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With very few exceptions, scholars take Socrates'[1] ethics to be eudaimonist.

How does war change the land? Where is its memory preserved – in monuments and trophies, or in absences and silences? This paper deals with the aftermath of the naval battle of Actium in 31 BC. Focusing on two Greek epigrams, it analyses the interplay between warfare, loss, and renewal in literary depictions of the Ambracian Gulf and its environs.

The most famous battle in the Argonautica is the tragic scene in which the Argonauts mistakenly fight and kill their former hosts, the kindly Doliones (1.1025-52). This episode is generally taken to exemplify Apollonius’ response to the warfare of the Iliad: scholars have found in it a criticism of the traditional martial ethos (e.g. Hunter 1993, 43-44; Goldhill 1990, 317-19), or even a condemnation of war itself (e.g. Effe 2008).

Although readers have long noted the influence of dramatic genres on historiography, most discussions of “tragic history” have been preoccupied with the emplotment of certain episodes (e.g., Thomas 1991), the use of tragic emotions in history (e.g., Marincola 2003), or else the connections between historiographic narrative and dramatic predecessors (e.g., Wiseman 1998 or Santoro L’Hoir 2006). All of these studies have in common the invaluable grounding of their historiographical subject in the educative and cultural milieux of the early principate.

In this paper, I argue both that the Stoic and Platonic accounts of non-rational feelings and desires are more similar than scholars have generally thought, and that appreciating this similarity helps to elucidate Plato’s account of the positive contribution of non-rational feelings and desires to the fully virtuous soul.

Thesis: The slaves listed in the Attic Stelai are unrepresentative of the Athenian slave population: the proportion of female slaves is too low, because the confiscations from the Hermokopidai did not usually include property attached to their wives.  This property contained a high proportion of female slaves, but would often have been retained by the wives or re-possessed by their families before the auctions recorded in the Attic Stelai.

Euripides’ Helen is a bold experiment in the flexibility of tragedy, one that features a number of elements (e.g., humor, metatheater, a happy ending) more akin to comedy than to tragedy. Direct influence of comedy on tragedy has been difficult to identify, but this paper suggests that such influence is found in the Helen. Specifically, I argue that Euripides has woven into the play’s mythological framework Cratinus’ treatment of Helen’s conception and birth in his comedy Nemesis.

The mythology of the primordial king Erechtheus was critical to the self-definition of fifth and fourth century BCE Athenians. Its most comprehensive retelling is the Erechtheus of Euripides which, although fragmentary, is now receiving scholarly attention (Calame, Collard-Cropp, Kannicht, Sonnino). Euripides does not passively record mythology though, and, in order to understand the play, it is critical to first understand how he interacts with the competing mythological traditions of his era.

Inscribed epigram has recently attracted considerable attention, particularly with regard to its ritual and material context (Day; Baumbach, Petrovic, & Petrovic). Yet, while epigram has often been used as a comparison point for epic and lyric (Scodel; Irwin; Elmer), the place of inscribed epigram in archaic literary culture has not been fully considered since Friedländer & Hoffleit’s commentary on archaic epigram and Di Tillio’s catalogue of formulae shared between epigram and epic.

At the height of popularity of the Epidauran Asklepieion in the 4th century BCE, a suppliant would expect to participate and perform a varied set of rituals as part of the incubation process.  There was a period of decline in the Epidauran sanctuary between the middle of the 2nd c. BCE and the renovation of the sanctuary by Hadrian and then Antoninus in the 2nd c.