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Kapêloi and Economic Rationality in Fourth-Century BCE Athens

William Munford was born 15 August 1775 in Mecklenburg County, Virginia to a distinguished family.  In his youth, Munford studied Greek and Latin at Petersburg Academy until the age of twelve, at which time he entered The College of William and Mary.  After graduating with honors, he benefitted from the tutelage of George Wythe – signer of the Declaration of Independence and a “second Socrates,” according to Munford – who encouraged him to keep up with his Greek and to embark on a career of public service.  By the time of Munford’s death in 1825, he had indeed enjoye

           Angelo Poliziano’s four Silvae, presented as preliminary essays (prolusiones) on classical poetry for his students, are master classes in the medium of classicizing Latin verse: he elucidates classical poetry by renewing and rewriting it. In his silva entitled Nutricia (1491), Poliziano surveys poetry from classical antiquity to contemporary Italy.

It has long been recognized that the debate between Helen and Hecuba in Euripides’ Troades (915-1048) imitates the basic framework of an Athenian criminal trial. Moreover it has often been argued that the two speeches reflect the kind of sophistic rhetoric exemplified by Gorgias’ Encomium of Helen (e.g., Scodel 99-100, Goldhill 236-38, Conacher 51-58).  I argue that both sides of the debate imitate sophistic rhetorical experiments, but also rhetorical training pieces in general.

The Augustan Ludi Saeculares of 17 BCE were the first occasion on which Republican sacrifices at Tarentum in the Campus Martius were connected with Rome’s entrance into a new age, or saeculum. From this new association Augustus, with the help of Ateius Capito, renamed the old Tarentum sacrifices (formerly known as Ludi Tarentini) the Ludi Saeculares, the name they would bear in all future celebrations.

Talking Donkeys: A Seriocomic Interpretation of Apuleius, Metamorphoses 11.2

Hesiod’s Theogony is fundamentally concerned with the role of sound as a structuring force in the cosmos, a process in which his own poetic language is deeply implicated. Nowhere does this emerge more clearly than in the description of Zeus’ final adversary, Typhon, a monster whose hundred ophidian heads combine their individual voices to reproduce a variety of noises and sounds (Th. 820-35). Much recent scholarship has explored the significance of the voices of this distinctly poetic figure (e.g.

In his classic 1986 work on The Ethnic Origins of Nations, Anthony D. Smith argued that the Phoenicians are a prime example of his central argument that although the ‘nation’ as a political entity is a modern phenomenon, the kind of ethnic groups united by culture and sentiment that often justify the existence of modern nations can be found in much earlier periods. My suggestion in this paper is that the Phoenicians in fact illustrate a very different phenomenon, in which ancient ethnic groups are constructed by modern national discourse.

In this paper I examine Pausanias’ historiographic motives and methods through a close analysis of the logoi about the Hellenistic kings in Book 1. I propose that we can learn a lot about Pausanias’ self-presentation as an able writer of history, his explicit claims to authority, and his implicit claims to difference, by looking at how these logoi are incorporated into descriptions of the monuments of the Athenian Agora, especially the monument of the eponymous heroes.

Recent work on the poetic grammar of Pindar has emphasized the interaction of syntactic and metrical constituency and prosodic features of the language in relation to the syntactic and metrical boundaries of the verse. This work has also taken into account the value of comparison of these aspects of Pindar’s lyric verse with the hymns of the Rigveda (Watkins 2002a, 2002b), following an early account of parallels in the metrical systems of the Greek and Indic traditions (Meillet 1923).