The ancient commentaries and scholia to Cicero’s speeches have hitherto received relatively little scholarly attention. This volume is dedicated to Asconius’ first-century commentary and the corpora of the scholia stemming from the 4th-7th centuries (Bobbio, ps.-Asconius, and Gronovius). It shows the specific interpretative challenges of these corpora and offers interpretative case studies. Furthermore, it contextualizes the corpora within the learning and learned environment of their time, by contrasting them with rhetorical teaching (via the transmission of Cicero on papyri and his...

The cryptic figure of the cinaedus recurs in both the literature and daily life of the Roman world. His afterlife – the equally cryptic catamite – appears to be well and alive as late as Victorian England. But who was the cinaedus? Should we think of a real group of individuals, or is the term but a scare name to keep at bay any form of threating otherness? This book, the first coherent collection of essays on the topic, addresses the matter and fleshes out the complexity of a debate that concerns not only Roman cinaedi but the foundations of our theoretical approach to the study of...

The fourth book of Virgil’s Aeneid is the shortest of his epic, and yet it has had an inestimable influence. The tragedy of Dido is replete with allusions to the Medeas of Euripides, Apollonius, and Ennius, as well as to Catullus’ Ariadne and the historical Cleopatra of Virgil’s Augustan Age. The book has intratextual connections to the poet’s own fourth Georgic (as he revisits the topic of apian regeneration and the loss of Eurydice), even as it confronts the reality of Rome’s bloody history with Carthage. The present volume offers the first full-scale commentary on the book in...

How Latin philosophical vocabulary developed through the translation of Greek sources, the varieties of translation practices Roman philosophers favoured, and how these practices evolved over time are the overarching themes of this monograph. A first of its kind, this comparative study analyzes the creation of philosophical vocabulary in Lucretius, Cicero, Apuleius, Calcidius, and Boethius. It highlights a Latin literary tradition in which the dominance of Greek philosophical expression was challenged and renovated over time through the individual translation choices of different Latin...