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The status of nous in Aristotle’s De Anima (DA) has been controversial from antiquity onwards. Is it simply a power of the human soul, albeit one that may be able to function without the body (I will call this the Human Intellect view)? Is it a unitary extra-bodily intelligence, human in species, which individual human beings temporarily participate in (I will call this the Platonist Intellect view)? Is it the first unmoved mover of Metaphysics Λ (I will call this the Divine Intellect view)?

Most of early Greek mathematics lies in darkness: though Thales at the beginning of the 6^th century BCE might have been the earliest Greek mathematician, as the ancient tradition has it, the first auth­entic first-hand testimonies date only from the first half of the 4^th century BCE. All that we know about the earlier stages of Greek mathematics comes from later authors who, however, were (re-)writing them in the terms of (post-) Euclidean mathematics.

The origin of the idea of ‘Republic’ has until recently been taken for granted among classicists. New works are beginning to address the fact that debate cannot continue without a reassessment of the ‘problem of definition’ of the derivation respublica. However, this has not yet taken place from a classical perspective.

The main interlocutor in Thomas More’s Utopia is Raphael Hythloday, an explorer who prefers Greek to Latin “because his main interest is philosophy, and in that field he found that the Romans have left us nothing very valuable except certain works of Seneca and Cicero” (More 11). Critics of Utopia have long debated the conflict in this text between Roman commitments to politics, or the vita activa, and the vita contemplativa associated primarily with Greek philosophical traditions.

In his Politica (1589), Justus Lipsius (1547-1606) presents his political philosophy as a carefully constructed cento, ostensibly addressed to emperors, kings, and princes but, in reality, to other learned humanists who could activate the associations and deliberate on the alluded context. This essay focuses on Lipsius' allusions to Lucretius in his controversial fourth book.

Lucian's entanglement in Reformation politics has remained somewhat understudied. But it is no coincidence that at the nadir of their tumultuous relationship, Martin Luther, in his Tischreden, uses no single term more frequently to vilify Erasmus than "Lucianist". The story is more complicated than that Luther and members of his circle always responded univocally against Lucian and, more specifically, Erasmus' translations of Lucian, or themselves did not incorporate Lucianic elements into their own writings.

In this paper (the basis for a chapter in a larger monograph) I trace and compare the reception of Plutarch through a number of political thinkers who were also translators of Plutarch in Renaissance Europe. Budé, Erasmus and Seyssel all engaged in translation of various aspects of Plutarch’s work and their work in translation also had an impact on the development of their own political theory. In particular, I focus on the competing understandings of the theme of the la chose publique that animates these various thinkers.

This presentation surveys theoretical developments in ancient Mediterranean religion related to social history. It examines one phenomenon, the rise of Christianity, as a case study for detecting how the same commitments can lead like-minded researchers in opposing directions depending on the theories and methods they use. This topic was famously studied by sociologist Rodney Stark in his widely-cited The Rise of Christianity: How the Obscure, Marginal Jesus Movement Became the Dominant Religious Force in the Western World in a Few Centuries (1997).

In this paper I will show that the decline in prodigy reporting in the early Roman Empire reflects broader political and religious changes in this period. Prodigies were reported and expiated almost annually during the Roman Republic, but during the Empire, there were sometimes decades-long gaps between reports. I will provide reasons for this shift, but I will also examine the continued, though diminished, activities involving prodigy reports and expiations under the emperors.