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This work explores how Seleucid kings exercised infrastructural power in the third century BCE by allowing individuals to re-attach the land property they received from the royal administration to the Greek cities in Asia Minor.

Ptolemaic dynastic successions were often bloody, especially when they devolved into civil wars or when the populace of Alexandria violently intervened. Only Peter Fraser has specifically written on the latter, and he has harshly (and racistly) criticized the role of the Alexandrians in dynastic politics, saying that “the throne [was] at the disposal of the mob…partly because of the gradual Egyptianizing of the Greeks of the middle and lower classes” (Fraser, 131).

Our knowledge of Egyptian political history in the 150s BC is very lacunose, but for the last 100 years its broad contours have been universally accepted. However, one crucial piece of evidence has invariably been ignored, which has significant consequences for our understanding both of Ptolemaic history and Roman-Egyptian relations.

Orpheus has been a queer icon since even before Eurydice existed, and he lives on in modern queer love stories. There are only five references from antiquity that specifically reference Orpheus’ queer, namely pederastic, love: Phanocles, Ovid, Hyginus, Philargyrius and Virgil, the latter three which follow Ovid, who is believed to have followed Phanocles. Phanocles’ fragment, from his elegiac poem which survives in Stobaeus, is the first instance of the myth having an element of same-sex love and can be read as an example of a queer relationship.

“Costume is Flesh”:

Trans*ing Pentheus in Anne Carson’s Bakkhai

“Queering the Hero,” Society of Classical Studies 2024 Annual Meeting

“Look at Pentheus / twirling around in a dress, / so pleased with his little girl-guise / he’s almost in tears. / Are we to believe / this desire is new? / Why was he keeping / that dress in the back / of his closet anyhow? / Costume is flesh.”

I propose to consider Euripides' Cassandra through the lens of queer possibilities offered by Jack Halberstam's Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire and The Queer Art of Failure. By reading Cassandra as “wild” and a “failure,” in Halberstam's terms, we free her from heteronormative expectations for subjectivity and can read her refusal of sexuality, her prophetic frenzy, and her speech that exceeds regular signification in new and productive ways. She knows and declares that her relationship with Agamemnon will result in death and not new life.

This paper argues that post-Homeric Greek writers employed references to Achilles and Patroclus as a way to subtly address the taboo topic of mutual eros between men. According to the normative model of Classical Greek sexuality, adult citizen men desired and sexually penetrated their social inferiors: boys, women, and slaves (Dover 1978). A reciprocal erotic relationship in which one party did not seek to dominate the other was, according to these norms, unthinkable (Konstan 1997).

At Iliad 24.511–12, Akhilleus “weeps now for his own father, now again for Patroklos,” αὐτὰρ Ἀχιλλεὺς κλαῖεν ἑὸν πατέρ’, ἄλλοτε δ’ αὖτε / Πάτροκλον. Commentators have generally ignored the second clause, focusing rather upon the reciprocal weeping of Akhilleus and Priam. The mutuality of fathers and sons and the making of fictive kinship, however fleeting, have been taken as strong signs of narrative closure.

The Parco Virgiliano a Piedigrotta, Naples, has a “Virgil Garden”—a terraced park that feature the many plants mentioned in the poet’s works, all carefully labeled with botanical detail and a pertinent hexameter excerpt. This paper examines this site through ten frames, to understand how Virgilian vegetation is redeployed for homage, honour, and horticulture. The ten frames perceive the garden

(i) as a park, with beautiful views of the Amalfi coast and Mt. Vesuvius, purporting to offer a connection with nature and elevating the site within the city’s long history;

Virgil shows a particular fondness for ancient trees and forests throughout his entire oeuvre. In this paper, I would like to highlight some philosophical implications of the relationship between ‘arboreal time’ and ‘human time’ as represented in his poetry, a topic that deserves further investigation in the context of more recent ecocritical approaches.