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While the historicity of the first secession of the plebs (c. 493 BCE) is somewhat debatable, it remains canonically the first major development in the ‘conflict of the orders,’ a nearly two-century struggle between mass and elite that gradually produced, via constitutional reforms, the socio-political foundations of the mid and late Roman republican state (Cornell; Lintott; Raaflaub; Mignone; Forsythe).

When, in the Politics, Aristotle sketches the constitution of the city that “one would pray for” (Pol.

This paper explores how prayers in Homer’s Iliad are rhythmically distinct from other speech-acts. To date scholars have established how an epic poet can differentiate individual speakers and groups by modulating the vocabulary and world-view expressed (Parry 1956; Reeve 1973; Friedrich and Redfield 1978; Scully 1984; Griffin 1986; Scodel 1989; Martin 1989; Mackie 1996; Beck 2009, 2012, 2017); others have explored the phrasing and colometry of epic Greek in light of differing genres and speech-acts (Bakker 1997; Edwards 2002; Blankenborg 2017).

Recent studies on Pyrrhonism have taken seriously the mention in Diogenes Laertius (9.61) that its eponymous founder, Pyrrho, studied with Indian Gymnosophists while he travelled in the retinue of Alexander the Great. Most notably Christopher Beckwith (2015) argued that Pyrrhonism is one of the earliest documented representations of Buddhism, but more generally scholars (Flintoff, Hanner, Kuzminski, McEvilley) have noted similarities in Buddhist skepticism and the Pyrrhonist version of the same school of thought.

(Content Warning: This paper contains detailed discussion of sexual violence and trauma)

In this talk, I will argue that displaced populations in the Classical Greek world crafted a new ‘displaced identity’ that has not been noticed before. Moving beyond studies that focus on how expelled populations revived their civic identities and institutions (Gray 2015, 2017), I propose that these populations also created a new set of self-definitions that incorporated their experience of expulsion much more closely.

Despite its popularity from antiquity through the Renaissance, Oppian’s Halieutica has found itself largely neglected by modern classical scholarship, dismissed as a stale, versified assemblage of dry technical learning (Fajen 1999).

The communis opinio posits a division of roles in the Hellenistic period between the cultural hubs of Athens and Alexandria. Athens remained the place for philosophy, whereas those in Alexandria engaged in scientific research (e.g., mathematics, geography, and anatomy) and paid scant attention to philosophy (Fraser 1972; Netz 2020).

Of all the language that characterizes women and their sphere of action in the Odyssey, the formulaic system involving the upper/inner rooms is the only one used exclusively of Penelope. Scholars, especially since Nagler’s influential article (1974), have linked the formula with Penelope’s faithfulness to Odysseus.

This paper aims to explain the position of Ajax’ speech as last in the embassy to Achilles in Book Nine of the Iliad. Prior to Ajax’ speech, Phoinix, recounting the myth of Meleager, mentions a sequence of suppliants at Ι.575-85.