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The PeriodO gazetteer is a collection of period definitions with coordinates in both time and space, drawn from authoritative sources and provided as structured data with globally unique, persistent identifiers. This growing collection of period definitions seeks to provide a common reference for descriptions of named time-spans in the past (like “the Archaic period” or “the Iron Age”), in the same way that Pleiades provides a common reference for places in the past.

This presentation introduces the concept of "semantic inferencing" as it applies to archaeological databases. Inferencing in general means deriving new facts from one set of facts. All finds within a stratigraphic unit can also be said to be from the tomb to which the unit belongs. All finds from Italy or North Africa also belong to the group of finds from the Central Mediterranean. This form of reasoning can be efficiently expressed and utilized to answer queries that combine findspot, geographic origin, and other common archaeological criteria.

Computational stylometry has aided the work of philologists for over 50 years. From simple word counts to the latest use of machine learning for authorship attribution, computation offers the literary critic a wide array of techniques to better understand individual texts and large corpora. To date, these methods have largely been accessible to specialists possessing a background in programming and statistics.

In a showdown between the grammarian Pomponius Porcellus and the emperor Tiberius, who used a word of doubtful Latinity, the grammarian reportedly had the last laugh: “You, Caesar, are able to give citizenship to people, but not to words” (Suet. Gram. 22.2; cf. Dio 57.17.2). The anecdote is a telling one about the relationship between the princeps and intellectual culture (Wallace-Hadrill 2008, 70), but it also illustrates a distinctly Roman way of viewing vocabulary: through the prism of citizenship (civitas).

Using a culturally situated approach to cognitive linguistics, this paper argues for a Greco-Roman conceptual metaphor of POETIC COMPETITION IS BOXING. I will analyze Virgil’s use of a boxing match in the Aeneid as an adjudication of a poetic competition between earlier Greek hexametric poets, concluding with a discussion of how this episode potentially comments on Virgil’s choice to write political poetry.

At Cat. 2.17 Cicero shifts his attention from Catiline himself, now safely outside Rome’s walls, to the conspirator’s followers, to whom he offers, to the extent possible, to apply the cure of his own advice and oratory (medicinam consili atque orationis meae...afferam). Cicero’s use of medical metaphor to cast his Catilinarian opponents as sicknesses afflicting the body politic and his own policies as cures (e.g., Cat. 1.11, 1.30-1; 2.1-2, 2.11; Sul. 53, 76) has received ample attention (e.g., Leff; Gildenhard; Walters; Mebane).

Recent decades have witnessed a renaissance in scholarship on Marcus Terentius Varro, characterized by a renewed interest in the political dimensions of the antiquarian’s treatises. This is especially true of the De lingua Latina, a text that is inextricably bound up with the late Republican struggle to redefine Romanness (Bloomer 1997, Moatti 1997, Dench 2005, Wallace-Hadrill 2008, Zehnacker 2008, Spencer 2011 and 2015).

Like any other human activity, warfare creates its own aural environment. From the blasts of horns and the clash of swords down to the moans of the dying, military conflict in the ancient world was a dangerously aesthetic experience. The epic tradition from Homer onwards has engaged with the noise of war by attempting to represent in verbal art the lethal clamor of battle through similes and other literary descriptions (e.g. recent work by Strauss Clay 2011 and Gurd 2016). This sonic dimension of aesthetic representation in Roman epic, however, remains relatively unexplored.

Aurality in Thucydides, unlike visuality, has gone largely unnoticed in the scholarship. Vision is usually considered to be the “privileged sense” in the History (Connor 1984: 10). Yet vivid visuality, in the narrative, is frequently accompanied with equally vivid depictions of sound, the two types of sensory phenomena conspiring together as complementary vectors for affect, each with the capacity to help or harm.

This paper argues that the military trumpet occupies a liminal space in Hellenistic aesthetics between musical instrument and disciplinary tool. It is thus an important test case for the relationship between melodic sound and the human soul. Does the trumpet’s wordless melody have an inherent power to stir our emotions, as the Stoic Diogenes of Babylon believed? Or is it simply a conventional symbol designated to communicate strategic directives, as claimed by the Epicurean Philodemus of Gadara? The war trumpet gives each critic an opportunity to make his case.