Untersuchungen zur antiken Literatur und Geschichte

Dieser Begleitband zur neuen Teubnerausgabe der spätantiken Prosakomödie Aulularia sive Querolus vereint Prolegomena und einen sowohl textkritischen als auch sprachlich-inhaltlichen Kommentar. Damit liegt erstmals ein ausführlicher moderner Kommentar zu diesem Stück vor.

Die Prolegomena sind in zwei Teile untergliedert. Im ersten Teil wird das Stück in seine Entstehungskontexte sowie sein geistes- und literaturgeschichtliches Umfeld eingeordnet. Dabei wird dargelegt, dass der Querolus entgegen der Lehrmeinung christlich geprägt ist. Zudem werden die sprachlichen, stilistischen und rhythmischen Eigenheiten des Texts herausgearbeitet. Der zweite Teil umfasst überlieferungsgeschichtliche Untersuchungen, auf denen das neue, zweispaltige Stemma aufbaut, das der Edition zugrunde liegt. Der ausführliche Kommentar erhellt sprachliche und inhaltliche Besonderheiten und Schwierigkeiten. Zudem begründet er die editorischen Entscheidungen und die Textkonstitution der Teubneriana.

Alongside Cicero and Pliny the Younger, Emperor Augustus has been the third important writer of private letters in the Late Republic period and the early Principate. However, his letters have only been preserved by indirect transmission, i.e., as quotations and paraphrases in the work of later authors. Together with a study on the ancient textual and reception history of the letters, this volume contains an edition of the fragments with a commentary.

Unlike most of Lucian’s satirical dialogues, Hermotimus pursues a rather serious theoretical question: which are the fundaments of true philosophy? The introduction to this study of Lucian’s longest dialogue contextualises the work within the multifaceted phenomenon of the Second Sophistic, the Italian translation makes the Greek text accessible to a wider public, and the commentary examines the wide range of literary and philosophical contents.

Despite the relevance of astrology in Graeco-Roman mentality, our information about the early period of Hellenistic astrology is marred by the scarcity of original sources. Personal astrology did not take off until the late Hellenistic period, due to the more substantial Hellenization of Mesopotamia facilitating the import of Babylonian theories. The most relevant doctrines, mostly surviving as references and partial paraphrases in later authors and astrological miscellanies, are attached to the pseudepigraphical names of Nechepsos and Petosiris, which have been traced back to the Egyptian Demotic tradition. Critodemus, who is classified as a later author even if Firmicus Maternus invokes him as a founding authority, appears as a parallel to these Egyptian transmitters, in that he presented astrology, like them, in the form of a didactic poem, but employing an Orphic frame instead of Egyptian. By collecting, contextualizing, and analyzing all the evidence on this author, this book establishes a relatively early chronology for Critodemus and aims both at distinguishing his original contributions and at explaining the various forms in which his text was used and modified in the later tradition.