In Memoriam Ed. Champlin

In this article, I argue that fictional stories about the Roman emperor are a fruitful avenue for excavating a multifaceted discourse about the sole ruler of the Roman world, who, in this case, is Tiberius. Edward Champlin, who worked on anecdotes about Tiberius in the last decade or so, attributes these negative impressions of the emperors to the pen of a single author (i.e. M. Servilius Nonianus). This argument, I argue, sells the wider meaning of these stories short. The anecdotes themselves are windows into a wider discourse about how the emperor seemed to his subjects. Fictitious or true, such stories inform imaginations about who Tiberius was seen to be, which make these the stories historically relevant. We must both embrace these stories as relevant historical evidence for how Roman emperors were scrutinized and criticized and recognize them as a crucial part of Roman understandings of who the emperor was.

This paper reasserts that the narrative of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter is logically coherent, contrary to the common belief among scholars who often claim that the actions of Demeter herself in Eleusis are unmotivated. I argue on the contrary that the narrative of the Eleusis Episode can clearly be seen to be motivated in two regards: firstly, in terms of the intentions of the poet, who is demonstrably deploying and skilfully intertwining traditional story patterns of hospitality and wrathful withdrawal, the extent of which has previously not been fully realized; and secondly, aspects of the in-world motivation of Demeter as a character have been overlooked by past scholarship. The analysis of these aspects of the Hymn’s narrative reveals the poet’s skill in harmonizing the internal and external motivations when creating an innovative version of the myth which seems to differ from other known versions.

The gladius hispaniensis was the quintessential weapon of the Roman Republican legionary. Yet the date and mechanisms of its adoption are not fully understood. It will be argued, utilizing both the archaeological and literary record, that it was adopted and spread rapidly throughout the Roman army during the Hannibalic War, becoming a key element of the Roman armament in their wars of expansion in the second century bce. The rapidity of its adoption explains why it entered the literary record, why it was specifically associated with Spain, and why it was feared amongst the Greeks and Macedonians.

This paper considers the processes that contributed to the creation of an Athenian red-figure rhyton in the form of an Amazon, signed by the potter Sotades, which was excavated in Nubia in 1921. Despite its secure archaeological provenance, the rhyton has not played a significant role in studies of trade or intercultural interaction because its unusual form and iconography – it features images of Persians defeating Greeks in battle – seemingly make it exceptional. Yet these features are best explained as the result of a feedback loop of information between Sotades and his Persian customers, relayed by merchants. This information was distorted, translated, and perhaps even manipulated in the course of transmission, which contributed to the rhyton’s unusual appearance. Thus the rhyton does not represent a special circumstance, but rather is the culmination of a sustained period of tenuous yet persistent links between Sotades’ workshop in Athens and Persians living in Egypt.

The place of hippocamps in the Graeco-Roman cultural imagination was highly uneven, as they appeared prominently in visual media, but were exceedingly rare in ancient literary sources. Hippocamps can be demonstrated to be a mythological creature wholly derived from art, but which never prominently made a transition into narrative storytelling. These half-horse, half-marine animals were, then, accompanied, from the Hellenistic period onwards, by a series of other marine Mischwesen (‘mixed beings’), a grouping that I demonstrate to be related to the sea monster of the ancient world, the κῆτος (pl. κήτη). This article further examines this grouping of imaginary animals as a case study to consider the imaginative construction of such figures as a result of cultural assumptions about nature, rather than mere misapprehensions of real animals alone. In this case, it is the notion that the undersea world was essentially reflective of the terrestrial world, containing such ‘sea versions’ of land mammals.

The article considers unity and its counterpart, digression, as themes within Pindar’s own poetry, rather than a ‘problem’ for criticism to ‘solve’. The article considers Pindar’s treatment of action, time, and place (the so-called ‘Aristotelian unities’) alongside the modern critical concept of deixis (temporal, spatial, and person deixis). The property of indexical statements of being centred on a certain person, place, or time (‘me’, ‘here’, ‘now’; ‘him’, ‘there’, ‘then’) makes them naturally conducive to the creation of centripetal or centrifugal dynamics in a Pindaric ode, according to whether the implied deictic centre is constant or variable. It is argued that an important way of understanding Pindaric unity is as a complex equilibrium and counterpointing of competing and complementary principles of centripetalism and centrifugalism, not only acting within and across the areas of action, time, place, and person, but also observable in Pindar’s handling of grammatical, metrical, and thematic structures.

Urban redevelopment creates winners and losers. The monuments of ancient Rome are visually impressive, but they often overlie residential areas. Many Greek and Latin authors eulogize feats of construction, but others express uneasiness about, even hostility to, such works. While the double-edged sword of urban development in contemporary cities continues to be the focus of intense scrutiny, scholarship on the Roman world predominantly emphasizes the positive aspects of monumental architecture – baths, forums, temples, entertainment complexes. Yet what was the impact of these large structures on the people who actually lived around them? What was the opposition to such projects? Questioning the assumption that ‘public’ buildings necessarily benefit the ‘public’, this paper examines the harmful side of building activity in antiquity.

This article is a response to Thomas Harrison’s lively thesis that atheism in ancient Greece is not a historical reality but ‘fundamentally, a scholarly mirage’. Repurposing and updating the arguments from the influential work of Lucien Febvre, The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century, Harrison reasons that atheism could not have emerged in the age of Socrates and Plato: all we have from this period are empty accusations of atheism, a religious mentality which was incompatible with total unbelief, and a society in which religion dominated every sphere of personal and public life. This article, conversely, will argue that Greek atheism was a reality: in the fifth century bce and beyond, there were some Athenians who believed in no gods at all. Reasoning from the testimony of atheism in Plato’s Republic and the Laws, and also the intellectual and social conditions of Classical Athens, it will be argued that atheism probably had some limited currency in the upper classes of Athens as a life option. Along the way, the article will assess the merits of applying Febvre’s thesis to an ancient society and identify some of its flaws in the terminological ambiguities it can create.

This article focuses on Aeneid 7.475−510, in which the killing of a tame deer sets off the war between the newly-arrived Trojans and the native Latins. It situates the story within Vergil’s larger narrative of colonization and reads it in conjunction with other trials and conflicts over the killing of deer in colonial America. Deer occupy a liminal space between wilderness and domestication, and stories about deer from colonial contexts share similarities that raise questions about the colonial experience and highlight the complexity of encounters between colonizing forces, local inhabitants, and the natural environment.

Kalos-inscriptions identify historical individuals, gods, heroes, even horses, as objects of amorous attention in Athens in the sixth and fifth centuries bce. Missing from catalogues of kalos names is an inscription on a bell-krater attributed to a painter in the Group of Polygnotos and dated to c. 440–430 bce. This vase, now lost to the art market, shows the Return of Hephaistos and includes the misspelled phrase ΚΑΛΟΣ ΗΦΑΡΣΤΟΣ. In this brief article, I re-present this vase and offer possible avenues for its interpretation. I argue that the vase can contribute to discussions of kalos-inscriptions, the characterization of the god Hephaistos, and the relationship between Athens and Hephaistos in the fifth century bce.

This article traces how changes in the depiction of atimia (loss of honour/citizen rights) in Athenian tragedy provide crucial information for understanding how the actual punishment evolved in the fifth century. Scholarship on the term has long agreed that the archaic personal form of atimia differed from the legal version of the fourth century, but has failed to explain why and when that change occurred. The tragedians’ discussion of atimia reveals when the punishment took on its legal aspects and how its scope expanded after the restoration of democracy at Athens, when the Four Hundred were declared traitors and atimoi.

The Cynics, especially Diogenes of Sinope, reportedly enjoyed ‘leisure’ (σχολή) even as they recommended toilsome ‘training’ (ἄσκησις). This paper aims to show that these seemingly opposite motifs are, in fact, closely interrelated, and that ‘leisure’ has implications for the whole scheme of Cynicism that have previously been overlooked. We can understand the connection between these motifs in two ways: first, what drives one to engage in unceasing labour is excessive desire, from which Cynic training frees one, bringing about leisure; second, Cynic leisure is always open to the outside world; it functions as a provocative performance that can, albeit occasionally, urge potential Cynics towards training.

I argue that the scenes featuring Briseis and Xanthus in Iliad 19 are closely parallel. Each features a speech from an unexpected source, previously constructed in the epic not as a character but as a valued possession. The audience’s brief access to their fresh perspectives is soon curtailed by the recentring of Achilles’ corresponding speech and familiar point of view, and the enslaved woman and the horse are subsequently relegated to their former object status. These scenes form part of a broader pattern as a private counterpart to the public exchanges that constitute the Greek assembly. Together, the paired speeches throughout Book 19 produce a significant accumulation of unresolved tensions that underlie the superficial consensus of action and mark the limitations of Achilles’ reintegration into the community. It is this dynamic, I suggest, that unifies the book and defines its primary function in the epic.

This paper interrogates the paradox of military leadership in the Athenian democracy within the analytical framework of mass and elite political negotiation. Although the stratēgia (the Athenian generalship) was filled by election rather than by democratic lottery, thereby privileging wealthy, notable citizens as candidates for office, the institution simultaneously incorporated robust democratic oversight and availed the dēmos of benefits that attended the personal networks of the Athenian elite. Building on seminal works on the stratēgia, the paper demonstrates that the seemingly undemocratic selection of generals was, in fact, a deliberate mechanism that not only harnessed elite expertise but also allowed the dēmos to leverage the personal ties (xenia and philia) and foreign resources of the men they elected as generals. I argue that the stratēgia should not be understood simply as an exception to democratic ideals but as a sophisticated institution that balanced elite capacity and claims to honours with both public oversight and public benefaction.

The assassination of Hasdrubal in 221 bc created a power vacuum in Carthaginian leadership, echoing the crisis that followed Hamilcar’s death eight years earlier. Yet Hannibal’s subsequent appointment has attracted surprisingly limited attention in modern scholarship. This article reconsiders the event as the result of converging forces: a military command in search of stability, an aristocracy negotiating legitimacy, and a republic striving to preserve institutional continuity. Through an integrated analysis of education and politics, it contends that Hannibal’s elevation illustrates the capacity of Hellenistic Carthage to manage crisis through a calibrated balance of formation, tradition, and collective authority.

What happens if we translate polutropos in the first line of Homer’s Odyssey as ‘much-travelling’? The result is Jonathan Burgess’ comprehensive and compelling exploration of The Travels of Odysseus.1 By centring the theme of travel in Odysseus’ character and story, Burgess brings together the diverse parts of the multifaceted Odyssey and brings them into conversation with the Iliad, the Cyclic Nostoi, and Telegony, and comparable narratives of heroes such as Gilgamesh, Heracles, Perseus, Bellerophon, and Jason. It is a thematic study, then, that does not confine but rather reaches out and forges new and valuable connections, certainly across the Homeric and non-Homeric epic traditions but also across genres and cultures. The emergence of ‘travel writing’ that we can see in, for instance, Herodotus, Xenophon, or Pliny’s Natural Histories is tracked back to the Odyssey, the stories of the Argonauts, or the Egyptian Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor.

Seneca’s creative reworkings of earlier Latin and Greek literature are by now an essential part of his scholarly treatment. This article identifies a heretofore unrecognized component of his method of conceiving literary reception: vomit. Given the negative moralistic associations of vomit in Latin literature – including in Seneca’s own corpus – the repurposing of vomit as part of a normative theory of reception may come as a surprise, but close attention to the Apocolocyntosis, Ep. 108, and Ep. 84 reveals a serious Senecan engagement with the image of vomit as reception, helps shed light on some absent presences within Seneca’s texts, and adds complexity to our understanding of the trope of ‘textual digestion’.

Introducing newcomers to Latin literature and its history is an important aim, which Laurel Fulkerson and Jeffrey Tatum achieve amazingly well in their ambitious history of Latin literature ‘from its beginnings to the age of Augustus’.1 They provide a thoughtful and exciting introduction to the key genres and texts up to and including the Augustan age: the beginnings of Latin literature; Republican drama; oratory and rhetoric; the ‘personal voice’ in satire, Catullus’ poetry and Cicero’s letters; didactic literature; history and biography; Augustan love poetry; Augustan epic; and the Augustan ‘personal’ poetry of Vergil’s Eclogues, the works of Horace, and Ovid’s exile poetry. The writing is lively and clearly conveys the authors’ passion. I particularly liked the fact that the chapters include discussion of individual lines and phrases, to give readers an idea of the sound, rhythm, and style of the language. Another thread that runs through the volume is the way Latin literature developed through a dialogue with Greek texts, and how later authors kept shaping it in a reaction to both their Greek and Latin predecessors. A number of useful ‘sidebars’ (that appear at the end of each chapter, though) provide introductions to basic concepts such as Roman nomenclature, Latin metre, slavery in Rome, Callimachus’ Aetia, or the civil wars, followed by recommendations for ‘further readings’, of both primary texts in English translation and some key secondary literature, commendably containing a section of a few crucial works in languages other than English. A timeline of historical events and the lives of key Roman authors, maps, and a glossary provide further orientation for readers with no prior knowledge. The only aspect that I thought should have received a bit more attention is the transmission of Latin literature and the role of textual criticism, which would have provided more background, e.g. for the discussion of an important textual variant in the proem of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Otherwise, I very much enjoyed this lucid and intriguing account of Latin literature up to the age of Augustus and hope that it will reach many newcomers as well as students of Latin – and that Fulkerson and Tatum, or others, will soon undertake the task of writing a follow-up volume on imperial Latin literature.

The books reviewed here offer a chance to look right across our discipline and each subfield’s priorities and approaches. Sometimes, from the perspective of another, these can seem quite alien though there are also common preoccupations. I trace some of those oddities and commonalties here, not at all as a criticism of any of these authors or their disciplines, but as a reflection on the variety of ancient visual and material studies today.

Ritual caves emitting poisonous gases were known in Asia Minor as Charonia. Greek Charon and the Canaanite god Hauron, a cave-dweller and lord of the netherworld, shared similar clusters of cultural characteristics. It is probable that during the archaic period the cult of Hauron-Horon arrived in Asia Minor and gave rise to the cult of Charon. Although the mephitic cave at Acharaca is no longer extant, the combination of literary, geological, and toxicological data suggests that the poisonous gas emitted at this Charonium was hydrogen sulphide. The sulphurous cave at Acharaca was used for two types of initiations, differing from each other in terms of their location in the cave and duration. Acharaca offers a unique example of a complex, two-fold initiatory cult based on an extreme ritual that made use of both olfactory effects and the chemical properties of poisonous gas.