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            Ovid’s Metamorphoses is famous for its extraordinarily high incidence of stories of sexual coercion (Curran, Richlin, Murgatroyd, and Raval are essential background). Throughout these stories, the reader sees a common motif in which victims are disempowered by sexual force; when pursued by a sexual predator, those who are not actually raped are frequently “saved”--transformed into subhuman figures like plants, birds, or geographic features--such that they remain vulnerable to their attackers.

Ovid’s treatment of the character of Lucretia and his account of her rape in the second book of the Fasti (2.685-852) have been overwhelmingly interpreted as a portrait of a woman disempowered by enforced silence, a private individual whose suffering is “absorbed and altered by a political ideology committed to an exemplary view of the past," a system "whose acceptance she can seek only through dying” (Newlands 1995: 146, 167).

When the Argonauts head to Colchis in book II of Apollonius Rhodius’ Argonautica, a significant portion of the narrative describes the Argo’s progression as it travels along the Pontic coast and past various lands and peoples. Several of these places are presented in some detail, including regarding the customs of the peoples that inhabit them — despite the fact that none of these lands are ever actually explored by the Argonauts, and none of these peoples (the Mossynoeci excepted) ever actually interacted with. The very presence of such descriptions is puzzling.

This paper presents a close reading an episode in Polybius’ Histories (8.15-21) that considers the role of pistis (trust, or an indication of trustworthiness) in an act of delegation to an untrustworthy subordinate. The episode in question is a rollocking tale of ancient espionage.

This paper reconsiders the prevailing interpretation of the civic function of late Archaic and early Classical Greek treasuries. Recent scholarship has configured the great Panhellenic sanctuaries’ thesauroi (treasuries) in the broader context of a reconstructed “contest of paradigms” between aristocratic ethos and civic ideologies (Neer 2001; Morris 1996; Kurke 1991).

Horace’s relationship with Neoteric poetry is ambivalent. His work seems steeped in principles embodied in the poetry of his late Republican predecessors. At the same time, he never really has anything good to say about them—certainly not directly. This paper interprets the figure of Inachia in Epodes 11 and 12 in light of this Horatian ambivalence toward Neoteric poetry.

My paper examines the formal and thematic aspects of catalogues of women in Homeric epic to account for the genesis of the Hesiodic Gunaikon Katalogos (GK), a comprehensive genealogy structured as a list of mortal women. I show that catalogues of women appear in epic because they feature exogamous marriage as an instantiation of heroic action; exogamy and heroic action are both exceptions to the course of nature. A Panhellenic genealogical project like the GK preserved accounts of exogamy to avoid the repetitive nature of genealogy.   

        For over a decade scholars have read Horace’s so-called “diatribe satires” within the context of the poet’s disparate personas (Martindale 1993; Oliensis 1998), which, in hindsight, ought to strike readers as the equivalent of a diagnosis of literary schizophrenia.  The only thing these poems seem to have in common is their helplessly lackadaisical, quasi-Cynic approach to moral vice (Oltramare 1926; Fiske 1971; Freudenburg 1993), which has been described in terms of incompetence (Rudd 1966; Fiske 1971), utter confusion (Fraenkel 1954; Rudd 1966) and even mo

About the only scholarly consensus on Ep. 58 of Seneca’s Epistulae Morales is that it is perplexing. This paper concerns one prominent nexus of questions: What is Seneca’s attitude towards the Platonic ideas recounted here? Does he ascribe to them? Or merely use them for his Stoic purposes? Scholars have argued that Seneca adopts a Stoicized Platonism in Ep. 58 (e.g. Donini [1979]) or a Platonized Stoicism (e.g. Setaioli [1988], Sedley [2005]).

Letters 13-16 of Aelian’s Epistulae rusticae well exemplify how creatively Greek authors of the Imperial period approached canonical texts from the fifth and fourth centuries BCE. In these four epistles Aelian presents to the reader the correspondence between two characters of Menander’s Dyskolos: the “grouch” Knemon and his neighbor Kallippides.