bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Troas
Authors: Mitchell Stephen
Published: November 2023

The Troad received Greek colonies. Several of its cities are said to have been colonised from the island of Lesbos: Tenedos was settled from Lesbos (Hdt. 1.151.1–2),Achilleion specifically from Mytilene (Strabo 13.1.39), and Assos probably from Methymna (Strabo 13.1.58). There is probably no truth in the supposition that Arisbe was connected with the homonymous settlement on the island of Lesbos, since it is more reliably identified as a Milesian foundation (Strabo 14.1.6). Assos in turn created a sub-colony at Gargara (Strabo 13.1.58).
Crete
Authors: Perlman Paula
Published: November 2023

Written sources, including coin legends, provide us with the toponyms and city-ethnics of sixty-four Cretan settlements of the Archaic and Classical periods. Written sources from the Archaic and Classical periods survive for forty-five of these toponyms. The written sources for sixteen of the remaining nineteen toponyms are late, and the Archaic and Classical phases of these settlements are attested by the material evidence which in most cases consists of surface remains only.
Rhodos
Authors: Nielsen Thomas Heine , Gabrielsen Vincent
Published: November 2023

This evidence clearly proves that throughout C6 and C5 there was a general development in the direction of pan-Rhodian (political) unity. The synoecism in 408/7 may reasonably be seen as a decisive step in this unifying development. Though there are problems of interpretation, nos. (7) and (8) above render it probable that a unified state existed prior to the foundation of the city of Rhodos. The polis of Rhodos (no. 1000) came to monopolise such important functions as, e.g., foreign policy, military organisation and minting.
Polities Called Polis
Authors: Hansen Mogens Herman , Nielsen Thomas Heine
Published: November 2023

A=Called polis in Archaic and/or Classical sources [A]=Listed under the heading poleis in Archaic and/or Classical sources B=Known for one or more of the essential characteristics of a polis.
Poleis in 400 versus Poleis no longer or not yet Existing in 400
Authors: Hansen Mogens Herman , Nielsen Thomas Heine
Published: November 2023

Spain and France Emporion Massalia Sikelia Abakainon Agyrion Akrai Alaisa Apollonia Engyon Galeria Heloron Henna Herakleia Minoa Imachara Kallipolis Kamarina Kasmenai Kephaloidion Lipara Longane Morgantina Mylai Mytistratos Nakone Selinous Syrakousai Zankle/Messana.
Political Architecture
Authors: Hansen Mogens Herman , Nielsen Thomas Heine
Published: November 2023

italics buildings attested in written sources bold buildings attested archaeologically Sikelia Agyrion bouleuterion C4.
Greek Sophists in the Roman Empire
Authors: Bowersock G W
Published: November 2023

Greek Sophists in the Roman Empire
Sophists and Emperors
Authors: Bowersock G W
Published: November 2023

The wealth, intelligence, and patriotism of the sophists, expressed in public service and benefaction, contributed largely to the prosperity of their cities. They became a valuable part of the local administration which was so important to the efficient functioning of the Roman empire. Since teachers and rhetors had tended the affairs of eastern cities long before the second century, it was no accident that as the rhetors became more numerous, more important, and richer, their cities did too. Hence the resurgence of places like Pergamum and Ephesus. The social and political influence of the rhetors of the late republic and early empire can be discerned clearly by anyone who cares to look; in the second century it simply cannot be missed, so conspicuous are the intellectual and (in many cases) lineal descendants of those earlier men of culture.
The Circle of Julia Domna
Authors: Bowersock G W
Published: November 2023

With all that has been said so far about the sophists of the second and early third centuries and their relations with the Roman government, there has still been no discussion of an aspect of the sophistic revival which has general notoriety among historians of Rome. This is the circle of sophists and philosophers which the empress Julia Domna assembled around her in the reigns of Septimius Severus and Caracalla. Since Philostratus’ life and writings have throughout provided an apposite terminus for these inquiries, it is appropriate to turn to a discussion of the coterie to which Philostratus himself belonged. Unfortunately, much of what has to be said on this matter is negative, because for the first time in dealing with the Second Sophistic we touch upon a topic that has been treated often by historians. The result has been a welter of error and misunderstanding.
Other Literary Men
Authors: Bowersock G W
Published: November 2023

In his biographies of the sophists Philostratus found space for men whom he could not truthfully denominate sophists; yet their achievements were such as to warrant inclusion.1 The rhetorical prowess of Dio of Prusa and Favorinus the Gaul induced Philostratus to write their biographies. From a historical aspect his decision may be justified no less. The careers of those philosophers and their contacts with the Roman government exhibit, as has already emerged, much in common with the careers and contacts of the greater sophists. It was inevitable that it should be so, for the liaison between politics and literature does not recognize all distinctions in literary activity.
Two Case Histories
Authors: Pomeroy Sarah B
Published: November 2023

Far from being grotesque or totally pathological, the families encountered in private orations can often serve as examples for the generalizations that have been made in preceding chapters about topics such as sentiment, naming patterns, demographic regimes, choice of spouses, and devolution of property. This is not the result of circular reasoning. The patterns have been detected in other pieces of evidence deriving from ‘normal’ families, rather than solely from those that became the fractured, fractious ones well known through litigation. Rather than discuss families in the abstract, I have chosen to present detailed case-studies and to generalize using these examples as touchstones. I trace the life cycle in at least three generations of two well-known families, which allows us to view the changing relationships within families as men select wives, wives become widows, children become adults and marry, and patrimonies are dispersed. This provides a more complex picture of the family than would be the case with discussions of anonymous persons engaged in normal or average behaviour.
Pelagius’s Commentary On. St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans
Authors: Bruyn Theodore De
Published: November 2023

The Pelagian controversy has secured an enduring place for Pelagius in the history of western Christian thought. Few of Pelagius' writings, however, have been preserved, and until recently none was available in English translation. This volume presents Pelagius' commentary on Romans for the first time in English. The commentary, one of thirteen on the Pauline epistles, dates from the time when Pelagius was active in Rome, before he became embroiled in controversy. But already there are adumbrations of the later debate and signs of different currents of thought in Italy and beyond. In his introduction Theodore de Bruyn discusses the context in which Pelagius wrote the commentary and the issues which shaped his interpretation of Romans. He also takes up questions about the edition of the commentary. The translation is annotated with references to Pelagius' contemporaries. A new recension of Pelagius' text of Romans is presented in an appendix.
Roman Theatre Design
Authors: Sear Frank
Published: November 2023

Logically one might expect to begin a study of design with the architects, and many names are known to us. For example, an inscription on the outer south wall of the eastern parodosof the large theatre at Pompeii names the architect as ‘M. Artorius M. I. Primus’. The architects who rebuilt the odeum of Pericles after the sack of Athens of 86 bc are known from an inscription to have been Gaius and Marcus Stallius and Melanippus. The theatre of Herculaneum was built or restored at the time of Augustus with Numisius as architect. In the theatre at Aspendus two inscriptions honour the architect, Zeno son of Theodorus, each of which enumerates part of his titles.
Republican Theatres in Italy
Authors: Sear Frank
Published: November 2023

The earliest attested theatre in the west is that at Syracuse, which was in existence at the time of Aeschylus. Its architect is known from Eustathius to have been Damocopus Myrilla. The shape of the Damocopus theatre is unknown although the seventeen rectilinear rock-cut steps just west of the later theatre are sometimes regarded as belonging to an older theatre. There may also have been a theatre at Catania in the later fifth century bc. The oldest surviving theatre in the west seems to be the trapezoidal theatre at Morgantina (Plan 110), which dates to c.325 bc. It originally had rectilinear seating, but was rebuilt with a curved cavea in the later third century bc.
Sidonius Apollinaris and the Fall of Rome AD 407-485
Authors: Harries Jill
Published: November 2023

The fifth century AD was a period of military turmoil and political upheaval in Western Europe. The career of the Gallo-Roman senator and bishop, Sidonius Apollinaris (c. 430-c. 485), holder of government office under three Roman emperors and later bishop of Clermont Ferrand, vividly illustrates the processes which undermined Roman rule. A champion of Latin letters and Roman aristocratic values, Sidonius was also for most of his career an advocate of co-operation with the Goths of Aquitaine. Both a career politician and an ardent Christian, Sidonius in his writings reveals both the confusion of loyalties afflicting an aristocracy under threat and the compromises necessary for survival. This book, the first in English on its subject for sixty years, argues that Sidonius adapted literary conventions and exploited accepted techniques of allusion to explain his dilemmas, justify his own role, and convey his personal understanding of, and response to, the fall of Rome.
Georgia in Antiquity
Authors: Braund David
Published: November 2023

This is the first full history of the ancient Georgia ever to be written outside Georgia itself. It is also an introduction to the substantial archaeological work that has been carried out in Georgia in recent decades. The principal purpose of this book is to open up ancient Georgia for the world of scholarship at large. It is not only the history of a neglected region, but also a sustained attempt to inform topics and issues that are more familiar to the historians of antiquity: myths of the periphery, Caucasian mountains and their passes, Greek colonization, the Persian, Athenian, and Selecuid empires, Pompey's conquest of Mithridates' empire, the development of the Roman frontier in the eastern Black Sea region, Roman diplomancy in Iberia, the Christianization of Iberia, Sassanian ambitions in Transcaucasia and Byzantine warfare there. The author has lived in Georgia for substantial periods during the last decade: he has made extensive use of scholarship in Georgian and Russian, and has first-hand knowledge of most of the sites which he discusses.
Introduction
Authors: Braund David
Published: November 2023

The principal purpose of this book is to construct a history of ancient Georgia. In this case, the familiar task of historical construction has been more fundamental than is usual in studies of ancient history, because, to a large extent, the histoty of ancient Georgia has not existed in western historiography or in any kindred form. Indeed, there have been very few attempts to write such a history in any intellectual tradition. With a few honourable exceptions, western historiography has simply ignored ancient Georgia. This book is intended as a new beginning. It offers a historical framework within which ancient Georgia can begin to be understood.
Roman Imperial Themes
Authors: Brunt P A
Published: November 2023

This book comprises sixteen articles published over thirty years, with supplements including two additional essays. Its range is broad, from discussions of Rome's aspirations to world dominion, to studies of provincial administration. The results of these studies suggest that Roman rule was not endeared to the subjects by the lightness of the burdens imposed, nor by the integrity and professional competence of the administrators; both have often been overestimated. The higher orders among the conquered peoples, however, were eventually reconciled by the Roman policy of assimilating them to Romans, and entrusting to them control of local affairs and an increasing influence in central government. Though the attitude of the masses to the empire is virtually unknowable, there was, except in Judaea, no national resistance comparable to that in the British empire, a theory illustrated by detailed consideration of the first-century revolts in Gaul and Judaea. About one-third of the contents of this volume is new.
The Revolt of Vindex and the Fall of Nero
Authors: Carolyn Higbie
Published: November 2023

The revolt of Vindex has often been seen as a national movement for Gallic independence, or at least in Professor Syme’s words, as ‘a native insurrection against the Roman power’. Schiller, who held the more extreme of these views, depicted Nero’s fall as an almost fortuitous aftermath, brought on by his own timidity and indecisiveness. In his, and other modern accounts; the conduct of Verginius Rufus is (I believe) misrepresented and the true order of events distorted: while his interpretation of the Gallic revolt is altogether mistaken. In this paper I propose first to reconstruct the sequence of events from the time of the revolt to Nero’s death, when he was already abandoned by everyone, and secondly to show that Vindex rose to end oppression, not only of the senatorial class to which he belonged but of all Rome’s subjects. Like the Gordians in 238, he perished, but his cause triumphed, for he had not risen against Rome, but against Nero. |
Reflections on British and Roman Imperialism*
Authors: Carolyn Higbie
Published: November 2023

In the heyday of British imperialism some fifty years ago, when Lord Cromer could find that the empire was ‘the main title which makes us great’, imperialists were apt to compare the British with the Roman empire and to seek ‘in the history of imperial Rome for any facts or commentaries gleaned from ancient times which might be of service to the modern empire of which we are so justly proud’. A critic of imperialism, J. A. Hobson, sourly remarked of such enterprises that ‘history devises reasons why the lessons of past empires do not apply to our own’.2 Primafacie, however, the comparison was encouraging. Both the Romans and modern imperial powers claimed that it was their purpose to govern in the interests of the subjects; both had undoubtedly established peace and order in a large part of the world; both had extended their own Jaw and their own civilization. The Romans, moreover, had in some measure created a genuine sentiment of unity and loyalty among all the peoples of their empire, and when it disintegrated, it was amid the lamentations of at least the most vocal of its inhabitants. In the provinces Rome first acquired her rule lasted for 600 years.
Did Imperial Rome Disarm her Subjects?
Authors: Carolyn Higbie
Published: November 2023

In his Roman Social Relations 50 B.C.–A.D. 284 (New Haven and London 1974) Professor Ramsay Macmullen presents a sombre picture of the condition of the lower orders in the Roman empire, which in general appears to me to represent the truth only too well. But among the many suggestions he throws out which provoke reflection, at least one may challenge dissent. In his sketch of Roman taxation he urges that the resistance movements it caused ‘reveal in rough outline a common pattern of desperation: first, initial conquest by the Romans; next, the rapid confiscation of all hidden weapons’; and then assessments and ‘recurrent spasms of protest against the weight of tribute harshly calculated and still more harshly exacted’. His belief that even in the early empire taxation was heavier than is commonly assumed seems to me justifiable, but that is not my subject here. Is it right that disarmament, indeed rapid disarmament, was normally the first act of the conquerors as a prelude to taxation? Macmullen founds this claim on (a) a few texts relating to the disarmament of particular peoples and (b) an interpretation of the law or laws de vi, which in his judgement show that disarmament was universal.1 By implication, it was also permanent. There is perhaps some risk that this view will gain credit, unless rebutted. A fuller survey of the evidence suggests to me that disarmament was far from normal and, where attempted, without lasting effect.
Josephus on Social Conflicts Roman Judaea
Authors: Carolyn Higbie
Published: November 2023

In chapter 12 I had occasion to observe that ‘even in Judaea upper class Jews seem mostly to have opposed revolt or to have sought to sabotage it, not only because (as Josephus makes king Agrippa urge) in their judgement it was certain to fail, and it was folly to “kick against the pricks”, but because Rome guaranteed the social order; the revolt of66 was almost as much directed against native landlords and usurers as against the heathen rulers.’
Laus lmperii
Authors: Carolyn Higbie
Published: November 2023

My purpose in this paper is to explore the conceptions of empire prevalent in Cicero’s day. What Romans thought is often best ascertained from their institutions and actions, and some use will be made of this kind of evidence; it is necessarily inferential, and there is always a danger of reading into the actions of Greeks and Romans motives of too modern a kind. However this may be, I propose to draw principally on actual statements by Romans, as the clearest indications of what was most explicit in their own consciousness; how far this reveals the true driving forces in their imperial conduct is another matter, which may be left to bolder inquiry.
The Revenues of Rome*
Authors: Carolyn Higbie
Published: November 2023

This doctoral dissertation, the first comprehensive treatment of its subject since J. Marquardt, RÖm. Staatsverwaltung II ( 1884), examines tributum soli (19—98) and tributum capitis (117—34), rents on public and imperial property (99—103), the vicesima hereditatium and vicesima libertatis (135-41), and extraordinary levies in kind (104-16) and cash (142—8) the introduction reviews the Republican inheritance, and a final chapter sums up Neesen’s conclusions and looks forward to the system of the late empire (149—80). The notes which follow cite most of the evidence, and (perhaps to excess) the views of earlier scholars on every point treated; only for Egypt is N. content to summarize standard works; here the student will still turn particularly to Wilcken’s Gr. Ostraka I (1899), for its incomparable lucidity, and to the briefer and sometimes modified account Wilcken gave in his Grundzüge (1911 ), and for fuller detail to S. L. Wallace, Taxation in Egypt from Augustus to Diocletian (1938), with the index locorum in ZPE 16 (1975) ).
The Economic and Political Situation of the Roman Empire in the Mid-Third Century AD
Authors: Potter D S
Published: November 2023

When the armies of Alexander Severus launched a threepronged invasion of the Persian empire in 232, it must have appeared to most of the inhabitants of the empire that Roman power was at its height. There would probably have been few men like the distinguished consular Cassius Dio, who felt that in his lifetime the empire had passed from being a kingdom of gold under Marcus Aurelius to one of rust and iron under Septimius Severus and his successors. To the casual observer in Lyons or Ephesus, in Carthage or Thessaloniki, the reign of Caracalla, which Dio regarded as a horror, would have appeared as one in which the barbarians were kept from the frontiers and the one in which most of the inhabitants of the empire had been granted Roman citizenship. The threat of barbarian violence such as that which had rocked the Balkans under Marcus seemed a dim, if horrible, memory.
The Thirteenth Sibylline Oracle
Authors: Potter D S
Published: November 2023

Like the other oracles which deal with historical events, the Thirteenth Sibylline Oracle consists of a number of texts composed at various times in the period it covers. The evaluation of its information on any given point must therefore begin with a consideration of two separate issues: the learning of the final compiler and the learning of those authors whose texts were selected for inclusion. Closely connected to these questions are broader issues of the relation of this text to other extant oracles, the purpose of the person who compiled it, and the vision of the events shared by that writer with the contemporaries who appreciated this work as being one of divine inspiration.
Aidōs in Homer
Authors: Cairns Douglas L
Published: November 2023

This study takes as its starting-point an examination of the usage in Greek authors of the cluster of terms centred on aidōs, notoriously one of the most difficult of Greek words to translate. Von Erffa rightly insists that aidos is 'eine eigene Kraft, fur die uns das Wort fehlt',1 yet the significance of this observation is all but ignored in the remainder of his account, in which he is constantly concerned to identify separate meanings and persists in the separate treatment of nouns, verbs, compound verbs, adjectives, and adverbs which are derived from the same root and which obviously operate in the same general area, as if there were some methodological advantage in regarding data on (say) aidoios as of a different order from that offered by the usage of aideomai.
Aeschylus
Authors: Cairns Douglas L
Published: November 2023

Moving from archaic poetry to drama we return to a genre which, like epic, represents the action of human characters in a context in which they possess their own status, function, and motivation, and which involves their interaction both with the events which constitute the plot of the piece and with other characters; we are thus able to observe the operation of aidōs and related concepts in beings who, while they are not accorded the multiplicity of traits and idiosyncrasies which may constitute the personalities of real people, are nevertheless presented for the consideration of real people as representations of human agents. Tragedy may be the representation of an action, as Aristotle insists, but action, if it is to be intelligible at all, requires human agency, and intelligible human agency requires motivation, states of mind, character. In Aeschylus and the other tragedians the complex of terms centred on aidōs occurs with some frequency; these terms themselves (like a multitude of others) refer to states of mind, to features of personality, to motivation, and thus it should be one of the great mysteries of scholarship that it was ever objected that concepts of this type, or the concept of character tout court, should not be imported into the study of Greek tragedy. Given the explicit emphasis of the texts on states of mind and motivation, we cannot do other than take these elements into consideration.
The Influential Fictions in the Scholia to Pindar’s Pythian 8
Authors: Lefkowitz Mary R
Published: November 2023

The substance of ancient poetry, like the texts of the poems themselves, has reached us only through the mediation of many minds and hands. In particular, the Odes of Pindar have survived inextricably enmeshed in critical opinion, since they required interpretation to be understood even in antiquity, once they had been removed from the original provenance of their performance. In the third century BC the text was edited by Aristophanes of Byzantium, and an explanatory commentary was written by Aristarchus in Alexandria. Other scholars, like Aristarchus’ student Aristodemus, added interpretations; in the first century Didymus wrote a commentary, disputing Aristarchus’ interpretations on many points. Over the next centuries these scholars’ contributions were preserved, elaborated, and finally condensed and compiled into our present scholia to Pindar.
Who Sang Pindar’s Victory Odes?
Authors: Lefkowitz Mary R
Published: November 2023

Since the mid-nineteenth century most scholars seem to have assumed that choral and monodic lyric were different genres. In his edition of the lyric poets Diehl even discarded the ‘chronological’ arrangement of poets that had been established in late antiquity, in favour of a classification that grouped ‘choral’ poets like Aleman, Stesichorus, and Ibycus apart from poets like Sappho, Anacreon, and Corinna. But the notion of a firm distinction between choral and monodic poetry has no ancient authority.
Pliny’s Sources
Authors: Healy John F
Published: November 2023

Although Pliny records information obtained1 while on active service in Germany, and as procurator in Spain2 (and, probably, North Africa3), most of the content of the Natural History is derived from secondary sources, and includes accounts of countries and peoples by geographers, historians, scholars, encyclopaedists, writers on special topics, local people, Roman commanders in the field (reports and commentarii), provincial governors, equites, and other officials. The accuracy and value of this information varies according to their criteria. In addition there are many facts from unidentified sources.
Pliny and Research
Authors: Healy John F
Published: November 2023

Aristotle, in his On Parts of Animals, sets out some of his prerequisites for research. Although his observations refer to zoology, they also involve general principles in the context of which it is useful to examine Pliny’s attitude to research. He writes (PA 639a): ‘There are, as it seems, two ways in which a person may be competent in respect of any study or investigation, whether it be a noble one, or humble: he may either have what can be called a scientific knowledge of the subject; or he may have what is roughly described as an educated man’s competence and, therefore, be able to judge correctly which parts of any exposition are satisfactory and which are not. That, in fact, is the sort of person we take to be the “man of general education”, whose education consists in the ability to do this.’ Pliny (pref. 14) likewise claims that the topics included in the Natural History are those relevant to an allround education.
Minerals as Pigments
Authors: Healy John F
Published: November 2023

Pliny (35. 29 ff.) gives a brief account of minerals used as pigments by artists. However, his claim that painting began with single colours (‘monochromata’) is not borne out by the extant evidence.
Introduction
Authors: Stockton David
Published: November 2023

The Greeks had a word for it, and the word was demokratia, a compound of dêmos (‘the people’) and kratos (‘power’, or ‘rule’). But it is significant that the first occurrence of the word in surviving Greek literature is in Herodotus’ History (6. 43, 131), which he was writing during the third quarter of the fifth century. It was perhaps coined in the period following the reforms of the last decade of the sixth, which later won fame for Cleisthenes as ‘the man who gave the Athenians their democracy’ (Herodotus 6. 131; Ath. Pol. 29. 3)—although in his own day the slogans most favoured may well have been isonomia (‘equality for all under the law’) and isegoria (‘the right of everyone to have his say’). In 431 Pericles could claim (Thucydides 2. 37) that the Athenian system of government was unique, and an example to every other society in Greece: ‘It is called a “democracy”, because it subserves the interests not of a privileged few but of the bulk of its citizens.’
Local and Central Government
Authors: Stockton David
Published: November 2023

Early in 424 Aristophanes staged his comedy The Knights (Hippeis) at the Lenaean Festival. It won the first prize. It exploited the amusing fancy of presenting the Athenian people (the dêmos) as a householder, with politicians as his slave-servants. The name he gave his householder was ‘Demos Pyknitês’, ‘Mr Demos of the Pnyx’. (The ecclêsia regularly met in the Pnyx, in the shadow of the Acropolis of Athens.) Aristophanes’ choice of the adjective Pyknitês is significant: it is a made-up ‘demotic’. An Athenian might be addressed or referred to either simply by his personal name, or by his personal name plus that of his father, or by his personal name plus that of his deme; but the full ‘official’ form of his name was ‘A, son of B, of deme C’, the deme element (his ‘demotic’) being either adjectival or adverbial, for example ‘Acharnian’ or ‘of or from Alôpekê’. Thus, the name ‘Mr Demos of the Pnyx’ underlines the central importance which his deme had for every Athenian both in his private life and in his standing as a citizen.
Consoling Heliodorus
Authors: Scourfield J H D
Published: November 2023

Jerome (AD c. 347-420) is best remembered as the author of the Vulgate translation of the Bible. But he was also an untiring letter-writer. Among the many letters which have survived are several written to friends who have suffered recent bereavement. In the most impressive of these, Letter 60, Jerome consoles Heliodorus, Bishop of Altinum in north-east Italy, on the early death of his young nephew Nepotianus. The letter is composed from a thoroughly Christian perspective; but it belongs to a tradition of consolatory literature that reaches far back into the pagan world. In this commentary, Professor Scourfield places the letter in the context of this consolatory tradition, showing how in the late fourth century a highly literate Christian author could take over pagan ideas and put them to Christian use. The commentary also includes a full discussion of matters of language and style, theology and exegesis, as well as the historical background. There is a freshly revised text, as well as a completely new translation of the Letter.
Man in Nature
Authors: Beagon Mary
Published: November 2023

Despite the limitations on c described in the last chapter, man’s central position in Pliny’s view of the cosmos remains in no doubt. The works of man as well as of Natura may be included in a description of mundus and it is the sculpture, paintings, and buildings of man rather than the natural materials themselves that dominate the last five books of the HN (Ch. I. 5). Man emerges as a partner of Natura; his works are worthy to be set beside those of the great artifex. Indeed, if all the public buildings of Rome were brought together in one place, it would seem that mundus alius had been created by man (36. 101).
Land and Sea
Authors: Beagon Mary
Published: November 2023

Animals in conflict represented for Pliny the idea of a fundamental struggle inherent in Natura. Naturae dimicatio, the conflict of nature, is also to be seen on a much larger scale in the unending conflict between the opposing elements, land and sea. In this struggle, the sea dominates, ’snatching’ and ‘devouring’ land: ‘Ocean … in its greedy progress (avido meatu), overwhelming all the lands which shrink in terror at its coming, washes also those which resist with a winding and broken coastline’ (3. 5). The sea ‘bursts in’ and •swallows up’ the breadth of the Peloponnesian peninsula at the Isthmus of Corinth (4. 9). Such encroachment may be seen as an instance of a ‘peculiar jealousy (invidia) on the part of Natura, which indulges the sea’s greed without any limit’ (6. 1). The land resists (invitis … terris), as is proved by the narrowness of the passages thus created (6. 2). The idea is best summed up in HN 2. 170 ff. Herc the inequality of the struggle is suggested, since the seas which ’encircle the globe and divide it in two, depriving us of half the world’ are vast beyond measure: ‘the holding owned by such a mighty mass is bound to be enormous and without limit’. While the sky, by creating uninhabitable zones, has ‘stolen’ three-quarters of the earth, ‘the extent of ocean’s pillage is uncertain’. In contrast, Pliny moralizes on the theme of earth’s insignificance (174, see 1. A. i).
Canons of Style in the Antonine Age
Authors: Rutherford Ian
Published: November 2023

The purpose of this study is to explore the relationship between literature and stylistic theory in the Antonine Age. The literature is the prose literature of the Second Sophistic and the stylistic theory is the so-called idea-theory set out in the Peri Ideon of Hermogenes of Tarsus, as well as two anonymous works: the Peri Politikou Logou and the Peri Aphelous Logou. The author discusses the relationship between idea-theory and sophistic declamation, the relative value attributed to prose and poetry, attitudes towards Xenophon and Demosthenes, and the reputation of Aelius Aristides. He concludes that the links between literary theory and literary practice are greater than previously imagined. A translation of the anonymous Peri Aphelous Logou (`On Plain Language') is included as an appendix. This has not previously been translated although it is the major source for the reception of Xenoephon in this period.
Metamorphosis in Greek Myths
Authors: Forbes Irving P M C
Published: November 2023

The transformation of human beings to animals, plants, and stones is one of the commonest, and most characteristic themes of Greek mythology. In the first study of the subject in English, Dr Forbes Irving examines what is of most interest in Greek myths - their appeal as stories. He attempts to analyse the various ways in which these stories imagine and explore what it means for a person to change his or her form.
Homer and the Telemachy, Circe and Calypso, The Phaeacians
Authors: Reinhardt K
Published: November 2023

Who was Homer? A fiction or a human being? One poet or two? Or a dozen? An original genius or an editor? The legendary head of a school of rhapsodes? The hero of popular stories about a ‘wandering minstrer? Is his name- ‘hostage\ ‘guarantor ‘, or ‘guild comrade ‘-a proper name or a generic one? And what are the Iliad and the Odyssey? Are they what the ancients thought they were? The work of the same poet in his prime and his old age? Or the legacy of a guild of rhapsodes? Of what time? Do they divide into smaller epics or into strata? Should we divide them, as it were, by vertical sections? Or strip them off each other, layer by layer? Mycenaean and geometric? Or products of different hands, styles, and temperaments? In order to reach the essential do we first have to free a central core from its wrappings? Did a second master builder alter the original work of a first? Are different plans interlocked? Did the whole epic originate from rhapsodic competitions? So many questions, so many answers. Apart from an isolated precursor in the seventeenth century, the Abbe d ‘Aubignac, the guessing, or the ‘Homeric question ‘, has been going on in uninterrupted succession since the end of our classical period, since the time of Herder, Christian Gottlob Heyne, Robert Wood, and especially Goethe ‘s friend Friedrich August Wolf and Goethe himself.
Introduction
Authors: Rowlandson Jane
Published: November 2023

The site of the ancient city of Oxyrhynchus lies some 180 km south of Cairo, at the junction between a desert route from the Small (Bahriya) Oasis and the major watercourse running along western edge of the Nile valley, the Bahr Yusuf. The town, called Permedjed in Egyptian, was already in Pharaonic times the centre of its administrative region (the Nineteenth nome). It had an important cult of Thoeris, the hippopotamus-goddess of childbirth, and later also a cult of the ‘sharp-nosed’ fish, the oxyrhynchos, from which the town derived its Greek name. Under Ptolemaic and Roman rule Oxyrhynchus became an increasingly important centre of regional administration, reaching a peak of prosperity in the Byzantine period. After the Arab conquest of Egypt it retained some significance, suffering a sharp decline only under the Mamelukes. The site of the ancient city was abandoned, but its impressive limestone ruins became a source of building material and lime for the remaining inhabitants of Bahnasa, the small town which now clings to the western bank of the Bahr Yusuf, and of the equally modest Sandafa al-Fâr on the opposite bank. Part of the site has also been covered in modern times by a cemetery.
Private Agricultural Tenancy and its Context
Authors: Rowlandson Jane
Published: November 2023

Agricultural tenancy may variously be viewed as an economic, social, or legal relationship; but the perspective offered by the papyri is primarily legal. Contracts of land lease, called in Greek misthoseis, are the most numerous single type of document used in this study. So far, 139 have been published from Oxyrhynchus dating between 30 BC and the end of the fourth century AD, with new examples constantly coming to light; this evidence can be supplemented by the related material in rent receipts and by references to leasing in letters and estate accounts. For this reason alone, the leases are likely to exert a marked influence on our picture of landholding in the nome. Sheer numbers of survival are, however, a poor guide to the original importance of a type of document, especially since many leases were valid for one year only. If the leases are to be taken as throwing significant light on agricultural conditions in Roman Egypt, this needs to be justified in detail. The main aim of this chapter is to argue that, while leases in Egypt often had a relatively circumscribed role of providing management or capital over very short terms for landlords who for some reason could not supply these needs themselves, the role of these contracts in Oxyrhynchus can be seen to expand, during the two centuries from the mid-first to the mid-third century AD, to represent the normal means by which the metropolitan landowners managed their land, by leasing it on a more long-term basis to local villagers.
Birth and Death
Authors: Parker Robert
Published: November 2023

Eclipses, earthquakes, and monstrous births are commonly seen by primitive peoples as fearful portents. The fact is well known, and easy enough to understand; these are phenomena that disrupt nature’s normal, observable course. It is at first sight more paradoxical that the most intimately natural of all experiences - begetting, birth and death - should also be seen by people living close to nature as potent sourses of impurity and danger. Religious teachers and philosophers have rejected the world of coming-to-be and passing-away with scorn. One might suppose their stance the late product of speculation, a kind of estrangement from nature, but the restrictions that hedge around the natural processes throughout the world suggest that it has deeper roots. Almost any book of exotic travels, any ethnographic study will tell of the perils of sexuality and fertility, and the monstrous impurity of the corpse. This vast diffusion does not mean that the phenomenon is readily understood; on the contrary, it is one of those universals or near universals that are often taken to be comprehensible merely because they are common, and that prove under investigation too deep-seated, diverse, or complex for any simple or single explanation. The same impurities take on in different cultures very different significance. In Hinduism, the uncleanness to which the body is liable provides a theoretical basis for the caste structure, since the lower castes are rendered impure by washing the laundry, cutting the hair, and tending the corpses of the higher. In Zoroastrianism, by contrast, the implications of impurity are not social but cosmic; it is a weapon of the evil principle Ahriman in his unceasing struggle with the creator, Ohrmazd Belief in the body’s impurity may be a phenomenon, like animal sacrifice, about which little can usefully be said in general terms.
Purifying The City
Authors: Parker Robert
Published: November 2023

It was noted earlier that there was, in Greek belief, no such thing as non-contagious religious danger. Some dangers were more commonly seen as communicable by contact, while others rather threatened the guilty party’s descendants; but the difference was one of degree rather than of kind. Every member of any community, therefore, in principle lived under threat of suffering for his neighbours’ offences. The ways in which divine anger against a community could be expressed were diverse. At the beginning of Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus, Thebes is afflicted in three ways - the crops have failed, women and animals cannot bring forth their young, and plague is raging. This is a typical situation that constantly recurs both in myth and in the Greeks’ own perception of historical reality. The name for this whole complex of disasters is loimos, which is thus much broader than ‘plague’ by which it is commonly rendered. It could be called down against the violator of an oath, or its opposite besought in prayer. But though divine anger was typically expressed through disturbances of the natural order such as these (storms too are often mentioned), it might also be the ultimate cause of events readily explicable on the human level. Civil strife and military failure are commonly associated with loimos; the Spartan setbacks in the Archidamian war had a religious origin, and the anger of Zeus Xenios against Paris was fulfilled through the Greek expedition against Troy. Moving passages in Hesiod and Aeschylus contrast afflictions of all these kinds with an ideal picture of the good life that a righteous community may enjoy.
Epilogue
Authors: Parker Robert
Published: November 2023

This book has not been a history; the evidence for significant change in attitudes to pollution is too sparse. If we look forward briefly beyond the fourth century, we still find more evidence for continuity than transformation. One familiar figure does, it is true, seem to disappear, that of the polluted murderer. Little is known at all about the legal and social responses to homicide in this period, but it is probable that, if pollution had been much spoken of, it would in some way have intruded upon the sources. The function of ‘purification’, or the restoration of normality by a positive and public act, had been taken over by legal process, and it gradually ceased to be necessary to think of the killer as significantly different from any other malefactor whose offences were dealt with by the courts. Something similar can perhaps be observed in respect of certain forms of sacrilege. In historical times, cutting sacred wood no longer evokes a savage punishment from the gods, as it does in myth, but a comparatively modest fine.1a The gods could afford to be more lenient because they now had precinct governors who provided effective practical protection for their groves.
Cicero’s Translations from Greek
Authors: Powell J G F
Published: November 2023

A number of passages in Cicero’s philosophical works are translated directly from Greek. Apart from this, Cicero devotes considerable attention to the problems of rendering individual Greek words and concepts in Latin. In this chapter I shall examine these two aspects of Cicero’s literary activity, with a view to enabling the reader to assess more accurately Cicero’s contribution to the development of the Latin language as a medium for the expression of abstract thought. I do not aim to provide a commentary on the translated passages or to catalogue in detail every item in Cicero’s philosophical vocabulary, but merely to identify the central issues and suggest some possible lines of thought about them.
Cicero the Historian and Cicero the Antiquarian
Authors: Rawson Elizabeth
Published: November 2023

Cicero’s views on history and historians, and his general conceptions of the past, have received a good deal of attention - some, most recently, in Rambaud’s short book Ciceron et l’Histoire Romaine; but his historical practice has had less consideration. True, practically every passage in which he refers to an event of the past has been somewhere thoroughly elucidated, and the sources to which he turned in any particular work have been investigated by a crowd of commentators. But the general accounts of Cicero’s knowledge of and relation to the historiographical tradition of his time are either antiquated or disappointing, and estimates of Cicero’s scholarship range from the enthusiastic admiration displayed, but hardly justified, by most recent writers, to the contempt of older ones, most extravagantly Munzer, who stigmatized the De senectute as a historical fantasy, or Zingler, who even accused Cicero of inventing his exempla.
Scipio, Laelius, Furius, and the Ancestral Religion
Authors: Rawson Elizabeth
Published: November 2023

In the anxieties of the Second Punic War the Romans sought divine aid alike from new Greek and even oriental cults and from ancient Italian rites. But in the subsequent decades a deeper-and to some extent a disenchanted-knowledge of Greece and things Greek combined with the nationalistic pride of a conquering people (and one already committed to reverence of its ancestors) to create a new consciousness of the Roman religious tradition, and of the need to keep it free from the contamination of foreign cults-or foreign scepticism. In 186 BC the Bacchanals were suppressed, and in 181 the books of Numa; in 161 philosophers and rhetors were expelled; either in 173 or 154 two Epicureans were thrown out of Rome by a consul, L. Postumius; in I 5 5 the embassy of the Athenian philosophers caused some concern; and in 139 Chaldaeans (astrologers) and possibly Jews were banned by the praetor and Xvir, Cn. Cornelius Scipio Hispanus. The new Latin-writing historians of the period, Cato and after him the so-called early annalists, Cassius Hemina and Pisa, recorded and explained ancient rites in a doubtless unsystematic fashion, but probably more fully than their predecessors who used the Greek language. And it appears that some time around the middle of the century a Lex Plaetoria may have set up IIviri to restore the decrepit altars of traditional cults.
The Interpretation of Cicero’s De legibus
Authors: Rawson Elizabeth
Published: November 2023

Cicero is not usually thought of as an enigmatic author. His style is generally full and explicit; he is sufficiently self–conscious to explain in detail his intentions in writing many of his literary works, which also often act as mutual commentaries. But the De legibus forms the exception; uncertain in date, debated as to its sources, fragmentary in preservation, ignored, it seems, both in the letters and the other treatises, in parts oracular and mock–archaic in style (and, partly as a result, seriously corrupt in text), it poses innumerable problems. As a result, too many students of its author bypass it altogether, or devote to it only a few conventional words; and though it has recently had a fair amount of special attention devoted to it, and has been edited several times, it is depressing to see how little solid advance has been made in the last hundred years, since Vahlen’s edition laid the basis for the text and the last full commentary was made by A. du Mesnil. All too often, since then, good ideas have been dropped, while new ones have been wrong-headed.
Religion and Politics In the Late Second Century BC at Rome
Authors: Rawson Elizabeth
Published: November 2023

Polybius and Cicero, in well-known passages, assert the importance of religion in Roman public life; 1 and the ways in which the nobility controlled and used religion for political ends have been amply demonstrated for the period where our evidence is fullest, the first century BC. It is very hard to suppose that their predecessors were not attempting to do the same thing in the late second century, an age of vital political struggles. But though the social and political aspects of the Senated’s objection to the influx of oriental religions, and also to the growth of scepticism, have been noted, and the importance of the leges Aelia et Fufia, by which obnuntiatio was extended for use against tribunes, has not been overlooked, the part which religion played in the political debate from about 135, and its place in the programme of optimate or popularis propagandists, have not been studied in detail.