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Ancient critics did not simply talk about literary style; they also created their own. Although important work has been published recently on ancient literary criticism (de Jonge, Wiater, Worman, and Porter), the language developed by ancient critics for the analysis of style has not received due attention. Yet the style of aesthetic discourse that critics crafted in their treatises reveals broader cultural sensibilities and the remarkable creativity with which they approached the authors they cite.

The goal of this paper is to examine the model of Ptolemaic hegemonic control at work in Cyprus from the perspective of Hellenistic state formation and the epigraphic representation of power in imperial and local terms. In 313/12 BCE, Ptolemy I arrested or killed four of the seven Cypriot city-kings (Diodorus 19.79.3-4) and, following the death of Nikokreon of Salamis in 311/10, took control of the island by installing Menelaus, his own brother, as the king of Salamis and the commander of Ptolemaic forces on the island.

I present new results in the digital analysis of inscriptions through a case study focused on IG XIV 1, the early sixth-century BCE text carved into the stylobate of the temple of Apollo at Syracuse. Over the past 150 years, scholars attempting a restoration have been challenged by the text’s unusual letterforms and location—on the first extant Doric temple in Sicily—and the lack of formulas found in later dedicatory inscriptions (Oliverio 1933; Guarducci 1949; 1982; and Svenson-Evers 1996 no. 42 compile the full bibliography).

After narrating in detail the Spartan campaign led by Dercylidas against the Persians in Asia Minor, Xenophon states that the Spartans waged a war against Elis ‟at the same time” (κατὰ τὸν αὐτὸν χρόνον; Hell. 3.2.21). This is at odds with both Diodorus’ (14.17.4-12) and Pausanias’ (3.8.3-5) accounts, which place Dercylidas’ campaign at least a year after the Elean War. Since the discovery of the Hellenica Oxyrhynchia as an independent source for this time period, scholars generally reject Xenophon’s synchronism in Hell. 3.2.21 as a historical blunder.

In his Phaedra, Seneca draws on passages from Vergil’s Georgics that explore the struggle between ratio and furor, more pervasively than has been previously noted (Trinacty, Coffey and Mayer). He weaves these Vergilian intertexts into a genre rich in dialogism in order to explore contrasting approaches to Stoicism and the consequences of a life lived without philosophy’s stabilizing force, reveling in the kind of decline Stephen Hinds argued that imperial poets embraced.

This paper examines how the nonhuman environment contributes to the production of bucolic song in Vergil’s Eclogues, by attending to the dense soundscapes imagined, constructed, and transmitted by the poems. I argue that the poems crucially link song and poetry itself to the nonhuman world, and to the particularities of local environments. The Eclogues imagine human song as emerging from a larger network of natural sound production, and derive their particular character from representing a bucolic soundscape including but not limited to anthropogenic sounds.

The elegies of Propertius are referred to by the enigmatic description Monobiblos in two places: the incipit of one of the two earliest manuscripts (A, Leiden, Voss. lat. o. 38),incipit monobiblos propertii aurelii nautae, and the lemma to Martial, apoph. 189 (xiv.189), Monobyblos Properti. Current consensus holds that the title in A was interpolated from Martial (cf. Butrica 1996), but there is no consensus as to the precise signification of the word and why it was attached to Propertius' work (Heyworth 2007: xii).

In its extensive description of Heracles' shield, the Hesiodic Aspis shows a remarkable preoccupation with motion and time. Near the end of the ekphrasis, the poem portrays a chariot race in which the charioteers have an 'eternal labor' (aidion...ponon 310) and 'unawarded prize' (akriton...aethlon 311), and the 'victory is never achieved' (oude pote...nikê epênusthê 310-11).

This paper offers one explanation for the apparent efficacy of claques (groups hired to applaud performers and politicians) in ancient Rome. Claques were a regular feature of crowds from at least the late Republic into the later empire. They were present in the theater and the arena (e.g. Cic. Pro Sest. 106; Dio Cass. 73.2; Lib. Or. 41.6), as well as in the courtroom (Pliny Ep. 2.14.4-5).

At the beginning of Apuleius’ Metamorphoses an unnamed speaker promises to the reader that she will experience wonder, a siren-like seduction, and entertainment by listening to the novel’s stories about the metamorphoses of human characters (Graverini 2012, 1-50). This paper argues that a large section of the famous Cupid and Psyche story (henceforth C&P), namely the narration set in Cupid’s palace (Met. 5.1-24), contains an unnoticed re-enactment of the novel’s prologue, with a focus on its ‘poetics of seduction’.