Peripatetic and Platonic Poetics in Porphyry's "Cave of the Nymphs"
By Matteo Milesi (University of Michigan)
In this paper I argue that the Cave of the Nymphs by the Neoplatonist philosopher Porphyry (234-305 CE) is best interpreted as an attempt to harmonise Aristotelian and Platonic ideas about poetry.
Musaeus the allegorist? Hero and Leander and late antique hermeneutics
By Benedek Kruchio (University of Cambridge)
Musaeus the allegorist? Hero and Leander and late antique hermeneutics
Meter and Meaning in Greek and Roman Lyric: Greater Asclepiads from Alcaeus to Horace
By Il-Kweon Sir (University of Cambridge)
This paper offers a fresh approach to Greek and Latin lyric meters by proposing a new methodology for a literary history of Greek and Latin lyric meters and examines greater asclepiads (gl2c) as a test case.
Depicting what cannot be heard? Diagrams in the Tradition of Greek Harmonic Theory.
By Anne Weddigen (Sorbonne Université)
This paper aims at considering the shape and function of musical diagrams transmitted in ancient musical treatises. Despite their number and variety, diagrams have only been taken marginally into account in critical editions of musical treatises (a critical assessment of the diagrams in Ptolemy’s Harmonica is still to be undertaken (CREESE), as well as for Boethius’, BOWER). Recent changes come from the field of mathematics (NETZ, ACERBI). Extant musical treatises mainly deal with harmonic theory and were written for didactical purposes.
Clarity or Confusion? Delphic Ambiguity in Imperial Greek Literature
By Rebecca Frank (Oberlin College)
In this paper, I address how Imperial Greek philosophers discuss Delphic ambiguity in their writings. I argue that the Delphic oracle was used as a literary motif, serving as a key medium through which philosophers debated questions of the gods and divination in the Imperial Greek world. Although the Delphic oracle’s political power and popularity decreased from the Hellenistic age onwards (e.g. Parke, Levin), Delphi still held a prominent position in the philosophical literature of the imperial era.
Aere Perilleo: The Bull of Phalaris and Phenomena of Actualized Mimesis in Graeco-Roman Antiquity
By Scheherazade Jehan Khan (University of Pennsylvania)
When Ovid curses Ibis to “imitate real bullocks with Perillean bronze (aere Perilleo),” he can count on his audience being familiar with the story, already common in the time of Pindar, of the human-sized, bull-shaped cauldron-instrument the sculptor Perillos designed for the tyrant Phalaris of Agrigentum to conceal the agony of his victims as they roasted to death in its belly, converting their cries into mimetic bellows via an invisible system of pipes running through the animal’s head and opening at its nostrils (Ibis 437).