147

          Ancient Greek lullabies resemble protective magical incantations designed to protect the hearer from the attack of daimonic forces.

Pindar’s First Pythian Ode, written for Hieron of Syracuse in 470 BC, is not only one of the greatest extant Greek lyric poems, but also a priceless historical document because it provides a unique perspective on the Sicilian victories over the Carthaginians and Etruscans in 480 and 474 BC. This paper explores the relationship between Pyth.

A fragment of Kallixeinos of Rhodes’ Peri Alexandreias (FGrH 627 F 1, ap. Ath., Deipn. 5.204d-206d) provides a lengthy description of the Thalamegos, the luxurious Nile barge of Ptolemy IV Philopator. Unlike the Tessarakonteres, Philopator’s giant warship, the Thalamegos was built for pleasure cruises, a purpose reflected in its lavish interior design. Distributed over its two decks were promenades, bed chambers, and several dining rooms, including one dining room decorated in an Egyptian style and another with columns of Indian stone.

This paper analyzes Xenophon’s Hiero as a piece of literary criticism akin to Plato’s Ion. It argues that Xenophon interrogates poetic modes of advice-giving as a way to propose a prose alternative to didactic poetry addressed to leaders. It concludes that Xenophon uses his engagement with praise poetry to transform epinician χάρις into a political tool.

Scholars generally consider the Homeric Hymns to be without organization.  Exceptions are Van der Valk (1976), who argues that the Homeric Hymns are arranged according to “archaic religious principles,” and Torres-Guerra (2003), who believes they are arranged by narrative type.  I outline a new organization for the Homeric Hymns, one which alters our understanding of the Hymns as a group and suggests that the collection is much older than is generally thought.

Aristotle asserts that if listeners are to benefit from his ethics lectures, they must have grasped "the that" (ta hoti) (cf. EN I.4, 1095a30-b7). Many scholars seem to think that ta hoti in ethics refer to “concrete judgments about how people, actions, or states are similar or different and better or worse than one another" (Salmieri, “Aristotle’s Non-‘Dialectical’ Methodology in the Nicomachean Ethics,” 322).

            In this paper I make a case for the reading hunc, the presumed reading of manuscript V, at Catullus 29.20, treating it as an intentional exception to the pure iambic trimeters of the poem analogous to the use of the proper name Mamurra in line 3 of the same poem.

           The reception of Cicero’s work within Ambrose’s De officiis has attracted much scholarly attention, and the range of opinions about his use of Cicero range from outright plagiarism to a complete transformation. By focusing on Ambrose’s treatment of a single virtue, liberalitas (generosity), the independence of Ambrose’s homonymous work becomes apparent.

John Kaminiates’ Sack of Thessaloniki is a text surrounded by controversy. It purports to be Kaminiates’ tenth-century eye-witness historical account of the sack of the city by an Arab fleet in 904 CE, but almost every element of this self-presentation was strongly attacked by Kazhdan (1978), who argued that it was not by Kaminiates, who did not exist at all, and further maintained that it was not written in the tenth century and therefore was neither an eye-witness account nor of particular historical value.

Werner Jaeger’s work on Aristotle, and particularly the Metaphysics is characterized by the basic idea that inconsistencies in Aristotle’s writings are reflections of different stages in the philosopher’s intellectual development. Although Jaeger’s interpretation was rather influential on 20th-century Aristotelian scholarship, his method is out of fashion today and his conclusions have often been questioned (e.g. Cherniss 1935, Lachtermann 1990).