bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The ‘Inner Composition ‘ of the Speeches in the Iliad
Authors: Lohmann D
Published: November 2023

The morphological investigation of Homeric ring composition should begin with two speeches whose concentric structure was noticed elsewhere a Jong time ago, although the analyses put forward in those works differ m details. We will first look at Diomedes ‘ speech 6. 123-43.
Essence and Nature of the Homeric Similes
Authors: FräNkel H
Published: November 2023

‘He spun like a top ‘; ‘he fought like a lion ‘; ‘you are like a flower ‘-it would not be easy to define ‘the ‘ purpose common to all of these three very simple comparisons. So it is unlikely that we will be able to demonstrate a uniform purpose for the Homeric simile, which was refined to the limits and developed in many very different ways. Attempts to do so have been too narrowly or too broadly conceived to say anything definite. The opinion which is probably put forward most frequently is that the function of the simile is illustration, i.e. to make the unknown clear through juxtaposition with the known, or the invisible clear through the visible. Many a scholar has succumbed to the temptation to make the degree of vividness the yardstick of the simile. We probably do not need to refute this opinion in detail; the three modest examples we have just given do it conclusively enough.
Landowners and Tenants in Roman Egypt
Authors: Rowlandson Jane
Published: November 2023

Oxyrhynchus in Egypt is the best documented city of the Roman Empire. This book uses the thousands of papyrus documents found there to examine how its urban landowning class derived its wealth from the rural hinterland. After an introductory chapter discussing the topography and agricultural conditions of the region, the book analyses the conditions of tenure under which land was held; the social composition of landholders (who included both men and women) and the nature of their holdings; the transmission of ownership by inheritance and sale; and finally the role of short-term leasing among methods of land management. The system of land tenure, rules of inheritance, and law of sale and lease, together with social convention formed a complex web articulating the social relationships between landowners and tenants. The papyri from Oxyrhynchus, by illustrating in detail how individuals negotiated their way throug this web, provide unparalleled insight into the character of landownership in a Roman province.
Cicero’s Plato and Aristotle
Authors: Long A
Published: November 2023

The aim of this chapter is to approach Cicero’s philosophical work by studying his assessments and use of Plato and Aristotle. That could, of course, be a topic for a whole book.1 As assessed by Cicero, Plato and Aristotle constitute between them all that is best in philosophy, both in their own right and by the traditions they established via their successors in the Academy and the Lyceum. Merely translating their ‘superhuman talents’ (‘divina ingenia’), he says, would be a patriotic service (Fin. I. 7). Cicero even called the two gymnasia of his Tusculan villa by these names.2 So an adequate account of Cicero’s Plato and Aristotle, it might seem, would have to incorporate the main part of Cicero’s philosophical writings. In fact, those works are primarily concerned with postAristotelian or Hellenistic philosophy. Aristotle, and especially Plato, were more to Cicero than great names from the past, but their philosophies per se were not major talking-points during his lifetime. By including Plato and Aristotle in his philosophical corpus, Cicero was less concerned with their individual doctrines than with the general impetus they had given to the subject, their diffused influence as expressed by the terms Academici and Peripatetici, and their literary distinction.
Probabile, Veri Simile, and Related Terms
Authors: Glucker John
Published: November 2023

It is usually assumed that probabile and ueri simile are alternative Latin terms employed by Cicero to translate the Carneadean πθɑ𝒗ó𝒗 This seems to be the case in the first appearance of these two concepts, and together, in an extant philosophical work of Cicero: ‘Volunt enim ... probabile aliquid esse et quasi ueri simile, eaque se uti regula et in agenda uita et in quaerendo ac disserendo’ (Luc. 32).
Caesar’s Heritage: Hellenistic Kings and their Roman Equals
Authors: Rawson Elizabeth
Published: November 2023

In 44 bc Caesar, newly declared dictator perpetuo, told a crowd hailing him half-heartedly as king that they were mistaken: he was ‘not Rex but Caesar’; but he punished the tribunes who removed the diadems placed on his statues, and who arrested a man for putting them there. Not long after, at the Lupercalia, the consul Mark Antony thrice offered a diadem to Caesar, who was sitting, as Cicero, doubtless an eye-witness, describes him, ‘amictus toga purpurca, in sella aurea, coronatus ‘; Caesar refused it, sending it to Jupiter on the Capitol, and had inscribed in the Fasti a notice that he had been offered the diadem populi iussu (which was certainly not true), but had not accepted it. But would he have accepted had the people been more enthusiastic? Thus began a controversy as to Caesar’s final intentions that has still not been resolved. I have no dogmatic answer to the question and I do not wish to go through all the old arguments, though I would like to suggest that there is good contemporary evidence for believing that Caesar was willing to be worshipped as a god, but did not wish to take the name of king; and I would also like to suggest that there might have been more logic than appears at first sight in accepting a number of honours that suggested kingship (as well as divinity, which so often in the East went with it), and yet refusing the name. For on the usual interpretations of Caesar’s last actions we are in a dilemma: if he simply wanted to avoid the name of king and the hatred which, as a practical proposition at least, it still aroused in Rome, then he did, or permitted, a lot of incredibly foolish things.
The Identity Problems of Q. Cornificius
Authors: Rawson Elizabeth
Published: November 2023

The problems connected with the Cornificii of the late Republic are various, and all concerned with identification. I have no major discoveries to present, but various minor rectifications and suggestions to make, which should give the younger Q. Cornificius at least more substance. Where he is concerned, one basic identification has been, rightly, generally accepted: that made by Jerome between the poet of the name and the Cornificius who fell in Africa in the wars of the Triumvirate, abandoned by the soldiers whom he had castigated as ‘hares in helmets’. I do not wish to discuss here in any detail the military career of Cornificius;2 son of the man, like him Quintus, who stood in vain for the consulship of 63, he fought with success for Caesar as quaestor pro praetore in Illyricum in 48; he was rewarded, probably in 47 when Caesar doled out many priesthoods, with the augurate, 3 and went out to govern Cilicia, only to find himself called on to help in suppressing Caecilius Bassus’ revolt in Syria. He was probably back in Rome in 45 to hold an early praetorship (unless he had held it in 47, sooner after his quaestorship than seems likely); and in 44, possibly shortly after the Ides of March, he was given the command of Africa Vetus as proconsul by the Senate, though Antony tried on 28 November to reinstate his predecessor Calvisius Sabinus, who had left his legates in the province. Perhaps swayed by the example of his friend Pansa, or by the eloquence of Cicero, he stood by the Senate, and co-operated with Sex. Pompeius in Sicily; but he was ultimately defeated by T. Sextius, once legate to Caesar in Gaul, now the Antonian governor of Africa Nova (Numidia). During the years 46-43 he was the recipient of a number of surviving letters from Cicero.
Seneca
Authors: Griffin Miriam T
Published: November 2023

For this Clarendon Paperback, Dr Griffin has written a new Postscript to bring the original book fully up to date. She discusses further important and controversial questions of fact or interpretation in the light of the scholarship of the intervening years and provides additional argument where necessary. The connection between Seneca's prose works and his career as a first-century Roman statesman is problematic. Although he writes in the first person, he tells us little of his external life or of the people and events that formed its setting. Miriam Griffin addresses the problem by first reconstructing Seneca's career using only outside sources and his de Clementia and Apocolocyntosis, whose political purposes are undisputed. In the second part of the book she studies Seneca's treatment of subjects of political significance, including his views on slavery, provincial policy, wealth, and suicide. On the whole, the word of the philosopher is found to illuminate the work of the statesman, but notable exceptions emerge, and the links that are revealed vary from theme to theme and rarely accord with traditional autobiographical interpretations of Seneca's works.
Ideology For A New Regime
Authors: Griffin Miriam T
Published: November 2023

Seneca’S Apocolocyntosis, as all would admit, has its serious political side. Menippean satire, a Hellenistic literary form already imitated by Varro, seems to have been social and general in its approach. Seneca took over the literary form and useful motifs but wrote instead political satire, ridiculing the dead Emperor by name and condemning the specific abuses of his reign. The farce was probably presented to the court and specially favoured senators and knights soon after Claudius’ funeral and consecration.
The Model City of Plato’s Laws1
Authors: Brunt P A
Published: November 2023

In the Laws Plato has constructed a political and social framework for what he himself calls ‘the second best city’, in comparison with the ideal state of the Republic; he makes reluctant concessions to prejudices which he has evidently come to regard as ineradicable. The framework is professedly devised for a colony in Crete to be named Magnesia, which is to be organized by Cnossus with settlers from Crete and the Peloponnese. The site is to be ten miles from the sea but with access to good harbours; however, the territory, though only moderately fertile, will yield enough to make it almost self-sufficient. As Morrow says, the city has ‘a definite location in Greek space and time’, and some at least of the laws that Plato proposes take account of its special situation. Still, Plato’s aim is to devise a model that can be adapted as expediency may require to other conditions, though he makes a half-promise to sketch a third best city, which he never does. All this, together with the minute detail of many of the regulations proposed, has served to create the impression on some minds that he is not creating a Utopia.
Zion
Authors: Taylor Joan E
Published: November 2023

The Bagatti-Testa school does not linger long in consideration of (Ps.-?)Eutychius’ text in regard to this site, but prefers to concentrate on other evidence which is claimed to demonstrate Jewish-Christian occupation. As the Benedictine archaeologist Bargil Pixner has recently argued, on Mount Zion we are to imagine the first Church of James, the central Jewish-Christian church. We will address here the question of whether the first Christians met on Mount Zion, and continued to meet here— despite the disturbances that befell Jerusalem—up until the Constantinian developments.
The Evolution of Christian Holy Places
Authors: Taylor Joan E
Published: November 2023

IN Chapter 3, we reviewed the religious demography of Palestine from the end of the Bar Kochba Revolt to the date that Constantine won the East in 324. We saw that pagans, Jews, and Samaritans lived in their own general regions where their own customs could be preserved, though there was some intermixture of populations in the large cities like Caesarea and Gaza. The archaeological and literary evidence would suggest that villages tended to be one thing or another: Jewish, Samaritan, pagan, even Christian. But as yet there is no instance of a rural community in which the religious pluralism of the cities can be ascertained. Christians were clearly a small part of the population and were found predominantly in cities.
Patterns of Trade in Roman Italy
Authors: Frayn Joan M
Published: November 2023

To understand the reasons which determined the position of market centres in Italy during the later Republic and the early years of the Empire, and to appreciate their role in the social and economic life of their time, we have to consider the whole pattern of trade of which they formed a part. It has been noted that not all the towns which we know from inscriptions to have had nundinaealso had macella,and this in itself implies that the nundinae,as an occasion of buying and selling produce, if not as an actual site, continued to exist in some places, perhaps in all. To discern the pattern of trade relations, small though they may be, we shall have to take as examples certain areas for which sufficient evidence is now available to make this worth while.
The Place of Markets in Local and Long-Distance Trade
Authors: Frayn Joan M
Published: November 2023

The mmdinae,the older and more traditional markets, appear to have sold cheap items and in general to have traded among the lower classes within a very limited price range. At this level there was little competition except from travelling salesmen, and in towns from the small shops.
Attic Symposia after the Persian Wars
Authors: Vickers Michael
Published: November 2023

Before the nature of symposia held at Athens after the Persian Wars can be determined, it is necessary to establish what kind of a city Athens was at that time. It might well be thought that this task presents few problems, but such is far from being the case. John Boardman reflects a widely held view when he states that ‘the city had for a while [after the Persian Wars] no time or money to lavish on monumental art’, and indeed an implicit contrast is often made between Athens’ pre-war splendour and post-war poverty. Needless to say, this is wholly in keeping with the way in which the material evidence of pre-Classical Athens is often dated.
Adolescents, Symposion, and Pederasty
Authors: Bremmer Jan N
Published: November 2023

In the second half of the nineteenth century both anthropologists and ancient historians developed a great interest in the family as the basic unit Qf society. In anthropology, this interest led to a series of theories focusing on the ‘lineage’ or ‘descent’ model of political organizations, while in ancient history, Fustel de Coulanges catapulted the genos and gens into prominence as the minimal unit of, respectively, Greek and Roman society.2 But already in the last decade of the same century, Eduard Meyer and De Sanctis moved in a different direction. They not only rejected Fustel’s Indo-European framework by treating the genos as a problem different from the gens, but they also redirected attention from the genos to groups which, in their opinion, cut across kinship relationships, such as the ethnos and the tribes.
Mnemosyne in the Symposion
Authors: RÖSler Wolfgang
Published: November 2023

Early Greek poetry lived through oral performance, and therefore in situations which were embedded in the communal life of Archaic society. As one would expect, these are not random situations, but specific types of situation, which in turn were bound to specific social institutions. This fundamental fact is one which the interpreter of early Greek poetry ignores at his peril. The more this conviction has been explored in recent years, the more the symposion has inevitably become the focus of attention: on the one hand, as the evidence of art already shows, musical performance, with its corollary, the act of listening to poetry, was an essential part of the symposion; on the other hand, a general consideration of all possible social contexts and institutions compels us to see the symposion, not merely as one among many possibilities, but as the central place for the creation and performance of poetry. Strictly, this applies to that particular area of melic, elegiac, and iambic poetry which often makes direct and explicit reference to the sympotic situation. But texts where there is no such reference also had their place in the symposion; and this raises the question of attributing them in accordance with other possible criteria.
Ancient Landscapes
Authors: Rackham Oliver
Published: November 2023

What did Ancient Greece look like? The Abbé Barthélémy, writing in the 780s, thought he knew: it was like Marie Antoinette’s France, with heroes spearing the boar in noble forests and nymphs swimming in crystal fountains. From this popular writer, and his scientist contemporary Sonnini, derives the traditional theory that Greece has gone to the bad since classical times. The forests, we are told, have been felled and burnt and the remains grazed to create the prickly-oak ‘scrub’ that the modern visitor sees. The soil, no longer under the magic protection of the trees, has washed away into the plains or the sea; the fountains have dried up; and some say that the very climate has been degraded. These changes are supposed to be progressive and irreversible, so that mischief done in the age of railways has been added to that done by Turks, Venetians, and Byzantines. This theory makes excellent sense and is still very much alive: it is the basis for a recent television programme, The First Eden, as well as for many scholarly publications.
The Size and Resources of Greek Cities
Authors: Nixon Lucia , Price Simon
Published: November 2023

Most Greeks, particularly in the Aegean basin, lived in or were part of cities where political life, as the modern word shows, was based. Our topic is the size and resources of these cities. The data that we are working with, as outlined in section I, are the so-called Athenian tribute lists, which give an idea of allied contributions to the Athenian empire in the second half of the fifth century BC.
Saving the City
Authors: Kearns Emily
Published: November 2023

When the Eleans were fighting the Arcadians, the story runs, a woman came to the commanders with her baby son, saying that she had been told in a dream to give him to fight for the city. The generals put the child at the front of their ranks, and when the enemy charged the child became a snake, so that they fled in terror and confusion. The story was told to account for the cult at Elis of a divine or perhaps heroic figure called Sosipolis (‘city-saving’). Modern students of the past, heir to the Thucydidean scorn for ‘the mythlike’, would tend to draw a more or less firm line between such picturesque stories and what ‘really’ happens when the city is in danger and crisis, even if they recognize that some supposedly historical events in fact contain strong elements of myth.
The Structure Of Magnesia
Authors: Saunders Trevor J
Published: November 2023

In chapters 8-14 I attempt to make a systematic comparison, crime by crime, between the penalties of Magnesian law and those of Attic law. The enterprise is difficult, because often there is some evidence from one side or the other but not from both, and one can easily stumble into comparing uncertainties with unknowns; and sometimes because Magnesian law is elaborate and extremely complex, and operates in terms and categories which are not on all fours with those of Attic law. However, my attention centres on the punishments imposed,2 and their justifications and purposes; I consider the details of the structure and procedures of the two legal systems only when they seem relevant to penology. This fairly narrow focus enables me to leave aside many problems which have no bearing on my enquiry, however important they may be to other students of Greek law.
Assault
Authors: Saunders Trevor J
Published: November 2023

Like homicide and wounding, assault ( aikia) is a crime of violence ( bia); but since it involves mere rough treatment of the body by blows, without actual wounds, it is the least serious of the three. Nevertheless, Plato lavishes a great deal of attention on it; his laws are a phenomenally complex and highly distinctive construction of considerable penological importance. Three Athenian suits are relevant to the understanding of it.It was possible to bring suit for ‘ill-treatment of parents’ (and certain remoter forbears). The ill-treatment could take various forms, notably failing to support them in their old age, and/or hitting or beating them. The penalty was complete atimia, ‘disfranchise¬ ment’, in the form of deprivation of the right to enter temples and market-place, to hold public office, and to speak in the assembly or a law-court (the latter entailing inability to prosecute).Graphi hubreos. Seven complementary studies facilitate discussion. The suit, which is of uncertain date.
Theft
Authors: Saunders Trevor J
Published: November 2023

‘En cette matiere, les Lois deviennent presque un modele de confusion inintelligible.’ Plato’s law of theft is indeed confusing. The six relevant texts have to be fetched from afar, from widely scattered locations in books 9 and 11-12 of the Laws; when compared, they seem mutually inconsistent. To understand their interrelationships, we have to consider Plato’s literary strategy in the composition of the dialogue as a whole.In order to clarify these exceptional problems I first set out the bare provisions of his laws of theft in full, but without reference to historical law, and sharply shorn of their contexts and the sometimes lengthy explanatory matter which penetrates and surrounds them.
Introduction: Summary of the Papers; The Story of Greek Historiography; Intertextuality and the Greek Historians
Authors: Hornblower Simon
Published: November 2023

A word is necessary about the shape of this Introduction. After Section I, the present opening section, I summarize the papers in this book (Section II), and thereafter I often refer forward to them. Then the chronologically organized Section III sketches the general story of Greek historiography, thus I hope providing the larger frame into which the individual papers fit, and introducing the reader to some names taken for granted in the individual chapters. Section IV is thematic, and addresses itself to such problems as ‘intertextuality’–the awareness shown by one writer of another’s work, and the difficulties of assuming direct influences–and the legitimate use of arguments from silence. What can we infer from a historian’s non-mention of a particular item? These issues are (see further below, pp. 69ff.) raised in one form or another by all the chapters in the book.
Rome and the Nomads
Authors: Batty Roger
Published: November 2023

In this comprehensive illustrated study, Roger Batty examines the historical importance of migration and the pastoral economy in Eastern Europe during ancient and early medieval times, with an emphasis on the early period of Roman rule. Across a wide geographical area, from the Ukraine to the shores of the Aegean, the interaction of imperial rulers and migrating steppe nomads both with each other and with the indigenous farmers and herdsmen, forms a central strand of European history. Batty uses both textual and archaeological evidence to establish a clear picture of life in the region. In explaining the historical development of the area in antiquity, whether in the Roman period or afterwards, he investigates the economic choices available to, and the ideas espoused by, both larger and smaller social groups. Historically important but unrecognized structures and trends are all given prominence over the more temporary initiatives of centralizing powers.
Simon Magus, the Bad Samaritan
Authors: Edwards Mark
Published: November 2023

The fear or hope of martyrdom is ubiquitous in the literature of early Christianity. There is no book of the New Testament (except, perhaps, some very brief epistles) that is free of references to the time of trial, to imprisonment, and to the dangers of apostasy: persecution, first at the hands of Jews and then of Romans, is among the childhood memories of the Church. Nevertheless, its incidence in literature, at least in the first two centuries, is greater than in life,3 and martyrologies were more popular than martyrdoms. If these were at first based partly on observation, the accumulation of instances would tend to produce a literary type. In this case, the type was moulded by the real or supposed experience of Israel in the Captivity and the period of the Maccabean revolt.
Mesopotamian Contact And Influence In The Greek World
Authors: Dalley Stephanie , Reyes A T
Published: November 2023

In The Achaemenid Period The Nature Of the evidence for contact and influence between the Greek and Mesopotamian worlds changes. Con temporary Greek histories and records survive, making it possible to document more fully interaction throughout the Near East and Mesopotamia from a Greek point of view. To this interaction the Persian Wars posed no obstacles. Archaeological excavations have found no discernible break in the material records of relevant sites in Cilicia or along the Levant, and written sources show that the overland routes from the Mediterranean into Mesopotamia and Iran remained open.1 During this period of over two hundred years, indigenous Babylonian religion and literature, far from being overlaid by Persian practices, actually flourished with royal patronage, and were widely admired for their antiquity and sophistication.
Archaeology, the Salaminioi, and the Politics of Sacred Space in Archaic Attica
Authors: Osborne Robin
Published: November 2023

Historians and archaeologists have generally pursued rather different lines of enquiry in their work on Archaic Athens. Archaeologists have tended to concentrate on artefacts, occasionally raiding Greek texts for possibly relevant snippets. Historians have immersed themselves in texts and raided the work of archaeologists for certain items of archaeological interpretation (such as population growth). Few archaeologists show much awareness for the problematic status of the texts which they plunder, and few historians show any awareness of the nature of the archaeology whose interpretations they come to depend upon.
Sanctuaries in the Chora of Metaponto
Authors: Carter Joseph Coleman
Published: November 2023

A major criticism of current theorizing about Greek rural sanctuaries and their relation to the ’birth of the city’ is that elaborate theoretical structures rest on inadequate factual bases-often on the results of early excavations and incomplete investigations. What is needed, it has been urged, are detailed studies of the phenomena, case by case. The present paper, an attempt to deal with the rural sanctuaries in the territory of the Greek colony of Metaponto, is a response to this challenge.
Minding the Gap in Hellenistic and Roman Greece
Authors: Alcock Susan E
Published: November 2023

One of the oft-repeated, if less than popular, maxims of archaeological research is that negative evidence-the absence of material traces of human activity-is just as valuable as the richest and most copious of finds. While other papers in this volume are by and large concerned with where sanctuaries were placed, here I am equally interested in the problem of where they were not: or rather by cases where known sanctuaries disappear or cease functioning. My general argument is two-fold: first, that the Hellenistic and Early Roman era saw a relative decline in activity at rural sanctuaries, with this gap being followed (in some instances) by a Late Roman resurgence; and second, that this pattern betrays not only a considerable transformation of the religious landscape of Greece, but major transitions within the society that shaped and inhabited it.
Dionysos and the Polis
Authors: Seaford Richard
Published: November 2023

In the opening speech of Aeschylus’ Seven  Against  Thebes Eteokles urges the ‘citizens of Kadmos (I Káδμov πoλîτaι)’ to defend their polis, the altars of the gods of the place, their children, and their mother Earth, and explains why Earth, the ‘dearest nurse’, should be defended: ‘for she allwelcoming received you on her kindly surface as crawling infants, all the trouble of your nurture, and brought you up to be spear-carrying inhabitants, so that you might be relied on now to repay this debt’ (14-20).
Horace, Pindar, Iullus Antonius, and Augustus: Odes 4. 2
Authors: Harrison S J
Published: November 2023

Odes 4. 2 hasreceived much critical attention,1 owing to several evident difficulties. First, what docs it mean for Horace to reject imitation of Pindar in a poem which is itself somewhat Pindaric and which appears in a book together with other poems which are notably so (e.g. Odes 4. 4 and 4. 14)? Second, how is Iullus Antonius, the addressee, treated? Is he really envisaged as himself composing a poem in a context where Horace is unable to produce one, am\ if so whc1t kind of poem? Finally, does the poem in fact constitute effective praise of Augustus on Horace’s part, and is there a unified sequence of thought which links up the initial section on the poetry of Pindar and Horace (1–32), the middle section on Iullus and the return of Augustus (33–52), and the final vignette of the two differing sacrifices (52–60) The present treatment will deal with these themes, which form the central concerns of previous discussions, with the aim of producing a coherent and credible account of the poem in its social and literary context.
Poetry, Philosophy, and Letter-Writing in Horace, Epistles I
Authors: Harrison Stephen
Published: November 2023

Two long-running issues in the criticism of Horace’s first book of Epistles now appear to be in a steady state: that of whether these twenty hexameter poems are in any sense ‘real’ letters, and that of whether Horace’s professions of philosophical eclecticism in the programmatic Epistles 1. 1 (13–19) are borne out by the collection. On the first issue, most would now agree with a recent monograph that ‘while the possibility remains that some of the Epistles were actually sent as letters, they are best judged as fictional discourse’ and that these poems aim at ‘a lively illusion of reality’. On the second issue, Horace’s lack of dogmatism seems to be re-established after attempts to make him more philosophically systematic, and he is now seen as an independent purveyor of familiar ethical generalizations. These issues form the background to the questions addressed here.
Seneca, Stoicism, and the Problem of Moral Evil
Authors: Hine Harry
Published: November 2023

‘There are many good reasons for valuing the Letters [of Seneca]: for their realism of scene and language, for their psychological revelations, for their brilliant technique. But we shall not read them right if we do not also take the main theme seriously.’ Thus Donald Russell advises us near the end of his characteristically sympathetic and illuminating guide to reading Seneca’s Letters. My own study, which is concerned with a point of Stoic doctrine, starts, as it happens, from the passage with which Donald’s essay ends, the conclusion of Letter 90. Another of his comments is worth repeating before we begin: he frankly acknowledges that ‘In much of this letter, Seneca, as elsewhere, appears diffuse, unsubtle, incoherent in his moral vehemence.’ One may add that, with the rhetorical training that set a high premium on finding an unfamiliar twist to a familiar topic, he was well capable of devising a new angle on an ethical problem, which makes it sometimes hard to decide whether in a given passage a sketchily presented idea is a novel improvisation of his own or an adumbration of established Stoic doctrine. One must proceed by probing the coherence of the ideas in a given passage with what is found elsewhere in Seneca and other Stoic sources. That is what I shall seek to do with some of the ideas at the end of Letter 90.
Rhetoric as a Protreptic Force in Seneca’s Prose Works
Authors: Costa Desmond
Published: November 2023

Quantum inter philosophiam interest, Lucili virorum optime, et ceteras artes, tantum interesse existimo in ipsa philosophia inter illam partem quae ad homines et hanc quae ad deos pertinet. Altior est haec et animosior; multum permisit sibi; non fuit oculis contenta; maius esse quiddam suspicata est ac pulchrius quod extra conspectum natura posuisset. (2) Denique inter duas interest quantum inter deum et hominem. Altera docet quid in terris agendum sit, altera quid agatur in caelo. Altera errores nostros discutit et lumen admovet quo discernantur ambigua vitae; altera multum supra hanc in qua volutamur caliginem excedit et e tenebris ereptos perducit illo unde lucet.
Longinus, Sublimity, and the Low Emotions
Authors: Innes Doreen
Published: November 2023

It is important here to distinguish such emotion as a source of sublimity from emotion as the proper impact of the sublime. Longinus almost never uses the vocabulary of π α θ ο ς to describe the emotional effect of the sublime (exceptions: 26. 3, 39. 2), presumably in order to avoid confusion of source and impact.
The Decrees of the Greek States
Authors: Rhodes P J , Lewis David M
Published: November 2023

The many states of the ancient greek world were governed by small councils and assemblies of adult male citizens. The decisions of these bodies took the form of decrees. This book collects the evidence for decrees, many of which were inscribed on stone or metal, or appear in literary texts - either directly quoted, or indirectly reported. This evidence is used by Professor Rhodes, with Professor Lewis, to study the decision-making procedures of the Greek states, and the extent to which the citizens were actively involved in those procedures from the sixth century BC to the fourth century AD. An introductory section on Athens shows what questions can be asked and what answers can be given when there is a good supply of epigraphic material and literary texts. This is followed by the catalogue, systematically chronicling the usage of individual states throughout the Greek world with brief discussions of the interesting features in each case. The final section disusses the language of the decrees and the working of the political machinery that they reveal.
The God of Wine and the Frogs
Authors: Lada-Richards Ismene
Published: November 2023

The opening picture of the Frogs presents Dionysus in the guise of a traveller, entering the space of the Lenaean theatre in Athens. Nevertheless, the point of his departure is never stated openly for the sake of the spectators, as it is, for example, in the Bacchae (13-20). The god is just here, in the sight of the audience; he suddenly appears, an ‘itinerant epiphany’ (Detienne 1989: 5), a divinity coming from outside, arriving ‘from Elsewhere’ (Detienne 1989: 8).
Dionysus, the Poets, and the Polis
Authors: Lada-Richards Ismene
Published: November 2023

In the preceding chapters we have seen that the experience of the Eleusinian Mysteries, the ‘wine/symposion’ motif, and, most importantly, Dionysus’ ‘Heraclean’ role-playing have been designed in such a way as to orientate the dramatis persona of the god towards the space of the polis. Furthermore, as has been argued in Chapter 2, the literary argon should be considered as corresponding to Dionysus’ reaggregation into Athens.
Dionysus ‘Returns’ to Heracles
Authors: Lada-Richards Ismene
Published: November 2023

I have argued so far that on the level of poetic techne Aeschylus is the quintessence of a ‘Dionysiac’ poet. What still remains to be seen is how the relationship between the three stage-characters (Dionysus, Aeschylus, and Euripides) changes, if the contest is evaluated from the point of view of an artist’s impact on society, as one of the issues which is given great prominence throughout the agon is that of an artist’s influence on the social milieu of which he is a part (see esp. 1008-10). It is the thesis of this chapter, then, that, if the contest is looked at from a purely social angle, it is Euripides’ art which exercises a ‘Dionysiac’ influence on its environment, while Aeschylus, on the contrary, should rather be viewed as an essentially ‘Heraclean’ figure.
Dionysus, Comedy, and Tragedy
Authors: Lada-Richards Ismene
Published: November 2023

The previous chapters have suggested that Dionysus’ perspective has broadened so much during the agon of the Frogs as to become identical with the perspective of the entire Athenian polis as a theates. Correspondingly, however, although Dionysus is clearly the god of Drama when he first sets out on his quest for a ‘fertile’ poet (cf. 1. 7), it is only in the frame of the literary contest that his patronage of the theatrical events acquires its full range of implications. The present chapter, therefore, argues that, in clear contrast to the play’s earlier parts, Dionysus’ ‘viewpoint’ in the agon of the Frogs encompasses both Tragedy and Comedy at once.
Prolegomena
Authors: Heath Malcolm
Published: November 2023

Rhetoric is concerned with the persuasive use of language. In a broad sense, any skilled use of language to persuade or influence others could be counted as rhetoric; but in a stricter sense rhetoric is the consciously skilled use of language to persuade. The rhetoricians’ claim is that they speak or write well because their speech and writing is based on an explicit understanding of the general principles which govern the effective use of language. It is possible to speak or write well through innate talent, or because one has simply acquired a knack of effective communication through practice; but (according to the rhetorician) conscious technique can supplement or enhance that unreflective eloquence.
Constructing the Heroic
Authors: Easterling P E
Published: November 2023

The historian looking for contemporary evidence of fifth-century Athenian mentalite might reasonably think there is something to be learned from Greek tragedy about how (if not precisely what) the playwrights and their audiences thought about the community they lived in. After all, the plays were designed for the benefit of the community, for performances at public festivals in the presence of large audiences, and they were presented on the community ‘s initiative and behalf, with state funding, both direct and indirect, and citizen performers. So it certainly makes sense in general terms to look to the plays for some kind of refraction of the society that provided the context of production; but it is much harder to go further and attempt to read the signs in detail.
Between Public and Private: Tragedy and Athenian Experience of Rhetoric
Authors: Halliwell Stephen
Published: November 2023

Classical Athens is the most intensely rhetorical culture known to us from antiquity, and perhaps from any time or place. When the Thucydidean Pericles offers the Athenians an image of themselves as people who think that speeches do not damage action, but form the necessary deliberative preparation for it, or when Demosthenes describes Athenian political life as grounded in speeches and arguments (logoi), they characterize a principle which was embedded in civic institutions at every level from deme locality to the central organs of the polis, and which consequently sustained a mentality whose implications ramified into many areas of cultural activity. Demosthenes ‘ point, moreover, reveals the double-edged status of rhetoric. ‘There is no greater harm that anyone could cause you ‘, he states, ‘than by speaking falsely. For how could those whose political life is grounded in speeches be politically secure if these speeches are not true? ‘ As this warning, set within the occasion of an adversarial debate, helps to suggest, the intensity of the Athenian culture of rhetoric rested on no blind or uncritical commitment. On the contrary, it constituted an intrinsically and self-consciously ambiguous sphere of experi¬ence, in which an appetite for and appreciation of the formal spoken word sat uneasily alongside a suspicion of its possible artifices, snares, and partialities.
The Ecstasy and the Tragedy: Varieties of Religious Experience in Art, Drama, and Society
Authors: Osborne Robin
Published: November 2023

This book is concerned with what sort of histories can and cannot be written on the basis of the representations of tragedy. In this paper I want to look not just at the representations of maenads in tragedy but also in art, and in particular on Athenian pots, and to ask two questions: first, how do the representations on pots relate to the representations in drama? and second, can we use these representations to write a history of religious experience? E. R. Dodds had no doubt that we could talk of a history of religious experience.
The Riddle
Authors: Kingsley Peter
Published: November 2023

Equating Empedocles’ aer with the element of air was one thing for his interpreters. For Empedocles himself it was out of the question. Failure to appreciate this has meant that clues to the identity of the gods listed by him in the fragment we started with have been looked for in completely the wrong direction. As we have already seen, the rationale for equating Hera with air lay in the term aer itself. But Empedocles called the element aither, and there can be no real justification at all for identifying his Hera with aither. On the contrary, when Hera did come to be associated in Stoic circles with the air it was precisely so that she could be equated with the lower, damp, feminine aer, while Zeus was the warm, masculine aither that lay on top of her.
The Shield of Achilles: Myth and Reality in the Reign of Alexander the Great
Authors: Bosworth A B
Published: November 2023

One of the most attractive—and admirable—qualities of Henry Broad head’s commentary on the Persae is his ability to see beyond Aeschylus’ ‘patriotic enthusiasm’ for the Greek victory and appreciate the tragic pathos of the defeated Persian monarch. I hope that he would have sympathized with my own approach to the history of Alexander the Great and the negative emphasis upon the costs of conquest. We should perhaps begin with a paradox. Imperialism is no longer in fashion, nor is aggression for its own sake. Yet a positively rose-tinted aura surrounds Alexander, the leader of one of the most successful wars of imperial aggrandizement, pursued wholly for gain and glory under the specious pretext of revenge. He has become divorced from history and elevated into a symbol, the type of military invincibility and the culture hero with a mission to propagate Hellenic values world-wide.
Alexander and the Desert
Authors: Bosworth A B
Published: November 2023

Nothing was dearer to Alexander than the belief in his invincibility. By the end of the reign there was a proposal at Athens to erect a statue of ‘King Alexander, the invincible god’, and the mover was none other than Demosthenes. Whether or not the proposal was carried is irrelevant. What matters is that it was Alexander’s invincibility that was identified as his divine attribute. Alexander the invincible is a familiar figure in ancient and modern literature, and an anecdote of Plutarch (Al. 14. 6-7) is particularly instructive. The young Alexander supposedly visited Delphi, and wished to consult the oracle. The officiating priestess refused to initiate the procedure, since it was a day of recess.
The 2500th Anniversary of Cleisthenes' Reforms and the Tradition of Athenian Democracy
Authors: Hansen Mogens Herman
Published: November 2023

We are celebrating David Lewis and Athenian democracy. We all agree that David Lewis deserves to be celebrated, but what about Athenian democracy? Furthermore, David Lewis's day and year of birth have probably never been disputed. But when was Athenian democracy born? The event we claim to celebrate is the 2500th anniversary of Cleisthenes' reforms, but during this conference not one single paper has been devoted to Cleisthenes or to the problem of what kind of democracy he introduced. I am not surprised; for the same thing has happened at the other three '2500 years of democracy' conferences I have attended so far. Why is this so?
How Violent was Athenian Society?
Authors: Herman Gabriel
Published: November 2023

At the beginning of book I, Thucydides looks back into the distant past, contrasting it with his own time. The contrast yields several interesting observations, of which I shall be discussing only one. Like an ancient Norbert Elias, Thucydides believes to have revealed a ‘civilizing process’in the course of ·which lawlessness, indiscriminate violence, and coarseness of manners have gradually given way to settled a:p.d peaceful conditions and to more refined manners.
Money Talks: Rhetor, Demos, and the Resources of the Athenian Empire
Authors: Kallet-Marx Lisa
Published: November 2023

The pervasiveness of finance in the. life of the Athenian polis in the mid-to¬ late fifth century is patent when one looks at evidence as diverse as comedy and inscriptions concerned with the financial resources of the city and its empire. From the ubiquity of reference in Aristophanes to tribute, bribery, and pay ,X from the emmisthos  polis at home and the extraction and accumulation of revenue from the empire, to the published records of expenditures, loans, and tribute quota to Athena, the degree of ‘fiscality’ in the public realm, and of public consciousness about money, is remarkable. At the same time, the cohesion of the democracy depended on the stability of its institutions, but, as has become clear as well, it also relied greatly on rhetoric.2 In rhetoric lies a crucial key to understanding the relationship between leader rhetor and the demos, as it was the means by which their respective claims to power in the democracy were negotiated. But it also reveals how the Athenians collectively thought about the democracy and the empire, and illuminates the collective values, norms, and identity of the polis
The Demos and the Priests:The Selection of Sacred Officials at Athens from Cleisthenesto Augustus
Authors: Aleshire Sara B
Published: November 2023

In 1955, David Lewis, in a characteristically brilliant flash of intuition, asked ‘Who was Lysistrata?’ and answered that Aristophanes based his feisty heroine (in name at least) on Lysimache, the daughter of Drakontides of Bate, priestess of Athena Polias. It is in a spirit of admiration and gratitude that I offer this small footnote to his key article in the Annual  of  the  British  School and ask how Lysimache came to be priestess of Athena.
The Reciprocity of Giving and Thanksgiving in Greek Worship
Authors: Bremer Jan-Maarten
Published: November 2023

If, however, reciprocity is given the sense of ‘a practice of making voluntary return for benefit (or harm)’, then it is possible for man, in his relation to god(s), to do something in return: he can build temples, erect statues, bring sacrifices, offer gifts and prayers of gratitude. As Parker’s chapter in this volume concentrates on sacrifices, this chapter will deal with the gifts and prayers expressing thankfulness. Some scholars have argued that, in the relation of the Greeks to their gods, thankfulness is conspicuously lacking: rituals and prayers of gratitude seem to be scarce.
From Barbarians to New Men
Authors: Dench Emma
Published: November 2023

The Central Apennine peoples, represented alternately as decadent and dangerous snake-charming barbarians or as personifications of manly wisdom and virtue, as austere and worthy "new men", were important figures in Greek and Roman ideology. Concentrating on the period between the later fourth century BC and the aftermath of the Social War, this book considers the ways in which Greek and Roman perceptions of these peoples developed, reflecting both the shifting needs of Greek and Roman societies and the character of interaction between the various cultures of ancient Italy. Most importantly, it illuminates the development of a specifically Roman identity, through the creation of an ideology of incorporation. The book is also about the interface between these attitudes and the dynamics of the perception of local communities in Italy of themselves, illuminated by both literary and archaeological evidence. An important new contribution to modern debates on Greek and Roman perceptions of other peoples, the book argues that the closely interactive conditions of ancient Italy helped to produce far less distanced and exotic images than those of the barbarians in fifth-century Athenian thought.