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The capacities of nonhuman animals were much debated in the philosophical schools of Late Antiquity (Sorabji 62, 82-5, 192-4). This paper explores Porphyry’s claim in De abstinentia, Book Three, that all animals, insofar as they have soul, perception, and memory, participate to some extent in logos (Abst. 3.1 and 3.26.1; cf. Haussleiter, 332-3; Preus, 153-7). This claim about animal logos culminates in a story Porphyry tells about how, when he lived in Carthage, a partridge flew to his window, whom he raised to speak with him.

Did the Romans have zoos? Or keep animals for anything other than slaughter in the arena? This paper responds to those questions by investigating private animal collections in ancient Rome. It focuses, in particular, on the words Romans used for enclosures meant for animals in captivity: vivaria, leporaria, roboraria, therotrophia, paradisi, aviaria, ornithones, piscinae.

This paper examines the complexities of the human-animal interface in hunting by focusing on key differences in the treatment of the dog and the hare in Xenophon’s Cynegeticus.

In the first half of the twentieth century it was common practice to translate an unspecified theos as “God,” in an attempt to bring out a supposed commonality between Greek religious thought and the monotheism of their own times. But in the last half-century the significant advances in understanding polytheism have shown why creating such supposed commonality is at best misleading, if only because it might lead a reader to assume that Greek gods shared with the Judeo-Christian deity a commitment to further the general welfare of mankind.

The play that has come down to us in the manuscript tradition as Oidipous tyrannos is best known in English as Oedipus the King, a translation of the Latin Oedipus Rex. In one respect, Rex is a reasonable translation: the idea of “king” was anathema for centuries in the Roman Republic, but tyrannos has resonances in Greek that rex in Latin and “tyrant” in English lack. Rendering it as “king” instead of “tyrant” obscures a crucial dramatic development which is clear in Greek but not translatable into English without the help of notes.

This paper aims to examine the ways that anachronism is currently feared, used, avoided and understood in Anglophone translations of Greek tragedy, and to interrogate current assumptions about anachronism.

This paper investigates changes in the metrical choices made by translators when dealing with the iambic trimeter of tragic speeches and dialogue.

Classical Greek exclamations, as words with a very wide range of possibilities for representation in modern English, provide an interesting basis for a discussion of translation tastes and principles; particularly as related to the perennial question of how loosely a translator should render the original language in an effort to achieve roughly analogous literary effects.

The recognition that Roman religious practices were deeply enmeshed in social life has led to a host of recent work on the shifting dynamics of cult practices, places, and images across the Roman world that went hand-in-hand with the changing power structures of the empire. At the same time, greater focus on localized social frameworks has tessellated accounts of cult life, even in cults (like strains of Christianity) explicitly aiming for a sense of universalism.

The study of Greek religion in its various traditions has been informed by a variety of anthropological theories. For instance, Robert Parker’s Miasma: Pollution and Purification in Early Greek Religion was inspired by Mary Douglas’ seminal book, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, or the so-called Paris School’s approach to Greek religion (e.g., Detienne, Marcel and Vernant, Jean-Pierre, La cuisine du sacrifice en pays grec) owes much to French anthropological studies.