“How many mouths could tell ...?” An Epigram by the Empress Eudocia and Cento Poetics
By Timo Christian
This paper investigates the literary techniques of an epigrammatic text by the Empress Eudocia that was found in the baths of Hammat Gader (SEG 35:1502; first edition: Green/Tsafrir 1982). The bath complex, one of the most celebrated in Late Antiquity, second only to Baiae, was visited by the Empress around the middle of the 5th century. The epigram consists of 16 lines and tells of the miraculous healing powers and the elaborate canal system of the baths.
Eden Is the Paradise of Truphē
By Vanessa Gorman
In previous work, we established that τρυφή is mistranslated as “luxury, softness, delicacy, daintiness, effeminacy,” and even “wantonness” (LSJ). The meaning is so contaminated that, come the Hellenistic Era, scholars require special pleading to explain what are thought to be its “new,” complimentary implications as an epithet of Ptolemy VIII (e.g., Heinen 1983) as well as its irrefutably positive presence in the Septuagint. While the definition “luxury” may be appropriate in a vague sense, it is uninformative.
The So-called Calliopian Recension of Terence
By Benjamin Victor
The present contribution reassesses the textual history underlying the medieval manuscript tradition of Terence. This tradition, it has long been recognized, derives from two lost ancient sources: Γ, ancestor to one group of Carolingian manuscripts, and Δ, ancestor to another. In what follows, the class of manuscripts descending recta via from Γ will be called ‘γ’, those so descending from Δ ‘δ’.
A New Fragment of Ovid’s Medea
By Pierluigi Leone Gatti
In 2011, I identified a new fragment of Ovid’s lost tragedy Medea in L. Caecilius Minutianus Apuleius’ de orthographia:
de orthographia fr. 18 Osann Vulcanus cum duplici .uu. Praecipitatus est a Iove de coelo, quia matri in se auxilium ferre voluerit, Homero in primo . . . et . . . Sed et Valerius in Argonauticis. At Ovidius in Medea a Iunone.