Curio’s six lictors with laureled fasces (Cic. Att. 10.4.9) are best explained by his holding command in 49 BC not as Caesar’s legatus, but pro praetore with imperium nominally in his own right, granted (‘extra-constitutionally’) by Caesar directly, without vote of Senate and People.

This essay develops a concept of curiotization, through which people are reduced to a curio for the fascination of others. I argue that trans people as they have appeared in media, philosophy, and narratives of history are curiotized as forever fascinating, new, titillating, and controversial. In contrast to the narrative of momentous trans progress in the mid-2010s, I point out that frameworks such as the "Transgender Tipping Point" worked to position its "trans moment" as unprecedented and always on the (...) threshold of arrival. To work through a specific example, I point to decades of renewed fascination over trans women being capable of breastfeeding and the long history of trans fascination in popular music. I conclude by emphasizing the obscured world-historical presence of transsexuality as it coincides with the history of pharmaceuticals, hormone technologies, and birth control. In contrast to a "goldfish memory optics" through which trans people become eternally new, fascinating, and debatable, I stress the importance of restoring the complexity of "trans" and its histories back into an understanding of the present. (shrink)

There are curios for sale in a vacant lot: an armless mannequin next to a gramophone, bedsprings lie before a group of children who, playing, hold hands. There is a lamp suspended from a tree and a man sitting at a Louis Quinze table that stands in the open air. Clothes flap from a clothesline aboard a barge like flapping sails or even like discarded skins. In Georges Franju’s film Le Sang des bêtes/Blood of the Beasts, the violence of “displacement” (...) is seen in the juxtaposition of out-of-place curios in the vacant lot and the dismemberment of bodies in the slaughterhouse. In the slaughterhouse, a horse’s head is cleaved with a mallet. The shock of the blow, like a burst or surge of energy, gives way to the... (shrink)

The verb κενόω means ‘to empty’ and St. Paul uses the word ἐκένωσεν writing that ‘Jesus made himself nothing’ and ‘emptied himself’. Śūnyatā is a Buddhist concept most commonly translated as emptiness, nothingness, or nonsubstantiality. An important kenosis–śūnyatā discussion was sparked by Abe Masao’s paper ‘Kenotic God and Dynamic Śūnyatā’. I confront the kenosis–śūnyatā theme with Vattimo’s kenosis-based philosophy of religion. For Vattimo, kenosis refers to ‘secularization’: when strong structures such as the essence and the fulfilment of the Christian message (...) are weakened. Parallels between Abe’s and Vattimo’s thought will be demonstrated with regard to themes current in East–West comparative philosophy: reality and emptiness, the overcoming of metaphysics, the position of the Self, the human and the divine, and the relationship between science and religion. The latter point is particularly timely because since the 1990s religious fundamentalism has pushed forward a curio.. (shrink)

"Most entries are brief and nontechnical in nature, highlighting useful philosophical terms rather than trendy ones. Placing his emphasis on living philosophy, Bunge deliberately excludes many of the archaic terms and philosophical curios of other dictionaries.

Among the difficulties in Propertius is the question whether to retain ‘cecinit’ in 3. 3. 7 or to adopt the conjecture ‘cecini’. Propertius dreamed that he was reclining upon Helicon in a grove by Hippocrene and that he was able to compose a Roman historical epic: Visus eram molli recubans Heliconis in umbra, Bellerophontei qua fluit umor equi, Reges, Alba, tuos et regum facta tuorum neruis hiscere posse meis, Paruaque tam magnis admoram fontibus ora Vnde pater sitiens Ennius ante bibit, (...) Et cecinit Curios fratres et Horatia pila Regiaque Aemilia uecta tropaea rate Victricesque moras Fabii pugnamque sinistram Cannensem et uersos ad pia uota deos Hannibalemque Lares Romana sede fugantes, Anseris et tutum uoce fuisse Iouem, Cum me Castalia speculans ex arbore Phoebus Sic ait… According to the paradosis 7–12 constitute a summary of Ennius' Annales. In that I case Propertius' failure to observe historical sequence is peculiar; nor is it defended securely by I supposedly parallel passages. More damaging, however, is that 8 must describe the triumph of L. Aemilius Paullus in 167, two years after the accepted date of Ennius' death. Hertzberg and Postgate claimed that it alludes to the defeat of Demetrius of I Pharos by a L. Aemilius Paullus in 219 ; this is unlikely for some of the same reasons as the rival theory of Butler and Barber, which has found many adherents, that it refers to the victory over Antiochus' navy by L. Aemilius Regillus at Myonnesus in 190. (shrink)

Dr. Rice Holmes has thrown a flood of light on innumerable passages in Caesar's Commentaries, but in one small matter he has, as I hope to show, darkened counsel. In his recent work on the Roman Republic and the founder of the Empire his anxiety to retain the MSS. reading III. in Caesar , ‘Mittit … in Siciliam Curionem pro praetore cum legionibus III.,’ leads him to pervert or neglect the plain meaning of other passages in Caesar. He holds that (...) ‘Curio was not sent to Sicily with any legions,’ and that the ‘Domitian cohorts,’ which Caesar says he sent to Sicily straightway from Corfinium, are identical with the three legions which Caesar says he sent with Curio from Brundisium. Dr. Holmes believes that this was what Caesar really meant, though he expressed himself loosely. Let us see how it agrees with Caesar's other statements. (shrink)

"It is impossible for me to write about the imagination; it is like asking a fish to describe the sea," Ruefle announces before proceeding to do just that. Marshaling Wittgenstein, Jane Goodall, Gertrude Stein, Jesus, and Emily Dickinson, alongside Ukrainian Easter egg dyeing traditions and teddy bear tea parties, Ruefle presents a curio cabinet of the human imagination's boundless forms.

Of the four surviving fragments of Varius' De Morte1 perhaps the most widely discussed has been the first: Vendidit hie Latium populis agrosque Quiritum eripuit, fixit leges pretio atque refixit This is imitated by Virgil, whose Sibyl says of a soul in Tartarus: Vendidit hie auro patriam dominumque potentem imposuit; fixit leges pretio atque refixit Most commentators, quoting Cic. Phil. 12.5.12, connect both passages exclusively with Antony, and rightly point to Servius' words on v. 622, ‘possumus Antonium accipere’. What should (...) be stressed, however, is that Servius also thinks the words ‘vendidit hie auro patriam’ have a general reference, but are at the same time designed to recall historical individuals, of whom he names two: etiam haec licet generaliter dicantur, habent tamen specialitatem: nam Lasthenes Olynthum Philippo vendidit, Curio Caesari XXVII. S. Romam: de quo Lucanus Gallorum captus spoliis et Caesaris auro. (shrink)

Between the fall of the Soviet Union and the fall of Lehman Brothers, if the Anglophone academy could be said to have arrived at any consensus about the value of Marxist theory, it would be that Marxism was a quaint historical curio at best and a world-historically hubristic folly at worst. Today, however, well on our way through the first quarter of the twenty-first century, we live in a moment of greatly renewed interest in Marxist ideas. This curiosity is (...) stoked by, among other factors, the worldwide economic shocks of 2008 and, in more recent times, by impending climate catastrophe, incipient fascisticization, and the still-ongoing global COVID-19 pandemic. Any of these on its own would stand out as a rebuke to the neoliberal triumphalism of the 1990s, famously crystallized in Francis Fukayama's assertion that humanity had arrived at "the end of history," there to find permanently expanding capitalist prosperity. Taken together, they present at least strong prima facie evidence for what Karl Marx identified as the inherently and ineluctably crisis-ridden nature of capital and, therefore, good reason to encounter his writings anew. (shrink)

Asconius 63 , commenting on the pro Cornelio: Fuerunt enim plures Quinti Metelli, ex quibus duo consulares, Pius et Creticus, de quibus apparet eum non dicere, duo autem adulescentes, Nepos et Celer, ex quibus nunc Nepotem significat. Eius enim patrem Q.Metellum Nepotem, Baliarici filium, Macedonici nepotem qui consul fuit cum T. Didio, Curio is de quo loquitur accusavit … Cicero and his scholiast refer to ‘duo Metelli, Celer et Nepos’ but like Asconius do not specify their relationship. Celer himself, (...) followed by Cicero in correspondence with him, calls Nepos his frater, but since both bore the praenomen Q., this cannot be the whole story. Celer's career shows that he was the elder, yet Nepos senior, according to Asconius, entrusted his feud with Curio not to him but to Nepos iunior. (shrink)