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Pivotal counterfactuals (“Then X would have happened had not Y intervened”) are a frequent Homeric construction.  Previous scholarship has analyzed this construction in general (Lang 1989, Louden 1993) or specifically in its occurrences in the Iliad (De Jong 1987, Morrison 1992), but has tended to overlook certain key differences between the two epics’ utilization of pivotal counterfactuals.  I argue that the Iliad uses pivotal counterfactuals to accentuate Achilles’ dignity regarding freedom of choice vis-à-vis other humans and that, in contrast to the Odyss

Diomedes holds a special place in the Achaean camp of the Iliad: he is at once the youngest of the basilewes and one of the most experienced in warfare. No other Greek hero is as important on the battlefield or as narratively dominant in Achilles’ absence. Yet despite his prominence in the Iliad he remains little studied. This paper will explore how Diomedes navigates the class of basilewes and rises in the ranks to become the second most important of the Achaeans in both war and counsel.

This paper demonstrates how Achilles code switches in his conversation with his mother Thetis, toggling between divine and human worlds. I examine two speeches of Achilles: his cry to Thetis from the shore (1.352-356) and his longer speech to her after she comes (1.365-412). On the surface these two utterances seem to accomplish similar things: asking for his mother’s help, complaining about how he has been mistreated by Agamemnon, and seeking Zeus’s intervention.

The poet, the grammarian and the Origines: Servius, Vergil and the record of Cato’s history in ancient scholarship

Why do so many ancient historical digressions take place at sea? In his short novella, Watermark, Joseph Brodsky declares, “There is something primordial about traveling on water, even for short distances...Water unsettles the principle of horizontality” (1992, 14). The same could be said for digressions: they frequently delve into the murkier “plupast” (cf. Grethlein and Krebs, 2012), and unsettle the seeming horizontality of historical narrative time.

When it comes to Roman-Germanic history, one name is omnipresent: Tacitus. The rediscovery of his writings is usually seen as a key moment after which Germanic prehistory is integrated in historical narratives. Most influential was the Germania that served as a resource for the construction of an imagined “Germanic identity”. Alongside, several political incidents were recorded in the Annals and Histories like the Batavian revolt and the battle of the Teutoburg Forest.

In Annals book one, Tacitus records the capture of Arminius’ pregnant wife and her kin, at the urging of her father Segestes. Tacitus describes her as a woman “more like her husband than her father in spirit, neither overcome by tears nor suppliant speech, with her hands pressed firmly together in her lap she looked upon her pregnant belly” (mariti magis quam parentis animo, neque <e>victa in lacrimas neque voce supplex, compressis intra sinum manibus gravidum uterum intuens. Tac. Ann. 1.57.4).

My presentation explores the tragic intertextuality of Plutarch’s Life of Coriolanus, a Life whose ‘tragic colouring’ has not hitherto been probed. The first part makes the case that the ‘apolitical’ nature of Coriolanus has two tragic models, Sophocles’ Ajax and Adrastus’ funeral oration in Euripides’ Supplices. The second investigates the dramatic structure of the second half of the Life and the different way in which Dionysius and Plutarch use tragic intertexts in the portrayal of Volumnia.

Civil war is among the central themes of Tacitus’ historical work. It is explicit at the beginning of the work now called the Historiae; it is implicit at the opening of the Annales. This paper reads the opening of the Annales as being in dialogue with the Historiae after demonstrating that the circulation history of both works points to Tacitus’ having conceived Annales 1 as the opening act of a consolidated thirty-book history.

The Repentant Rapist: A Menandrian Strategy of Characterization in Callimachus’ Acontius and Cydippe (frr. 67–75 Pf.)