A familiar image from the Roman world is a Pompeian portrait of a man and woman sometimes identified as Terentius Neo and his wife. He has a papyrus roll under his chin, while she looks out with a writing tablet in one hand, a stylus held to her lips in the other. The message of the attributes presented would seem to be: ‘ We can and do read and write’. But how should the message be interpreted? To judge from the (...) houses in which this and similar portraits were found, the couple was not of the elite decurion class, but belonged to that difficult to define group of varying social, economic and cultural statuses recently described by Keith Hopkins as ‘sub-elites’. Does the display of book and pen then reflect the social reality of the sub-elite orders of Pompeian society, or is the self-representation rather an expression of social pretension, with the couple attempting to emulate the Roman elite? If the latter is the case, what does the image say about the habits of the Roman ruling class? This question has been raised in relation to the issue of literacy, particularly women's literacy, but the image invites another question. (shrink)

Recent research on “psychotherapy” in Greek philosophy has not been fully integrated into thinking about philosophy as a way of life molded by personal relationships. This article focuses on how the enigma of Socratic eros sustains a network of thought experiments in the fourth century BCE about interpersonal dynamics and psychical transformation. It supplements existing work on Plato's Symposium and Phaedrus with comparative material from Aeschines of Sphettus, Xenophon, and the dubiously Platonic Alcibiades I and Theages. In order to select (...) and illuminate commonalities among all of these, it also draws critically upon Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic technique and his numerous comparisons between Socrates and psychoanalysts. What emerges is a more complex and qualified but no less sincere appreciation for the ideal of reflective, cooperative aspiration toward Beauty portrayed in Plato's dialogues. (shrink)

Une enigme litteraire - celle, posee par les textes prefaciels de Vitruve dans leur signification et leur date - qui se resout par une histoire de mots, l'histoire des mots latins du livre, dont la langue francaise et nombre de langues ...

La plus grande épave du Ve s. av. J.-C. connue à ce jour a été découverte récemment au large de l'île d'Alonnissos, dans les Sporades du Nord. Le navire, chargé d'une cargaison de vin, sombra durant le dernier quart du Ve s. av. J.-C. par 30 m de profondeur. Il était chargé d'amphores vinaires de la ville de Mendè, sur la côte de Macédoine, et de l'île de Skopélos, célèbres toutes deux dans l'Antiquité pour la qualité de leur vin, exporté (...) dans toute la Méditerranée et jusqu'en mer Noire. Le navire transportait aussi une abondante vaisselle de banquet à vernis noir d'origine athénienne. Les navires d'époque classique précédemment découverts en Grèce, à Chypre, en France, en Italie et en Israël ne dépassaient pas 17 m de long et 4 m de large. L'épave d'Alonnissos mesure au moins 25 m de long et 10 m de large : elle constitue le premier témoignage archéologique de l'existence en Méditerranée dès le Ve s. av. J.-C. de bateaux marchands jaugeant plus de 100 tonnes. (shrink)

It is often assumed that we know very little about how literary texts circulated in the Roman world because we know very little about the Roman book trade. In fact, we know a great deal about book circulation, even though we know little about the book trade. Romans circulated texts in a series of widening concentric circles determined primarily by friendship, which might, of course, be influenced by literary interests, and.by the forces of social status that regulated friendship. Bookstores and (...) ‘public’ libraries, which made a text available to individuals personally unknown to the author and his friends, were comparatively late developments. To trace the circulation of a Roman literary work, we shall use a schematic model to follow a literary text from its initial conception through the widening circles through which it moved. (shrink)

The contemporary books of Cassius Dio's Roman History are known for their anecdotal quality and lack of interpretive sophistication. This paper aims to recuperate another layer of meaning for Dio's anecdotes by examining episodes in his contemporary books that feature masquerades and impersonation. It suggests that these themes owe their prominence to political conditions in Dio's lifetime, particularly the revival, after a hundred-year lapse, of usurpation and damnatio memoriae, practices that rendered personal identity problematic. The central claim is that narratives (...) in Dio's last books use masquerades and impersonation to explore paradoxes of personal identity and signification, issues made salient by abrupt changes of social status at the highest levels of imperial society. (shrink)