Given Plutarch’s fragmentary piece on Aristophanes and Menander, a piece of Table Talk on almost the same topic and various attacks on comic poets scattered through the Lives, one might believe that Plutarch is a staid, conservative and humourless author. But several other instances in his writings reveal a playful, facetious, witty and humorous Plutarch. This paper will focus on the Quaestiones Convivales, which bear ample witness to this aspect of Plutarch’s personality and authorial technique. It will examine the ways (...) in which he introduces and describes the various interlocutors, discuss certain comments with which he tries to ridicule his philosophical opponents, notably the Stoics and the Epicureans, try to distinguish the various manifestations of Plutarch’s humour and finally suggest that Plutarch’s stance and attitude towards playfulness, comic situations and laughter may ultimately be affected, at least in part, by his allegiance to Plato. (shrink)

Statius' Silvae 5.3 is a poem written in honor of the poet's dead father. In the course of the poem, Statius recounts his father's life and achievements. Prominent among these accomplishments are the years the elder Statius spent as a teacher of Greek poetry—a grammarian—in Naples. Statius tells us which Greek poets his father taught and to whom. The content and audience of Statius' father's instruction form the basis of this paper. A number of the Greek poets taught by Statius' (...) father are not obvious candidates for inclusion in a course of instruction in Greek poetry. Lycophron, Corinna or Epicharmus, for instance, are not commonly found in other accounts of Greek education in Roman Italy during the early empire. The elder Statius' pedagogical activity has thus been viewed as a Neapolitan peculiarity. Yet, I argue, the same authors taught by Statius' father were the focus of grammarians who were working in Rome itself. The curriculum of Statius' father is thus representative of Greek intellectual activity in early imperial Rome. The pedagogical activity of Statius senior is relevant to Roman intellectual history in a second way. His students consisted of aristocrats from around the Bay of Naples and southern Italy. Some of these students were likely Roman. So too the students of the Greek grammarians working in Rome likely encountered young Romans. How did the study of some mainstream and some recondite Greek poets fit into the élite discourse of the early empire? I argue that knowledge of the poets taught by the elder Statius was geared towards marking off the élite from the non-élite. Students of grammarians such as Statius' father were given the tools to engage in aristocratic discourse, which constituted a claim for prestige and honor in early imperial Rome. (shrink)

The absorption of the Greek world into the Roman empire created intellectual problems on several levels. In the first instance, Greek confidence in the superiority of Hellenic culture made explanations for the swiftness of Roman conquest all the more necessary. In accounting for Rome's success, Greeks focused on the structure and character of the Roman state, on Roman attitudes towards citizenship, and on the nature of the Roman constitution. Greeks initially attempted to understand Roman institutions and beliefs by assimilating them (...) to paradigms within Hellenistic political thought. On the one hand, this process tended to obscure substantial differences between Greek and Roman political theory. At the same time, appreciation of Rome's relations with Italy created a means through which Greeks could imagine their own integration into the Roman community. Among the conceptual models available to Greeks of this age, only the polis provided a paradigm for a collectivity in which individuals had equal rights and toward which they directed their patriotic sentiments. That Roman Italy was not a polis did not force the coinage of new terminology: the polis formed a conceptual boundary that Hellenistic political philosophy never truly escaped. Repeated construals of Roman ideas and institutions on analogy with polis-based models ultimately forced a shift in the semantic fields of Greek political terminology and altered Greeks' conceptual archetype of the political collectivity. This process provided a framework within which Greeks could justify their wholesale participation in imperial culture and political life: they could, on these terms, argue that the gradual evolution of the world toward a single, unified empire actualized man's natural tendency to center his life around a single polis. (shrink)

The author of this article is interested in how Plutarch of Chaeronea created the picture of the Sullan War in Parallel lives, especially in the Life of Lucius Cornelius Sulla. Firstly, the author notes that in presenting the civil war Plutarch was dependent on the Memoirs of Sulla. But not only. There are fragments from other source too, probably the same that Appian of Alexandria used. Therefore the Author wonders to what extend Plutarch was tendentious in presenting the Sullan War. (...) Secondly, the author shows which moments of the Sullan War were of especial interest to Plutarch of Chaeronea and tries to answer why some of the events Plutarch was to described so briefly. Finally, the author indicates why this report of Plutarch of Chaeronea remains a very important source for any historian of the civil wars in Rome. (shrink)