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Orphic studies specialists have recently been fortunate due to Giulia Rossetto's discovery of an unknown hexameter text within a palimpsest, which had Arabic script on its surface. This text stands out for its artificial literary language, typical of the epic tradition, and the presence of direct speech. Its archaic style is characterized by the reuse of Homeric formulas and echoes phrases from various texts, such as the Rhapsodies, Nonnus' Dionysiaca, and the Orphic Hymns (Rossetto, 2021). The intertextual links between the Sinai hexameters and these texts, especially the direction of their influence, are yet to be established. This paper will detail the codex's condition, describe the text's material features, summarize its content, and explore the academic discussion it has ignited. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the affective, emotional, and ideological questions raised by the practice of evidentiary torture (basanos) as necessity (anangkê). It proposes that competing ideas about its truth-value in Athenian forensic oratory reflect a degree of ambivalence sufficient to indicate that the Athenians (can) recognize the inherent unreliability of the slave's tormented body and mind to reveal the truth. In Prometheus Bound, the torture of Prometheus is dramatized as brutal coercion by Zeus' authoritarian state and set against the 'coercion' exercised by the bonds of kinship and emotional attachment. As such it engenders unbending anger on both sides and fails to coerce Prometheus to speak. The juxtaposition of the two genres establishes the unreliability of torture for extracting information along with a recognition that the criteria of exclusion for rendering bodies torturable are arbitrary, as are the rights they help maintain in the interest of Athenian exceptionalism. Fully embracing these recognitions would necessitate a new politics of care and fundamental reorganization of the civic community to expand 'kinship' and the bonds that compel mutual recognition and political inclusion. The paper closes by turning to the use of torture by the CIA in the context of the American war on terror to elucidate the persistence of discourses of necessity in contemporary politics of righteous anger and brings forth similar misrecognitions in the interest of American exceptionalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares two anti-modern readings of Plato and the Platonic tradition, both complementary and opposite, that of Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821) and that of Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848-1907). These appropriations, which respectively open and closes the nineteenth century, express the rise and decline of the "romantic Platonism." De Maistre quotes, comments on, translates and rewrites Plato's dialogues, as well as various texts from the ancient Neoplatonism and the modern Platonic tradition. On the other hand, Huysmans's texts, particularly À rebours (1884), the most representative novel of decadent aesthetics, express the crisis of romantic Platonism, as shown by its nihilism, the figure of the simulacrum and the modification of the androgynous topic. Thus, Platonism and its crisis explore historical temporality, from revolutionary acceleration to fin-de-siècle decadence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers, to the best of our knowledge, the only translation into spanish of the chapter "On Chess" of the encyclopedic work De naturis rerum written around 1190 by the english philosopher Alexander Neckam (1157-1217). The mentioned chapter, which follows another one on dice players, is relevant not only to understand the continuity of an anti-ludic attitude that has its roots in the thought of the first Christians, but also to notice the reception of muslim chess in christian medieval England both in its symbolic representations and in the rules of the game. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of paralinguistics, i.e. the ways of communicating without the use of language, whether conscious, intentional and voluntary or otherwise, is an essential component of any attempt to reconstruct, understand and interpret the systems of cultural, societal, institutional, moral and inter-personal communication in modern and ancient societies. Three specific aspects of paralinguistics, as they are described in Attic oratory, are examined in this paper: face and facial organs (such as mouth and nose), hands, and gait. It is argued that the references to paralinguistics aim to win over the audience in the lawcourt or in political conventions by arousing emotions and by sustaining a war between the speaker's opponents and the Athenian community, whose cultural values and beliefs the opponents are presented as violating. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The importance of the 'affective turn' in classical studies is well acknowledged, as it can be perceived through the many interdisciplinary works that have been published in the area during these last decades. Taking into account the challenges and difficulties involving the historical analysis of feelings, this paper intends to account for the contributions that have been made in the last years on the study of emotions in Antiquity. By specially focusing on classical Greece, we seek to offer a wide theoretical framework that could be useful for those willing to embark in this promising field of academic research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores aspects of what I shall call pity or compassion in Homer (especially Iliad 24) and Aristotle (especially the Rhetoric), but nothing very much hangs on the precise terminology. The phenomena covered by terms such as "compassion", "sympathy", "empathy", and "pity" (and their analogues, where they exist, in other languages) constitute a family in which resemblances are often really rather close in practice (even if particular members of the group pass in and out of fashion and take on a range of different connotations at different periods and in different contexts). In concentrating on the theory and practice of literature, I am not offering a synthetic account of ancient Greek pity; instead I focus, in the main, on just two authors, Homer and Aristotle, and proceed primarily by means of a confrontation between the representation of pity in the final book of the Iliad and the theorization of that emotion in Aristotle's Rhetoric and Poetics. I begin with Homer, but immediately bring the Homeric narrative into relation with Aristotle's account of pity in the Rhetoric. This will lead to some thoughts on the nature of pity and compassion in Homer in general, before we return to the contrast between Homer and Aristotle (with emphasis on the Poetics), a contrast that is in some ways underscored by certain differences between Aristotle and Plato on the emotional effects of epic and tragic poetry. A particular focus will be Aristotle's linkage of pity with the kind of thing that one would fear were it likely to happen to oneself, by contrast with the connection in Homer and Plato between pity for others and the experience of grief, both one's own and that of others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the fraught chapter (V.7) of the Nicomachean Ethics concerning natural justice. It argues that the main tradition of commentary on the chapter has strayed onto a wrong path by misconstruing two quite precise junctures in the argument. When those two errors are corrected, there emerges an Aristotle who, far from being a champion of natural law theory in ethics, holds that the moral principles with which humans are naturally endowed are variable, and that in two senses. Not only do these moral principles vary across space and time, but also they can be deliberately modified by habituation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The experiences of transitional justice in Greek antiquity show to what extent emotions can play a specific role in the social reestablishment of memory, justice and truth. Based on a study of classical sources from Athens, Dikaia and Nakone, the purpose of this paper is to describe the affective fiction supporting this institutional framework: by expanding the emotional dimension from the realm of individuals to the society, a political installation of pathos is achieved with the aim of overcoming the traumatic effects of the civil war through the planning and design of an emotional community based on the virtues of reconciliation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present article contains the conference delivered by Prof. C.J. Rowe at the III International Ancient Philosophy Workshop (Buenos Aires, Argentina). There he exposes the main guidelines of the forthcoming edition of Aristotle's Eudemian Ethics which he has prepared for the Scriptorum Classicorum Bibliotheca Oxoniensis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]