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While creative artists in the modern world have continually sought to reanimate and inhabit the figures of classical mythology, scholars of gender—both classicists and others—have tended to warn us against their seductive power. Characters such as Odysseus and Helen have been seen as embodying roles to which we are tempted to aspire, only to find ourselves trapped in relations of domination and submission. The challenge for the next generation of scholars is to balance this valid warning with an appreciation of the myths’ potential for empowerment in the molding of gendered selves.

The modern printed page conveys the words of antiquity with apparent stability and authority to a global readership. Yet today’s standardized, mass-circulated classical text is itself the product of a series of contested historical developments and multiple displacements over time and space. This paper will re-open that history by examining the materiality and spatiality of the classical text in Pietro Bembo’s De Aetna, printed in 1496 by Aldus Manutius in collaboration with the author (Davies; Lowry; Pincus; Dionisotti; Dionisotti and Orlandi).

The importance of inscribed instrumentum domesticum for our knowledge of ancient economy has been recognized since the time of Heinrich Dressel. However most modern studies about the process of production and distribution of goods in the Roman world are based on stamps (amphoras, lamps, bricks and so on) and other kinds of “standard”, repeated information (like graffiti and tituli picti inscribed on different part of amphoras).

The ATHENIANS Project, soon to be made available in electronic format, offers researchers studying the ancient Athenian economy a vast body of epigraphical, topographical, and prosopographical information from a wide range of sources, including decrees, building accounts, confiscation records, manumissions, leases, grave stones, coins, and vases. These subjects have been combed by numerous scholars over many years, then verified, analysed, classified, entered, and stored in relational databases.

This paper investigates how the Latin inscription known as lapis Pollae (CIL X 6950 = CIL I² 638 = ILS 23 = ILLRP 454 = Inscr. It. III.1 272) can be used to address the shifting balance between agriculture and husbandry in Sicily and Lucania as a consequence of the growth of demand for grain in the 2nd century BC.

Delos, if you would like to be the home

of my son, Phoebus Apollo, […]

your inhabitants will be nourished

by the hands of foreigners

(Hom., Hymn to Apollo, vv. 34-40,

transl. M.P.O. Morford - R.J.Lenardon)

This paper examines the epigraphic and material evidence of private associations and domestic cults of Italian merchants in late Hellenistic Delos to address the ways in which merchants employed religious practices as economic agents in the dynamic urban economy of the island in this period.

The famous Spartan War Fund inscription (IG V 1 1) provides a list of poleis and individuals who “gave to the Lacedaimonians for the war” a series of specified contributions. Where most scholarship has focused on the dating of the text, which has now been anchored in the Decelean War (Bleckmann 1993 and 2002, Piérart 1995), the inscription has barely begun to inform our understanding of the Spartan economy (cf. Loomis 1993: 77-80, Smarczyk 1999: 63-64, Hodkinson 2000: 167-170; Thommen 2014, 94-99, 127-129).

Perhaps when reading Macrobius we should ask ourselves questions about our own reading and writing practices. Perhaps when piously praising the Victorian greats of philology we fail to appreciate their own deep theological concerns. And what will they say of us in two hundred years? Who were our gods, and what did we mean by to theion? Perhaps our own tenebrous commitments make it hard to appreciate with much clarity the shadowy contours of others’ lives. Any suggestion that we might be strangers to ourselves will naturally be a painful one.

The study of the study of Classics in the 19th century has become a staple of the burgeoning field of reception studies for obvious reasons. Classics provided the mainstay of elite education [Stray (1998); Goldhill (2002)] and had considerable reach throughout society, not just in the literature and art of both the grander and lower sorts, but also in circuses, music halls, and theatres (Richardson (2013); Hall (forthcoming); Bryant Davis (forthcoming); Flashar (1991) (2001); Prins (1999)]. Classics, in short, provided the furniture of the mind [Goldhill (2011)].