CLASSICAL WORLD最新文献

Supposititious children may be defined as children smuggled into households and then presented as legitimate off-spring. This article considers the sources that refer to such children in the Classical and Hellenistic periods at Athens. It explores the underlying concern of the male citizen that these children might be enrolled in the citizen population. It explains that this anxiety was tied to the possible contamination of their imagined pure bloodlines, a contamination they believed threatened the legitimate operation of the social, cultural, and political mechanisms of the city.

This article presents a state-of-the-field assessment of the use of digital resources and tools in ancient Mediterranean studies teaching. This includes a presentation of the results of a recent survey focusing on pedagogical practices and multimedia use among ancient Mediterranean studies professionals and an overview of the benefits and challenges of incorporating rich-format media and digital resources into learner-centered curricula. The article also provides a summary of methodological approaches that can enhance learning retention and promote authentic and deep learning, with the goal of empowering students to think critically about the ancient past and their modern world.

Cato the Elder’s De agricultura, the first farming manual in Latin, inspired a genre of farming manuals and didactic texts; yet Cato’s real-life participation in farming and the accuracy of his knowledge has been called into question. Centuries later, we see the rise in agricultural writing among British gentlemen of the 18th and 19th centuries; here wealthy landowners wrote detailed instructions about menial labor. This paper explores the emergence of the farming genre among elite authors in these two contexts and considers how it reflects the tensions of two nascent empires.

Unlike the fat body of Iros, παχύς bodies in Homeric poetry are powerful, attractive, and consistent with a non-gender- specific conception of the erotic. In Odyssey 18, Iros’ bulk belies his lack of strength, but Odysseus’ large frame, elsewhere described as παχύς, both promises and delivers effective action. A threat of castration distances Iros from the erotic; Odysseus enjoys sexual intimacy with several characters. Penelope exercises seductive charms over the suitors in book 18, shortly after being described as παχύς; the description of her “παχύς hand” at 21.6 suggests both bulk and strength.

This paper argues that Lucan’s use of the word privatus to refer to the proconsuls Caesar and Pompeius corresponds to the republican formal definition of promagistrates as privati vis-à-vis magistratus (the existence of such a definition is, however, a subject of modern debate). Additionally, Lucan uses the label privatus to highlight Caesar and Pompeius’ unusually proactive role in the sphere domi, outside their sphere of competence. Building on this analysis, it becomes possible to better appreciate Lucan’s distortions in his representation of Caesar as a proconsul.

Discussion of the Empress Fausta, wife of Constantine, has in the past concentrated largely on theories about her death. This article follows current trends on Late Antique empresses by examining the clues about her life and activities. It demonstrates her role in helping Constantine assert his imperial legitimacy, and suggests an involvement in church affairs and patronage of buildings. In all, she had more visibility in the public sphere than she is often credited with.

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• The Folds of Olympus: Mountains in Ancient Greek and Roman Culture by Jason König
• Micah Myers

Jason König’s monograph casts new emphasis on the role of mountains in ancient Mediterranean literature, art, and lived experience, from archaic Greece to early Christian contexts. König’s wide-ranging book, part of an even broader project on mountains funded by the Leverhulme Trust,¹ offers something for many readers, including Classicists interested in landscape, geography, and ecocriticism, as well as scholars from the cross-disciplinary field of “mountain studies.” It is also an embodied text, sprinkled with descriptions of the author’s own hikes up various peaks, especially in Greece. König views these mountain treks as having helped him understand his subject. He also expresses hope that his ascents will encourage others to follow the same scholarly and mountainous paths.

The book is divided into four thematic sections. The first looks at mountains as places of divine-human interface. Chapter 1 reviews archaeological and textual evidence for summit altars, convincingly demonstrating the importance of mountains as places of worship around the Mediterranean. The next three chapters turn to literary sources: archaic Greek hexameter poetry (chapter 2); Pausanias (chapter 3); and biblical and early Christian pilgrimage traditions, from Exodus to Egeria (chapter 4). König’s discussion highlights that mountains feature repeatedly as spaces where humans and gods engage through religious ritual and divine epiphany, whether in the poetic present or the mythological or biblical past.

In the second section, “Mountain Vision,” König returns to an argument put forward in the preface: that his book challenges the notion found in earlier mountain studies scholarship that only in the late eighteenth century did mountains come to be “appreciated as places of beauty and sublimity” (xx). Chapter 5 surveys examples of mountains described as beautiful and sublime from across classical literature, including Aeschylus, [Longinus] On the Sublime, and Lucretius. Chapter 6 focuses on volcanoes, particularly Mount Etna, as awe-inspiring objects of vision in sources ranging from Pindar to the Pseudo-Vergilian Aetna. Chapter 7, one of the strongest, considers mountains in Greek and Roman art. König argues that miniaturizing mountains or representing them as a rock or rock pile is not a matter of indifference. To the contrary, mountains were: “crowded with symbolic and narrative associations; it would have taken only a cursory representation of the summit to acti