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For the Christians of late antiquity, the resurrection of the mortal body was a cornerstone of their faith. While the Nicene Creed of 325 AD enshrined the resurrection of the dead in a general statement of faith, the concept had been much disputed in the preceding centuries. In the 2nd and 3rd centuries several treatises were written in response to pagans who questioned what exactly would happen on the Day of Judgement (e.g., Tatian, Ps.-Athenagoras, Tertullian).

This paper takes as its subject Andrea Alciato’s Rerum Patriae Libri IV (1504-5), a local history of the colony of Mediolanum (Milan) from pre-Roman times up until the joint reign of Valentinius and Valens in 364. Its aim is two-fold. First, I will demonstrate how Alciato refashions ancient historiography to raise the idea, commonly held among early-modern exponents of settler colonialism, that the political history of the Roman Empire could be apprehended through that of its colonies (see e.g. Pelgrom and Weststeijn 2020, Somos 2020).

The 16^th century Venetian poet and cortegiana onesta (high-status courtesan) Veronica Franco adapted ancient and contemporary literary traditions to articulate an outsider’s perspective on men, masculinity, and the relationships between men and women (Rosenthal 1992, Adler 1998, Wojciehowski 2006, Migiel 2016). In Renaissance Italy, many male poets wrote love poetry influenced by or directly imitating Ovid’s, both in Latin and in their vernacular, rooting themselves in Ovid’s tropes, characters, and genres.

This paper provides the first systematic ranking of acrostics in Latin and Neo-Latin literature. The program performing the ranking examines all sequences of characters in a corpus and for each sequence estimates the syllabic similarity to Latin (consider the lorem ipsum placeholder text that is often used in publishing to fill empty space and which, although it is originally derived from Cicero, is nonsensical by design).

The Periodos to King Nicomedes of Pseudo-Scymnus (to follow the conventional attribution) has received increased attention in recent decades (Marcotte 2000, Korenjak 2003, Hunter 2006, Lightfoot 2020), but the significance of its most striking feature, its iambic trimeter form, has not been fully appreciated.

At many points throughout his philosophical prose corpus, Seneca the Younger encourages his audience to “circumscribe” some part of their life for moral improvement: for example, at Ep. 122.3, Seneca advises Lucilius, circumscribatur nox et aliquid ex illa in diem transferatur, and at De Ira 3.11.2, Seneca makes anger the object of this circumscription (circumscribenda multis modis ira est).

Whenever two groups working in the same field (be it mathematics or any other science) seem to contrast sharply with one another, an investigation into points of similarity is merited. In this paper, I will undertake an investigation of one such point in the history of Greek mathematics: the hybrid systematist-heurist texts. It has been shown in a recent dissertation (Winters 2020) that two distinct schools of Greek theoretical mathematicians, dubbed “systematists” and “heurists,” can be observed in the textual record.

The Oneirocritica of Artemidorus, an early 3^rd century CE manual of oneiromancy, is unrivalled among literary sources for its potential to reveal the social worlds, anxieties, and aspirations of urban non-elites in the Roman world [Pack; Pomeroy; Weber; Chandezon]. This sociological approach is possible because Artemidorus is strikingly opposed to psycho-analytic approaches to dreams; instead, the dreamer’s essentialized position within larger social structures (free/enslaved, rich/poor, young/old etc.) determines how dream elements should be read [Price; Thonemann].

A comparison of the Sirens of the Odyssey, Plato’s Cratylus, Xenophon’s Memorabilia, and TheDeMa517, a curse tablet buried along Rome’s Via Ostiensis in the 1st century C.E. (Bevilacqua & Colacicchi 2009, 303; Urbanová 2017, 72), reveals siren-song as an archetypal binding spell within both the literary discourse and practice of “magic” in Greco-Roman antiquity.

Plato’s dialogues have been mined many times over for the roles of theology and religion therein. A particular point of focus has been the language and imagery of the Eleusinian Mysteries, notably in the Symposium, and “Orphic” rites, especially in the Phaedo (recent scholarship includes Betegh 2022; Nightingale 2021; Edmonds 2017). For instance, Nightingale 2021 focuses on Plato’s narration of the “story of the soul” and emphasizes his adaptations and modifications of Eleusinian stages of initiation and Orphic notions of purification.