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The Patristic exegete and theologian Origen of Alexandria, a major Christian Platonist who was strongly influenced by many aspects of Stoicism, was very well acquainted with the thought of the Roman Stoic Musonius Rufus (as Clement of Alexandria also was) and, noting the coherence between Musonius’s thought and his life, described him as a ‘model of the best kind of moral life’ (παράδειγμα τοῦ ἀρίστου βίου, Cels. 3.66). While Musonius’s influence on Clement of Alexandria has been studied extensively (e.g.

Musonius Rufus has attracted increased attention as an important Stoic guide for how to live a meaningful life. Indeed, the surviving reports of his teaching primarily focus on ethical questions. Following Stoic doctrine, Musonius often backs up his advice noting that one must live “in accordance with nature” (Striker). Despite the importance of nature for Musonius’s ethics there is little discussion nature itself. A key exception is Fragment 42, which contains a brief discussion of the “nature of the cosmos.” This fragment has received little comment.

This paper analyses the pseudo-Lucianic dialogue entitled ‘Nero or on the digging of the Isthmus’. This text has been generally neglected by scholars: there is neither a critical edition nor a commentary on it; it pays the price for its complex textual history and its authorship. The aim of this paper is not to partake in its often debated authorship; instead, it will focus on the character of the Stoic philosopher Musonius Rufus.

Musonius’ surviving corpus often addresses the theme of freedom. Although this reflects the high value placed on autarky in Stoic philosophy, the argumentation is not reduced to conventional philosophical positions: Occasionally, common topoi are transformed, and the ideas expressed do not always quite fit the context. Instead, connections to traditional Roman notions can be discerned.

The last paragraphs of Musonius' treatise 9, 'That Exile is not an Evil', feature Musonius himself, in a development on parrhesiain exile. Exile, he says in substance, contrary to what Euripides may have written, does not deprive one of straight talk and he proves it by his own experience:

Musonius’s Discourse Περὶ φυγῆς appeals to the philosopher’s own experience on Gyaros; as Whitmarsh has shown (141-55), exile is an element in his self-fashioning. And the contemporary resonance of the topic cannot be doubted in a period when banishment to an island was an option for imperial censure and when philosophers were soon to be removed from Rome by Vespasian’s decree. Van Geytenbeek (147) and others have noted, however, that the content of Musonius’s work is startlingly close to that of Teles the Cynic, writing on the same subject in the 3^rd century BCE.

This paper examines the relationship between gender, disability and slavery through analysis of Roman legal writing, focusing on Justinian’s Digest 21, writings recorded in Aulus Gellius’ Attic Nights and papyri evidence from across the Roman empire. Roman slavery, as an institution unfamiliar and horrific to modern eyes, provides a particularly useful angle into the construction of gender and disability, as it lays bare the cultural and historical contingency of both categories.

The figure of Attis in Catullus’ poem 63, for many modern readers, presents a problem to be solved.

The poem is declared ‘complex and difficult’ (Harrison 2004: 532), it ‘shocks and

Debra Martin wrote that “masculinity is more a verb than a noun” (Martin 2021, 171). It was something performed, like an athletic competition or an oral poem, so it fundamentally depended on cultural context. Traditionally, scholars have closely associated violence and warfare with masculinity (see Van Nortwick 2008). However, detailed studies of violence and further engagement with disability studies complicate these uncritiqued equivalencies between masculinity and violence.

Classicists’ analyses of the Philoctetes often stop where their understandings of disability do: on the surface of Philoctetes’ physical, visible body. Frameworks of queer, trans, and disability theory, however, reveal gaps inside and outside the body-text of Philoctetes. In one such gap, I argue we can see Herakles, Philoctetes, and Neoptolemos existing in a network of relationships which enables and encourages them to navigate chronic illness, gender, and embodiment.