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Ovid’s Fasti relates a wide variety of apotheosis narratives, from the catasterisms of characters like Callisto and Orion to the miraculous assumption of Romulus. Throughout the Fasti, most of the narratives of supernatural transformations are some species of apotheosis (in contrast to the Metamorphoses, in which most supernatural transformations are punitive transformations into subhuman forms (see Salzman (1998))), and moreover most of these transformations are catalyzed by violence.

How is time represented and distributed in the Iliad? Interest in this question began very early in the history of Homeric scholarship. Zenodotus is credited with having written a calculation of the number of days in the Iliad, a matter which continues to spark debate now more than two thousand years later. It is not hard to see why readers are so consistently drawn to issues of time in the Iliad.

Pompey the Great and the Value of the Past in Seneca’s De Brevitate Vitae

Conventional wisdom has it that the genre of Greek declamation was full of nostalgic recreation of the old glories of the Persian wars, a symptom of the alleged escapism of much of the literature of the Greek imperial period (thus, canonically, Bowie 1970; Russell 1983; et al.). This paper argues that this assumption is unsafe, based as it is on partial (in both senses of the word) surveys of the quantitative and qualitative evidence for declamation.

Discussions of Greek land leases often maintain a distinction between public and private properties, rarely bringing the two into dialogue with one another. Yet, the leasing of orphan estates and corporately-owned property had much more in common with that of public land than of individually-owned private property: while the latter is typified by social disparity between lessee and lessor, the former are intra-elite phenomena.

Recent scholarly work on Maffeo Vegio’s Supplementum to the Aeneid (1428) argues against the importance (or existence) of Christian allegory that was once thought to suffuse the poem. Building on arguments made by Hijmans (1971) and Ross (1981), Putnam (2004) claims that Vegio “avoids any step that would lead the reader toward any medieval, anagogical interpretation of the hero’s life … Vegio is inexorably classicizing.” (xviii).

This paper investigates a stylistic oddity in several scenes of the Odyssey from a sociological perspective. The scenes in question involve precise manual practices: Polyphemus milks his sheep and goats (Od. 9.244ff., 309ff., 342ff.); sailors equip their ships for sea (Od. 4.783ff., 8.54ff.); and Nestor sacrifices a bull at Pylos (Od. 3.457ff.). Each activity is construed as a sequence of contrasting objects, colors, and directions densely packed into three or four lines.

I argue for the following claims: (1) The overall cosmogony presented in Plato’s Timaeus ought not to be read literally but as an extended metaphor; (2) Reading the text metaphorically shifts the explanatory emphasis from efficient causation to final causation; and (3) in light of this approach I retain ἀεί at 28a1.

This paper will examine the role of personified divine rumor (Fama) and public opinion in the Res Gestae of Ammianus Marcellinus. It focuses specifically on passages in which Ammianus uses Fama, with all her literary trappings, to publicize Julian’s successes and his ultimate succession.

This paper argues that Aulus Gellius, in his Noctes Atticae, engages in a significant translation of Plutarch’s concept of the appetite of πολυπραγμοσύνη—not simply translating the word (as Apuleius does, resulting in curiositas), but isolating the corollary concept, the stimulus that acts upon the appetite, and giving it a Latin name instead (inlecebra, “seduction”). This underscores Gellius’s significance as an ancient theorizer of cognition, and as a recipient and transmitter of ancient philosophical concepts.