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For a text about a practical alchemical procedure, Zosimos of Panopolis’ Visions abounds in violent and bizarre imagery: a man is harmonically dismembered, people are boiled alive, and the dismembered bits of a snake are used to create a step for a temple. In this paper, I use the text’s internal structure to examine the relationship between this imagery and the practical and spiritual alchemical processes they are meant to represent.

Pedagogical methods from modern Arabic curricula offer promising models for introducing undergraduates to complex aspects of ancient Greek, whose enrollments routinely trail those of Latin – and Arabic (Looney and Lusin 2019). The additional complexity – a new alphabet, more principal parts, definite articles, aorists, optatives, middles, duals, and the ever-dreaded accents – intimidates new students. Attrition rates in introductory Greek can be steep and the inclination is often to delay presenting complex material until students have attained higher levels.

In the past decade, Classical scholars have been working to remake the field, pushing back against the field’s white, elitist reputation and calling out the oft-touted rigor of its philology as exclusionary gate-keeping (Eccleston and Peralta 2022: 201). At the same time, the discipline itself seems perilously close to a death-spiral, with departments and programs being shuttered both in secondary schools and in higher education.

Title: Teaching Latin in Independent Greece: A Metric of Europeanness?

Abstract:

This paper examines the ways provincials used the practices, documents, and spaces of Roman law to articulate their local civic identities in the early empire. Provincial communities routinely dispatched embassies to the emperors and his officials to safeguard existing civic privileges, request new ones, or engage in litigation.

Some few hundred wax tablets were preserved in various locations around the Bay of Naples by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius of 79 CE. These included the larger archives of the auctioneer and businessman L. Caecilius Iucundus of Pompeii and the Sulpicii, formerly-enslaved members of a creditary and banking firm based at Puteoli, as well as various smaller personal archives from Herculaneum. These tablets recorded different legal and financial procedures and transactions.

This paper seeks to offer a new interpretation of a series of loan inscriptions (IG XII, 7 63-70) from the city of Arcesine on Amorgos and what they reveal about legal culture in the Aegean islands. The island of Amorgos has historically been considered both geographically and epigraphically peripheral among the Cyclades and has thus received less attention than other islands such as Paros and Delos. Yet a peculiar collection of loan agreements from the island warrants more attention.

In this paper, I will discuss the Testament of Ptolemy VIII as a document whose conceptual implications allow for a renewed reflection on the problem of statehood and constitutional law. I shall argue that the testament articulates a concept of the state modelled on the legal institution of the will: used to dispose of one’s personal possessions after death, the will offered the conceptual means with which the state could be presented as entirely belonging to, even coinciding with, the sovereign.

This paper discusses penalties for officials recorded in inscribed Athenian laws of the classical period. At a basic level, it assesses what those penalties can tell us about Athenian accountability procedures.

If Latin songs were sung as Roman power collapsed, what was the relationship of Latin songs to Roman power? I ask that question of the hymn Pange lingua (PL), drawing on anthropological studies of literacy in postcolonial Ghana (Goody). In late antique Gaul, “the last poet of antiquity” (Bernt) Venantius Fortunatus wrote a hymn in trochaic septenarius, a meter sung by Roman soldiers, including those who occupied Gaul (Suetonius, Iul. 49.4, 51; Vell. Pat. 2.67.4).