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The association of Herodotus with the colony at Thurii in southern Italy is generally accepted (Murray 2001: 323-24) based on Aristotle's quotation of the first line of the Histories (Rhet.

In Sophocles’ Trachiniae, only when Heracles is about to succumb to gruesome death does he realize that the prophesied peaceful end to his toils (170, 825, 1168-9) will be death itself. Until then, he and the other characters in the play had grossly misunderstood the “trusty oracles” of Zeus (μαντεῖα πιστὰ, 77). Five distinct versions of the oracle appear in the play, each suggesting a different fate for Heracles; strikingly, each different version of this oracle is fulfilled in the end.

Politics 7 claims that the self-assertive and defensive faculty of soul, the thumos, is “the faculty by which we love” (philoumen; 1328a1). Interpreters have been slow to credit this claim, in part because Aristotle’s treatises on friendship in the Nicomachean and Eudemian Ethics attribute no such function to thumos. Other places in the corpus corroborate it, however, and the passage and its interpretation illuminate a crux in Aristotelian friendship: whether an initial self-love “extends to others” (EN 9, 1168b5-6).

This paper seeks, in a limited way, to build off several trends in the interpretation of Virgil’s Aristaeus epyllion (G. 4.315-558).  I begin with a question: Why does the bugonia described by Cyrene at the end of the epyllion (G. 4.538-58) differ so radically from the bugonia described by the narrator earlier in the poem (G. 4.294-314)?  I argue that the very existence of divergences has metapoetical and epistemological implications.

I propose to investigate an argument that Plato makes only in the Laws, namely that self-mastery is a kind of freedom (635b-d). The Platonic concept of freedom is one of the more controversial subjects in the scholarly literature, but there is nearly universal agreement that Plato posits a concept of freedom as self-mastery, and that self-mastery is, what Isaiah Berlin called, “positive liberty” (Berlin 1997: 204, 212-213; cf., Stalley 1998: 145, 151-152; Klosko 2006: 165-169; Edge 2009: 44; Hansen 2010: 27, 21).

The study of gnômai (Lat. sententiae) in the Greek novel received its greatest impetus from Morales. She first focused on the “intratextual” functions of these proverbs to show that they are integral to their framing narratives (2000) and then continued to identify subtle and effective uses of gnômai by Achilles Tatius in particular (2004). This paper investigates the rich application of gnômai by another novelist, Heliodorus, and especially his construction through gnômai of an authorial voice that is powerful yet impersonal.

Most of the scholarship on the Archaeology--the inquiry into the Greek past that opens Thucydides' history (1.2-1.19)--has emphasized its programmatic qualities. It is the Archaeology, for instance, which introduces the idea of the Athenians and Spartans' opposing national characters (Luginbill 1999). It is likewise the Archaeology where the relationship between ships, money and imperial power is first foregrounded, anticipating Athens' hegemony and establishing its pillars (Connor 1984: 23-27).

To convince the Athenians to launch the Sicilian Expedition against the Syracusans, Thucydides’ Alcibiades describes the would-be enemy as a mixed group that easily accepts changes and new citizens:

ὄχλοις τε γὰρ ξυμμείκτοις πολυανδροῦσιν αἱ πόλεις καὶ ῥᾳδίας ἔχουσι τῶν πολιτῶν τὰς μεταβολὰς καὶ ἐπιδοχάς. καὶ οὐδεὶς δι’ αὐτὸ ὡς περὶ οἰκείας πατρίδος οὔτε τὰ περὶ τὸ σῶμα ὅπλοις ἐξήρτυται οὔτε τὰ ἐν τῇ χώρᾳ νομίμοις κατασκευαῖς·

Music (including dance, instrumentation and poetry) constitutes a major theme in Euripides’ Troades, and the play itself is predominantly musical in its performance. The ratio of lyric to spoken trimeters and recitative anapaests confirms this impression, as lyric makes up approximately half of the drama. A handful of scholars have observed this quality of the play. For instance, Murnaghan  (2011) understands the chorus’ references to choral celebrations prior to the fall of Troy as emphasizing the social breakdown evident in the play’s dramatic present.

The Greek term παρρησία has a historical life: it possesses a different meaning under different periods and in different contexts, denoting a practice, an ideal, or a right. This paper focuses specifically on παρρησία as the ethically-oriented performance of frank-speaking that Foucault schematizes as “monarchic parrhesia,” and explores how Greek authors under the Principate deployed it as a rhetorical trope with which to pass judgment on Roman emperors.