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The letters exchanged between Cicero and Cato in 50 BCE (Fam. 15.4-6 = SB 110-112) are among the most memorable of Cicero’s epistolary corpus. Cicero’s initial request for Cato’s support for a supplicatio en route to a triumph, Cato’s refusal, and Cicero’s reply give the modern scholar an excellent resource for understanding the politics that went into such a request.

Amidst the standard ethnographic and epic topoi employed in his catalogue of Scythian enemies (Argonautica 6), Valerius Flaccus provides some unexpected contemporary details on Sarmatian arms and tactics (6.162, 231-238). This paper considers how Romans processed new information about barbarian peoples within a conceptual system where established stereotypes and traditional topoi held primacy of place.

The will of Zeus, Dios boulē, is a concept of particular importance to the interpretation of the Iliad, not least because it implies that the poem results from a particular purpose and is therefore fundamentally interpretable. Beyond the certainty that it is important, however, we quickly encounter two related problems: What does the will of Zeus will, and how does it relate to the agency of fate which is also at work?

In Plato's Critias, Hephaistos is set apart from the other gods for his philosophia and philotechnia. As philosophia is a loaded term for Plato, this raises the question: what makes Hephaistos philosophical? And, can exploring this throw light on Plato’s conception of his own philosophical project?

My paper explores the ability of Hellenistic communities to assess and take risks in times of crisis. The underlying argument is that, although they may have lacked modern mathematical formalism, decision-making bodies were perfectly capable of probabilistic thought. I will look at literary evidence to draw attention to how decision-makers calculated chances of success at critical moments, particularly in a context of conflict. Risky situations produced significant psychological pressures.

Juvenal’s Fifteenth Satire and its indignant criticism of infighting Egyptians’ barbarous cannibalism has always proved a puzzle to scholars, beginning with Ribbeck’s outright rejection of Juvenal as the poem’s author. Satire 15 is a poem of winks and nods: Juvenal constantly shifts gears and all but begs the reader to dismiss his own veracity and moral sincerity.

One of the most famous Ancient Stoic doctrines is that the ideal life requires the elimination of all emotions or passions (pathē) that could impede the attainment of a perfectly rational state of mind. So famous is this doctrine that in modern usage, the term “stoic” refers to a state of complete freedom from the passions. However, it is now generally recognized that the Stoic philosophy of emotions is more robust than this caricature represents. The Stoics in fact deployed a wide range of “affective” notions in their philosophy.

A peculiar rescript of Theodosius II, ostensibly dated between August 421 and August 423, claims to abrogate his decree of 14 July 421 that the patriarch of Constantinople should have jurisdiction over Illyricum, in satisfaction of a request of Honorius. This rescript, found in the Collectio Thessalonicensis (Vat. Lat. 5751), has remained a troubling piece of imperial legislation because the earlier decree remains both in the Codex Theodosianus (16.2.45) and the Codex Iustinianus (1.2.6) while the rescript abrogating it does not.

This paper challenges two prominent trends in Lucretian scholarship: the use of the De rerum natura as a reliable source for Epicurean orthodoxy, and the related view of the DRN as a poem whose “meaning” is solely one of Epicurean persuasion and whose inconsistencies can be explained away in furtherance of this goal. The former position is articulated most forcefully by Sedley 1998, who argues that Lucretius is a “fundamentalist,” following Epicurus’ On Nature with little divergence.

Ancient ravaging warfare was morally problematic in its organized violence against targeted enemy peoples—many males slaughtered, many young females raped and enslaved, and many resistant and older females killed, often by lethal gang rape (Gaca 2015). Yet the forces ordered to carry out this aggression were trained by their superiors to regard their ravaging “ferocity” (saevitia) as a “virtue” (virtus), as exemplified in the First Mithridatic War on both the Pontic and Roman sides (Flor. Epit. 1.40).