The contributions to this volume, which take into account literary, visual, and other types of evidence, show that animals and humans in Graeco-Roman antiquity are interconnected on a variety of different levels and that their encounters and interac.

This article examines the dog-like aspects and associations of two marine monsters of Graeco-Roman antiquity: Scylla and the κῆτος. Both harbour recognizably canine features in their depictions in ancient art, as well as being referenced as dogs or possessing dog-like attributes in ancient texts. The article argues that such distinctly canine elements are related to, and probably an extension of, the conceptualization of certain marine animals, most prominently sharks, as ‘sea dogs’. Accordingly, we should understand these two sea (...) monsters and the sea dogs as being interrelated in the ancient imagination. Such a canine resonance to certain sea creatures offers a valuable insight into the Graeco-Roman imagination of the marine element as being the abode of creatures reminiscent of terrestrial dogs. (shrink)

Resumen: Para reconstruir el pasado de Europa, los cronistas medievales debieron recurrir a un cúmulo de textos narrativos de origen griego y romano, atiborrados de elementos de carácter mitológico, dioses y héroes. En el presente artículo exponemos el proceso de evemerismo empleado por esos clérigos cristianos para depurar doctrinalmente la historia antigua. El análisis de las crónicas universales redactadas en el siglo XII muestra la construcción de un discurso narrativo basado en un rico lenguaje compuesto de sustantivos, adjetivos y sus (...) derivados adverbiales, tendiente a desacreditar la veracidad de la mitología clásica.: In order to reconstruct Europe’s past, the medieval chroniclers had to resort to a series of narrative texts of Greek and Roman origin, which were full of mythological elements, gods and heroes. In this paper we present the process of euhemerism used by these Christian clerics to doctrinally purify ancient history. The analysis of the universal chronicles written in the XII century reveals the construction of a narrative discourse based upon a rich language composed of nouns, adjectives and adverbs, with the purpose of discrediting the veracity of classical mythology. (shrink)

Poetry and mathematics might seem to be worlds apart. Nevertheless, a number of Greek and Roman poets incorporated counting and calculation within their verses. Setting the work of authors such as Callimachus, Catullus and Archimedes in dialogue with the less well-known isopsephic epigrams of Leonides of Alexandria and the anonymous arithmetical poems preserved in the Palatine Anthology, the book reveals the various roles that number played in ancient poetry. Focussing especially on counting and arithmetic, Max Leventhal demonstrates how the (...) discussion, rejection or enacting of these two operations was bound up with wider conceptions of the nature of poetry. Practices of composing, reading, interpreting and critiquing poetry emerge in these texts as having a numerical component. The result is an illuminating new way of approaching Greek and Latin poetry – and one that reaches across modern disciplinary divisions. (shrink)

Everyday Writing in the Graeco-Roman East. By Roger S. Bagnall. Sather Classical Lectures, vol. 69. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2011. Pp. xiv + 179, illus. $49.95.

In the twenty-eighth book of the Naturalis Historia Pliny the Elder claims that, if a chameleon’s left leg is roasted together with a herb bearing the same name, and everything is mixed with ointment, cut in lozenges, and stored in a wooden little box, this will bestow on those who own it a perfect camouflage. The ring of Gyges (Plato, etc.), that of Midas (Pliny), the heliotropium (Pliny), the dracontitis (Philostratus): ancient cultures abound with references to objects, recipes, and techniques (...) able to bestow different kinds of invisibility, meant as a perfect resemblance with the environment. At the same time, these same cultures also teem with references to how to avert the perfect camouflage: for instance, by being endowed with a pupula duplex, a double pupil (Ovid).The paper explores such vast corpus of texts from the point of view of a semiotics of cultures, in order to track the roots of a conception of camouflage that, from these ancient cultures on, develops through intricate paths into the contemporary imaginaires (and practices) of invisibility.The paper’s more general goal is to understand the way in which cultures elaborate conceptions of invisibility meant as the perfect resemblance between humans and their environments, often on the basis of the observation of the same resemblance between other living beings and their habitat. Ancient texts aretherefore focused on in order to decipher the passage from camouflage as an adaptive natural behaviour to camouflage as an effective combat strategy. (shrink)

Cet ouvrage est issu d’un colloque organisé lors du mois de juillet 2014 à Ioannina en Grèce. Il est constitué de quatorze chapitres rédigés en anglais par différents contributeurs et répartis en trois sections de manière à mettre en exergue une série d’approches thématiques distinctes mais complémentaires. La première partie (ch. 1–5 : Discourses, Legitimacy, Charisma) s’intéresse aux processus de créations par les élites gouvernantes de messages politiques invoquant des éléments appartenant...

Vittorio Cotesta's Eurasian Visions of the World traces the origin of the images of the world typical of the Graeco-Roman, Ancient Chinese and Medieval Islamic civilisations. Each of them had its own peculiar way of understanding the universe, life, death, society, power, humanity and its destiny. The comparative analysis carried out here suggests that they all shared a common human aspiration despite their differences: human being is unique; differences are details which enrich its image. Today, the traditions derived (...) from these civilisations are often in competition and conflict. Reference to a common vision of humanity as a shared universal entity should lead, instead, to a quest for understanding and dialogue. (shrink)

Vittorio Cotesta's Eurasian Visions of the World traces the origin of the images of the world typical of the Graeco-Roman, Ancient Chinese and Medieval Islamic civilisations. Each of them had its own peculiar way of understanding the universe, life, death, society, power, humanity and its destiny. The comparative analysis carried out here suggests that they all shared a common human aspiration despite their differences: human being is unique; differences are details which enrich its image. Today, the traditions derived (...) from these civilisations are often in competition and conflict. Reference to a common vision of humanity as a shared universal entity should lead, instead, to a quest for understanding and dialogue. (shrink)

Chinese and Graeco-Roman ethics influence modern philosophy, yet it is unclear how to compare them. Clustered around the concepts of life and the good life, this volume offers a comparative analysis of the core concepts of both traditions: human nature, virtue, happiness, pleasure, the concept of mind, knowledge, filial piety and deliberation. It is thus an essential contribution to comparative ethics as regards both content and method.

We have extremely strong reasons for supposing that the exposure of infants, very often resulting in death, was common in many different parts of the Roman Empire, and that it had considerable demographic, economic and psychological effects. The evidence for the first of these propositions has been reviewed or alluded to in several recent publications.1 However, a thorough new study, covering the whole of Greek and Roman antiquity, would be worth while. In the meantime Donald Engels has declared (...) that in the Greek and Roman worlds the exposure of children was ‘of negligible importance’ , 112–20). (shrink)

This volume provides the reader with the substantial evidence, presented here for the first time in a chronological manner, of the essential place that Dionysus occupied in Greek and Roman political thought. The eleven chapters that make up the volume are authored by an interdisciplinary team of scholars (including four top specialists in the field, Cornelia Isler-Kerényi, Richard Seaford, Richard Stoneman and Jean-Marie Pailler) and cover the period from archaic Greece to the late Roman empire. The reader can (...) therefore observe how the political ideas and motifs rooted in Greek classical thought were continued, adapted, and developed in successive periods of history. The contributors reconstruct the political significance of Dionysus by examining different kinds of evidence: historiography, poetry, coins, epigraphy, art, and philosophy. They discuss the place of the god in the politics of Greek city-states, explore the long tradition of imitating Dionysus that ancient leaders, from Alexander the Great to the Roman emperors, manifested in various ways, as well as demonstrate how the political role of Dionysus was reflected in Orphism and Neoplatonist philosophy. Dionysus and Politics provides an excellent introduction to a fundamental feature of ancient political thought which until now has been largely neglected by mainstream academia. The book will be an invaluable resource to students and scholars interested in ancient politics and religion. (shrink)

Several times in the past the question has been raised whether in Greece or in Rome there were any free-born citizens who would have been prepared to take over the management of a farm, a business thought to have usually been entrusted to slaves. In this connection the number of sources testifying to the manumission of Roman slave bailiffs has also attracted some attention. It must be said, however, that notwithstanding previous scholarly efforts to assemble the relevant testimonia, important (...) evidence has been disregarded or simply overlooked; in addition, in one instance at any rate, a source was not yet available. (shrink)

This volume in honour of Miriam Griffin brings together seventeen international specialists. Their essays range from Socrates to late antiquity, with a particular focus on Cicero. Subjects covered include the Stoics and Cynics, Roman law, the formulation of imperial power, Jews and Christians, 'performance philosophy', Augustine, late Platonism, and women philosophers.