Vita e Pensiero

Public notices were frequently posted in the cities, towns, and villages of Graeco-Roman Egypt. The available data makes it possible to answer several questions related to this topic: What material was used for posting notices? Did the authorities issue any instructions on the format of public notices? For how long should a notice be posted?

This paper aims to bring to light the figure of Aurelia Isidora through a detailed reading of the will of her husband Aurelius Hermogenes, preserved in an Oxyrhynchus Papyrus. It shows the local and Roman ways of life of a well-to-do Oxyrhynchus family, the concern of the deceased for his wife and children, but it is also a documentary example to study and analyse the life of Roman women at all stages of their lives...

Giuseppe Passalacqua conducted some excavations in Egypt collecting a lot of antiquities, that he brought along to Paris. There he exhibited them, waiting for a convenient purchase offer. Thanks to three letters, filed in the Biblioteca degli Intronati in Siena, we learn that Passalacqua invited the ambassador of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Daniello Berlinghieri, to admire his collection and to attend the opening of his mummy, hoping he would recommend to the Grand Duke purchasing his Egyptian antiquities...

Alongside the traditional tripartite division of musical instruments into wind, string and percussion instruments, in ancient times there were other classification criteria for musical instruments, one of these, attributed to Aristoxenus of Taranto, was the one that saw the instruments divided into instruments natives and instruments of foreign origin, later became part of the Greek musical tradition...

The music-silence dichotomy, also extended to musical instruments, was already known in the ancient world. In the musical technical lexicon of the ancient Greeks, alongside the numerous words used to indicate harmonies, musical instruments, sounds, etc., there are as many that indicate ‘absence’, ‘deprivation’ and which refer to music, words, musical instruments, terms that therefore indicate a deliberate or even forced silence...

This article analyzes the Greek version of a sentence by Brutus (PLUT. Brut., 22, 4) and comes to the conclusion that Plutarch misunderstood the Latin text (reported by Cic. ad Brut., 1, 17, 6: dominum ne parentem quidem maiores nostri voluerunt esse) perhaps due to the influence of the political propaganda of the Flavian age...

Fascicolo annuale del 2021