149

Aside from Cicero’s own works, the extant ancient sources that provide us with the most vivid picture of Cicero—the man and the politician—are Plutarch’s Life and the portion of Cassius Dio’s Roman History that deals with the late Republic. In this paper, I contrast the two authors’ distinct conceptions of Cicero’s personality, identity, and political aims.

Ancient biographies of powerful men trigger reflections on power – sometimes in verses. This paper investigates how the ancient biographies of the Roman emperors engage with anonymous and fragmentary poetry, as in the cases of the Historia Augusta and Suetonius’ Lives of the Caesars. Indeed, both works quote several anonymous verses (Blänsdorf, Courtney), which mostly convey satirical and mocking attacks against the emperors. In Suetonius, we find 59 verses covering the lives of Caesar, Augustus, Tiberius, Caligola, Nero, Galba, Otho and Domitian.

Among the most popular topics of interschool debate in Hellenistic and Imperial philosophy was the question of what role, if any, ordinary emotions such as love, anger, and the like play in a virtuous and fulfilling life. The two most famous interlocutors in this debate were the Stoics and Peripatetics, who held opposing views on the value of emotions.

Richard Sorabji claims that the ancient debate concerning the proper treatment of animals “came to turn on whether animals were rational.” Only the Stoics seem be a case in point, since they say that justice “should extend only to beings like us and therefore rule out irrational animals” (De Abts. III.1.187). Yet by Sorabji’s own admission, he does not succeed in identifying a faculty of mind such that the Stoics could have reasonably inferred, from the absence of that faculty in animals, that animals were without a claim to be treated justly.

In this paper, I analyse how Aristotle understands Zeno’s arrow and how he solves it, by carefully looking at Physics Z. First, I offer a reconstruction of Zeno’s argument based on Aristotle’s report, and argue that he solves the paradox by denying that time is composed of indivisible nows.

Christianity's long ambivalence about the legacy of Hellenism and the extent of its reach into the formative stages of the new religion written in Greek continued to generate an immense amount of involved research throughout the 20th century. The intense debates that investigated the Hellenism of Early Christianity were first and foremost concerned with issues of language. What do the forms of syntax and vocabulary carry into the ideas they shape and their resonance?

Scholars of Mediterranean antiquity, Judaism and early Christianity have long been fascinated by the encounter between Greek and Hebrew in the ancient world and in Hellenistic Alexandria in particular. The very term “Hellenist” was coined as early as the turn of the 17th century, when humanists debated whether the Greek of the Septuagint, of Philo, of Josephus and the New Testament reflected the distinct Jewish dialect of a bilingual culture, an idiom redolent with Hebraisms, starkly different from that of Periclean Athens (Hardy 2012).

In the invitation to this panel, one organizer described the relationship between Classics and theology as that of ‘roommates’. This paper takes seriously the implications of this figure of speech and will begin from the few months in 1799 when Friedrich Schlegel and Friedrich Schleiermacher shared lodgings in Berlin, a period of co-habitation and sharing of ideas that also led to the plan for a collaborative translation of Plato’s works. In the end, Schleiermacher executed the project on his own, but in its conceptualization, it bears the traces of both (Arndt 1996; Lamm 2000).

Many of the pioneers of Classical philology, from Lorenzo Valla, to Richard Bentley and Karl Lachmann, to name just a few, moved with ease between Greco-Roman texts and the New Testament. According to the prevailing scholarly opinion, the relation between these two fields in the late eighteenth and nineteenth century was one of direct influence of sacred philology over its profane counterpart. Thus, according to Giorgio Pasquali, philologia profana is a “tributary” of philologia sacra” (Pasquali, 1952, 8).

This paper examines the use of legal documents and dispute resolution procedures within the chancery of Abraham of Hermonthis, a seventh century bishop from upper Egypt. It does so using a dossier of Coptic ostraca, which the author has examined in person, that have so far only appeared in a mid-twentieth century unpublished dissertation.