Herculaneum: Image and Text

Philodemus’ large treatise On Poems consists of five books, of which the conclusion of the fifth and last was the first to be properly published (Jensen 1923). As Jensen demonstrated, in the latter part of Book V Philodemus summarized the views of a whole series of critics that were known to him from handbooks by earlier writers—the unknown Philomelos, the Pergamene critic Crates of Mallos, and his own teacher, the Epicurean Zeno of Sidon.

Demetrius Laco, On Poems II (coll. 63-5) is our only source for Alcaeus fr. 358 Voigt. Only the top part of this text (PHerc. 1014) survives. (Unfortunately, we have no way of determining the original height of the papyrus.) Its damaged and darkened condition has hindered attempts to read it, but much progress has recently be made both via infrared photography (for improved readings) and a better understanding of the early history of the collection (which allowed us to read its pieces in the correct order).

One third of the human life is spent sleeping. Sleeping is fundamentally important to the well-being of humans; in order to solve the sleep-related problems, it is crucial to understand how sleeping is arranged in different societies past and present. The major theme within sociohistorical research of sleeping is "that how we sleep, when we sleep, where we sleep, and with whom we sleep, are all influenced by social, cultural and historical factors".

The Villa dei Papiri revealed an extraordinary Epicurean library that attested to the activity of the Garden of Epicurus. It contained a great quantity of volumes written by the Epicurean Philodemus that testify to his own incredible scholarly activity. In this paper I will talk about a work called Peri Parrhesias (in Latin, De libertate dicendi; On Frank Criticism) that belongs to a group of Philodemus’ works on ethics.

Philodemus stands at a crucial juncture for our understanding of the rhetorical and philosophical concepts of enargeia – a term translated as “vividness” in rhetorical writings but “self-evidence” in philosophical writings. In the centuries after Philodemus, enargeia becomes an indispensable rhetorical term: it denotes the quality of writing that puts the subject “before our eyes”, and becomes one of the virtues of rhetorical handbooks from Theon to Hermogenes to Aphthonius.