Untersuchungen zur antiken Literatur und Geschichte

This companion volume to the new Teubner edition of the late antique prose comedy Aulularia sive Querolus combines prolegomena and a text-critical and linguistic commentary. This is the first detailed modern commentary on this play.

The Prolegomena are divided into two parts. In the first part, the play is categorised in the context of its origins and its intellectual and literary-historical environment. It is shown that, contrary to doctrine, Querolus is Christian in character. In addition, the linguistic, stylistic and rhythmic peculiarities of the text are analysed. The second part comprises studies on the history of transmission, on which the new, two-column stemma on which the edition is based. The detailed commentary sheds light on linguistic and content-related peculiarities and difficulties. It also justifies the editorial decisions and the textual constitution of the 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.