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The doctrine of sympatheia, promulgated by Stoic philosophers such as Posidonius and explored in various genres of Greek and Latin literature, posits that all of the universe’s components, including human beings and their lives, exist in a network characterized by a constant state of interdependent tension and reciprocal interaction.

Among the legions of bronze and marble statuary and the mountains of charred papyrus scrolls recovered during the Bourbon excavations in the Villa dei Papiri emerged a humble yet practical object: a silver-plated bronze, portable sundial in the shape of a ham. Though the Encyclopédie scooped the Accademia Ercolanese by publishing the first widely circulated description of the sundial in 1757, the Accademia responded in 1762 by featuring it as the first small find subjected to their rigorous analysis in the preface to their third volume of Le Antichità di Ercolano.

As mediators between the past and the present, maps are a means for understanding antiquity in new ways. Yet what can you even do with linked data for over 35,000 ancient places, locations, and names? Pleiades.stoa.org has a few answers. The gazetteer, which began as a means of digitizing the Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World (2000), grows daily and provides extensive coverage for the Greek and Roman world. It is also expanding into Ancient Near Eastern, Byzantine, Celtic, and Early Medieval geography.

This paper examines the nature and stratigraphy of Proclus’ Paeonian chain which brings together the Body of the universe and the body of the individual in one and the same cascade of healing power and ontological proliferation. It unfolds from the Demiurge, through Apollo, Athena, Asclepius, Heracles, angels, daemons, heroes, individual healing souls, animals and plants.

“We prefer to appear before the gods in holy places, even though they are everywhere.” In his commentary on Plato’s Phaedo (I§499), the 5^th century CE Neoplatonist Damascius makes this curious, even paradoxical statement when explaining a detail in the myth Socrates tells of the judgement of souls. The souls gather in a particular place to be judged, but, as Damascius notes, they could be judged anywhere. The gods are everywhere, and yet certain places are somehow holy, sacred, superior for contact with the gods.

Plotinus’ seemingly hubristic insistence that “our endeavor is not to be out of sin, but to be a god” (I.2.6, 2-3) goes further than the Platonic and Aristotelian commonplace that the goal of human life is to become as godlike as possible for a human being. In V.1., he includes “we ourselves” along with the cosmos, the sun, and the other stars, as things that are gods in virtue of soul, which is therefore a superior god (V.1.2, 40-45).

Outreach, it seems to me, is a simple numbers game. If we want to have maximum impact, we have to reach the maximum number of people and let them know who we are and what we’re doing.

To that end, I suggest the SCS redirect its efforts away from labor-intensive projects that cannot scale, such as visiting individual high schools, and toward the largest possible venues, audiences, networks, and distributors. What does that mean in practical terms?

This paper summarizes a program of book groups that have now run in New Hampshire for eight years (premises, design, logistics, and sessions) and assesses recent innovations, particularly the development of all-female reading groups (2016) and an NEH funded collaboration with New Hampshire Humanities and Dartmouth College to develop a curriculum combining ancient and modern war stories and to train facilitators for the programs (2016).