In a post two weeks ago, I discussed an amusing if tendentious story about Aristotle and his crew usurping Plato’s turf in the garden of the Academy and suggested that this story helps us to imagine the ways in which partisans of various students of Plato (e.g. Read more
“For just as all the sophisticated doctors and most sophisticated athletic trainers pretty much agree that those who are to be good doctors or trainers must be experienced about nature – and indeed much more than the former … in the same way, the statesman must have certain norms taken… Read more
In his “biography” of the first king of the Persian Empire, Xenophon says of Cyrus the Great: In his nature Cyrus is reputed and still celebrated even now among the barbarians as most beautiful in his form and most loving of humanity (φιλανθρωπότατος) in his soul, as well as most… Read more
The issue of bilingualism is central to my study of the Tebtunis priests. The priests employed Egyptian in “personal” (and, of course, cultic) texts throughout the Roman period—language preference is a more complicated matter—but the use of demotic Egyptian in official contexts drops significantly rather early on—not immediately with the… Read more
What is an epigram? A dwarfish whole, its body brevity and wit its soul (Samuel Taylor Coleridge) In her book on “Poetic closure”, Barbara Herrnstein Smith envisioned a poem of maximal closure as “pre-eminently teleological” and “in a sense […] suicidal […], for all of its… Read more
