I. Presidential Address
Kathleen M. Coleman, "Bureaucratic Language in the Correspondence between Pliny and Trajan"
This article identifies and analyzes bureaucratic features in the language employed by Pliny and Trajan in Epistles 10 as an example of communication between two officials of senior but unequal status who were engaged in managing provincial affairs in the Roman Empire.
II. Papers
Stephen Kidd, "The Meaning of bÅmolochos in Classical Attic"
The bÅmolochos (buffoon, fool) has received misguided attention in comic scholarship due to a misunderstanding of Pherecrates fr. 150 (KA). The second-century C.E.Harpocration (who cites the line) considers this passage to consist of a genuine etymology, and his view has gone roughly unchallenged ever since. But this is a mistake: the etymology which Pherecrates provides is not a legitimate one but rather a typical case of comic wordplay.
Robert L. Tordoff, "Coins, Money, and Exchange in Aristophanes’ Wealth"
This essay pursues an economic and “numismatic” reading of Aristophanes’ Wealth, focusing on how the play represents exchange and coinage. While Wealth rejoices in the acquisition of vast riches and in the creation of a society in which justice and good citizen conduct meet with economic rewards, it also systematically presents coins and more “disembedded” forms of transaction in sharply negative terms. Accordingly, the play exploits and seeks to negotiate an ideological fissure between rich and poor Athenians, retailing utopian fantasy for the dispossessed with one hand, while with the other pointing towards the fantasy’s ironic deconstruction and dissolution.
Tomislav Bilić, "Crates of Mallos and Pytheas of Massalia: Examples of Homeric Exegesis in Terms of Mathematical Geography"
Crates of Mallos, a Hellenistic grammarian and geographer, is known to have combined Homeric exegesis and mathematical geography into a comprehensive world view. His views appear to have influenced a tradition of map-making, as evidenced by an unusual late antique map that locates parts of Odysseus’s voyage from Aeaea to Hades according to Crates’ geography. This essay elucidates Crates’ geographical accounts of the Homeric Laestrygonians and of the constellation Draco and his understanding of the arctic circle in light of the map and of earlier geographers, particularly Pytheas of Massalia, who similarly incorporated Homeric references into his theorizing about the fixed arctic circle.
Shane Hawkins, "On the Oscanism salaputium in Catullus 53"
This paper argues that Catullus 53 deserves a place among the other programmatic statements in the poet’s work. By reconsidering a reference to this poem in Seneca’s Controversiae and the way in which the word salaputium is applied to Catullus’s close friend, C. Licinius Calvus, the article aims to show that the poem can be read as a re-fashioning of an old literary topos into a terse and truly witty neoteric statement. That statement has interesting ramifications both for the connections between neoteric poetics and Atticist rhetoric and for the interpretation of other poems in the Catullan oeuvre.
Stephanie McCarter, "The Forging of a God: Venus, the Shield of Aeneas, and Callimachus’s Hymn to Artemis"
Callimachus’s Hymn to Artemis provides a useful intertext for tracing the development of Venus and Aeneas in Vergil’s Aeneid and Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The Callimachean Artemis and Vergilian Venus each receive promises of future glory from their fathers, charm artisans into producing weapons that advance their divinity, and gradually emerge as powerful goddesses in their own right. Comparison with theHymn furthermore shows how Aeneas’s status as a future god is guaranteed by his divine armor.
III. Paragraphos
Neil Coffee et al., "Intertextuality in the Digital Age"
This paper describes a new digital approach to intertextual study involving the creation of a free online tool for the automatic detection of parallel phrases. A test comparison of Vergil’s Aeneid and Lucan’s Civil War shows that the tool can identify a substantial number of meaningful intertexts, both previously recorded and unrecorded. Analysis of these results demonstrates how automatic detection can provide more comprehensive and accessible perspectives on intertextuality as an aggregate phenomenon. Identification of the language features necessary to detect intertexts also provides a path toward improved automatic detection and more precise definitions of intertextuality.