Rivista di Filologia e di Istruzione Classica

The supplement <καὶ τόλμην> is suggested instead of the traditional <καὶ ῥώμην> in Gorgias’ Epitaph (DK 82 B 6, 3).

The antistrophe of the song of Sophocles’ Antigone that begins with Ἔρως ἀνίκατε μάχαν does not describe the effects of sexual desire, but those of desire for autocratic power, and refers to Creon’s μεγάλοι θεσμοί (which I interpret as ‘horrible decrees’). That desire comes from Aphrodite, as sexual desire does. The goddess is designated here by the kenning εὔλεκτρος Νύμφα, ‘the Girl who gives the pleasure of bed’. The play Antigone as a whole shows Creon as a tyrant, but it transforms the traditional idea of a tyrant. This is a tyrant who uses new intellectual tools, those of rhetoric and philosophy, for evil purposes. The poet perceives the dangers that can come from a new kind of politician.

This paper reappraises the evidence for the Athenian bank by adopting the insights of new institutional economics, above all the recently developed theoretical model known as ‘neosubstantivism’. This reappraisal leads to a new understanding of the economic behaviour of the average Athenian banker and shows that every choice he made was affected by a profound interdependence between cultural values, maximization of profit and civic institutions.

Virgil’s concept of love in book 4 of the Aeneid is completely negative, perhaps the most terrible in the whole of Latin literature. The reasons for this can be understood only by explaining some unclear passages in book 4 correctly. For infelix Dido love is the cause of irreparable psychological and moral degradation: the loss of univiratus, pudicitia and fama; the neglect of negotia and officia; the loss of composure and, ultimately, her suicide. So, as a result of love, the behavior of the queen becomes the antithesis of traditional Roman values, but also of proper Epicurean behavior: book 4 of De rerum natura is, in fact, an important ideological model for Virgil.

This article, accompanied by an editio princeps, French translation and commentary, presents two new Greek fragments of John of Alexandria’s Commentary on the sixth book of Hippocrates’ Epidemics. This Commentary had been considered lost until 1917, when G. Mercati discovered 43 fragments in the margins of Vaticanus gr. 300. This medical manuscript containins the Ephodia, which is a Greek translation of a medical handbook of the 10th century, the Zād al-musāfir composed by Ibn al-Ğazzār. I have been able to identify two new fragments on earache in a Florence manuscript (Laurentianus Plut. 74.10), in which they are found among excerpts from the same Ephodia.

Chapters 6, 8, 9 and 14 of the so called Paradoxographus Palatinus (PP) have posed problems to editors, as they contain toponyms considered corrupt. Based on some considerations set out in a previous article on the PP, a solution to those problems is here proposed, highlighting the existence of the places named and the reality of the phenomena described in the chapters, as well as the lack of any textual relation with other loci in Greek. As a consequence of this, the confirmation of the manuscript readings and the possibility that the chapters may be the excerptor’s creation are suggested.

The article investigates how, during the nineteenth century, the proemial section of Thucydides’ Histories came to be labelled ‘Archaeology’.

This article deals with the origin of the name of the Roman tutelary gods Lares, which does not have a clear etymology. It seems relevant to compare its earlier form Lasēs (the Carmen Arvale) with OInd. lásati ‘shines, glitters, appears’ (epic class.), Gr. λάω ‘look’, ἀλαός ‘blind’. Ovid’s evidence that the Lares were represented as twins allows us to suppose that this image originates from an Indo-European mytheme of the divine twins, who regularly bear names meaning ‘bright’ or ‘shining one’ in different Indo-European traditions, reflecting their solar nature.