Recent ucb_dagrs_ccs items

Funerary Spectacle: Applied Digital Humanities in the Roman Forum

Thu, 2 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Funerary Spectacle: Applied Digital Humanities in the Roman Forum presents “close” and “distant” readings of the three-act funeral of Lucius Aemilius Paullus Macedonicus, who died in 160 BCE. Unique in its highly visual and computational approach, it combines three-dimensional reconstructions of the Roman Forum with traditional philological evidence to reconstruct various possibilities of what might have been seen and manipulated during the procession, eulogy, and gladiatorial games held to commemorate the death of Paullus. This study of one event reveals more broadly how the built environment functioned as a dynamic stage for aristocratic self-representation, both posing new questions and offering new solutions to long-standing debates regarding the visibility and logistics of Middle Republican spectacle.

Papiri da Tebtynis pubblicati dal Seminario di Papirologia dell’Università di Parma (P.Tebt. VI)

Tue, 3 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Stemming from a seminar held at the University of Parma during the past years, this volume offers 69 editions of papyri belonging to the Center for the Tebtunis Papyri (The Bancroft Library, University of California-Berkeley).

Following the traditional division between literary and documentary texts, the book first presents newly considered or thoroughly revised Homeric papyri, shedding light on the fluidity of textual transmission in antiquity. Significant variants, from simple scribal errors to alternative readings with philological relevance, illustrate the dynamic evolution of Homeric poetry. Additionally, remarkable manuscripts featuring punctuation, prosodic marks, and traces of scholarly annotations offer glimpses into ancient reading practices. An exercise of transcription of a Euripidean verse and a fragment of an unknown philosophical prose text complete the literary section.

The documentary section provides an in-depth look at the administrative,...

Greek and Egyptian Magical Formularies: Text and Translation, Vol. 1

Wed, 20 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The magical formularies on papyrus are precious witnesses to practices and processes of cultural transmission: i.e. the creation, communication, transformation and preservation of knowledge, both in text and image, across history and between the cultures of Egypt and Greece. More than eighty such handbooks survive, some of them in a fragmentary state. Our book, the work of an international team of papyrologists and historians of magic, replaces Papyri graecae magicae edited by K. Preisendanz, which appeared almost a century ago and has been used as one of the most important sources for the study of Greek magic, augmented in the 1990s by the excellent work of R. Daniel and F. Maltomini, the Supplementum Magicum . Our project has collected all the known magical formularies and fully studied both their materiality and their texts. The facing English translation with notes replaces The Greek Magical Papyri in Translation...

Edgar J. Goodspeed, America’s First Papyrologist

Thu, 9 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

This is a study whose main sources are archival, principally Edgar J. Goodspeed’s “Student Travel Letters” from 1899–1900. These letters home recount Goodspeed’s daily and sometimes hourly activities during nearly two years abroad, in continental Europe, England, Egypt, and the Holy Land, in pursuit of scholarly seasoning. The book’s focus is on his engagement with the newly emergent field of papyrology—the decipherment and study of the ancient Greek manuscripts then being discovered in Egypt. The letters allow for a tracking of this engagement in far greater depth than that allotted in his 1953 autobiography, As I Remember, or in his 90-page unpublished memoir, “Abroad in the Nineties,” filling in some apparently intentional gaps, casting doubt on some of his later self-assessments but putting much additional substance to the claim that he was indeed “America’s First Papyrologist.” The result, part biography, part travelogue, part diary, part academic history,...

Preliminary Studies on the Scholia to Euripides

Sun, 20 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This work presents five studies that are parerga to the online edition of Euripidean scholia (EuripidesScholia.org), for which the release of a much more complete sample covering Orestes 1–500 is planned for 2018. The first chapter reviews the achievements and shortcomings of previous editions of Euripidean scholia and argues for a more comprehensive treatment of this and similar corpora of scholia and for the importance of glosses. It assesses the few surviving traces in the scholia of views attributed to philologists and commentators working from Hellenistic times to early Byzantium. The second chapter illuminates a genre of annotation termed here “teachers’ scholia,” prominent in many of the younger manuscripts, but also present to a small degree in the oldest witnesses. Evidence for the teaching of Ioannes Tzetzes related to Euripides is gathered more completely than previously, as is that for Maximus Planudes. The third chapter offers...

Early Greek Alchemy, Patronage and Innovation in Late Antiquity

Sat, 13 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Early Greek alchemy, Patronage and Innovation in Late Antiquity provides an example of the innovative power of ancient scholarly patronage by looking at a key moment in the creation of the Greek alchemical tradition.

New evidence on scholarly patronage under the Roman empire can be garnered by analyzing the descriptions of learned magoi in several texts from the second to the fourth century CE. Since a common use of the term magos connoted flatterer-like figures ( kolakes ), it is likely that the figures of “learned sorcerers” found in texts such as Lucian’s Philopseudes and the apocryphal Acts of Peter captured the notion that some client scholars exerted undue influence over patrons.

The first known author of alchemical commentaries, Zosimus of Panopolis (c. 300 CE), presented...

The Archaeology of Roman Surveillance in the Central Alentejo, Portugal

Fri, 17 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

During the first century B.C.E. a complex system of surveillance towers was established during Rome’s colonization of the central Alentejo region of Portugal. These towers provided visual control over the landscape, routes through it, and hidden or isolated places as part of the Roman colonization of the region. As part of an archaeological analysis of the changing landscape of Alentejo, Joey Williams offers here a theory of surveillance in Roman colonial encounters drawn from a catalog of watchtowers in the Alentejo, the artifacts and architecture from the tower known as Caladinho, and the geographic information systems analysis of each tower’s vision. Through the consideration of these and other pieces of evidence, Williams places surveillance at the center of the colonial negotiation over territory, resources, and power in the westernmost province of the Roman Empire.

The full set of figures for this work is available in a Supplement available on this site (under...

The Traffic in Praise: Pindar and the Poetics of Social Economy

Mon, 22 Aug 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Pindar’s epinikian odes were poems commissioned to celebrate athletic victories in the first half of the fifth century BCE. Drawing on the insights of interpretive anthropology and cultural history, Leslie Kurke investigates how the socially embedded genre of epinikion responded to a period of tremendous social and cultural change. Kurke examines the odes as public performances which enact the reintegration of the athletic victor into his heterogeneous communities. These communities—the victor’s household, his aristocratic class, and his city—represent competing, sometimes conflicting interests, which the epinikian poet must satisfy to accomplish his project of reintegration. Kurke considers in particular the different modes of exchange in which Pindar’s poetry participated: the symbolic economy of the household, gift exchange between aristocratic houses, and the workings of monetary exchange within the city. Her analysis produces an archaeology of Pindar’s poetry, exposing multiple...

Alexander of Aphrodisias and the Text of Aristotle's Metaphysics

Tue, 15 Mar 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Alexander of Aphrodisias’s commentary (about AD 200) is the earliest extant commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics , and it is the most valuable indirect witness to the Metaphysics text and its transmission. Mirjam Kotwick’s study is a systematic investigation into the version of the Metaphysics that Alexander used when writing his commentary, and into the various ways his text, his commentary, and the texts transmitted through our manuscripts relate to one another. Through a careful analysis of lemmata, quotations, and Alexander’s discussion of Aristotle’s argument Kotwick shows how to uncover and partly reconstruct a Metaphysics version from the second century AD. Kotwick then uses this version for improving the text that came down to us by the direct manuscript tradition and for finding solutions to some of the puzzles in this tradition. Through a side-by-side examination of Alexander’s...

Greek Satyr Play: Five Studies

Mon, 24 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000

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With a new introduction and some revisions, these essays on Classical Greek satyr plays, originally published in various venues between 2002 and 2010, suggest new critical approaches to this important dramatic genre and identify previously neglected dimensions and dynamics within their original Athenian context. Griffith shows that satyr plays, alongside the ludicrous and irresponsible—but harmless—antics of their chorus, presented their audiences with culturally sophisticated narratives of romance, escapist adventure, and musical-choreographic exuberance, amounting to a “parallel universe” to that of the accompanying tragedies in the City Dionysia festival. The class oppositions between heroic/divine characters and the rest (choruses, messengers, servants, etc.) that are so integral to Athenian tragedy are shown to be present also, in exaggerated form, in satyr drama, with the satyr chorus...

A Commentary on the Satires of Juvenal

Mon, 21 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Edward Courtney's study of the Satires of Juvenal is the only full-scale commentary on the corpus since the nineteenth century and retains its value for students and scholars a generation after its first appearance in 1980. This commentary incorporates the findings of classical study up to that time, including the work of A. E. Housman, new discoveries such as those of papyri, and the expanding horizons of classical research. Courtney elucidates the form of each poem and the progression of thought, and offers many suggestions for the adjustment of traditional punctuation. In addition to basic explanation of the text, the commentary offers a detailed understanding of the literary and historical context, including thorough treatment of social customs, realia, development of the Latin language, and rhetorical features. The Introduction discusses Juvenal's life, his development as a satirist, his view of society and morals, his style, and his handling of metre.