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Linguistic contact between Greek and Latin in the first thousand years of our era is often seen as a stream of ideas, concepts, and words flowing in one direction: from Greek East to Latin West. (Berschin, 15-17) While Introductory Latin textbooks are careful to point out Greek loanwords like poeta and philosophia, their Greek analogues are silent on parallel processes from West to East. Scholars who treat the subject of cultural influence usually frame their discussions from a Greek to Latin perspective (Hutchinson, 149-153).

In the context of a research project on ancient scholarship on archaic Greek iambos, this paper focuses on exegetic material on Archilochus preserved by the indirect tradition.

Even though we are members of a discipline and a profession at risk, Classicists seem to dedicate ourselves too little to issues of social justice and inclusion. Nevertheless, Classical scholars have long been present in social issues from abolition to LGBTQ+ rights (Malamud 2016; Meckler 2006).

Galen uses the production of and the commentary on ancient texts as tools to establish his own medical authority. He leverages both the physical possession of ancient books and the superior claim to familiarity with ancient authors that they afford him in order to set himself up as the authoritative master in the field of medicine and, to some degree, also that of philosophy. In these practices, he adapts the contemporary culture of the second century A.D., with its emphasis on the authoritative value of books and the privileged place of antiquity, to his own professional ends.

I propose a reading of the ambiguous ending of Juvenal Satire 1 as a programmatic statement of Juvenal’s appropriation of Lucilius and Horace through the echo of words and themes from Horace Epistle 1.19. I do not propose a single, stable meaning for Juvenal’s complex ending, but the dialogue with Horace provides a literary rather than social context and thus a more positive reading.

Plutarch concludes his Life of Pelopidas with the story of how Alexander was assassinated in his bed by his own wife Thebe and her brothers (358/357 BCE). This paper argues that Plutarch not only prolonged the Life of Pelopidas as posthumous vengeance for his hero’s demise (Georgiadou 1997, Sprawski 2006), but also wrote Alexander’s murder to satisfy the quintessential elements of the end a tyrant ought to experience. In a 2013 article, Nino Luraghi proposed that motifs which recur in the death narratives of tyrants have symbolic meaning and he identified elements (i.e.

The end of the Odyssey has long presented challenges to interpreters. Zeus’ unexpected declaration of an eklêsis, or ‘amnesty’ (24. 485–486), invites separate and often discrete responses. This sudden ending can seem generically problematic in prizing forgetfulness in a genre of memory and commemoration; and its abruptness has also struck some as artistically lacking. Nevertheless, in a way, it functions like a Platonic aporia, forcing its audiences to reconsider their questions and assumptions anew.

Livy’s discussion of Rome’s topography has garnered a significant amount of attention from scholars interested in the role that monuments play as receptacles of cultural memory, even after their destruction or decay (Kraus 1994, Jaeger 1997, Gowing 2008, Lushkov 2014).

Catullus’s Carmen 64 has puzzled many a critic by its “disobedient ekphrasis” (Laird) of a coverlet: not only does it scarcely describe its subject, but it turns into a long first-person monologue by Ariadne, the main figure woven into the coverlet. Instead of materially describing the artwork to “bring its subject before the readers’ eyes” following the rhetorical tradition transmitted by the Progymnasmata, the ekphrasis gives voice to its central character.

The Antonine Plague, the great epidemic that first swept across the Roman Empire in AD 165, and recurred in waves over the following decades, ‘is widely agreed to have been smallpox’ (Sallares: 2007, 37). This identification has been argued for and assumed in the most recent sustained treatments of the topic (Gourevitch: 2013; Lo Cascio (ed.): 2012), building on the key article by the Littmans published in 1973. It has fed into the lively debates on the demographic and economic impact of the plague (see e.g. Elliott: 2016; and essays in Lo Cascio: 201); following Duncan-Jones: 1996).