Perception and the Senses

      The Epicureans, like other ancient philosophical schools, offered a detailed and comprehensive account of physics, including perception.  This branch of philosophy was especially important for Epicureanism due to its crucial role in dispelling fears about the gods, death, and celestial phenomena—fears which Epicureans believed caused mental anxieties and threatened our acquisition of happiness (see e.g. Epicurus, Ep. ad Hdt. 79, Ep. ad Pyth. 85, KD 10-11; Lucretius, 4.33ff, 5.110ff).

Letters 13-16 of Aelian’s Epistulae rusticae well exemplify how creatively Greek authors of the Imperial period approached canonical texts from the fifth and fourth centuries BCE. In these four epistles Aelian presents to the reader the correspondence between two characters of Menander’s Dyskolos: the “grouch” Knemon and his neighbor Kallippides.

In this paper, I argue both that the Stoic and Platonic accounts of non-rational feelings and desires are more similar than scholars have generally thought, and that appreciating this similarity helps to elucidate Plato’s account of the positive contribution of non-rational feelings and desires to the fully virtuous soul.

Hesiod’s Theogony is fundamentally concerned with the role of sound as a structuring force in the cosmos, a process in which his own poetic language is deeply implicated. Nowhere does this emerge more clearly than in the description of Zeus’ final adversary, Typhon, a monster whose hundred ophidian heads combine their individual voices to reproduce a variety of noises and sounds (Th. 820-35). Much recent scholarship has explored the significance of the voices of this distinctly poetic figure (e.g.

          Ancient Greek lullabies resemble protective magical incantations designed to protect the hearer from the attack of daimonic forces. Scholars have noted the ritualistic nature and magical potential of the performative aspects of lullabies to lull an audience to sleep or express and alleviate the fears of the performer (Wærn 1960; Frankfurter 2009; Karanika 2014), but little attention has been paid to the ancient lullaby as a vehicle for apotropaic or protective magic in particular or to how such verbal protective magic could be thought to work.