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The field of classical receptions has sought antiquity everywhere, it seems, but the North Sea. With few exceptions, notably William Mullen’s essay “Sailing Homer’s Baltic” (2007) and Felice Vinci’s controversial The Baltic Origins of Homer’s Epic Tales (2005), the relationship between Mediterranean texts and non-monastic Northern Europe has received scant attention from classical philologists. Yet the lack of interest in these receptions is surprising, given the overwhelming number of Latin texts known to the Anglo-Saxons.

        This paper argues that, by aligning the Carmentis of the Fasti with his own poetic concerns, Ovid fashions her into his programmatic representative.  Furthermore, a comparison of Carmentis’ explicit praise of Livia in Fasti 1 to the implicit praise of Livia found in the Hersilia episode of Metamorphoses 14 suggests that Ovid uses Carmentis to deflect the offense potentially found in his ultimate statement of poetic power: the deification of Livia.   

This paper examines the reception of Apuleius’ “Cupid and Psyche” in South Korean manhwa, an indigenous genre of animated film (not to be confused with manga, a Japanese form better known in the west). Since the mid-2000s, one particularly successful manhwa, Olympus Guardian, has mined Bulfinch’s retellings to bring Greco-Roman mythology to millions of children in the Republic of Korea (ROK) via Saturday morning cartoons and comic books. Of all the show’s episodes, “The Love of Eros and Psyche,” ranks among its most popular.

Scholars of imperial Greek literature have long appreciated the fundamental importance of the classical Greek past for the Second Sophistic movement.  For Philostratus, the author of the Vitae Sophistarum (VS), a core question is who, in the ethnically interconnected Mediterranean, can inherit and claim access to the legacy of this Greek past: is Hellenism inborn or can it be taught?

In his History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides connects the massacre at the river in Sicily (7.84) and the subsequent imprisonment of the Athenians in the quarry (7.87) to his description of the plague in Book II. Both linguistic ties and imagery link all three passages. Unifying threads of these episodes include the totality of suffering (where all of Athens is affected), overwhelming crowding, and a lack of basic necessities. Moreover, Thucydides links the passages with the imagery of descent, namely a καταβασις.

Messalla Corvinus’ Ciceronian Career

A particularly enduring metaphor of political thought is that of the head-of-state, in which the authority of the individual over the many is naturalized by analogy to the head’s command over the body. This discourse can be traced to the Roman principate, where the princeps was conceptualized as the head of the body politic (Cancik; Béranger). Ovid celebrates Augustus as the caput orbis (Trist. 3.5.46), while Velleius calls Tiberius the rei publicae lumen et caput (2.99).

In Against Timocrates (139), Demosthenes praises the system for proposing laws in the western Greek city of Locris: a speaker proposing a law was required to stand with a noose around his neck. If the speaker failed to persuade the voters to pass the law he was hanged on the spot.

In recent years, scholars have frequently discussed the egalitarian nature of the Greek polis, trying to define the real breadth of the phenomenon. Among them, Josiah Ober (Ober 2010) has devoted particular attention to the theme. He argues that the polis was characterized by a set of rules and conventions that enabled citizens to have equal opportunities in the political life of the community. This “rule egalitarianism” did not apply to economic or social life, but was limited to the political sphere.