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The poetry of Virgil famously inspires a plethora of antithetical interpretations. In particular, the Eclogues have instigated unending dispute about Virgil’s intentions in employing the pastoral mode and his opinion of the pastoral world itself. Does Virgil approve of the bucolic ideal, or does he denounce it? Scholars abound on both sides of the debate. In an effort to decipher Virgil's true understanding of the pastoral world and its poetry, in this paper I examine Virgil’s use of the quintessential pastoral trope: umbra.

Catullus 2 and 3 offer two of the most prominent appearances of the sparrow in Classical Greek and Latin literature. While poems about pets, and especially dead pets, were already popular in the Hellenistic period, Catullus was the first to introduce the sparrow to this genre (Hooper 162). Following the dedicatory poem to Cornelius Nepos, the passer poems also stand out as the first two in the Catullan corpus. The importance of these poems is suggested by Ovid’s deliberate imitation of Catullus 3 where Corinna watches her parrot pass away (Am.

In the Ecclesiazousae, Aristophanes presents his audience with a radical political question: what if the entire Athenian democracy were turned over to the women of the city, and they became the custodians of democracy rather than the men? As Zeitlin (1999) notes, the overall effect of this radical change is never fully explored within the play, and thus there is ambiguity as to whether or not this “communist” innovation deserves political approbation or blame. However, as Lape (2004) explores, Greek comedy had a powerful ability to reinforce norms and laws in society.

Commentators on Homer’s Odyssey have offered several unsatisfactory or incomplete explanations of Athena’s repeated affirmation (Od. 1.93-95; 13.421-424) that kleos will come to Telemachus in the course of his voyage to Pylos and Sparta (Clarke 1967; Rose 1967; Jones 1988; Van Nortwick 2008). I propose an interpretation of Athena’s statement which takes into account the broad scope, lineal roots, and social character of kleos in the Homeric world.

Political Culture revolves around interaction and exchange – words, gestures, consent and obedience – and recent scholarship out of Germany has made great headway in exploring the cognitive and communicative aspects of such transactions. Missing from this research, however, has been an economic focus.

The recent knowledge advancement in Roman Republican studies has been due to a vivid, vibrant international scholarly debate. Yet despite the close exchange between scholars and students from both sides of the Atlantic, and elsewhere, there are noticeable fracture zones. Indeed, since the days of Gelzer and Syme, one such ridge runs through the exchange between scholars in the Anglophone world and those in German speaking academia. It does not emerge from ill intend or ignorance, but largely from the different trajectories of divergent university cultures.

The Roman Republican ‘ideology of publicity’, Millar’s suggestion that important decisions and procedures had to be performed in public with the populus Romanus as witnesses, has made the public contio central to our understanding of Republican politics. But Millar’s further claim that the ideology of publicity is evidence of popular political power has been challenged. In German, Hölkeskamp and Flaig argued that public politics consisted of ritualized performance which reproduced existing power structures.

Scholars across all scientific disciplines forge their vision of the world both according to their own individual perspectives and in the larger context of their national academic discourses. National scientific cultures have a significant influence on the activities (and research results) of the individual scholar, based on specific epistemological traditions, academic institutions, and their hierarchies.

This paper is focused on the particular interaction between German, English and American scholars working on the field of politics and political structures of the Roman Republic ever since Matthias Gelzer and Friedrich Münzer published their classic books in 1912 and 1920 respectively.

Nearly every book of Vergil’s Aeneid includes the unfinished verses which bespeak the author’s precocious death. The indications that Vergil left his work uncompleted lead some readers to believe that he might have intended to write a thirteenth book, and authors throughout the centuries have themselves composed additional books for the epic. This paper concerns four Neo-Latin imitators of Vergil from across Europe.