Scaling down the world, up to a point: ludic limits in Pseudo-Scymnus’ Periodos to King Nicomedes
By Johannes Wietzke, University of Massachusetts at Amherst
The Periodos to King Nicomedes of Pseudo-Scymnus (to follow the conventional attribution) has received increased attention in recent decades (Marcotte 2000, Korenjak 2003, Hunter 2006, Lightfoot 2020), but the significance of its most striking feature, its iambic trimeter form, has not been fully appreciated.
Senecan Geometry and Stoic Surfaces
By Mason Wheelock-Johnson, Lawrence University
At many points throughout his philosophical prose corpus, Seneca the Younger encourages his audience to “circumscribe” some part of their life for moral improvement: for example, at Ep. 122.3, Seneca advises Lucilius, circumscribatur nox et aliquid ex illa in diem transferatur, and at De Ira 3.11.2, Seneca makes anger the object of this circumscription (circumscribenda multis modis ira est).
Hybrid Mathematical Texts and Greek Intellectual Networks
By Nick Winters, Northwestern University
Whenever two groups working in the same field (be it mathematics or any other science) seem to contrast sharply with one another, an investigation into points of similarity is merited. In this paper, I will undertake an investigation of one such point in the history of Greek mathematics: the hybrid systematist-heurist texts. It has been shown in a recent dissertation (Winters 2020) that two distinct schools of Greek theoretical mathematicians, dubbed “systematists” and “heurists,” can be observed in the textual record.