Translation and Reception

The philosophical dialogues of Socrates’ student Aeschines of Sphettos are known to us only from fragmentary quotations and brief testimonia (see Giannantoni, SSR). There is thus considerable uncertainty about their contents. Using historical, philological, and papyrological evidence, this paper refutes a widespread misinterpretation of Athenaeus’ indication of the content of Aeschines’ dialogue Callias. Where Athenaeus (5.220b) says that “his (sc.

Nishiwaki Junzaburō’s Ambarvalia, first published in 1933, has become one of the key works of Japanese Modernism and is also a work profoundly influenced by the world of classical antiquity.

This paper argues that Aulus Gellius, in his Noctes Atticae, engages in a significant translation of Plutarch’s concept of the appetite of πολυπραγμοσύνη—not simply translating the word (as Apuleius does, resulting in curiositas), but isolating the corollary concept, the stimulus that acts upon the appetite, and giving it a Latin name instead (inlecebra, “seduction”). This underscores Gellius’s significance as an ancient theorizer of cognition, and as a recipient and transmitter of ancient philosophical concepts.

In the early 1780’s, the Austrian composer Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf (1739-1799) composed a set of programmatic symphonies depicting Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Dittersdorf’s original plan called for a set of 15 symphonies, one representative of each book of Ovid’s poem; however, the constraints of publication and convention prevented him from fully achieving his ambitions.

“For if you kill me you will not easily find another like me, who, if I may use such a ludicrous figure of speech, am a sort of gadfly, given to the state by the God …” (Jowett translation, Apology 30e)

In attempting to reconstruct ancient Greek gambling, one is struck by the near omnipresence of dice. Lysias speaks of people ‘dicing away their patrimony’ (κατακυβεύσας τὰ ὄντα, 14.27; cf. Gernet and Bizos 1924-6, Lamb 1930, Albini 1955, Carey 1990 ad loc.); Isocrates of youth ‘dicing’ in gambling halls (ἐν τοῖς σκιραφείοις κυβεύουσι, Antid. 287; cf. Norlin 1928-9, Ley-Hutton and Broderson 1997, Too 2008 ad loc.); Xenophon’s Socrates shakes his head about ‘dicing’ (κυβεῖαι, Oec. 1.19-20; cf.