In Ps.-Plutarch's epitome, Doctrines of the Philosophers (Plac.), lemma 4.11 bears the heading: Πῶς γίνεται ἡ αἴσθησις καὶ ἡ ἔννοια καὶ ὁ κατὰ ἐνδιάθεσιν λόγος (‘How sense perception, conception, and internal reason come to be’). The text reads:

Some of the best recent work on Roman priesthoods under the Republic has engaged with the issue of priestly authority and its role in defining the place of priesthoods vis-à-vis other centres of power, influence and knowledge. The aim of this paper is to make a contribution to this line of enquiry by focussing on the concept of priestly auctoritas, which has seldom received close attention. The working hypothesis is that the study of priestly auctoritas may contribute to a broader understanding of the place of priesthood in Republican Rome, and especially in the Late Republican period, from which most of the evidence derives. The link between religious authority and religious expertise requires special attention.

Cicero's letter to his brother Quintus from February 54 is best known for containing the sole explicit contemporary reference to Lucretius’ De rerum natura, but it is also notable as the source of the only extant reference of any kind to another (presumably) philosophical didactic poem, Sallustius’ Empedoclea (Q. fr. 2.10(9).3= SB 14):

In February 54 b.c. Cicero concludes a missive to his brother with a passing and – for us – tantalizing remark: Lucreti poemata ut scribis ita sunt, multis luminibus ingeni, multae tamen artis. sed cum veneris. virum te putabo si Sallusti Empedoclea legeris; hominem non putabo. Quintus had, it seems, read De rerum natura, or at least parts thereof, just before he left Rome for an undisclosed location nearby, and he shared his enthusiasm with his brother per codicillos. Meanwhile, he was corresponding with Julius Caesar, whose staff in Gaul he was about to join. When, a few months later, he was stationed with Caesar, he was involved in another literary affair, this time concerning his brother who wrote to him, inquiring about his autobiographical De temporibus suis:

Suave, mari magno turbantibus aequora ventis
e terra magnum alterius spectare laborem;
non quia vexari quemquamst iucunda voluptas,
sed quibus ipse malis careas quia cernere suave est.
suave etiam belli certamina magna tueri 5
per campos instructa tua sine parte pericli.
sed nil dulcius est, bene quam munita tenere
edita doctrina sapientum templa serena,
despicere unde queas alios passimque videre
errare atque viam palantis quaerere vitae, 10
certare ingenio, contendere nobilitate,
noctes atque dies niti praestante labore
ad summas emergere opes rerumque potiri.
o miseras hominum mentes, o pectora caeca!
qualibus in tenebris vitae quantisque periclis 15
degitur hoc aevi quodcumquest! nonne videre
nil aliud sibi naturam latrare, nisi utqui
corpore seiunctus dolor absit, mensque fruatur
iucundo sensu cura semota metuque?
(Lucr. 2.1–19)

It is pleasant, when the winds stir up the waters on the great sea,
to watch the great struggle of another from land;
not because it is a great pleasure that anyone be troubled,
but because it is pleasant to observe the troubles you yourself lack.
It is also pleasant to watch the great contests of war 5
spread out over the plains without taking any part in the danger.
But nothing is more pleasing than to hold lofty yet calm temples
that are well defended by the teachings of wise men,
from which you can look down and see others everywhere
go astray and wander while seeking the path of their life, 10
competing in wits and contending over their nobility;
throughout nights and days they strive with outstanding labour
to come out at the peak of riches and have power over everything.
O wretched minds of men, O blind hearts!
In what shadows of life and in how many dangers 15
is this bit of life, whatever it may be, being spent by you! Do you not see
that nature barks for nothing other than this – that
grief be separated from the body and far away, and that the mind enjoy
pleasant feelings cut off from anxiety and fear?

At Book 5.324–37, the DRN’s narrator says that the world is young, claims that the nature of the world has been understood only recently (with the advent of Epicureanism), and asserts that he is either the ‘very first’/‘most pre-eminent’ or, as I suggest here, ‘among the first’/‘among the most pre-eminent’ to turn (vertere) Greek Epicureanism into Latin. It is the last of these three claims that concerns us:

denique natura haec rerum ratioque repertast   335
nuper, et hanc primus cum primis ipse repertus
nunc ego sum in patrias qui possim vertere voces.

The tale of Gyges' ring narrated by Cicero at De officiis 3.38 is of course originally found, and acknowledged as such by Cicero, in Plato (Resp. 359c–360b). I would like in this paper to address two questions about Cicero's handling of the tale – one historical, one philosophical. The purpose of the historical question is to evaluate, with respect to the Gyges narration, Cicero's quality as a reader of Plato. How well does Cicero understand the role of the story in its original Platonic context? The motivation for the question is that, at first blush, Cicero seems to have badly misunderstood it. I shall argue that the appearance is illusory, and that Cicero understands the tale's Platonic provenance perfectly well. Now it should be noted that the question of Cicero's grasp of the tale's purpose in Plato is distinct from the question whether Cicero himself puts the story to the same or a different use than Plato did. I shall suggest that while there are striking points of contact between the two treatments, on one crucial feature – namely the tale's ostentatiously far-fetched nature – Cicero is instructively more explicit than Plato.

Without doubt, veni vidi vici is one of the most famous quotations from Antiquity. It is well known that it was Julius Caesar who coined the renowned expression. Less frequently discussed is the fact that ‘I came, I saw, I conquered’ was announced as written text. According to Suetonius, Caesar paraded a placard displaying the words veni vidi vici in his triumph held over Pontus in 46 b.c. (Suet. Iul. 37.2):

The compact formed between Antonius, Lepidus and Octavian near Bononia in November 43 b.c. (Dio Cass. 46.55.1–3), commonly named the second triumvirate, was characterized by civil conflict. The major battles at Philippi, Perusia and Naulochus led to the presence of many legions in Italy. In addition, a large number of time-served soldiers were settled throughout the peninsula. The requirement of land for the veterans meant conflicting interests arose with landowners who were dispossessed to make way for them. The impact of the army on Rome itself and on the population of the Italian countryside was great during the late first century b.c.

Over the past century or so, questions concerning the word ‘meaning’ have been understandably prominent in the field of the philosophy of language. There is, however, a historical aspect to the debate that is of especial interest to literary critics – the fact that verbs and expressions of meaning have been applied to different kinds of things in a number of languages spanning the western literary tradition. I shall introduce the topic by focussing on the Latin expression sibi uelle and on how Roman authors exploited its ambiguities for the purposes of humour (§§ I and II). I shall then move on to a discussion of a later Latin phrase familiar from the pages of the Virgilian commentator Servius, hoc uult dicere, and argue that the assumptions we have about expressions of meaning may lead us to adopt a particular interpretation of it (§§ III and IV). In the final part of the paper (§§ V, VI and VII) I shall proceed to a discussion of why it is important for modern literary critics to pay attention to how they use verbs such as ‘to mean’: I argue that the different functions of the verb facilitate a personification of the text that allows us to equivocate about the role of the author.

Shortly after his accidental transformation into an ass, Lucius attempts to return to his human form by grabbing some roses decorating a statue of the patron goddess of the quadrupeds, Epona. But his servulus feels outraged at the sacrilegious act. Jumping to his feet in a temper and acting as a faithful defender of the sacred place, he addresses his former human owner as a new ‘Catiline’ (Apul. Met. 3.27):

In Libanius' speech For the Temples (Or. 30), sometimes regarded as the crowning work of his career, he refers to an unnamed city in which a great pagan temple had recently been destroyed; the date of the speech is disputed, but must be in the 380 s or early 390 s, near the end of the speaker's life. After deploring the actions of a governor appointed by Theodosius, often identified with the praetorian prefect Maternus Cynegius, Libanius continues (30.44–5):

The speech of the Armenian embassy to Khusrow in the opening of Book 2 of Procopius' Wars has received little scholarly attention. Historians propose that this embassy, along with those sent by the Goths and Lazi, provided Khusrow with a pretext for violating the Eternal Peace in 540. As for the speeches themselves, they have been considered formulaic set pieces, requirements of the genre in which Procopius was writing. However, Anthony Kaldellis has argued that Procopius uses the Armenians as a mouthpiece for his own criticisms of Justinian, namely that the emperor is to blame for ending the Eternal Peace and that he behaved like an oriental despot. While these literary and historical readings are not incompatible, none fully explicates the mechanics and function of the Armenians' speech.

The ghost of Darius provides a versified history of the Persian kingship, from the beginning down to the reign of his luckless son Xerxes, that starts out as follows in Martin West's Teubner text (1990):

Mῆδος γὰρ ἦν ὁ πρῶτος ἡγεμὼν στρατοῦ,   765
ἄλλος δ’ ἐκείνου παῖς τόδ’ ἔργον ἥνυσεν·
ϕρένες γὰρ αὐτοῦ θυμὸν ᾠακοστρόϕουν·
τρίτος δ’ ἀπ’ αὐτοῦ Κῦρος, εὐδαίμων ἀνήρ,
ἄρξας ἔθηκε πᾶσιν εἰρήνην ϕίλοις,
Λυδῶν δὲ λαὸν καὶ Φρυγῶν ἐκτήσατο   770
Ἰωνίαν τε πᾶσαν ἤλασεν βίᾳ·
θεὸς γὰρ οὐκ ἤχθηρεν, ὡς εὔϕρων ἔϕυ.
Κύρου δὲ παῖς τέταρτος ηὔθυνε στρατόν·
πέμπτος δὲ Mάρδος ἦρξεν, αἰσχύνη πάτρᾳ
θρόνοισί τ’ ἀρχαίοισι·    775

Κίμων ἔγραψε τὴν θύραν τὴν δεξιάν,
τὴν δ’ ἐξιόντων δεξιὰν Διονύσιος.

Cimon painted the door to the right,
and the right door as one goes out, Dionysius.
(Anth. Pal. 9.758)

Herodotus is a fascinating author, not only to scholars of history, but also to a wide spectrum of scientists, such as engineers, who are not usually considered to be relevant to humanistic studies. A strong indication of the persisting interest in Herodotus is the recent proliferation of books, for example those of C. Dewald and J. Marincola and A.M. Bowie, on various aspects of his work. At the same time, there is a remarkable interest in the evolution of knowledge in different scientific fields which promotes the understanding of a) the relationship between socio-economic phenomena and technological progress and b) the process of acquiring and documenting scientific knowledge. In the field of hydraulics and hydrology in particular, this interest is documented by journal papers (for example by L.W. Mays et al. and D. Koutsoyiannis et al.), books (for example by A.K. Biswas, Ö. Wikander), book chapters (for example by A.I. Wilson) and conference proceedings.

In Python's comic satyr play Agen (perhaps actually written by Alexander of Macedon) Harpalus, Alexander's errant treasurer, is mocked for erecting costly buildings left and right to honour his dead lover, the notorious prostitute Pythionice:

ἔστιν δ’ ὅπου μὲν ὁ κάλαμος πέϕυχ’ ὅδε
†ϕέτωμ’ ἄορνον, οὑξ ἀριστερᾶς δ’ ὅδε
πόρνης ὁ κλεινὸς ναός, ὃν δὴ Παλλίδης
τεύξας κατέγνω διὰ τὸ πρᾶγμ’ αὑτοῦ ϕυγήν.
(TrGF 91 F 1. 1–4)

Vitruvius has something interesting to say at De architectura 2.8.8:

In a recent contribution to this journal, D. Kovacs addresses the following passage from the fourth Eclogue (cited here from the OCT of Mynors):

o mihi tum longae maneat pars ultima uitae,
spiritus et quantum sat erit tua dicere facta!

As the first poem of the last book of Ovid's Amores, 3.1 parallels the programmatic recusatio of the first two books, which present the traditional opposition of elegy to epic. In Amores 3.1, the personified Elegy and Tragedy compete for Ovid's poetic attention, and scholars have accordingly scrutinized the generic tension between elegy and tragedy in this poem. My study, by contrast, focusses on the import of the metapoetic locus in which Ovid sets his contest between the two genres, by considering the linguistic and allusive play in the opening lines. Ovid exploits the metaphor of literary tradition as an ancient and sacred forest to transform an author's choice of poetic genre into a walk in the woods. Moreover, allusions to Virgil's Aeneid 6.179 and Ennius' Annales 175 (Sk.) in the first line guide Ovid's audience to expect the more traditional opposition of elegy and epic. The less conventional contest between the genres of elegy and tragedy soon overturns this expectation; nevertheless, elegy's customary opposite, epic, maintains a presence in the form of a woodland context for Ovid's innovative generic opposition.