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The notion of reversal (περιπέτεια), famously developed by Aristotle in the Poetics (1452a), is integral to the genre of tragedy. This paper explores the importance of περιπέτεια for Lucian’s Menippus or Necyomantia, in which Menippus tells a friend about his recent journey to the underworld, by focusing on its Euripidean tragic intertexts. These operate on multiple planes: the plot’s circumstances, the plays’ themes, and Lucian’s broader socio-critical project.

Early in Tacitus’ Dialogus, several friends visit Curiatius Maternus, following his sensational recitation of a drama entitled Cato.  Powerful persons have taken offense, and they urge Maternus to revise the work for safety.  By no means, replies Maternus: he will soon complete a Thyestes that will say anything the Cato left unsaid (Dial. 3).  Scholars have long recognized that Maternus’ Thyestes, and other dramas on this theme, can be taken—by contemporaries and by mo

[Formatted title: Cicero’s De oratore and the Platonic Art of Writing]

Plato’s Myth of Er experienced a bifurcated reception history in the Greek and Latin philosophical traditions, respectively. Whereas Greek Middle Platonic texts take criticisms of Plato head on (i.e., in polemical treatises, e.g., Plut. Adv. Col.), the Latin tradition, under the impetus of Cicero, adopts a more oblique approach.

Recent scholarship on the early dialogues of Augustine of Hippo (Conybeare 2006; Topping 2012; Pucci 2014; Kenyon 2018) has emphasized the centrality of pedagogy and educational methods in these texts. And yet, the ways in which Augustine’s pedagogy intersects with the ways he styles himself a Platonis aemulus has been underappreciated.

In Jane Gallop’s Sexuality, Disability, Aging, she proposes thinking about gender, sexuality, and identity at large as “longitudinal.” In so doing, she invites us to consider the ways bodies cut across categories through time – and, I would add, space.

In conversation with post-colonial studies that hold sexuality, gender, ethnicity and race to be co-constitutive and integral to the workings of empire (e.g., Bhabha; McClintock; Puar; Stoler), this paper argues that ancient Christian discourses about “women” and femininity (to which feminist historians have been critically attentive, e.g., Boyarin, Burrus 1994, Clark, Cobb, Cox Miller, Kraemer) are implicated in colonialist projects in ways that we have not thoroughly considered.

In De virginibus velandis, Tertullian asserts that girls beyond the age of twelve have undergone an irrevocable transformation that requires them to be covered in public: the “inner covering” of pubic hair (uelamen extrinsecus habenti tegumen intrinsecus [12.1]) also demands an outer covering of her “shame” (pudor ubique uestitur [11.8]). In Carthage, as elsewhere, consecrated virgins were expected to veil themselves when venturing outside.

Since the advent of the linguistic turn, the field of late antique Christian asceticism has hotly debated whether or not we can access the agency of any hagiographical subjects given the totalizing narrative of the male author. Following in the footsteps of Jasbir Puar (2012), I propose that we are asking the wrong questions. Instead of focusing on the identity formation of the ascetic, we should cease asking who an ascetic was and instead examine how an ascetic functioned. To do so, we must think beyond the bounds of the modern concept of the body as container.

In late antiquity, several hagiographies of assigned female saints who presented themselves as men were popular among Christian audiences. Within these hagiographies, the subjects changed their gender presentation and lived as men, often in monasteries intended for those assigned male. However, current historiography explains away these acts of gender variance from the historical record. Scholars often view these saints’ presentation as a means to negotiate patriarchy, such as to attain authority reserved for men (Lubinsky; Davis; Bennaser).