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The Madness of Antony: Mental Deficiency as a Marker of Character in Plutarch’s Life of Antony and Cicero’s Second Philippic

It is the contention of this paper that both Cicero and Plutarch, in their treatments of Mark Antony, use mental impairment or deficiency as a marker of, and even a shorthand for, Antony’s deficient character. Awareness of this strategic invocation of mental illness as a common element in both authors’ characterizations of Antony can help illuminate the role of disability in ancient elite discourse more broadly.

Firmly rooted in an acceptance of the inequalities of life and a subsequent desire to mock them, Cuban choteo (“joking”) is a trope that finds humor in dragging its lofty victims down with low language and crude comedy (Firmat 1984, Mañach 1991.) Given its quintessential role in Cuban identity, it is no surprise that choteo forms an integral part of the transformations of Classical tragedy for the Cuban stage.

The Villa dei Papiri revealed an extraordinary Epicurean library that attested to the activity of the Garden of Epicurus. It contained a great quantity of volumes written by the Epicurean Philodemus that testify to his own incredible scholarly activity. In this paper I will talk about a work called Peri Parrhesias (in Latin, De libertate dicendi; On Frank Criticism) that belongs to a group of Philodemus’ works on ethics.

Recent decades have seen an increase in the scholarly attention devoted to Juan Latino, the first known poet of African descent to be published in Latin. In this presentation I will discuss a rich point of criticism of Latino’s oeuvre: his self-proclaimed Ethiopian origins. This claim peppers some of Latino’s epigrams.

Throughout the 19th century intellectuals such as José Martí, Rubén Darío and José Enrique Rodó urged the youth of America towards a spiritual Hispanic Renaissance. This call asked future Latin American writers to engage with a wide range of cultural sources which would speak to the new postcolonial experience of the Americas.

Philodemus stands at a crucial juncture for our understanding of the rhetorical and philosophical concepts of enargeia – a term translated as “vividness” in rhetorical writings but “self-evidence” in philosophical writings. In the centuries after Philodemus, enargeia becomes an indispensable rhetorical term: it denotes the quality of writing that puts the subject “before our eyes”, and becomes one of the virtues of rhetorical handbooks from Theon to Hermogenes to Aphthonius.

This paper examines an unexpected encounter, and the conversation that unfolds, between
Orestes, the ancient Greek prince, and Paraśurāma, the ancient Indian sage who travels to Greece
across the Silk Route. This conversation is not from a lost Greek play, nor from an ancient
Sanskrit text. It can be found in a Bengali book written by Sisir Kumar Das and published as
recently as 2011. The book, aptly titled Aloukik Sanglap (Unearthly Dialogues), contains a
collection of speculative conversations, in modern Bengali, between ancient Greek and ancient

The Silk Road imaginary has historically relied on a totalizing dichotomy of East and West that
deemphasizes ancient cross-cultural connections along other axes, such as between China and East
Africa.i

This paper provides a critical interpretation of Diodorus’ account of Semiramis who builds the
first empire from Syria to Bactria from a comparative perspective. I argue that Diodorus has two
agendas in writing on Semiramis. First, it has to do with Rome’s eastern campaigns during the
late republic. Given Cicero’s accusation of the Syrian governor Gabinius as Semiramis in De
provinciis consularibus (Cic. Prov. 4.9), I contend that Semiramis registers late republican
Roman male elites’ anxiety about the potentially “contaminating” effect brought by Rome’s

Claudius’ Physical Attributes and his Political Authority in Suetonius’ Claudius