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Male anxieties relating to infertility inform a significant body of questions addressed to the Oracle at Delphi (Fontenrose 1978, 443). For example, a male questioner asks the oracle how he will have children (Q104); another petitioner states his desire for children (Q160), while another declares his lack of offspring (L23).

While the scholarly community has traditionally held Aulus Gellius to be an unimaginative compiler of information and excerpts, the process of rehabilitating the Noctes Atticae (NA) and its author is now well underway, and Gellius is increasingly considered to be a rich source of information on the vibrant Antonine intellectual culture. As the NA gain more critical attention, the focus typically remains the socio-cultural background of the text (e.g. the seminal Holford-Strevens 2003); recently, more attention has been given to Gellius’ literary techniques (e.g.

Plutarch's Quaestiones convivales (Symposiaka problemata) has attracted much attention in recent years (e.g. König 2007; Klotz & Oikonomopoulou 2011). The position of Quaest. conv. 9.1 (736D-737C) marks it as especially important, for it opens the final (and exceptionally long) ninth book. This paper examines Plutarch's use of this first problema in book nine to present divergent perspectives on the relationship between education and political power.

The role of oracles in Herodotus and Thucydides has been well examined. It has been argued, for example, that oracles provide Herodotus with a way for him to authorize his narrative voice (Kindt 2006) or to invite the reader's interpretation of the text (Barker 2006). Similarly, Marinatos (1981) has maintained that Thucydides critically engages with the ambiguities of oracular language. However, the oracles that appear in Plutarch's Lives have received no such systematic attention.

This paper argues that recent additions to our understanding of Roman Epicureanism enhance our appreciation for how Horace presents the tensions between public duties in the city and private pursuit of ataraxia in Satires 2.6. The most significant treatments of Satires 2.6 accurately describe the poetic effects, rhetorical devices, the carefully balanced structure of the poem, and identify some of the Epicurean intertexts such as Lucretius 3.1060-67 and Philodemus’ dinner invitation to his patron Piso, AP 11.44 (Bond, Brink, Gigante, Muecke, West).

One of the most powerful attributes of Horatian satire is its ability to provide seemingly frivolous entertainment while communicating moral truth. The Roman satirist Perseus effectively captured the force of this paradox: omne uafer uitium ridenti Flaccus amico | tangit et admissus circum praecordia ludit (1.116-117). This approach to satire is traditionally associated with the Cynic spoudaiogeloion motif, which combines attacks on vicious behavior with language that is colorful, outrageous and even obscene.

This paper contends that, although Philodemus of Gadara’s doctrines on friendship retain the essential elements of Epicurus’ teachings, he reshapes and adds to these teachings to reflect the social and cultural reality of his contemporary late-republican, Roman context. Where Epicurus had stressed the utilitarian nature of friendship among a community of Epicureans, Philodemus highlights both the utilitarian and affectionate nature of friendship.

Lucretius’ account of the emergence of consciousness in Book 3 of the De Rerum Naturae (DRN 3.136-9, 258-81, 323-32) has long resisted interpretation by scholars using the usual tools of analytical philosophy. In this paper, I argue that a literary analysis, sensitive to the figural aspects of language and borrowing from the poststructuralist toolbox (i.e. Derrida 1974, Butler 1993; cf. Kennedy 2002), solves some central philosophical problems in these passages.

In this paper I argue that the Orphic hymn to Zeus quoted in the Derveni papyrus, the Aristotelic De mundo, and by a series of later writers, was composed in a hybrid meter that combines Greek hexameters with the meter found in the poetry of Northern Syria and Mesopotamia. Using metrical analysis, I propose a new reconstruction of the hymn to Zeus. I contend that the earliest version of the hymn comply both with the standards of hexametrical and Semitic poetry, but that later versions sometimes display no familiarity with Semitic verse making.

Grammars of Classical Greek note that the potential optative can be accompanied by a negative, resulting in 'total negation' (Gildersleeve §442), i.e., the statement that it is not possible that something might happen (as opposed to the statement that it is possible that something might not happen), as in the following well-known dictum of Heraclitus,

(1) δὶς ἐς τὸν αὐτὸν ποταμὸν οὐκ ἂν ἐμβαίης.

You cannot step into the same river twice.

which does not mean that there exists just a possibility that you might not step into that same river twice.