athenian courtroom.

This paper treats two passages in Plato’s Gorgias that appear to present two conflicting accounts of the art of rhetoric. In the first (463a6-465e1) Socrates describes rhetoric as a pseudo-art: a mere knack based on experience (ἐμπειρία) with no real knowledge of its subject-matter; it is a branch of “flattery” (κολακεία) of the same status as cookery and cosmetics. But in the second passage (500d6-504e4) Socrates describes an orator with real expertise in the rhetorical art (ὁ τεχνικὸς ῥήτωρ).

I intend to investigate a central element of Antiphon’s rhetorical strategy in On the Murder of Herodes: the vocabulary of visibility and invisibility. The speaker, who has been accused of murdering Herodes on a stormy night after a drinking party, uses phaneros and phainomai and aphanēs and aphanizō to refer to the alleged crime, the alleged evidence, and the arguments of himself and his opponents.

The 2012 publication of Alice Oswald’s “Memorial” in America met with a mixed reception: while NPR’s Alan Cheuse rated it among the five best books in fiction and poetry of the year, the reviews by Peter Green for the New Republic and by William Logan for the New York Times were rather negative. In my opinion, the poem richly rewards attention, especially from readers who are trained in the Classics.

In an important article, Valerie Traub recently assessed ‘The New Unhistoricism in Queer Studies’ which, she argues, has gone too far in aligning (if not conflating) chronology, genealogy, teleology and ‘straight temporality’ in an attempt to free itself from ‘a lingering attachment to identity that unduly stabilizes sexuality and recruits earlier sexual regimes into a lockstep march toward the present … and through a kind of reverse contamination conscripts past sexual arrangements to modern categories’ (Traub 2013: 24).