Allusions Without Purpose: Reassessing Tacitean Borrowings by Ammianus Marcellinus
By Trevor Lee, The Ohio State University
Tacitus’s central impact on the Res Gestae by the fourth-century Latin historian, Ammianus Marcellinus, has generally been assumed as obvious by many academics. Shared vocabulary from Tacitus occurs more than almost any other ancient author in the Res Gestae, and such instances have been relatively well observed by modern scholarship. Yet, the recorded Tacitean allusions in Ammianus’s history leave a surprising amount of ambiguity in their thematic trends and literary purposes.
Porphyry, the Bible, and Christian allegory
By Matteo Milesi, University of Michigan
In this paper I propose a new interpretation of Porphyry’s criticism of Christian allegorical readings of the Old Testament, which is preserved in a long quotation from his work Against the Christians (fr. 6 Becker). I argue that, for Porphyry, Christian readers are to be blamed because their allegorical interpretations are forced upon the text from the outside and thus undermine valuable theological and moral teachings transmitted by the Hebrew Bible.
Augustine on Norms of Belief in Friendship
By Alexander Vega, Harvard University
In De Fide Rerum Invisibilium (1.1-3.5) and briefly in De Utilitate Credendi (10.23-4), Augustine argues that friendship is impossible without some beliefs, including the belief that our friends have goodwill toward us. Prior scholarship (e.g. White 1992, Nawar 2015) has addressed how Augustine adopts elements of classical conceptions of friendship (drawing especially upon Cicero) but modifies them to fit a Christian framework. Apart from a brief reconstruction of Augustine’s argument in F. Invis.