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In recent studies Cicero has emerged as a much more interesting and intelligent philosopher than has been granted for a long time, and the Ciceronian dialogue form has recently begun to receive the attention that it deserves (Schofield 2008). In this paper, I will address one specific element in Cicero’s dialogues which characterises his particular take on this form of writing: the political and philosophical underpinnings of the dialogue form.

In ancient literary criticism the name of the Greek rhetorician and historian Hegesias of Magnesia is inextricably connected to bad taste. We find fierce criticisms of his style in Cicero (Brut. 286, Or. 226, 230) and Dionysius of Halicarnassus (Comp. 4.11, 18.21-29). According to the latter, Hegesias epitomizes bad composition: “In the large volume of writing which the man has left behind, you could not find a single page that has been felicitously composed” (Comp. 18.23).

Riddling recipes: the elegiac instructions of Philo (SH 690) and Aglaias (SH 18)

In examining the many quantitative references in Catullus’ short poems, this paper has two goals: first to show the pervasiveness of mathematical concepts in Catullus’ work, a legacy of the conceptual traditions of Hellenistic poetry; second, to contribute to our understanding of the use of ideas, in this case mathematical ones, as items of social prestige in late republican Rome.

A surge of interest in the invective in Greek and Roman authors has surprisingly ignored the only extant study on the invective written in antiquity by the prolific Roman biographer and scholar Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus (late 1st – early 2nd c.). From the perspective of a social historian this study preserves a subliminal, authentic voice for the attitudes, perceptions, values, norms, and stereotypes which generated this invective.

            In the definitive publication of CEG 302 (inscribed on a Doric capital which once supported a lost statue) Ducat proposed that the statue faced the valley, with its back to the visitor, who read the epigram once s/he had arrived at the shrine.

This paper argues that maternity in the Iliad is associated with martial protection, and that Achilles identifies his own problematic role as the protector of his comrades with the figure of the Homeric mother who is both protector and destroyer of her own offspring. This is reflected in his use of maternal similes to describe his relationship to the Achaean army (9.323-27) and to Patroclus (16.7-11), as well as in his performance of feminine-gendered mourning behavior, such as when he holds the dead Patroclus’ head in his hands at his funeral (23.136-137, cf.

In the late second or early third century CE, two women presented a dedicatory inscription to the goddess Leto in which they referred to themselves as ship owners and merchants who participated in trade on the Red Sea. What is remarkable is the degree to which these women engaged in trade. Previous research and assumptions about gender roles have downplayed the involvement of women in shipping and trade, relegating them to the peripheries of investing in trade.

A bilingual inscription on a recently rediscovered pedestal from Alexander the Great’s shrine at Bahariya, in the Western Desert of Egypt, has been analyzed for its Egyptian text, which contains the only complete titulary for Alexander as pharaoh (F. Bosch-Puche, “L’ ‘autel’ du temple d’Alexandre le Grand à Bahariya retrouvé,” BIFAO 2008, followed by his “The Egyptian Royal Titulary of Alexander the Great, I: Horus, Two Ladies, Golden Horus, and Throne Names,” JEA 2013). Remaining unanalyzed is the Greek text that accompanies the Egyptian one. It reads,