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Since the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, international law in this area has been based on the relationship between Human Dignity, taken to be an inherent and inalienable quality of all humans equally; and lengthy lists of the Human Rights that, in some sense, are described as deriving from or dependent upon this Dignity.

Aristotle claims that Socrates founded ethical philosophy (Metaphysics 987b1; cf. Diogenes Laertius 1.14). But Plato and Xenophon present us a Socrates who esteemed the ethical wisdom of the traditional Seven Sages (σοφοί or σοφισταί) even as he disdained the activity of natural scientists. Xenophon’s Socrates is a student of the Sages who incorporates their maxims into his teaching. Plato’s Socrates, conversely, makes the Sages resemble himself. Both Plato and Xenophon, though, seek to establish Socrates within the tradition of earlier ethics.

Extending reevaluations of Stoic emotions to the therapeutic potential of disgust (e.g. Graver 2007; Berno and Gazzarri 2022; Graf 2023), I argue that anagnorisis in Seneca's Thyestes is achieved not through an Aristotelian model of cognitive detachment (Staley 2009; Mowbray 2012; cf. Schiesaro 2001) but through affective engagement with material elicitors of disgust.

My paper reinterprets the natural-law arguments employed by Cicero in Philippics 10 and 11. In these two speeches, delivered before the Senate in early 43, Cicero proposed sweeping military commands for his allies Brutus and Cassius respectively. On both occasions, Cicero’s opponents accused Brutus and Cassius of acting without senatorial authorisation and, in particular, with entering another governor’s province. Cicero defended them not by citing legal loopholes but by appealing to the superiority of natural law.

In Roman mythology, Lucretia represents the archetypal Roman matron, embodying the linked values of castitas (chastity) and pudicitia (sexual virtue) (Langlands). This paper identifies an additional, and closely associated, dimension to Lucretia’s exemplarity: her behavior as a slaver.

Greco-Roman motherhood has received recent scholarly attention (Petersen and Salzman-Mitchell 2012; Sharrock and Keith 2020), but studies of non-citizen mothers in Classical and Hellenistic Greece are more limited (though, see Hong 2016). One notable exception is Strong 2012, which provides an examination of mother-daughter bonds among prostitutes. Nevertheless, Strong exclusively mothers who were free(d) at the time of their respective stories (though some ‘daughters’ were enslaved, e.g., [Dem.] 59.19).

The systematic expulsion of an entire population from its polis in the Classical Greek world was a remarkably frequent, yet understudied, reality. One common form of these uprootings was the mass enslavement of the population. From my compilation of all cases in the Classical Greek world, this amounts to over thirty instances of civic andrapodismos, committed by hegemonies, tyrants, and empires from Persia to Philip II.

Most discussions of enslaved labor in ancient education do not go far beyond noting that some teachers were formerly or even currently enslaved (Wrenhaven). The figures of the paedagogus and the wet-nurse are recurrent points of interest: the enslaved female who looked after infants and toddlers and the enslaved male who accompanied boys to school and sometimes provided basic instruction are taken as emblematic of the contributions of enslaved people to Greek and Roman education (Young, Aly).

As scholars like James and Bonandini have shown, Ovid’s elegies reformulate elegiac tropes in a way that exposes the social realities those tropes tend to conceal. Amores 1.6, for example, reimagines a paraclausithyron, a lament before the closed door of the beloved. Whereas Tibullus 1.2 is dedicated to the door itself, Ovid’s speaker confronts the enslaved ianitor who monitors the entrance to his beloved’s house.

This paper considers how enslaved women in Late Antiquity were expected to conform to the Christian ascetic practices of their households through consecrated virginity. Enslaved people did not have control over their sexual practices and were often exposed to abuse. This paper argues that ascetic practices and dedication to virginity were another way to control enslaved women’s sexual choices.