Horses for courses: Plato's vocabulary and authority in the Onomasticon

Abstract The Onomasticon by Julius Pollux is more than just a word-hoard: Pollux’s work actively mediates, through lexicographic appraisal, the cultural assets and anxieties of the Second Sophistic. In the light of the ongoing debate among the Imperial intellectuals and specifically Platonists about the value of style and diction as ingredients of the Platonic text, the numerous references to Plato’s vocabulary from across the Onomasticon bespeak an essentially coherent yet ambivalent attitude. Pollux cites Platonic words both appreciatively (at times, demonstrating reasonable awareness of the philosophical content) and critically; there is a tendency to characterize Plato’s lexical choices as strained and cavalier. As a case study of how Pollux deals with a famous Platonic passage that was held dear by the Middle Platonists and Imperial pepaideumenoi at large, his handling of the epithets used in the description of the two horses in the Chariot Allegory (Phdr. 253d–e) is examined.</jats:p

The noise-lovers: cultures of speech and sound in second-century Rome

This chapter provides an examination of an ideal of the ‘deliberate speaker’, who aims to reflect time, thought, and study in his speech. In the Roman Empire, words became a vital tool for creating and defending in-groups, and orators and authors in both Latin and Greek alleged, by contrast, that their enemies produced babbling noise rather than articulate speech. In this chapter, the ideal of the deliberate speaker is explored through the works of two very different contemporaries: the African-born Roman orator Fronto and the Syrian Christian apologist Tatian. Despite moving in very different circles, Fronto and Tatian both express their identity and authority through an expertise in words, in strikingly similar ways. The chapter ends with a call for scholars of the Roman Empire to create categories of analysis that move across different cultural and linguistic groups. If we do not, we risk merely replicating the parochialism and insularity of our sources.Accepted manuscrip

Plutarch's literary paideia

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The City and the Self in Plutarch

Chapter 13 investigates Plutarch’s conception of the polis as a somatic, psychological, and moral entity, which recalls and elaborates the city/soul analogy in Plato’s Republic. It is argued that the tropes for the soul in Plutarch are not dominated by contemporary references to the Roman empire, but rather point to a timeless, palpably classical, polis fighting off the enemies from its gates. Such a ‘defensive’ turn of the city/soul analogy does not, however, make it any less valuable to Plutarch as a Platonically bent interpreter of the past and of the imperial present. The city/soul analogy helps to triangulate the three major ideological circuits of the Plutarchan macrotext: his sustained interest in human soul and character, his scrutiny of city-state politics from a perspective which is simultaneously pragmatic and idealistic, and his decision to explore both character and the polis with, and through, Plato.</p