149

A didactic kettle of fish? Literary dimensions of Marcellus’ De Piscibus (GDRK 63)

Plato’s Charmides, set in 429 B.C., is a dialogue between Socrates, the future democratic partisan Chaerephon and two future oligarchic politicians, Critias and Charmides, both relatives of Plato. The fact that Plato has combined in the same scenario the full spectrum of political ideologies strongly intimates that for him political history presented different shades of grey, rather than a simple dichotomy of black and white.

The Clementia of Burning Letters

This paper investigates the nexus of ekphrasis, landscape, and identity in Achilles Tatius’s Leucippe and Clitophon by examining a single, striking case study: the arrival of the phoenix at the end of the third book (3.25). Few moments tie these strands of the novel so tightly together as does the phoenix, which affords us an opportunity to see how Achilles Tatius’s imagined landscape becomes a key character in his narrative project.

In 174/3 BCE, the censor Q. Fulvius Flaccus seized marble roof tiles from the Heraion at Cape Lacinium, the former pan-Italiote sanctuary administered by the city of Croton, for reuse on his Roman temple of Fortuna Equestris. The Senate decreed that the tiles be returned and the censor’s impious action be expiated (Livy 42.3.1–11, 28.10–12). The despoiling of foreign temples by Roman (pro-)magistrates occurred occasionally—e.g., the looting of the temple of Locrian Proserpina by Q. Pleminius in 205/4 (Livy 29.8–9.

In his exhortation to his men, Tacitus’ Calgacus locates his Caledonians as living at the “furthest limits of the earth and of freedom” (terrarum ac libertatis extremos, Agr. 30.3); this has been their natural defense, but nothing satisfies Roman avarice. Calgacus’ connection between land and libertas reflects upon the Roman impact outlined earlier in Tacitus’ text, when Agricola encourages urbanization, but the revised landscape leads to immorality and decadence.

This paper focuses on the content and significance of the terms Italus and Italia in Aeneid 7-12, and their rhetorical deployment by Turnus and his lieutenants during the war against the Trojans. The landscape of Vergil’s primeval Italy is populated by a wide array of distinct ethnic and cultural groups that inhabit politically autonomous cities. Prior to Turnus’ mobilization of resistance to the Trojans, there appears to have been little sense of unity and solidarity as “Italians” between the individual communities.

When P. T. Stevens coined the term ‘tragic koine’ for the linguistic stock-in-trade of Greek tragedy from the later fifth century on, he immediately acknowledged the limits of our evidence: ‘... if the rest of Attic tragedy had survived we might find that the style of Sophocles was more distinct from the tragic koine than that of Euripides ... and that a good deal of what now appears to be Euripidean would be seen as common at any rate to a group of dramatists’ (Stevens 1965: 270; cf. Fries 2014: 29-30).

Herodotus’ description of the Sauromatae’s origins has it all—love, language, and warrior-women. Most strikingly, it includes one of the first instances of an awareness of the effects of language contact, defined most simply as “the use of more than one language at the same place at the same time” (Thomason 2004: 2-3, Thomason 2001: 1). In the story, a group of Amazons travel far from home and end up among Scythians, whose territory they raid (Hdt. 4.110).

In my presentation I will challenge the belief, long dominant among scholars of the ‘Athenian Empire’, that the Athenian exaction of phoros (tribute) from its allies was particularly odious to those allies. Lisa Kallet (1993 p.