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This paper aims to conduct a reflection on the new reality that has occurred in the context of the present discipline of the Classical Tradition: the emergence of Reception Studies, in order to rereading Greek and Latin Classics over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the topics of the discourse about decadence, a discourse which, as it is known, can be traced in many ancient and modern historical, philosophical and literary sources. Our investigation, which takes as its starting point the works of Edwards 2002, Freund 1984, Le Goff 1991, Lovejoy-Boas 1997, Momigliano 1984 and Starn 1975, contends that 'decadence' is not a process that actually operates in human reality, but a metaphor used to interpret historical change. We will thus not attempt to describe a supposedly existing 'decadence', but the various ways in which discourses about decadence have been used to interpret historical, social or literary phenomena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ethnographical and geographical digressions of Ammianus Marcellinus' Res Gestae are examined in this paper. This writer, who was heir to a long historiographical tradition going back to Herodotus, belongs also to the ethnographical and geographical tradition that originated in the Greek periplus accounts. This literary genre was then systematically consolidated in Hellenistic times, whence the Roman historiography drew a lot of inspiration. Ammianus Marcellinus use of all those informations will be accounted for as a probable synthesis of historical, literary and scientific traditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]