Sometime in the second century CE, Pausanias of Magnesia (modern-day Turkey) wrote the Description of Greece. Ostensibly a tour of the places to see on the Greek mainland, the Description also provides historical accounts related to the topography through which Pausanias moves. Little attention has been given to how these building blocks of…[Read more]

The case of Cicero’s de inventione is interesting for many reasons. First, the work is an early example of the construction of cultural memory in the field of Roman rhetoric. Second, this work shows a strong connection between rhetorical theory, the Ciceronian interest in other disciplines (especially philosophy) and the oratorical formation of a…[Read more]

The Dictio 17 (= 239 Vogel) of Ennodius is a controuersia in which the declamator speaks against a son who did not provide for the care of his aged father and thus procured his death. The argument is reinforced by examples of animals – eagles and wolves – who, unlike the defendant, take care of their parents. In the example of the eagles, Enn…[Read more]

While the discipline of computational linguistics mostly deals with the modeling and the investigation of individual languages (often “big” languages such as English, German, Arabic, or Chinese), Multilingual Computational Linguistics focuses on the comparison of languages, trying to develop new methods and techniques by which languages can be com…[Read more]

This course provides a detailed examination of the life and administration of the Roman emperor Augustus (reigned 31 B.C. to A.D. 14), a time of pivotal social and economic change that forever altered the trajectory of Roman history. Augustus and his administration will be examined from a variety of viewpoints, drawing on a rich dataset that…[Read more]

This course provides a detailed examination of the life and administration of the Roman emperor Augustus (reigned 31 B.C. to A.D. 14), a time of pivotal social and economic change that forever altered the trajectory of Roman history. Augustus and his administration will be examined from a variety of viewpoints, drawing on a rich dataset that…[Read more]

This course explores the art and archaeology of the Greek world from the Late Bronze Age to the Roman period. The course focuses on architecture, sculpture, painted pottery, and wall painting as its main object classes and situates artistic and stylistic developments within their social, political, and historical context. We will consider issues…[Read more]

Since H. Humbach’s Baktrische Sprachdenkmäler (Wiesbaden, 1966) the main etymological
proposal for Bactrian χϸονο ‘(calendar) year, (regnal) year’ has been A. Thierfelder’s suggestion of a loanword from Hellenistic Greek χρόνος ‘time’. In this article the plausibility of this etymology is re-examined, and it is further argued that it should b…[Read more]

Preámbulo del libro SACRIFRICIO Y DRAMA DEL REY SAGRADO, de Eliseo Ferrer. (Se añade índice y bibliografía).
Vaya por delante que ésta no es una obra de consenso académico; y tampoco una obra guiada por la fe religiosa, ni por los presupuestos decimonónicos del ateísmo antirreligioso y anticristiano. Decía el mitólogo Joseph Campbell que la hu…[Read more]

Toda la tesis de R. Panikkar estuvo dirigida, dada su tradición intelectual multicultural y multirreligiosa, a «un encuentro sincero» entre el cristianismo y el hinduismo; y quizá por eso subtituló este libro («El Cristo desconocido del hinduismo») con el ambicioso reclamo: «Para una cristofanía ecuménica». No obstante, y para no engañar a…[Read more]

Dodecalogue of errors and nonsense / I believe that the secular influence of the theology and dogmatics of the Church (inherited, to a large extent, by the Lutheran reformers), as well as the ideology generated over eighteen centuries on the substratum of the New Testament, have led and They continue to lead in the XXI century to great errors of…[Read more]

Las filosofías racionalistas y la teología de la Iglesia ocultaron a lo largo de dos mil años el verdadero significado de los mitos y de la mitología antigua, para reducir su significado a aquello que, presentado como verdad aparente en un discurso, resultaba ser falso en realidad. En este sentido, un mito vendría determinado por la narr…[Read more]

Como ya saben muchos de mis amigos y seguidores de Internet, suelo organizar casi todos los meses un foro-debate en Academia.edu sobre asuntos que normalmente giran en torno a la antropología social y cultural, pero también relativos a asuntos destacados de la historia antigua y de la crítica textual, campos en los que normalmente se de…[Read more]

The present article examines the Corpus Leidense, the group of eight Ciceronian treatises among which the De natura deorum was also transmitted, focusing on its archetype. The second and longer section contains the first complete list of the 174 identified manuscripts of De natura deorum, with 57 new items added to the 117 already listed by Pease…[Read more]

The present article examines the Corpus Leidense, the group of eight Ciceronian treatises among which the De natura deorum was also transmitted, focusing on its archetype. The second and longer section contains the first complete list of the 174 identified manuscripts of De natura deorum, with 57 new items added to the 117 already listed by Pease…[Read more]

Recent scholarship has done much to challenge the long-held antipathy towards Pausanias, even if some of the best studies appear “enamored not so much of Pausanias himself as they are of the idea of Pausanias”. As one of the leading new Pausaniacs, Greta Hawes has been at the vanguard of efforts to get the measure of this storied landscape. Her…[Read more]

The subject of this chapter is a single contested word in Herodotus’ Histories. In it I explore its semantic range and use it to think about broader questions of Herodotus’ interplay with Homer. Where many of the Homeric touches in Herodotus can be put down to, and more productively used, as examples of traditional referentiality or, at least, n…[Read more]

The formalization of sound changes as finite state transducers is implicit already in the Neogrammarians. For at least six decades scholars have recognized the potential of transducers for improving the speed and rigor of research in historical linguists, but almost no historical linguists actually use them. This article identifies the obstacles…[Read more]

In the course, I give a basic introduction into some of the recent developments in the field of computational historical linguistics. While this field is predominantly represented by phylogenetic approaches with whom scholars try to infer phylogenetic trees from different kinds of language data, the approach taken here is much broader,…[Read more]

The weblog Computer-Assisted Language Comparison in Practice, published on the Hypotheses platform for scientific blogging (https://calc.hypotheses.org/), offers tutorials and discussion notes on computer-assisted approaches to the history and diversity of languages. A substantial part of its content is contributed as part of the ERC Starting…[Read more]