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When Sulla sacked Athens in 86 BC, he initiated a process of urban development that permanently redefined the local landscape—including many of the most famous objects and places that memorialized classical Athenian culture.

Seneca’s Philosophical Thyestes

Arguments have long raged about the extent to which Seneca’s tragedies reflect his philosophy. I maintain that there is a systematic and logical connection between the ideas espoused in the Epistulae Morales and the characters of the Thyestes, and moreover, I believe that the connection is one which reflects Seneca’s own relationship with Nero.

In the summer of 57 BCE, Cicero received the news for which he had long been waiting: a law was to be put before the assembly recalling him from exile. Setting out from Dyrrachium on 4 August, the day of the vote, he arrived in Rome later that month. When he reached the Porta Capena, he found the streets teeming with people shouting his name and applauding wildly. In the Forum and on the Capitoline, the crowd was even more remarkable: in foroque et in ipso Capitolio miranda multitudo fuit (Att. 4.1.5).

The Uniqueness of Homer, Reconsidered

How did the Romans write a million? Or five thousand? Or a hundred thousand? Most people know the Roman numerals up to a thousand, but even professional classicists struggle to go higher than that. Editors are no different, and where Latin texts include high figures our supposedly critical editions fill up with unreal numerals produced by error or guesswork. For example, all modern texts of Cicero’s letters, including that of Shackleton Bailey, the scourge of inherited nonsense, print a style of numeral shown to be unclassical already in the nineteenth century (Ad Q.

The worst-case scenario in Aeschylus’ Seven against Thebes happens if Eteocles and Polyneices confront one another at the seventh gate. Because of the multitude of permutations possible with seven attackers, seven defenders, and seven gates, the worst-case scenario is a low-probability event. The resulting miasma, however, makes it a high-consequence event. I argue that Seven against Thebes provides an important lesson in risk management by bringing about, against all odds, the low-probability, high-consequence outcome.

The influence of the Greek historian Thucydides on the Roman Sallust has long been noted, particularly regarding language and style, but also in famous passages of Thucydides that Sallust uses as models (Patzer, Parker, Syme, Scanlon). An educated Roman audience would have been familiar with Thucydides, and recognized both how Sallust reworks these passages and how he uses these intertextual relations to further comment on the history and personages of his own time.

Lucretius’ De rerum natura is widely regarded as the didactic poem par excellence in Latin literature. As such, it displays one of the most characteristic features of the genre, which is a close relationship between the poet/teacher and the addressee/pupil, who is not only spurred to the learning of Epicurean doctrine, but himself takes the floor, reacting to Lucretius’ teachings.

In this paper I examine a group of deities in Aquitania and Gallia Narbonensis. The names of these deities indicate a thriving forestry made visible through votive dedications. Viewing these votives through the lens of local industries reveals that the border between worship and commerce was somewhat ill-defined for timber communities in Gaul, only becoming more delineated as a result coexistence with Roman businessmen (conventus civium Romanorum) and various military personnel.

In this paper I examine the scholarly Latin translations of W. Holtzmann (a.k.a. Xylander), who produced multiple bilingual editions of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, as well as the nachleben of these editions in Méric Casaubon's edition of Meditations.