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Artificial intelligence has become an integrated element of our daily lives, transforming our research and classrooms. This was already evident in 2020, when I first taught a course in Classics and AI.

Linguist Charles Fillmore once described a certain tension between two types of researchers in the field (Fillmore 1991: 35)—there are armchair linguists who note interesting facts about language and corpus linguists who count, rank, and quantify whatever they can in the language.

Halcyon takes place on the desolate shores of Phaleron mid-winter where Socrates and Chaerephon hear the call of the kingfisher. Socrates narrates the myth of Aeolus’ daughter’s mourning after the death of her husband for which the gods honour her through her metamorphosis. I describe the dialogue as an inversion of Plato’s Phaedrus and its sojourn outside the city in mid-summer. The cicadas transformed for their love of singing are exchanged with the lone halcyon’s lament, instead of an ideal philosophical love the dialogue tells of the tragic end of a marriage.

In this paper, I will demonstrate that Cassius Dio made numerous references to Plato throughout his Roman History. I will focus my examination on books 52-56 in which Dio offers his summary and evaluation of Augustus’ words and deeds as a statesman. Perhaps it was because of Millar’s insistence that Dio “believed all philosophers to be fraudulent” modern scholarship on the philosophical underpinnings of Dio’s monumental work is comparatively underdeveloped.

Dio Chrysostom may write his own jokes, but his routine is not entirely original. This paper demonstrates the influence of Plato's discourses on laughter – in particular, those which appear in the Philebus and the Symposium – on the works of this Second Century CE orator.

The proem of Statius' Thebaid establishes Oedipus and his incestuous family (1.17: Oedipodae confusa domus) at the center of the epic narrative. The beginning of the narrative proper introduces Oedipus himself who enters the epic to deliver a prayer-cum-autobiography addressed to Tisiphone (1.56-87). In this paper, I shall explore the incestuous undertones of the Theban's programmatic speech as seen through his recapitulation of the mythic past as well as his construction of his relationship to the Fury.

The focus of this talk is, according to Williams 1973, “the most incongruous episode in the whole Aeneid,” otherwise known as Aeneid 9.77-122—the mystical moment when Cybele causes Aeneas’ burning fleet to be transformed into naiads. Schenk 1984, O’Hara 1990: 74-8, Glei 1991: 204-6, Papaioannou 2002: 35-7; 40-3 interpret this episode as a manifestation of the Trojans’ divine favour, their finished wanderings, and as representative reflections of Turnus’ hybris and Aeneas’ pietas.

Scholars have well appreciated imperial Latin literature's interest in the monstrous and grotesque. This includes its centralization of evocative descriptions of both transgressed or transformed mortal bodies as well as non-human creatures whose bodily multiplicity seems pointedly designed to evoke fear and disgust (for recent sustained studies, see Lowe 2015, Backhaus 2019, McClellan 2019, and Estèves 2020). In this paper, however, I consider how post-Vergilian Latin epic at times offers a different understanding of bodies traditionally conceived of as monstrous.

Just like the rumors she personifies, Vergil’s Fama in Aeneid 4 is a pervasive figure that has many ramifications in art and literature (Hardie 2012; Guastella 2017). In Statius’ Thebaid, scholars have identified many re-creations of the Vergilian monster. Besides the two main appearances of the goddess in books 2 and 3 (Snijder 1968, 179‑181; Hardie 2012, 201‑207; Gervais 2017, 140‑145), the figure of Pavor in book 7 has also been convincingly interpreted as an avatar of Fama (Smolenaars 1994, 55‑66; Hardie 2012, 207‑214; Clément-Tarantino 2015).

Communities around the world claim the nickname of Athens. There are Athenses of the North (Edinburgh), the South (Adelaide), the East (Madurai), America (Boston), South America (Bogota), etc. Yet, nowhere are there more Athenses than the American Midwest.