154

This paper offers a fresh historical reading of the concluding prayer to Paulinus of Pella’s confessional poem, Eucharisticos Deo sub ephemeridis meae textu, composed at Marseille around 460 CE, in which Paulinus claims that petitions for financial and reputational restoration have been answered by God (Euch. 579ff.).

In this paper, I deploy the riddle of the Sphinx to illuminate the divergent spatial programs of fifth-century lyric and tragedy. This case study stems from a book project that investigates the ways in which ancient Greek lyric poetry and tragedy speak to each other within a dynamic and evolving generic economy of fifth-century choral song. The book tracks lyric poetry’s varied but targeted responses to Athenian tragedy’s imperial ideology: fifth-century lyric poems resist, facilitate, and grapple with the ideological strategies of tragedy.

Before articulating its complex theories on the birth of the universe and the genesis of mankind, Plato’s Timaeus has Critias report a time-honored story, according to which an Egyptian priest describes Athena as settling Athens in Greece and Sais in Egypt. A cursory reference is made there to the Athenian autochthony myth wherein Athena brushed off Ephaestus’ sperma onto the earth/Ge thus generating the land’s first inhabitant, whose rearing Athena supervised. (23e)

Martial uses pulvis (dust) and its cognates throughout his corpus to describe several situations, including travel (3.5, 12.5, 10.14), bathing (5.65, 11.84, 12.50, 12.82), and even the passage of time (1.82, 8.3). Two epigrams stand out: 8.65 and 10.6 describe the emperors Domitian and Trajan heroically dusty from military campaigns. The common military theme in these epigrams uses typical panegyric language (Schöffel), however, the dust imagery unites the emperors in a way that invites comparison and reflection on the changing political landscape of Rome.

Erected in a corner of the Epigraphical Museum of Athens is a fragment of the Athenian Victors List preserving the names of a handful of victorious comic poets at the Athenian Lenaia (EM 8194). This fragment is remarkable because it includes within a tight grouping four of Greek New Comedy’s five canonical poets: Menander, Philemon, Diphilus, and Philippides. This would-be unbroken sequence of esteemed poets is split down the middle by an unsung Apollodorus (see 60-64, Col. IV, IG II² 2325E, Millis and Olson, 184).

As many scholars have noted (Rimmell 2006; Freeman 2014; Barchiesi and Cucchiarelli 2006; Bartsch 2015), the satirical body provides a means through which the poet is able not only to engage with and consume a self-referential generic precedent, but also to provide a literary antidote for societal ‘fleshiness’ and violability. Through this lens, the satirical body functions as an interpretive framework used to flesh out and configure the poets’ moralistic principles (Barchiesi and Cucchiarelli 2006).

Chryselephantine couches — exquisitely carved and gleaming with gold, glass, and ivory — are among the most widespread manifestations of Hellenistic elites’ embrace of Near Eastern custom. Well-documented in archaeological remains and written texts (e.g., Andronikos 1984; Plaut., Stich. II.2.50-55), the couches offer a concrete material lens through which to analyze the transfer of cultural knowledge about feasting: an ephemeral activity as significant for Mediterranean aristocrats as for their Assyrian and Persian predecessors.

Ammianus Marcellinus’s history survives as eighteen books numbered from 14 to 31, describing the years 353 to 378. His last paragraph (31.16.9) declares that his work had begun with Nerva’s accession in 96; the extant books cross-refer about thirty-five times (without book numbers) to the lost books. This paper offers a new conjecture about the nature of these lost books, which have troubled many scholars who have given them thought.

In book 3 of the Natural Questions, Seneca criticizes the knowledge offered by poets and offers his natural philosophy as an alternative. Through his treatment of the cyclical cosmic flood in 3.27-30, he shows that while poets are focused on the past and narrow human concerns, he can see the bigger picture and so both explain the present and predict the future.

At Frogs 320 Dionysus and Xanthias hear the chorus of initiates for the first time. Xanthias comments ᾄδουσι γοῦν τὸν Ἴακχον ὅνπερ Διαγόρας (“they are singing the song that Diagoras sang”) (printed e.g., by Sommerstein 1996) or alternatively – as proposed in the ancient scholia – ὅνπερ δι’ ἀγορᾶς (“which they sang passing through the agora”) (printed e.g., by Dover 1993, Wilson 2007).