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Giovanni Pascoli's Laureolus (1893) combines the folklore motif of the divine visitor, familiar from the Philemon and Baucis story for example, with an obscure Roman god and a notorious criminal. At rst these three ideas seem ill assorted, but I will argue that the name Laureolus is the thread that holds the poem together, and that the mood and style of the poem are more similar to Pascoli's Italian lyrics than to most of his Latin narratives.

Michael Serveto or Servetus was born in Spain in 1511 and on his mother’s side, belonged to a distinguished family of converted Jews. After a brilliant career as an author and physician, he was burned at the stake for heresy in Geneva in 1553, an act for which Serveto held John Calvin primarily responsible.

By one calculation, between 50,000 and 100,000 university dissertations were written in Latin in Germany and Austria between 1650 and 1750 (Leonhardt, 3). While the majority of these have remained unstudied, and may even deserve their obscurity, there are also some that amply reward scholarly attention. This paper analyzes one of the more unusual of these, focusing not on its stylistic merits (it is written in typical Lutheran scholastic prose), but raising questions regarding its literary structure and aspirations.

The paper intends to present an overview of the Latinity of Prospero Intorcetta (1625-1696), a Sicilian Jesuit who was sent to China as a missionary in 1657.

The purpose of this paper is to present a portion of my current research on Theodore Beza’s 1579 Latin verse translation of the biblical Psalms. I will argue for the clear influence of Catullus in Beza’s Latin Psalms, which is a proof not only of the enduring value of pagan poetry for the Genevan reformer, but more broadly, of the new and abundant life which the classical world enjoyed in the sixteenth-century Reformed church.

When the genre of the miscellany experienced a growth in popularity during the Imperial period, its influence bled into a number of texts in neighboring genres. This paper will investigate one of these miscellanistic-influenced Imperial texts, the Symposium of Methodius of Olympus.

Variety is a hallmark of Aelian’s output, ranging from invectives to literary epistles to miscellaneous collections. However, as scholars have begun to recognize the place of Aelian and his diverse oeuvre in the context of imperial literature (Smith, Goldhill), and miscellaneous writings have begun to receive more serious treatment as literary endeavors in their own right, Aelian’s De natura animalium (De nat.

Why were so many works commonly classed as miscellanies titled historiae (Pamphila’s Συμμίκτων Ἱστορικῶν Ὑπομνημάτων, Favorinus’ Παντοδαπῆ Ἱστορία, Aelian’s Varia Historia)? This paper argues that the titles of these works point to their close connections with historiography. While the roots of miscellany in philosophy and elite sympotic traditions have rightly been emphasized (Jacob 2013, Klotz and Oikonomopoulou 2011, Morgan 2007), reading such works against the tradition of historiography is equally compelling.

In classical antiquity, “miscellaneous” texts were sometimes accompanied by a kind of paratext known today as a Table of Contents: a sequential list of titles or descriptions of the chapters, essays or sections that make up the work. Modern study of paratext traditionally proceeds from studying books themselves, but no ancient manuscripts of these particular texts survive, which seems to foreclose a materially-oriented study of their nature and function.

In the preface to the second Book of Quaestiones convivales, Plutarch says that he simply jotted down the conversations “without any systematic order, as each came to mind” (Quaest. conv. 629D: σποράδην δ' ἀναγέγραπται καὶ οὐ διακεκριμένως ἀλλ' ὡς ἕκαστον εἰς μνήμην ἦλθεν). This statement is highly programmatic for the work’s underlying writing process and method of composition, including the structuring principles that guide it, however idiosyncratic they may be (König 2007, Morgan 2011).