Mark Masterson

Long associated with religion in the ancient world, obscenity features in the works of both the late-Platonic philosopher Iamblichus and the Christian author Arnobius of Sicca. While Iamblichus is decorous and indirect in his evocation of corporeal matters and Arnobius is exuberant in showing what ought not be shown, it is possible to see both of these authors speaking of the forbidden to render their respective religious agendas more lively and their assertions about the nature of the sacred more authoritative.

In this talk, I consider the visibility of male homosexual desire that is excessive of age-discrepant and asymmetrical pederasty within a late fourth-century CE Greek text: Eunapius' Lives of the Philosophers, section 5.2.3-7 (Civiletti/TLG); Wright 459 (pp. 368-370). I call this desire ' ...

This article seeks to show the effect that Vitruvius' probable social status had on the contents of the De Architectura. The education proposed for the architect, the receipt of a wage, and pleasure all shape the treatise in significant ways. The article supplements these discussions with a close reading of a section of the De Architectura hitherto neglected in the

Discussions of Byzantine eunuchs have generally relied on accounts that speak directly of a man's eunuch status. This has meant that scholars have constructed discussions of eunuchs from a destabilizing mix of highly critical and highly laudatory languages. This article proposes to de-emphasise the languages of difference, i.e., exclusion or excessive praise, and to consider how the eunuchs and the bearded, i.e., the intact, got along with one another as men. Discussing instances from Byzantine historiography and epistolography and employing Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's notion of reparative reading, we focus on the life and career of Nikephoros Ouranos. He was one of emperor Basil II's leading generals and hitherto not identified as a eunuch in the secondary literature. Nikephoros Ouranos is a good personage to use for considering how eunuch and bearded got along at a time in which they were highly integrated with one another in the government of the empire. Approaching the s...

An account of the influence of Dover's 1978 book on later scholarship, mapping significant scholarship in this field over the subsequent forty years. Particular attention is given to the '(social) constructionist' positions taken by Foucault, Halperin and Winkler as well as critics of this model, e.g. and esp. Davidson.

This paper explores the emperor Julian's use of pederastic and same-sex sexual tropes to characterize the importance of his friendship with Saturninius Secundus Salutius. The "Self-Consolation" or Oration 4 is read in light of its intertextualities with Theocritus, Plato, and various ancient discussions of dreams with nocturnal emissions.

behind where it was twenty-five years ago. Perhaps the entire book project would have been better served if the editors had taken the time to consider why we should care about sexual and gender landscapes in transition and particularly what possibilities exist for interrogation of current ways of seeing gender and sexuality given their recent invention. At least the reader can approach the book this way: as a document of newly hegemonic views and practices of gender and sexuality in countries that are far from done reinventing themselves.

analysis of manuscript transmissions is the presence in a manuscript of readings drawn from more than one source (the phenomenon stigmatised by the term ‘contamination’); I suspect that the scribes who engaged in it did so more often in the hope of recovering a better text (i.e. one closer to the original) than from a wish to reshape a text to suit their own taste. In his closing pages Z. throws out the intriguing suggestion that classical textual criticism’s preoccupation with recovering the lost original and its morally tinged vocabulary of ‘error’ and ‘corruption’ have their origin in the Protestant need for a secure text of sacred scripture. Protestantism may well have in·uenced the outlook of early stemmatic critics, but it was not responsible for the charged rhetoric to which Z. rightly calls attention. Long before Luther was born, Italian humanists had deployed a rich vocabulary of moral opprobrium in describing textual error, including terms such as uitium, corruptio and deprauatio (cf. S. Rizzo, Il lessico μlologico degli umanisti [Rome, 1973], pp. 219–26), and in doing so they were re·ecting ancient practice. The axiom that every classical text dictates the editorial method appropriate to its particular transmission is even more applicable to scholiastic texts than to canonical works of literature. The approach taken by Clausen and Z. to editing the CC cannot, therefore, be straightforwardly applied to the editing of other sets of scholia. But Z.’s distinction between a text (a coherent body of writing composed by a single author) and a process (an ongoing operation in which each set of scholia creates its own identity) could have implications for other texts of this kind. Z. himself has argued that the Virgil commentary of Servius is a text, while the notes that go under the name of Servius Auctus are part of a process of early medieval Virgilian commentary. To the extent that he is right – and in this area truth is more likely to be found in degrees than in either/or dichotomies – the e¶ort to reconstruct a compiler’s text of Servius Auctus is likely to remain frustrated. More broadly, Z.’s clear-headed analysis of the issues involved in deμning and editing the CC can indeed serve as a model of how to think about the problems raised by editing scholiastic texts.

STATIUS' THEBAID AND THE REALIZATION OF ROMAN MANHOOD ... Into a thousand parts divide one man, And make imaginary puissance. (Shakespeare, Henry V Prol. 24-25) ... Death sits so naturally on you! Death becomes the Mannons! You were always like the

Companion to Roman Satire, ed. kirk Freudenburg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 177–91, esp. 185–88. rosen’s best contribution is in teasing out connections with his own previous discussions: why does Naevolus mention a slave “as single as the broad eye of Polyphemus” (9.64–65) or end his complaint with the sirens (9.148–50), if not to relate the satirist’s alter-ego to the literary postures first assumed in the Odyssey? There is more here even than rosen says: scratch Corydon (9.102) and you find Polyphemus (via virgil, Ecl. 2), but that only reinforces the importance of the tradition he is teaching us. in his first chapter, rosen discusses Aristotle’s insistence that artistic mimesis “had a different experiential, even ontological, status from lived reality” (35). He returns to this subject in his final chapter. when Critias blamed Archilochus for making a public display of pone\ria in his poetry, was he naïve in his failure to distinguish between play selves and real selves? is there an answer to the Platonic fear that one is shaped by the roles one assumes? rosen points to a passage in Republic 396e which seems to make a double concession: a respectable person is ashamed to play a base role, in part because he is untrained to do so, unless for a joke. space for a respectable comic poet opens up, but quickly closes again in Laws 816d–e where comic roles are reserved for “slaves and paid foreigners” (260). Hellenistic critics offer a different view. eratosthenes insists that poetry is for entertainment not education. A fragment of Philodemus seems to say that ancient audiences admired Archilochus and Hipponax for representing bad characters, provided that they were well drawn. rosen may be in danger of turning archaic Greece into a world of artistic connoisseurs, “a time when people were capable of keeping these critical realms (morality and poetic value) separate” (265), but the closing chapter on trends in ancient literary criticism offers a useful coda to the case studies which have preceded it. readers attracted by the word “satire” in the book’s title may be surprised not to reach rome until page 207, but walking less familiar ground was, for me at least, a salutary experience. i think this book will spark new approaches in scholars working right across the comic spectrum.