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In this paper I present my experience as an academic directing a weekly reading group in which combat veterans read Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad, summarizing and assessing the course and suggesting next steps.

This paper will discuss The Big Read, a program sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities, which fosters community participation in revitalization of reading, encourages appreciation of literature, and sparks dialogue about how reading for pleasure and enlightenment can benefit our communities. I will talk about the critical need for more classicists to be involved in events such as this as a way of establishing and maintaining a two-way dialogue in our communities about the value of the past.

My paper will consist of the following sections:

My paper considers together Varro's two great works of the early to mid-40s, the Antiquitates rerum diuinarum and the De lingua Latina. Though ostensibly about quite different subjects—Roman religion and the Latin language—the two works not only show extensive overlaps in content (as when, in ARD, divine names are explained etymologically or, conversely, when a fair amount of the Latin vocabulary discussed in LL turns out to refer to religious sites or institutions), but also exhibit similar methodologies and comparable goals.

When looking for literary fasti, Ovid’s elegiac six-months is the obvious prize. But look back half a century before Ovid, and Varro’s study De Lingua Latina got there first. Varro’s calendar in de Lingua Latina is striking in its apparent separation of civic from religious time. He sets the gods first: their ‘days’ precede the legal, political schedule (Ling. 6.12-24) and Varro makes no concessions to an audience unsure of how and why the civic and natural years might be storyboarded differently. It is from this premise that the paper commences.

Varro presents Latin as a language of great historical complexity and geographic reach. He distinguishes, for instance, at least three layers of Greek influence that predate the founding of Rome (Pelasgian Greek, Doric brought by Hercules, and Arcadian brought by Evander; Stevens 2006) and identifies significant contributions of loanwords from Rome’s neighbors on the Italic peninsula, notably from Sabellian, Etruscan, and Celtic sources, and from further afield (e.g., “Armenian” tigris).

In this paper I argue that Varro’s highest form of etymology traces the origins of words coined by Rome’s kings to reconstruct their understanding of the archaic Rome they established. Further, Varro’s ‘kinship’ metaphor for the relations of words and of the things they name derives from Chrysippus and the Stoic theory of ‘appropriation’.

The Oxyrhynchite estate of the Apion family is the most richly documented of the Byzantine period, and the pronoetes accounts associated with the estate shed light on its low-level functioning. Each records the target receipts and actual expenditures in both grain and money for subdivisions of the estate called prostasiai.

After the emperor Diocletian had separated the civil and military powers, until then united in the hand of the provincial governor, comites rei militaris and duces held the highest military authority in the provinces. In Egypt these were the comes Aegypti in the north and the subordinated dux Thebaidis in the south. In 539 CE the emperor Justinian reunited civil and military authority in the hands of the duces et Augustales (Lallemand 1964; Gascou 2004; Palme 1999, 2007).

It is easy to allocate resources that exist in sufficient quantities to satisfy the needs of all of their users. If constant, unregulated use poses no danger to the supply or quality of a resource, there is little need to regulate access. The allocation of scarce resources, however, requires more care. If supplies are insufficient to satisfy every user’s desires, rules must be put in place to govern access and to resolve disputes. Still more difficult is the regulated allocation of resources whose supplies are unpredictable and variable.

P.Tebt. 2.302 records a petition sent by priests in Tebtunis in 71-2 AD to the prefect detailing their grievances surrounding an amount of temple land. In this document, a group of priests complain that the local komogrammateus has broken the terms of the agreement under which they worked a parcel of land in place of receiving a subvention from the state. When published in 1907 by Grenfell and Hunt, they noted that it “throws considerable light on the treatment of the temples by the State in the first century” (Grenfell and Hunt, Tebtunis Papyri, Vol.