In this article I examine the Letter of Aristeas, a Hellenistic Jewish text which narrates the events surrounding the translation of the Hebrew Torah into Greek at the command of King Ptolemy Philadelphus. I explore the various Alexandrian and Jewish means for manufacturing the marvelous that are depicted in the text, focusing upon the material, technical, and artistic strategies employed, the specific impact upon audiences, and the relationships constructed between mortals and the divine. I demonstrate that the text engages deeply with—and brings into dialogue—both Greek and Jewish conceptualizations of wonder. Moreover, I argue that this juxtaposition of different modes of wonder production has a cultural-political point. Alexandrian works generate a deceptive form of wonder that has a negative influence on observers, whereas Jewish forms of wonder provide a positive counterpoint that presents Jewish worship as an entirely evident and understandable practice generating an appropriate awe for God. The text critiques Greek wonder and instead promotes Jewish worship and the Jewish liturgy as the most powerful marvel. Such a cultural politics, I conclude, raises questions about the effect the cultural product at the center of this narrative—the Jewish Law in Greek—will have on its users.

This essay explores the role of mourning in Euripides’ Alcestis in relation to the thematics of identification in the play and in tragedy in general. Drawing on comparative texts, including Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia,” it considers two topoi in the drama: first, that of a man mourning his first wife, and especially its peculiarity here, that the man firmly believes that she is dying in his place—that somehow she is he; second, that of a man anxiously taking a second wife, and especially its peculiarity, that the second wife turns out to be identical to the first wife—that somehow she is she. The essay engages both topoi for what they illuminate about identification and illusion in the play, but also metatheatrically about the role of identification and illusion for the audience of the play.

This article shows that Thucydides is deliberately enigmatic about the causal effects of his speeches, and that this enigma is central to understanding his account of the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War. First, it shows that Thucydides was fascinated by the way speeches might not only illuminate events but also contribute to causing them. This ambiguous aspect of the speeches has been underappreciated in recent scholarship, but it is a theme to which the historian frequently returns. Second, the article shows that Thucydides explores this ambiguity in particular detail through the debates in Book 1. Using echoes of the “truest explanation” from 1.23.6 in the speeches, Thucydides suggests that the war might have started through a process of self-fulfilling prophecy, rather than—as some recent scholarship has suggested—self-fulfilling perception. Finally, this article suggests a new reading of 1.23.6, which reflects the ambiguous nature of the speeches in the ambiguous term πρόφασις, again hinting at the possibility of a self-fulfilling prophecy. This article therefore challenges not only the idea of the “Thucydides Trap,” which continues to dominate conceptions of Thucydides among political scientists, but also the way all readers of his work approach both Book 1 and the role of the speeches in general.

The so-called Attic Stelai list far more enslaved men than enslaved women among the confiscated possessions of those condemned in 415 BCE for the mutilation of the Herms and the profanation of the Mysteries. One potential bias in this evidence is that the wives of the condemned could retain their own female slaves and thus keep them from being confiscated. The Attic Stelai thus record fewer women slaves than the households of the condemned originally contained. How many fewer is a difficult question, one deserving of as rigorous and as sophisticated an approach as possible. We can at best estimate a wide range of possibilities (see appendix) based on uncertain starting assumptions. But within the range of reasonable assumptions, the gender imbalance in the AS persists; only with extreme and unlikely starting assumptions can it be conjured away. Thus, these inscriptions continue to suggest that the slaves of the wealthiest Athenians were mostly male. This investigation also argues that Athenian women could sometimes assert their property rights in public, official settings. A focus on litigation in the courts and on strict concepts of ownership has led scholars to overlook the ways that Athenian women controlled their own property, not informally but officially. In the complicated and high-stakes process of confiscation, wives were able to play an active role and assert their property rights—including those over enslaved persons—in a public, official context.

The Fasti Antiates Ministrorum Domus Augustae, a large inscription associated with the imperial villa at Antium, is best known for its iteration of the Augustan calendar. In this article, I reassess the fasti in their entirety, focusing on their manner of display and social function. I place special emphasis on the section of the inscription, largely overlooked, that contains the annual records of magistrates who led the voluntary association that commissioned the inscription, a detailed record of two decades of local history. The association revealed in these records worked to bestow honors on its members, offering them prestige within and beyond the household, and also acted to censure them. Because the fasti identify most magistrates by job title, they also provide invaluable information about the villa’s workforce, composed of enslaved people and freedmen; the document provides a valuable counterpoint to other testimonia for occupations, largely funerary. Manual laborers and domestics appear with greater frequency in the fasti than they do in occupational inscriptions from funerary contexts, while administrators, abundant in funerary contexts, form a minority. Importantly, the magistrates’ list reveals that the association was a group in which the “sub-clerical grades” of imperial slaves and freedmen could accrue prestige and wield authority as readily as their overseers. In the community reflected in the fasti, power derived not from job status within a workplace hierarchy, but from social standing among peers—acquired and maintained (or lost) over decades of service.

This paper considers Carson’s rewriting of Heracles’ tragic madness— through the art of collage, an assembling and disassambling of textual fragments, scraps of papers, drawings, chromatic smears, and sketches—as an imagistic site for theorizing the anti-normative materiality, physical and metaphysical, of par-a-noia. I make a case for a materiality of par-a-noia by proposing a comparison with Alain Badiou’s Marxist political formalism. The distinctive formal trait of H of H, verbal and pictorial juxtaposition, invites us to think of par-a-noia as an aesthetico-political radicality located on the edge of a voiding of thought (noein), a radicality that, as I suggest at the end, can be aligned with modes of non-normate cognition, with neuroqueer countersociality.

The question of the foreigner, especially as elaborated by Jacques Derrida in the first of his two essays Of Hospitality, is at the heart of Aeschylus’ Suppliants, a play in which the fifty daughters of the Egyptian king Danaus appeal to the Argive king Pelasgus for asylum. Indeed, Aeschylus structures much of the initial encounter between the Danaids and Pelasgus in the interrogatory mode: as an exchange of questions to the foreigner, of the foreigner. Beginning with queries about identity, the play moves quickly to pose questions about authority, ultimately running aground upon Pelasgus’ inability to decide what to do about these Egyptian-Argive women whose demands for hospitality threaten his control over the city. Where previous scholarship on the play has focused on its representation of foreignness or its introduction of democratic rule, a close reading in light of Derrida’s work on hospitality elaborates the important relationship between hospitality and democratic sovereignty that the play develops. For the real question of the foreigner asks how the people can wield power in a city; in response, the play imagines the origins of democracy as an act of civic hospitality or metoikia.

In December 2020, I was privileged to read an advance copy of a new book by the distinguished political theorist Bonnie Honig-already known to classicists for her significant rereading of the political possibilities of Antigone in Antigone, Interrupted.This new book, A Feminist Theory of Refusal, is based on the Flexner Lectures that Honig gave at my home institution of Bryn Mawr College in 2017, and it returns to Greek tragedy as both provocation and springboard for her vital and creative ideas.This time, she works with Euripides' Bacchae, and it immediately seemed to me that the book demanded response from classicists both as textual scholars and as civic subjects thinking about how classics may be used and misused in the world.Then, on January 6, 2021, came the insurrection at the US Capitol, and the idea of responding to A Feminist Theory of Refusal gained urgency.After all, the rioters at the Capitol were practising a politics of refusal too, though certainly not a feminist one, and they too were mobilizing themes and motifs from classics; and the results were ugly and violent and incalculably damaging to the body politic.We are still reckoning with their bitter effects, both within the US and elsewhere in the world, and we shall be doing so for a long time.What, then, should a feminist theory of refusal look like?How does the Bacchae help us to realize that vision?And how might we expand upon it?In A Feminist Theory of Refusal, Bonnie Honig uses scenes from the Bacchae to develop a fierce feminist activism that is grounded, paradoxically, in a refusal to act -or rather, to act within prescribed patriarchal frameworks-and she treats the retreat of the Theban Bacchae to Mount Cithaeron as a paradigm of this refusal.

Recent work on trauma, especially in the field of Holocaust studies, has tackled the question of how the “generation after” relates, and relates to, the trauma of its immediate ancestors as it navigates between the poles of remembrance and appropriation. Other studies have shifted focus towards the effects of trauma upon narration, in part through critiquing the prevailing psycho-analytic model of trauma as an unrepresentable event that evades/forecloses language. Aeschylus’ Suppliants, with its chorus of fifty female Danaids who react to their traumatic present by recourse to tales of the traumatic past of their ancestor Io and her son Epaphos (“Touch”), offers a productive stage for testing the applicability of these theoretical frames to the genre of ancient Greek tragedy. The Danaids’ turn to the past explores the agency of an ancestral trauma that reaches into their present, and in doing so highlights the unsteady inheritance of trauma both for those who relate and for those who witness these acts of testimony. The act of supplication itself is defined in part by physical contact between the suppliant and the supplicandus, yet this ritual emphasis on touch is amplified by the play’s consistent focus upon a series of real and hypothesized touches, from the traumatic to the salvific. Through this engagement with the haptic context of trauma and traumatic recall, Aeschylus’ play proposes an enlarged aetiology of touch—across cognitive, affective, and physical registers—for the ritual of supplication itself.

This article offers a thorough study of Virgil's interaction with the myth of Eteocles and Polynices' war for the throne of Thebes, as represented especially in Athenian tragedy. It demonstrates that allusions to the Theban myth are crucial to the Aeneid's construction of a set of tensions and oppositions that play an important role in Virgil's reflection on the historical experience of Rome, especially in connection with the transition from Republic to Empire. In particular, interaction with Theban stories allows Virgil to explore: (1) the dichotomy between similarity and foreignness in the depiction of Rome's enemies; (2) the tension in differing attitudes towards the state as reflected in antithetical character types—namely, the selfless youth who sacrifices himself for the community and the would-be tyrant prepared to go to any lengths to achieve sole power; and, finally, (3) the dichotomy between opposing notions of time defined by teleology, on the one hand, and circularity and repetition on the other, the two representing the differing temporalities of epic and tragedy, respectively.