This chapter assesses the imperial presence of lyric in the form of the textual tradition of the nine canonical poets established by Alexandrian scholars. It reviews the evidence for the circulation of archaic and classical lyric texts among students of literature and readers from the late Hellenistic period onwards. Papyri preserving lyric texts and commentaries, treatises discussing literary and rhetorical education, as well as the diffusion of lyric quotations among Greek prose writers are all surveyed to define the place of lyric poetry in imperial paideia. Compared to mainstream classics, the genre thus emerges as a special, more niche and refined form of reading. The chapter then shows that by the imperial period, the reception of lyric subgenres followed a crystallised system of personas, where each poet activated specific thematic, local, ethical and aesthetic associations. This mental map shaped the reception of lyric poetry by imperial writers who, like Aristides, knew and chose to deploy it.

This final chapter summarises the book’s substantial contribution to our interpretation of Aristides’ works and figure, as well as to our picture of ancient lyric reception and imperial Greek culture more widely. Besides looking backwards, however, this conclusion also adds some reflections on how the approach developed and deployed in this study may be productively applied to other imperial genres and writers, both pagan and Christian, down to Late Antiquity.

This chapter defines paradoxes. It reviews several definitions, demonstrating the difference between contradictions and paradoxes. The essence of paradoxes is that they deliver a certain truth and a higher-level meaning. Contradictions are conflicting elements within the same system, whereas paradoxes are conflicting elements that reveal a previously unknown truth. A definition derived from the field of psychotherapy is also mentioned: Paradoxes are best characterized as unacceptable conclusions derived by apparently acceptable reasoning from apparently acceptable premises. Paradoxes are also seen as unacceptable conclusions derived from apparently acceptable reasoning based on seemingly acceptable premises. The definition proposed for this book is “a statement that is seemingly contradictory or opposed to common sense and yet is perhaps true,” including the broader notion of an “air of absurdity,” provided that this absurdity carries a higher-level meaning. Some historical examples are presented, such as Achilles never catching up with a much slower tortoise, the arrow paradox, the paradox of place, the liar paradox, identity paradox, and the paradox of the stone.

Up to this point our concern has been how the ancient historian justifies himself before his audience and attempts to portray himself as the proper person for the writing of history, that is, with his role as narrator rerum. The present chapter examines how he approaches his task when a participant in the deeds he records, and how he reconciles the dual role of actor and auctor rerum. For many historians of the ancient world had the opportunity to be both participant and rememberer. The historian’s formal method of presenting himself has received comparatively little attention, yet it is of interest not only because it tells us something of the way that men who wrote history in the ancient world approached the writing of their own deeds, but also what their concerns were in doing so. It is usually assumed that in order to give authority to his account, an historian who narrated his own deeds used the third person and maintained a show of formal impartiality. But a study of the surviving (and partially surviving) historians reveals a variety of approaches and methods, changing with time, the specific type of history written, and the individual intention of the historian himself.

This chapter explores the idea of gendered social performance through the texts of Plutarch and Sima Qian. Chandra Giroux investigates two categories of social performance in particular: friendship and authority, and death and grief. Both categories are approached from the perspective of each author’s own social performance in these scenarios as well as how they represent the social performance of women in them. Through an investigation of Plutarch’s and Sima Qian’s self-representations of their own social performances, she argues that both authors attempt to establish themselves as exemplary figures, ones that focus on the idea of the maintenance of harmony. In this way, Plutarch’s and Sima Qian’s actions are meant as a mirror for their readers’ own lives. In comparison, the chapter analyzes the examples of Timokleia and Timoxena in Plutarch’s corpus, as well as that of Nie Ying in Sima Qian’s work, to explore the authors’ notions of the ideal female reaction to friendship and authority, as well as that of death and grief. In this analysis, Giroux finds that both authors’ representations of women are based in the gender expectations of their respective societies. It is thus the differences between their cultures’ approaches to gender relations that dictate how Plutarch and Sima Qian understood the ideal female reaction to death, grief, friendship, and authority.

The Hannibal of this book is Hannibal surnamed Barca. Scipio is Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus. The final extra name (‘the African’) was given to him in recognition of his victory over Hannibal in north Africa. The Prologue explains that the model for this joint biograohy of Hannibal and Scipio is not so much Plutarch’s series of parallel Greek and Roman lives, as Alan Bullock’s Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives. Ancient, Renaissance, and modern explorations of the parallels between the two men are discussed, and a separate section sketches the career and approach of Bullock as a classically trained modern historian and biographer. Another section sets out programmatically the view of Roman and Carthaginian imperialism to be adopted in the book. The limitations of the evidence available to biographers of individuals from the ancient world are candidly acknowledged, and the use of the ‘past presumptive’ tense (so-and so- ‘will have’ done, known, or thought this or that) is renounced.

Hannibal and Scipio left no autobiographies, except that Hannibal in 205, before leaving Italy for Africa, inscribed a bilingual account of his military resources. Scipio’s contemporary funeral elogium (list of his offices and achievements, a kind of succinct obituary) does not survive (a much later one does). This chapter offers, by way of introduction, semi-fictional replacements for these missing documents and explains what Hannibal’s full inscription is likely to have contained. Other first-person evidence by the two men is quoted and discussed, such as letters reported in the literary sources. The chapter closes by asking what Hannibal and Scipio looked like. Appendix 1.1 lists and evaluates the sources for the book, and there is a sub-section on reliability of speeches. Appendix 1.2 addresses the problem of whether Plutarch’s lost Life of Scipio was about Hannibal’s opponent or Scipio Aemilianus, his younger relative by adoption. Appendix 1.3 is about ‘roving anecdotes’.

The Hannibal of this book is Hannibal surnamed Barca. Scipio is Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus. The final extra name (‘the African’) was given to him in recognition of his victory over Hannibal in north Africa. The Prologue explains that the model for this joint biograohy of Hannibal and Scipio is not so much Plutarch’s series of parallel Greek and Roman lives, as Alan Bullock’s Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives. Ancient, Renaissance, and modern explorations of the parallels between the two men are discussed, and a separate section sketches the career and approach of Bullock as a classically trained modern historian and biographer. Another section sets out programmatically the view of Roman and Carthaginian imperialism to be adopted in the book. The limitations of the evidence available to biographers of individuals from the ancient world are candidly acknowledged, and the use of the ‘past presumptive’ tense (so-and so- ‘will have’ done, known, or thought this or that) is renounced.

Although there is no equivalent term for ‘essay’ in either Greek or Latin, ancient literature was instrumental to the development of the English essay in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in three principal ways. First, some classical prose works provided stylistic models for early English essayists. Second, some ancient authors (Seneca in particular) processed information in a way that resonated with later essay writers; even if there were not ancient essayists, there were ancient ways of reading and writing that were fundamentally essayistic. And finally, the essay became one of the principal ways that readers gained access to ancient texts and ideas.

This chapter discusses Plutarch’s On the Oracles at Delphi, and in particular the account of the grammarian Theon as to how prose came to replace verse, not just in the delivery of the Delphic oracle, but in literary discourse as a whole. Theon’s account of the history of Greek literate culture is an important document of how learned Greeks in the Roman empire imagined how their world had changed, along with the literature in which it was represented. The first part of the chapter considers another Plutarchan account of cultural and intellectual change, namely the opening of On the Obsolescence of Oracles, which tells the foundation story of Delphi. Both texts lay weight upon the fact of change itself, rather than on any detailed plotting of that change, let alone a chronology for it; so too, both illustrate a tendency to see recurrent patterns of change, by which the outlines of Greek literary history are found already adumbrated in classical literature itself. Among the classical texts which are central to this appropriation of past models are the programmatic chapters of Thucydides and Aristotle’s account of the development of poetic language.

Experience is the cornerstone of Epicurean philosophy and nowhere is this more apparent than in the Epicurean views about the nature, formation, and application of concepts. ‘The Epicureans on Preconceptions and Other Concepts’ by Gábor Betegh and Voula Tsouna aims to piece together the approach to concepts suggested by Epicurus and his early associates, trace its historical development over a period of approximately five centuries, compare it with competing views, and highlight the philosophical value of the Epicurean account on that subject. It is not clear whether, properly speaking, the Epicureans can be claimed to have a theory about concepts. However, an in-depth discussion of the relevant questions will show that the Epicureans advance a coherent if elliptical explanation of the nature and formation of concepts and of their epistemological and ethical role. Also, the chapter establishes that, although the core of the Epicurean account remains fundamentally unaffected, there are shifts of emphasis and new developments marking the passage from one generation of Epicureans to another and from one era to the next.

The Conclusion uses the downfall of Nero to consider the legacy of the body politic metaphor in Roman political thought. Julio-Claudian writers relied on the duality of head and body to express fears about the recurrence of civil war. Without a head to command Rome’s warring limbs, they argued, Rome would return to its ancestral cycle of self-destruction. The Year of the Four Emperors confirmed the prescience of their warnings. Plutarch and Tacitus relied on symbolism of a headless body politic to describe the conflict, confirming their perception of sole rule as necessary if not ideal. This contest for power therefore did not weaken the Principate so much as confirm its viability as an institution independent of its Augustan origins. With the rise of the Flavians came the formalization of both sole rule and the Imperial model of the body politic for centuries to come.

B 115 is generally regarded as the reference fragment of Empedocles’ doctrine of rebirth, being the place where he presents himself as a god banished from the divine community as a result of certain crimes, sent into exile on our earth and here condemned to be reborn as all kinds of mortal beings. In Chapter 1 I argue that, contrary to the vast majority of editions of Empedocles’ fragments, B 115 belongs to the incipit of his physical poem. The chapter mostly focuses on the Strasbourg papyrus and the evidence it uncovered that is relevant to the question of the character and content of the physical poem. After questioning the basis on which scholars have placed B 115 within the Purifications, I will show that the Strasbourg papyrus provides strong proof for its allocation within On Nature. The relocation of this central fragment thus sets the stage for a re-evaluation of Empedocles’ physical system in its entirety, by indicating that it consists of mythical and religious themes in synergy with more strictly physical principles.

Chapter 3 focuses on δαίμων and its significance in Empedocles’ concept of rebirth. I show that the demonological fragments and the term δαίμων, in particular, emphasize Empedocles’ divine nature in contrast to the rest of humankind and cannot represent, as is generally believed, the place where his personal vicissitude becomes exemplary of every soul’s destiny, thus grounding his doctrine of rebirth. To define what Empedocles intended when he called himself a reincarnated δαίμων, I analyze Plato’s myths of the soul’s otherworldly journeys and some fragments attesting to Pythagoras’ demonology. While Plato, in his concept of rebirth, conceptualized the δαίμονες as deities who guide souls during and beyond this life, Pythagoras articulated the idea that a god could exceptionally undergo rebirths, but these are usually reserved for ordinary souls. Following Pythagoras and anticipating Plato, Empedocles constructs his demonology which is linked, but does not overlap, with his doctrine of rebirth. Finally, addressing the issue of the ‘physical’ δαίμων in B 59 I argue that δαίμων is a predicative notion which, in all Empedoclean occurrences, is still intimately connected to the traditional sense of ‘god’.