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According to the Phaedrus, the first-century Roman fabulist, tribades and molles men were created when Prometheus got drunk and accidentally mixed up their genitalia: adplicuit virginale generi masculo, / et masculina membra adposuit feminis. / ita nunc libido pravo fruitur gaudio (4.16.12-14: “He attached the virginal part to the masculine race, / and placed masculine parts onto women, / thus lust now enjoys perverted pleasure”).

In the opening of the Hippocratic treatise the Peri Partheniōn, the author explains that there are certain fears that people dread so exceedingly that they go out of their minds and behave as if they see hostile daimones both day and night. This affliction can happen to both men and women, though more commonly to women, and it is especially common in young girls of marriageable age who are approaching menarche.

Various ancient sources make reference to a copy of Cicero’s speeches hand-made by his freedman, Tiro. The consensus of recent decades has been that this manuscript was in fact a forgery made in the second century. I argue that Tiro’s Cicero was not a single, purpose-made forgery, but rather that the name was applied to a whole series of spurious copies that arose accidentally.

Aporia and Insight in Plato’s Parmenides

The Oriental Institute Museum of the University of Chicago has a small, but important collection of Demotic papyri, nearly all of which have now been published. Yet, surprises remain to be found. Recently the presence of an unpublished Demotic papyrus was discovered during the planning stages for an upcoming special exhibit at the Oriental Institute on the Book of the Dead scheduled for autumn 2017.

My project is an investigation of the names and identity markers from the city of Uruk during the Hellenistic period (the 4^th–2^nd centuries BCE). Uruk, an ancient city in southern Babylonia (modern Iraq), was a vibrant community near the center of the Seleucid Empire, a kingdom founded after the conquests of Alexander the Great and ruled by a line of Macedonian kings.

Reliance on documents was long held to distinguish “modern” from “ancient” historiography (Momigliano 1950, Finley 1983). For Ginzburg, documents emphasize that history “[is] inevitably uncertain, discontinuous, lacunar, based only on fragments and ruins” (2012, 24). Yet these “fragments and ruins” have their own allure, as authentic, unmediated testimony through which the past can "speak directly" (Le Roy Ladurie 1975).

This paper examines Roman discourse on the saeculum during the Augustan period and argues that Roman poets use this language, typically associated with Augustan triumphalism (especially its connection to Golden Age mythology), to depict hypothetical futures in which Rome has been destroyed, calling into question the permanence of the Pax Augusta.

A major crux in the biography of Lysias is establishing when he and his brother Polemarchus returned to Athens from Thurii. According to Dionysius of Halicarnassus, the two’s close connections to Athens made them personae non gratae after the Sicilian Expedition, leading to a return post-413 (D.H. Lys. 1). This, however, clearly contradicts the appearance of the two in Plato’s Republic and the references to Lysias’ presence in the city in the contemporary Phaedrus, both set around 420 (Brandwood 1990).

In disputing the estate of Euctemon, the son of Philoctemon, the orator Isaeus employed a peculiar legal argument: he accused the plaintiff in the case of fabricating the existence of Callippe, Euctemon’s wife. Even more remarkable than the charge of “inventing a woman,” however, is the method by which the speaker in this case attempted to disprove her existence.