Review of Katell Berthelot, Jews and Their Roman Rivals: Pagan Rome’s Challenge to Israel. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021. Pp. 552. ISBN 9780691199290. $45.00.

It is my modest goal in this essay to trace how Nock uses conversion to produce religion(s) and then to explore its similarities to and differences from an analogous construction of religion-through-conversion in late antiquity.

In this paper, I argue that the traditional narrative of Iphigenia’s sacrifice lies allusively behind the opening scenes of the Iliad (1.8–487). Scholars have long suspected that this episode is evoked in Agamemnon’s scathing rebuke of Calchas (1.105–8), but I contend that this is only one moment in a far more sustained allusive dialogue: both th…[Read more]

Hellenistic literature and art commemorated victories over the Galatians through a variety of analogies and allegories, ranging from the historical Persian Wars to the cosmic Gigantomachy: each individual victory was incorporated into a larger sequence in which order constantly quelled the forces of chaos. This paper explores this analogical…[Read more]

Archaic Greek epic exhibits a pervasive eristic intertextuality, repeatedly positioning its heroes and itself against pre-existing traditions. Here I focus on a specific case study from the Odyssey: Homer’s agonistic relationship with the Catalogue of Women tradition. Hesiodic-style Catalogue poetry has long been recognized as an important i…[Read more]

In this note, I highlight a hitherto unrecognized literary resonance in the climactic final verses of Archilochus’ First Cologne Epode: Archilochus parodically and subversively reworks the Homeric description of a quivering spear. This Homeric resonance caps the poem’s ongoing clash between the generic conventions of epic and iambus, while also…[Read more]

In this paper, I investigate the repetition of Homeric hapax legomena in archaic and classical Greek poetry. Scholars frequently assume that fine-grained engagement with Homeric rarities is a distinctive feature of the Hellenistic period, but I reveal the significant precedent for this phenomenon in earlier poetry. Proceeding through comedy,…[Read more]

This paper seeks to shed fresh light on the aesthetic and stylistic affiliations of Lycophron’s Alexandra, approaching the poem from two distinct but complementary angles. First, it explores what can be gained by reading Lycophron’s poem against the backdrop of Callimachus’ poetry. It contends that the Alexandra presents a radical and polem…[Read more]

In this paper, I investigate how Ptolemaic poets’ presentation of their queens compares with and relates to the practice of their major rivals, the Seleucids. No poetic celebration of a Seleucid queen survives extant, but an anecdote preserved by Lucian sheds intriguing light on Seleucid poetic practice (Pro Imaginibus 5): queen Stratonice, bald…[Read more]

In this article for sixth-formers and school teachers, I explore the story of Achilles’ heel and Homer’s likely suppression of the myth in the Iliad. Homer’s Iliad appears to acknowledge, but simultaneously reject, an alternative tradition in which Achilles was more than mortal, part of a broader downplaying of heroic invulnerability and…[Read more]

Benjamin Porat’s Justice for the Poor differs from these books not only in that it is written in Hebrew (from the list above, only Wilfand’s 2014 book has been translated into Hebrew), but also because it envisions rabbinic charity as a branch of “law.” Porat is a law professor, and his book is jointly published by a law school, a think tank an…[Read more]

The Connections between ancient approaches to rhetoric, as found in Plato and Aristotle, the prime ancient theorists of rhetoric, and modern linguistic approaches to register and genre theory, as in Hallidayan linguistics, show continuity of thought across the centuries. They also suggest that there may be such things as universal rhetorical…[Read more]

“Chapter 7: Maintaining the City Enslaved Labor and Trade in Roman Philippi” in Philippi, From Colonia Augusta to Communitas Christiana: Religion and Society in Transition, edited by Steven J. Friesen, Michalis Lychounas, and Daniel N. Schowalter (Leiden: Brill, 2021).

The study of Archaic Greece has undergone a fundamental transformation in recent decades. Whereas studies up to the 1980s had favoured narratives that converged on the more tangible reality of the Classical period and emphasized radical change, the increase in archaeological data and the cultural turn have led to an emphasis on long-term…[Read more]

This chapter analyses Global Byzantium by situating the medieval empire of New Rome in the history of statehood’s generalisation worldwide. Arguing that statehood remains the implicit mental furniture of History at a macro-civilizational scale, and so more or less at the micro too, the chapter proposes the dual concepts of hegemony and c…[Read more]

In gewissem Sinne ist der Befehl zur allgemeinen Zwangstaufe im Codex Justinianus Abschluss einer beinahe 200-jährigen Entwicklung. Im Folgenden werden einzelne Stränge der kaiserlichen Gesetzgebung zwischen Konstantin I. und Theodosius I. besprochen. Der Schwerpunkt liegt auf dem westlichen Reichsteil. Allein die schiere Menge kaiserlicher B…[Read more]

This excel file contains structured and formalized data about all surviving and identified early medieval Western manuscripts containing the text of the Etymologiae of Isidore of Seville, fully or partially. It records information about the place of origin, provenance, preservation, the date of origin, material properties, script, content, the…[Read more]

This article provides an overview of the annotated pre-1200 manuscripts of the Etymologiae of Isidore of Seville and discusses the nature and character of the annotation of this work. It shows that the Etymologiae was annotated principally in the early Middle Ages. The glossing took place in three contexts: in the insular world, perhaps in the…[Read more]

A summary and contemporary application of the pedagogical handbook of Joseph Jouvancy, S.J. (1643-1719)

A summary and contemporary application of the pedagogical handbook of Joseph Jouvancy, S.J. (1643-1719)