Greece & Rome

OUR JOURNALS

Greece & Rome is a journal which delivers scholarly research to a wider audience. It showcases original and informative articles on ancient history, literature, art, archaeology, religion, philosophy, and reception of the ancient world. Although its content reflects current research and its contributors include leading figures in the field, undergraduates and general readers who wish to be kept informed of current thinking will also find it engaging and accessible, as well as professional scholars in Classics and in other disciplines. With the wider audience in mind all Greek and Latin quotations are translated.

About the Editors

Professor Ivana Petrovic

Ivana Petrovice is the Hugh H. Obear Professor of Classics and Department of Classics Chair at the University of Virginia. Her work focuses primarily on the interaction between the texts and their historical, religious and social contexts.

Professor Andrej Petrovic

Andrej Petrovic is a Professor of Classics at the University of Virginia. His research interests include Greek epigraphy, Greek religion, and Greek culture and literature (esp. epigram, elegy, and Greek inscriptional poetry).

A subscription to Greece & Rome includes an annual supplement of New Surveys in the Classics. These are a series of short books dedicated to key themes and concepts in the classical world. They deal with a wide range of topics, from key figures like Homer and Virgil, to subjects such as Greek tragedy, thought and science, women, slavery, Roman religion, and satire.

The latest issue of Greece and Rome is out now!

18

articles

250+

pages

17

open access articles

Find out about just a few articles from Greece & Rome 73.2 and click on their titles to read more:

A NEW SWORD FROM SPAIN: THE ROMAN ADOPTION OF THE GLADIUS HISPANIENSIS

The gladius hispaniensis was the quintessential weapon of the Roman Republican legionary. Yet the date and mechanisms of its adoption are not fully understood. It will be argued, utilizing both the archaeological and literary record, that it was adopted and spread rapidly throughout the Roman army during the Hannibalic War, becoming a key element of the Roman armament in their wars of expansion in the second century bce. The rapidity of its adoption explains why it entered the literary record, why it was specifically associated with Spain, and why it was feared amongst the Greeks and Macedonians.

Connor Beattie

BETWEEN ANCIENT ANIMAL STUDIES AND MYTHOLOGY: THE CASE OF THE HIPPOCAMPS AND OTHER MIXOKĒTĒ

The place of hippocamps in the Graeco-Roman cultural imagination was highly uneven, as they appeared prominently in visual media, but were exceedingly rare in ancient literary sources. Hippocamps can be demonstrated to be a mythological creature wholly derived from art, but which never prominently made a transition into narrative storytelling. These half-horse, half-marine animals were, then, accompanied, from the Hellenistic period onwards, by a series of other marine Mischwesen (‘mixed beings’), a grouping that I demonstrate to be related to the sea monster of the ancient world, the κῆτος (pl. κήτη). This article further examines this grouping of imaginary animals as a case study to consider the imaginative construction of such figures as a result of cultural assumptions about nature, rather than mere misapprehensions of real animals alone. In this case, it is the notion that the undersea world was essentially reflective of the terrestrial world, containing such ‘sea versions’ of land mammals.

Ryan Denson

VOMITING UP VERGIL: SENECA’S EMETIC THEORY OF RECEPTION

Seneca’s creative reworkings of earlier Latin and Greek literature are by now an essential part of his scholarly treatment. This article identifies a heretofore unrecognized component of his method of conceiving literary reception: vomit. Given the negative moralistic associations of vomit in Latin literature – including in Seneca’s own corpus – the repurposing of vomit as part of a normative theory of reception may come as a surprise, but close attention to the Apocolocyntosis, Ep. 108, and Ep. 84 reveals a serious Senecan engagement with the image of vomit as reception, helps shed light on some absent presences within Seneca’s texts, and adds complexity to our understanding of the trope of ‘textual digestion’.

Robert Santucci