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Some columns of Philodemus’ book IV of On Music develop a critique against the Stoics Cleanthes and Diogenes of Babylonia, who claimed that musical performances are means to pray and to pay homage to the gods. The Epicurean philosopher rejects their doctrine by arguing that music is not only useless for this purpose, but even damaging for the following reasons: 1) it neither pleases nor gives pleasure to gods, 2) it creates unnecessary delights in the worshippers, 3) it “distracts” the human mind from the “vision” of the divine.

The paper builds on the argument of Schultz 2016 that the modern understanding of the Roman ritual of devotio as a form of self-sacrifice (e.g., Yerkes 1952, Versnel 1976, Gustafsson 2015, van Henten 2018) clashes with actual Roman ritual taxonomy.  That article made the case that devotio and sacrificium (the particularly Roman instantiation of sacrifice) were two very distinct entities in the Roman ritual repertoire on the basis of the starkly different Roman attitudes toward each ritual and the fact that no ancient source claims any relationship between the

Scholars of French and English literature have recognized that the sibyl served as a symbol during the Romantic period for women authors who sought to break into the male dominated literary tradition (Hoog 1991, Lewis 2003). This paper employs depictions of the sibyl in Latin poetry as a framework for considering the sibyl’s reception in the fiction of four prominent women authors.

In Fam. 24, 11 Petrarch writes about the legacy of Virgil’s works: Aeneas’s glory lives on, the Mantuan fields continue to glimmer thanks to the fourfold cleft of the Georgics, and an older Tityrus, keeps playing his slender pipe (55: Tityrus ut tenuem senior iam perflat avenam). I approach this reference to Tityrus’s age as an entry point into examining a particular aspect of Petrarch’s complex self-fashioning as post-Virgilian poet (Hinds 2004). The shepherd’s old age in Fam.

Since Charles Martindale’s Redeeming the Text: Latin Poetry and the Hermeneutics of Reception (Cambridge, 1993), the idea that ‘meaning … is always already realized at the point of reception’ has become a mantra of classical reception studies. (Martindale 1993: 3; Hardie 2007; Martindale 2013: 1).

Although researchers have examined the reception of Greco-Roman antiquity in a range of popular media, including movies, videogames, comics, science fiction, fantasy, and children's literature, romance novels have not garnered their attention.

Marisela Treviño Orta’s Woman on Fire (updated version, 2016) presents a dramatic interpretation of Sophocles’ Antigone that explores the relationship between Chicanx and Mexican experiences at the geographical/political border between the United States and Mexico. In this paper, I explore how Treviño Orta’s play finds adaptive value in the Antigone through its narrative ability to vivify the corporeal conflicts of Chicanx (and Latinx) experience.

In this paper, I examine how the abrupt ending of the myth in Pindar’s break-off formulas, or Abbruchsformeln, is meant to affect the audiences’ overall reception of the poem, and therefore shows us what variants were familiar to them. I propose that Pindar exerts his power over the subject of the poem through a manipulation of available variants by breaking off the myth at the crossroads of possibility and preventing a negative future. Therefore the audience’s recognition of rejected negative variants is as significant as of variants selected for this exertion of power.

The purpose of this paper is to briefly reexamine the relationship between nature (φυά), art (τέχνα), and learning (μανθάνειν) in Pindar, and to argue that it has more in common with the Homeric than with the sophistic conception. The three notions are fundamental for an account of Pindaric poetics (and politics), and the basic relationship between them may seem obvious: nature is presumably opposed to art, which one must learn. Pindar famously derided learners (μαθόντες) in favor of φυά (O. 2.86); he and his audience must have likewise scorned τέχνα.

This paper argues for a metapoetic reading of the mythological narrative of Ixion in Pindar’s Pythian 2.  While previous scholarship (Carey 1981, Most 1985, Morgan 2015) has largely viewed this passage as a negative exemplum warning Hieron of Syracuse against the excesses of tyrannical power and stressing his moral superiority by contrast, I contend that Pindar presents Ixion as a poet of sorts, whose reproductive transgressions mirror the discursive transgressions characteristic of the genre.