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The issue of immigration is highly relevant to our Classics classrooms in ways that demand our attention, and if at first that attention would seem to take us away from the study of the ancient world stricto sensu, I will argue that in fact it offers opportunities for yet richer engagement with material long at the core of our discipline.

In his 1992 study of the refugee classical scholars whom National Socialism drove to America’s shores, W.M. Calder III observed that “American classics is entirely dependent upon a Weltpolitik which most of its practitioners prefer to denigrate and ignore.” As Calder demonstrated to powerful effect, the history of 20^th- and 21^st-century classics in the Western Hemisphere cannot be properly grasped without attention to geopolitical forces.

This paper argues that a case study of the Asculum Bronze (ILS 8888 = ILLRP 515 = CIL VI.37045 = CIL 1.2.709) provides evidence that political alliances in the late Republic were of short duration and depended on immediate personal interest rather than on enduring personal or familial connections. Its conclusions contribute directly to the ongoing scholarly debate over the nature of political life and of aristocratic political maneuvering in the late Republic.

In Book 2 of Heliodorus’ Aethiopica, the Delphic priest Charicles provides a detailed account of the ethnic affiliation and genealogical self-presentation of Theagenes, the male protagonist of the novel. This young man, Charicles reports, belongs to the ethnos of the Aenianians, who are the most noble inhabitants of Thessaly and can be said to be Greek in the truest sense of the word (akribōs Hellēnikon, 2.34.2) since they descend from Hellen, the son of Deucalion.

Visualizing Networks in the Ancient Mediterranean is a web-based tool that makes it possible to view dynamic mappings of ancient networks and to explore the primary evidence on which those mappings are based. By entering a given network center (e.g., Athens), type (e.g., alliance), date (e.g., 454 BCE) and extent (e.g., the Chalcidice), users are able to generate a visualization of their desired network (e.g., Athens’ allies in northern Greece in the mid-5^th century).

For modern readers, the table of contents is an essential element of a scholarly work, offering a synoptic view of the text. In contrast, only four such indices survive in Latin literature that were definitively composed by the authors of the original works: Scribonius Largus’ Compositiones, Columella’s Res Rustica, Pliny the Elder’s Historia Naturalis, and Aulus Gellius’ Noctes Atticae (hereafter NA).

Most Athenian decrees were probably recorded on papyrus and deposited in the city archives, and, like the archives, were lost to time (Sickinger 1999). A small number were also inscribed on stone, thereby furnishing some documentary evidence for the nitty-gritty of politics at home and abroad.

For an epic that recounts the horrors of civil war, Lucan’s poem refers with surprising frequency to an enemy that is not domestic but external: the kingdom of the Parthians, a vast empire to the east of the Euphrates ruled by the Arsacid royal family. The Parthians, the poet says, have unleashed the strife between Caesar and Pompey by killing Crassus, the only man capable of suppressing the rivalry between the two commanders (1.98–108). They escape vengeance for Carrhae as Rome sinks into civil war (1.10–12, 7.431).

This paper analyzes three types of enigmatic speech in Pindar’s seventh Nemean: etymologizing, number play, and kenning. I describe these figures as “enigmatic” because, first, each asserts a unity of opposing qualities, a hallmark of archaic enigmatic speech (Kahn 1979), and second, because these types of figures appear frequently in collections of enigmatic material (e.g., the Greek Anthology, q.v., Berra 2008).

The creative use of insults and abuse language is notable in many genres of Latin literature, but most Classical scholarship on insults tends not to account for the dynamism with which Latin abuse language is deployed. Philological treatments of insult-language are largely atomistic, and often characterize insults as static, readily-categorized lexical entities (e.g, Opelt 1965, Dickey 2002).