Everyone is into data mining these days. Retailers find patterns in what you buy so that they can better market to you, governments search for patterns that identify terrorist threats, and data mining is at the core of privacy debates about the quarry of information collected by Facebook, Google and other websites. But the news isn't all potentially nefarious or the subject of impending litigation. Data mining is simply a… Read more
Simonides’ dictum “Painting is silent poetry, poetry is speaking painting” is very well known and appears over and over again in modern studies of ancient art and ecphrastic literature; Plutarch himself, who quotes it in The fame of the Athenians 3 (mor. 346F), refers to it elsewhere as “that often… Read more
Life-likeness is an old aesthetic ideal foregrounded time and again in ancient descriptions of works of art. The pertaining problems were addressed frequently: Perfect life-likeness in a way means perfect deception, while excessive authenticity can sometimes ruin the art work, as the epigram by Lucillius I quoted in my last… Read more
I am working on the problem of the authenticity of a series of fragments in the Doric dialect attributed to the mathematical Pythagorean Archytas of Tarentum, preserved by Stobaeus and called On Law and Justice (Περὶ νόμου καὶ δικαιοσύνης). A provisional version of the Greek texts and translation can be… Read more
Why did the Athenians call the dramatic actor hypokritês? This question has drawn significant attention for more than one hundred years, but it has not yet received a satisfactory answer. Scholars on all sides agree that, whatever its meaning, the label hypokritês must refer… Read more
