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In the pamphlet On Salaried Posts in Great Houses Lucian of Samosata analyzes the problem of the impossible relationship between misthos, ‘money’, and paideia, ‘culture’ and ‘teaching’. Money is an indispensable asset for the necessities of life. But starting with Socrates and the Sophists it becomes problematic. In Lucian’s satire the attack is directed at philosophers and the marketing of culture in the Roman Empire at the time of the Second Sophistic.

This paper discusses problems of staging, address and word order in Greek tragedy to shed light on a controversial passage in Sophocles: Aj. 339-343. Ajax’s cry within, ἰὼ παῖ παῖ (339), has been alternatively taken to refer to Eurysaces (as suggested by Tecmessa) or to Teucer (whom Ajax mentions at 342-343). The paper argues for Teucer and responds to three arguments against this view: (1) παῖ is not only acceptable, but also effective to address one’s sibling; (2) the word order of 342, Τεῦκρον καλῶ, strictly implies ‘It’s Teucer I’m calling’ (not just: ‘I call on Teucer’), hence it cannot mark the move to a new addressee; (3) it is hardly possible for Ajax not to hear Tecmessa’s 340-341: short interactions across the skēnē door may occur, and the parallel scene at Euripides, Medea 1270a-1278 suggests that Ajax most likely hears Tecmessa’s words and corrects her wrong guess.

This paper focuses on some quotations of Pseudo-Psellus’ treatise on music. Three quotations are provided and discussed: the well-known one by Manuel Bryennius, and two others by Joannes Zonaras and Michael Italicus. The Byzantine tendency to preserve pagan contents within Christian categories, together with the unique presence of this text in the overview of the ancient theoretical tradition, may be the main reasons for its wide circulation in the Byzantine world.

In the following note, the contributor will lead a short discussion on a difficult passage occurring in Germ. fr. 4 Gain: the author revises previous emendations and then uses a palaeographical method in order to propose fresh conjecture, which actually provides a plausible reading of what an ancient scribe miswrote.

Conjecture on [Epicharmus] Fr. 249 K.-A.

In Tb 1,11–14 the words that Hannah says to her husband resemble in many aspects those of Job’s wife (Job 2,9). That of Hannah is the defiance of a lively faith, attentive to people and to the situations of life, more that in complying with the law, in the rites and works of justice. This was the primitive sense of her words; in fact, the author of Tobit constructed her portrait on the original archetype of Job’s wife, that can be seen in Old Greek (og) and in his addiction in v. 9a–e, by contaminating them. So, here she urges Job to cry out to God his hopelessness for so unfair a trial, and to seek in him a living interlocutor, no longer resigning himself to the events. A reworking of Hannah’s image is totally positive in vv. 11–13: there it’s reinterpreted in the light of the new portrait of Job’s wife, reworked with misogynist accents by Jewish tradition and incorporated in the mt and in the ecclesiastical Greek of the lxx, where her words, rather than an exhortation, they are a curse against Yhwh, responsible for Job’s suffering. In Tobit, however, it is just an ideological reading, that is a reworking of the meaning of Hannah’s words (v. 14), as sometimes the tradition did, assimilating her role to that of Job’s wife in the mt and lxx.

The Aldine edition of Galen, awaited for more than 25 years, was perhaps the most risky enterprise in the whole history of the publishing house, and it almost brought Aldus' heirs to bankruptcy. Although the editors were among the most renowned specialists of the time, the edition was harshly criticized by one former friend and collaborator of Aldus, Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam. Why? Was the edition so bad, were the manuscripts on which the edition was based responsible for its quality? Or were there other reasons for Erasmus' complaint? This paper tries to give some hints in order to answer such questions, arguing that the role of Erasmus in the assessment of the value of the edition should take us into Aldus' house in the period of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century, and into the political and religious debate of the time.