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This paper will explore the possibility that the Greek Anthology preserves the remnants of a collection of poems in iambic trimeter for Constantine I by the fourth-century Greek epigrammatist Palladas of Alexandria. Most attested poets from the Hellenistic to the Byzantine Age had some degree of contact with an imperial court. The same appears to be true of Palladas, although this has been obscured by the longstanding misapprehension of his dates.

Devoted to the human species, book 7 of Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis Historia is concluded by a catalog of inventions and inventors. In keeping with Pliny’s encyclopedic ambition (cf. Naas 2002; Doody 2009), the list aims at completeness and reliability, constituting a repository of the ‘extreme’ achievements performed by humanity in any given field. No wonder that Italo Calvino (1982:xii) compared Pliny’s seventh book to the Guinness Book of World Records.

Severus Alexander, the final emperor of the Severan dynasty (and by many definitions the Principate), is largely unknown to us. The major historians of the Severan period ceased writing early in his reign, his architectural footprint is mostly lost, and the man himself—crowned as a child and killed before thirty—did not leave the grandiose pronouncements of Caracalla or the strange coinage of Elagabalus. This makes him hard to discuss.

In recent years, scholarship on Statius’ Thebaid has emphasized the complexities and nuances of Theban identity, whether in relationship to the enemy Argives (Augoustakis 2010) or anachronistically to Statius’ contemporary Rome and its mytho-historical past (Braund and Cowan). Such analyses accept that Statius promotes the idea of a unified Theban identity, an assumption which needs to be challenged. Beginning with Lovatt’s observation that Statius prefers to mark Theban identity with epithets recalling its exilic roots (e.g.

This paper develops a novel interpretation of the account of Solon’s Egyptian trip in Plato’s Timaeus. Plato’s purpose in having Solon travel to Egypt to acquire his fabulous story about Atlantis, I argue, is not to bolster the story’s authority and credibility, as is usually supposed (see, e.g., Joly 1982: 259-62; Capra 2010: 206-9, 213). Rather, his aim is to invite careful reflection on the story’s philosophical value.

Thoughtful preservation of traditional elements is not commonly associated with fourth-century tragedy. Aristotle speaks of development, often implying decline, while modern scholars have either believed his verdict (and the image created in Ar. Frogs) or highlighted the innovative power of post-classical tragedians like Astydamas II and Carcinus II (Taplin 2009; 2014: 147-53; cf. already Webster 1954).

A more refined understanding of Greek word order, address terms, and directives: these are some fruits of recent work belonging to a “21^st Century Philology” (Dik 1995, 1996; Dickey 1996, Denizot 2011; Goldstein 2015: 695 for the term). Such scholarship makes use of inferential statistics and insights from relatively new fields in linguistics to analyze extensive and carefully gathered data. Inspired by this scholarly method, the present paper focuses on the Greek aorist and present imperative.

That Jean Racine was an avid reader of ancient literature is well known (Forestier, Knight, Phillippo), but underappreciated is the way he adapts the allusive techniques employed by Roman poets. Just as Ovid’s Ariadne self-consciously alludes to Catullus’ Ariadne, Racine's characters become 'readers' of ancient works and act and speak with reference to their predecessor-selves. In Andromaque (1667), the French poet employs this technique to great effect during the climactic confrontation between Andromaque and Pyrrhus.

Critics have long maligned Epistulae ex Ponto 4, the last book of Ovid’s career, for its incoherent structure (Evans, Helzle). Individual poems have attracted attention: 4.7 to Vestalis (Williams) and 4.8 about Germanicus (Fantham, Myers), but the book as a whole has not been evaluated. This paper shows that the book has a structure in which poems exploring the nature of the Roman consulship under Tiberius are contrasted with poems about other poets and their compositions. Ovid also juxtaposes his rise as a Getic poet with Tiberius’ ascension to emperor.

Diogenes Laertius (7.56-7) preserves for us the linguistic theory of the Stoic philosopher Diogenes of Babylon. Part of this theory included a distinction between voice (φωνή), which is both articulate and inarticulate, and utterance (λέξις), which is only articulate. There is also a further distinction between utterance, which contains both significant and non-significant utterances, and language (λόγος), which is a significant utterance.