Time and Memory

Bithynia-et-Pontus is a double province that originated from Pompey’s organisation of the kingdoms of Bithynia and Mithridatic Pontus. Six coastal cities, being naval bases and ports of trade, remained attached to Bithynia despite successive restructuring of Anatolian lands. Few literary attestations concern this coastal strip: only four of Pliny’s letters briefly discussed Heraklea, Amastris, Sinope, and Amisos (Sherwin-White 1966). Lucian’s Toxaris and Alexander contains short stories that have snippets of Amastris and Abonuteichos (Jones 1986).

Modern scholars (Starr 1954-55, 282-91; Baurain 1991, 255-66) have long assumed that the thalassocracy the Cretan king Minos was thought to have established over most of the Aegean sea and the Cycladic islands amounted to a fifth-century BCE Athenian invention endorsed by the historians Herodotus and Thucydides (Hdt. 3.122.2; Thuc. 1.4). According to this view, Minos was never imagined as a thalassocrat either outside of Athens or in earlier literature (Morris 1992, 174-5).

            An epitaph for a pantomime, Vincentius, from Timgad in North Africa, praises the deceased dancer who "held the theater until the evening [stars] arose" (tenuit theatrum us/que in ortus vesperos, Bayet [1967] 441). While Vincentius' epitaph is often cited as evidence for the attractive power of pantomimes (Lada-Richards 2007; Webb 2008; Hall 2013), scholars have not yet explored the reality of nocturnal pantomime performance behind the arresting image of the dancer captivating the audience into the night.

In this paper I examine Pausanias’ historiographic motives and methods through a close analysis of the logoi about the Hellenistic kings in Book 1. I propose that we can learn a lot about Pausanias’ self-presentation as an able writer of history, his explicit claims to authority, and his implicit claims to difference, by looking at how these logoi are incorporated into descriptions of the monuments of the Athenian Agora, especially the monument of the eponymous heroes.

This paper will explore the role that hourly timekeeping plays in the fever treatises of Galen of Pergamon. Galen was a physician of the second-century CE, who served three emperors at Rome and whose theories of medicine shaped the practices of western physicians through the 18th century. The present paper will focus on Galen’s theory of intermittent fevers, a theory which was accepted with little question until the 16th century.