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As many of his readers have observed, Galen’s picture of divine creation in On the Usefulness of the Parts accords an unusually active role to matter, as the collaborator of the demiurge (Hankinson 2017; Das 2020). Rather than working against material intransigency, Galen’s Demiurge works alongside and in close collaboration with the intrinsic movements of matter. This paper surveys three crucial passages in which Galen explores the nature of this collaborative creative relationship between matter and the Demiurge.

The medical materials of antiquity are a diverse and multidimensional group. Generally, these materials have been rendered approachable in modern scholarship by categorizations of type. These categorizations, then, lay the groundwork for meaningful investigation. The treatment of wounds as a general category offers an excellent opportunity for a close survey of a particular type of niche treatment. Exploring this topic, readers will encounter a material known as ‘Plaster’- καταπλάσμα in Greek and emplastra in Latin.

The physician Soranus was skeptical of amulets, but still maintained their usefulness in medical emergencies, including uterine hemorrhage: “...their application should not be forbidden, for even if the amulet does no good directly, still through hope (elpis) it will perhaps cause the patient to be more cheerful” (Gyn. 3.12.110–13 = Ilberg 3.42.3). This paper reads against the grain to explore the dynamic scene Soranus glosses over, in which a woman, perhaps having just given birth, begins to hemorrhage.

Money constituted an important material reality of ancient care. Indeed, from the Greek archaic through the Roman era, both divine and mortal healers were known to make a fortune from their medical services: Pindar sings of Asklepios’ healing driven by the pursuit of gold (Pyth. 3.47-60); Herodotus recounts the physician Demodokes’ exorbitant annual salary of 12,000 drachmas a year (3.131-38); while Diodoros Sikolos depicts the avaricious Sulla, who laid hands on the healing shrines of Apollo, Asklepios, and Zeus, to pilfer their abundant riches (37.7).

This paper investigates the acquisition and management of timber in the sanctuary of Apollo at Delos during the island’s political independence (314-167 BCE).

This paper examines the encoding of family memories in two poetic texts from the High Roman Empire: Silvae 3.3, a funerary poem written by the Flavian poet Statius for Claudius Etruscus’ father, and the funerary poem from the mausoleum of the Flavii in Cillium (second c. AD, CIL VIII, 211-216).

The Spartans famously buried their dead on the battlefield (Low 2011; Kucewicz 2021) while the Athenians repatriated their dead as part of their patrios nomos (Low 2010, 2012; Arrington 2015; Pritchard 2022; Rees 2022). Of course, the entirety of the Greek experience was far more complicated than this simple contrast would suggest (Low 2003; Christesen 2018; Bérard 2020).

Cenotaphs constitute some of the most impressive graves in Greek antiquity, particularly during the archaic period. However, while each of these memorials has been examined individually, scholars of ancient Greek history and archeology have yet to consider empty tombs as a discrete group with unique characteristics. This is especially striking considering the importance that scholarship on the modern nation-state ascribes to cenotaphs in (re)producing national ideology (Anderson 9–36).

Dio Chrysostom devotes the bulk of his First Kingship Oration (Or. 1), notionally delivered before the emperor Trajan, to a retelling of Heracles’ choice between Kingship and Tyranny, a story which the speaker claims to have heard from an old woman. In this paper, I will argue that Dio portrays this character as a philosophical prophetess and thereby combines the wisdom of philosophy with the authority of religion. Previous scholarship has either ignored the woman’s philosophical character (e.g. von Arnim 1898: 331 and Desideri 1978: 310) or only hinted at it (e.g.

Croesus’ test and subsequent consultations of the Delphic oracle and his failure to understand the meaning of the Pythia’s words stand as some of the most famous examples of the Delphic oracle’s impressive divinatory ability as well as the enigmatic nature of the Pythia’s responses. The accuracy of the Pythia’s words and Croesus’ culpability for failing to understand her message underlie Herodotus’ Croesus logos. Herodotus does not question the Pythia’s divinatory powers or those of Delphic Apollo, and his tale is one of human failing, rather than divine malice or deception.