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A New Work By Apuleius

By Justin Stover

In 1949, the historian of philosophy Raymond Klibansky made a dramatic announcement to the British Academy: a new Latin philosophical text dating from antiquity, a Summarium librorum Platonis, had been discovered in a manuscript of the Vatican (although he did not disclose its shelfmark). During the remaining fifty-six years of his life, until his death in 2005, his promised edition never appeared (Proceedings 1949).

Alexander's Persian Pillow

By Christopher Brunelle

The story that Alexander kept a copy of Homer’s Iliad under his pillow (προσκεφάλαιον; Plut. Alex. 8, 26) is justly famous but physically impossible. A copy of the full text would require more than 50 meters of papyrus [Boyd 40]; if it were partitioned into 8 scrolls, each scroll would have roughly the diameter of a can of beer [Johnson 150]. Moreover, Plutarch explicitly mentions that the text was kept safe in a casket (νάρθηξ, κιβώτιον). Ancient pillows were relatively large but not immense [Tsimpidou-Aulonite 125, 208 and figs. 30-31, 34; Richter figs.