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Ammianus Marcellinus’ Res Gestae (ca. 390 CE) is nominally a continuation of Tacitus’ historiographical oeuvre. Like Tacitus, Ammianus employs allusions to, and exempla of, early Rome and its original kings. As Timothy Joseph, Thomas Strunk, and others have shown, Tacitus’ regal references allow readers familiar with canonical authors such as Livy and Ovid to evaluate emperors such as Augustus and Tiberius by the precedents and standards set by kings such as Romulus and Numa.

After the twenty-year Gothic War ended in 554 CE, senatorial aristocrats were eager to recover their estates in Italy. Those who were in exile in Constantinople petitioned the emperor Justinian (527-565) for assistance.  In response to their request and those of their aristocratic bishop, Vigilius, the emperor issued 27 constitutions, today known as the Pragmatic Sanction.

The goal of this paper is to show that merit had a prominent place in Libanius’ argumentation to justify hiring a candidate for a position in the Roman imperial administration during the fourth century AD. Despite the vast number of extant letters of recommendation from late antique authors such as Libanius, these texts have received relatively little scholarly attention. As a genre, Roman letters of recommendation can appear quite impenetrable.

This paper investigates the creation and promulgation of forged correspondence amidst the court factionalism of the reign of Constantius II. Interest in ancient literary fakes and religious forgeries has had a recent renaissance (Peirano, Ehrman, Hopkins and McGill), but less attention has been granted to the creation, promulgation, or consequences of documentary forgeries (i.e. wills, diplomas, loan agreements, and correspondence).

On the meaning of δατέομαι, Martin West definitively states, “In Homer this verb is only used of people sharing out among themselves” (West 1997: 312). West is largely in agreement with the definitions of δατέομαι provided by Chantraine and Snell (Chantraine 1968; Snell 1999). This definition has proved influential for our understanding of the essential ritual act of feasting in Homeric poetry. For instance, in the opening of the Odyssey Athena, the first aspect of the scene that attracts Athena’s attention is such a ‘sharing’ of meat (Od.

This paper argues that Apollo’s comparison of Achilles to a lion in search of a feast at Iliad 24.39-45 constitutes a compressed fable narrative, which functions as an embedded ethical program within the epic. Reproaching the hero’s abuse of Hector’s corpse, the god describes an unusual scenario: a lion advances against flocks of sheep intending a distinctly human form of repast in the form of a “feast” (δαίς).

The present paper seeks to thread together in a precise way two well-studied phenomena from the Odyssey: the weaving metaphor and ring structure. Specifically, I claim that a narrative-level ring structure that links Circe and Penelope is used to effectively end Penelope's otherwise never-ending weaving trick. 

Odysseus’s Two Bodies: Recognition as Construction in Odyssey 19

At the end of the Odyssey, Zeus proposes to erase the memory of Odysseus’ rivals (ἔκλησιν θέωμεν, 24.485) in order to end the cycle of retribution and establish peace. Often noted for its abruptness, Zeus’ intervention has been viewed more recently as an organic part of the narrative whole (Loney 2019, 224-225 and Marks 2008, 62-65), despite persistent attacks on its authenticity from antiquity to the present day (cf. West 1989).

The Iliad is populated by an array of manufactured objects—including weapons, clothes, utensils, and vehicles—that allude to social and economic realities beyond the horizons of the Trojan battlefield. This paper argues that the rare scenes of manufacturing in the Iliadic narrative serve as sites of aesthetic resistance to the protagonists’ aristocratic, status-seeking ethos: two depictions of metalworking (Il. 18.478-608; 23.826-49) trace the tenuous place of martial labor in the broader world of epic.