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Study of the Homeric scholia has recently shifted from purely textual matters to their use in reconstructing lost chapters in the history of ancient literary criticism (Dickie 19-20). My paper addresses one area in which the scholia reveal a more nuanced criticism than their abbreviated form at first suggests, that of character (ethos) and characterization (cf. Richardson 272-75, Nünlist 2009: 246-54).

Scholars have long recognized that Odysseus’ wanderings culminate in his reestablishment of order in Ithaca according to traditional notions of elite power (e.g. Foley 2004). Burgeoning work in the field of social history shows that economic, social, and familial relationships intersect in a society’s animal management strategies (Howe 2008). No scholar has yet combined these approaches to assess Odysseus’ leadership in terms of the way he interacts with herds and herdsmen throughout the epic.

“τίς πόθεν εἰς ἀνδρῶν . . . ;” (“What man are you and whence?”). This seemingly innocuous question (recurring seven times in the Odyssey) may initially appear unremarkable because of its natural position in the guest-host type-scene, a context discussed extensively in scholarship (Goldhill 1991, Reece 1993, de Jong 2001, Louden 1999, Fenik 1974).

This paper argues that there is a strong and deliberate generic relationship between archaic didactic hexameter, as exemplified by Hesiod's Works and Days, and the oracular hexameter poetry attributed to the Pythia in Herodotus' Histories. For much of the 19^th and 20^th centuries, the corpus of oracular poetry was mired in debates about authenticity between positivist historians, as exemplified in the seminal collections of Parke and Fontenrose. Recently, scholars have begun to ask more generative questions about the poem.

Since West’s monograph (1985), and as a result of new papyrological discoveries, there has been a growing interest among scholars towards the Catalogue of Women (e.g. Hunter 2005). However, the origin of this poem ascribed to Hesiod remains controversial. Some scholars have recently pointed out that both the poem’s contents and language (at least in its final version) ultimately reflect a Northwestern milieu (Fowler 1998, Hirschberger 2004, Cassio 2009).

This essay identifies unspeakable crime—nefas—as a thematic motif in Book 2 of Ovid's Fasti and proposes that stories of crime and expiation from the first half of Ovid's poetic treatment of the month of February create a cogent literary theme that is sustained throughout the book. Building off of Feeney's (1992) and Newland's (1995) observations about speech and silence in Ovid's account of the “Rape of Lucretia” in Fasti 2, I suggest that the term nefas functions as the literal nexus of crime and silence (“unspeakable crime”) in Ovid's poem.

Ovid is no giant. It is true that at several places in the exilic works, he explicitly likens himself to one struck by a thunderbolt (e.g. Tr. 1.1.72, 81-2; 2.179-80; see Barchiesi, Evans, and Scott), and when combining the theme of the thunderstruck poet together with the references to Gigantomachy in Tristia 2, it is tempting to view Ovid in this poem as a giant fighting against Jupiter-Augustus. Biographically, the metaphor works nicely, for the giants, like Ovid, were relegated to the furthest reaches of the earth for their insolence.

In his discussion of lucky and unlucky days in the first Georgic, Vergil instructs the farmer to avoid the fifth as a day of especially ill omen, claiming it as the birthday for a rogues’ gallery of mythical figures, including Orcus, the Eumenides, the Titans Coeus and Iapetus, the monster Typhoeus, and the Aloidae Otus and Ephialtes (1.277-280).

The Hesiodic Shield of Heracles is a monstrous text, which establishes an antagonistic relationship with the reader – a phenomenon not found in any other archaic Greek text, and perhaps not again until modern works of horror. The reader is cast as a viewer (several figures are described as “not to be spoken of” or “not expressible in speech”) and is confronted with a succession of nightmarish images that give the text characteristics of a monstrous body: excessiveness, disorder and a dangerous glare.

This paper treats gendered constructions of the suppliant, or “patient,” in the Epidaurian iamata —a corpus of roughly 70 (47 complete and 23 fragmentary) short narratives detailing the miraculous cures performed by Asklepios (published as IG IV2 1, 142-44). I examine the assumptions about women and women’s diseases the inscriptions held, and show how these narratives structure the "ideal" female patient in a familial context. I go on to question to what extent these assumptions were shared with the authors of the (near contemporary) Hippocratic gynecological treatises.