Robert Cowan

Biographic Data

ID3874002
NAMERobert Cowan
GIVEN NAMESRobert
FAMILY NAMECowan
SIGNATURECOWAN R
AFFILIATIONSThe University of Sydney
ORCID0000-0002-5089-5231
VERIFIEDYes
TOTAL WORKS50
TOTAL CITATIONS24
AUTHOR COUNT49
EDITOR COUNT1
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR1980
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2025
H-INDEX2

  • Ennius Beyond Epic

    Thomas Biggs, Gesine Manuwald et al.BOOKEnnius Beyond Epic2025

  • Personal Religion and Old Comedy

    Open AccessRobert CowanCHAPTERPersonal Religion in the Ancient…2025

    Old Comedy was performed at polis festivals by a citizen chorus but depicted non-elite individuals pursuing their personal goals by personal means, including their personal interactions with the divine. Since its characters are individual community members, comedy is uniquely suited to reflecting and exploring the relationship between polis and personal religion. Although many of the personal religious practices in comedy can be interpreted as co…

  • Moral Responsibility While Dreaming

    Open AccessRobert CowanARTICLEErgo an Open Access Journal of…2024

    Are subjects ever morally responsible for their dreams? In this paper I argue that if, as some theories of dreams entail, dreaming subjects sometimes express agency while they dream, then they are sometimes morally responsible for what they do and are potentially worthy of praise and blame while they dream and after they have awoken. I end by noting the practical and theoretical implications of my argument

  • Tracking Listening Skill Development in Infants and Children with Hearing Loss: A Normative Dataset for the Functional Listening Index—Paediatric (FLI-P®)

    Open AccessRobert Cowan, Robert S C Cowan et al.ARTICLEChildren2024

    A normative dataset of FLI-P scores from typically hearing children has been established, allowing for comparisons with the scores and developmental trajectories of individual children with hearing loss. The study demonstrates how FLI-P can guide early intervention decisions and effectively monitor progress

  • Safety and dream scepticism in Sosa’s epistemology

    Open AccessJ Adam Carter, Robert Cowan et al.ARTICLESynthese2024References: 46

    A common objection to Sosa’s epistemology is that it countenances, in an objectionable way, unsafe knowledge . This objection, under closer inspection, turns out to be in far worse shape than Sosa’s critics have realised. Sosa and his defenders have offered two central response types to the idea that allowing unsafe knowledge is problematic: one response type adverts to the animal/reflective knowledge distinction that is characteristic of bi-leve…

  • Getting lucid about lucid dreaming

    Open AccessRobert Cowan, Robert G CowanARTICLEThe Philosophical Quarterly2024References: 3

    Lucid dreams are a distinctive and intriguing phenomenon where subjects apparently possess, inter alia, conscious knowledge that they are dreaming while they are dreaming. I here develop and defend a new model of lucid dreaming, what I call the ‘Dyadic Model’, according to which lucid dreams involve the tokening of both dreaming and non-dreaming states. The model is developed to successfully defend the Imagination Theory of dreams, according to w…

  • Silius Italicus, Tiberius Catius Asconius

    Open AccessRobert CowanCHAPTERThe Encyclopedia of Ancient History2023

    Silius Italicus was a successful politician under many Roman emperors but is best known as the author of the Punica , a seventeen‐book epic poem on the Second Punic War, against Hannibal. Although it is a historical epic, the gods are major characters and take part in the action. The poem marks Rome's ascent to world domination but also its shift from Republican freedom to the rule of emperors, and its tone is accordingly ambivalent.

  • A cruel and pointless trick? False non-closure in Horace’s Odes

    Open AccessRobert CowanARTICLEDictynna2023

    Some scholars argue that only a change of metre signals the beginning of a new poem in Horace’s Odes. Woodman has objected that, if this were the case, the juxtaposition of poems in the third and second asclepiadic metres, which begin with the same two metrical lines, would mislead the reader into thinking that a poem was continuing, only to realize belatedly at the third line that a new poem had begun, ‘a cruel and pointless trick’. This article…

  • Dreams, Morality and the Waking World

    Open AccessRobert CowanARTICLEPacific philosophical quarterly2023

    Is it ever wrong to cheat in a dream? It has been argued that the conjunction of reasonable claims about dreams with Evaluational Internalism (the view that moral evaluation is determined by factors ‘internal’ to agency, such as intentions) entails a positive answer. This implausible result seemingly provides reason to favour an alternative theory of moral evaluation. I here argue that a wide range of Evaluational Externalist views (which base mo…

  • The farmer wants a wife: Ecofeminism, domestic violence, and coercive control in Roman agricultural writing

    Open AccessRobert CowanARTICLEBulletin of the Institute of…2023References: 43

    This article explores the explicit and implicit depiction of domestic violence and coercive control in a range of texts from different genres, all dealing with agriculture: a farmer’s attack on his wife after a rustic festival in a Tibullan elegy, the Elder Cato’s instructions to his overseer on how to control his wife coercively in De agricultura, and the portrayal—and suppression—of anthropomorphized domestic violence against nature in Virgil’s…

  • The Phantom Senex: The Non-Existence of the Old Man in Seneca’s Troades

    Open AccessRobert CowanARTICLEMnemosyne2022References: 5

    The character designated by the manuscripts as Senex, who accompanies Andromache and Astyanax in act three of Seneca’s Troades , is problematic in many ways. He is not identified or acknowledged by any other character; his entrance and exit are unannounced; his presence onstage in the first half of the act requires that Astyanax’s two words of dialogue be delivered by a fourth actor or through ventriloquism; his very existence conflicts with the …

  • Lucan (Marcus Annaeus Lucanus)

    Open AccessRobert CowanCHAPTERThe Encyclopedia of Ancient History2021

    Lucan was an epic poet who flourished under Nero but committed suicide after conspiring against him. His Bellum civile is an epic narrative of the civil war between Caesar and Pompey. It rejects and distorts epic conventions and ideology through its unheroic heroes, absent gods, grotesque battles, and pessimistic tone.

  • Valerius Flaccus Setinus Balbus, Gaius

    Open AccessRobert CowanCHAPTERThe Encyclopedia of Ancient History2021

    Valerius Flaccus was a Flavian poet who wrote the Argonautica , an unfinished epic about Jason and the Golden Fleece. Almost nothing is known about his life, but his poem offers a Roman take on the myth, which is most famously narrated in Apollonius of Rhodes’ Hellenistic epic. It establishes the Argonauts as ushering in an Iron Age that will simultaneously bring technological progress and moral decline.

  • Knowing Me, Knowing You: Epic Anagnorisis and the Recognition of Tragedy

    Robert CowanCHAPTERElements of Tragedy in Flavian Epic2021

  • Moral motivation and the affective appeal

    Open AccessJennifer Corns, Robert CowanARTICLEPhilosophical Studies2021

    Proponents of “the affective appeal” (e.g. Dancy in Ethics 124(4):787–812, 2014; Zagzebski in Philos Phenomenol Res 66(1):104–124, 2003) argue that we can make progress in the longstanding debate about the nature of moral motivation by appealing to the affective dimension of affective episodes such as emotions, which allegedly play either a causal or constitutive role in moral judgements. Specifically, they claim that appealing to affect vindicat…

  • Statius, Publius Papinius

    Open AccessRobert CowanOTHERThe Encyclopedia of Ancient History2021References: 2

    Statius was a Flavian poet from Naples who wrote primarily under Domitian. His two epic poems are the Thebaid , about the Seven Against Thebes, and the unfinished Achilleid , about young Achilles hiding on Skyros. Five books of Silvae contain diverse “occasional” poems addressed to various patrons that describe buildings and works of art, celebrate special occasions, and console the bereaved

  • Since Orpheus Was in Short Pants: Reassessing Oeagrus at Aristophanes, Wasps 579–80

    Open AccessRobert CowanARTICLEThe Classical Quarterly2021References: 4

    In Aristophanes’ Wasps , Philocleon says that he and his fellow jurors do not acquit Oeagrus until he has recited a speech from the Niobe . Scholars have almost universally assumed that this was the name of a contemporary tragic actor, despite its extreme rarity. This article argues that the reference is rather to the father of Orpheus. As a figure from the generation before the archetypal bard, ‘an Oeagrus’ represents the old-fashioned poetry to…

  • Not the Consular Year: Perverting Annalistic Time in Sallust

    Open AccessRobert CowanARTICLEHistos2020

    The consular dating formula situates a work of historiography in the annalistic tradition (or alludes to it from outside) and evokes a complex of Republican norms. Time becomes Republican time and is organised according to the reassuring rhythms of the regular elections, tenures, and relinquishments of magistracies. Scholars have shown how Livy and Tacitus manipulate the formula’s associations to dramatise the disruption or obsolescence of these …

  • Glossing the Georgics: Valerius Flaccus on labor improbus

    Robert CowanARTICLEClassical Philology2020

  • An Ugly Cow With Big Feet: Sex, Metre and Genre in Georgics 3

    Open AccessRobert CowanARTICLEThe Classical Quarterly2020Cited by: 1References: 15

    Virgil's list of the qualities that are desirable in a brood cow corresponds closely to those in Varro's De re rustica and in the texts which, though later, can be plausibly taken as evidence of an existing tradition. Yet, there is one exception, and it is an exception to which the poet carefully draws attention. Varro's, Columella's and Palladius’ ideal cows all share with Virgil's and with each other hairy ears, very long dewlaps and tail, and …

  • Don’t Panic at this Hispanic: Politics and Palindromes in Georgics 3

    Robert CowanARTICLEMnemosyne2019References: 7

  • A Stranger in a Strange Land: Medea in Roman Republican Tragedy 1

    Robert CowanCHAPTERUnbinding Medea2017

    The first performance of a Roman version of a Greek tragedy in 240 BC was a momentous event. When a tragedy by Livius Andronicus was performed to celebrate victory over Carthage in the First Punic War, a central cultural practice of an alien culture was adopted, adapted, appropriated and transformed to serve as a central cultural practice of Rome. Euripides' Medea addresses her new friends simply as 'Corinthian women' but Ennius's stresses their …

  • Ovid, Virgil and the Echoing Rocks of the Two Scyllas

    Open AccessRobert CowanARTICLEThe Cambridge Classical Journal2017Cited by: 1References: 24

    Ovid, Metamorphoses 8.18, in which Scylla throws a tiny pebble against Megara's famous sounding tower, contains an exact, unique but unnoticed verbal echo of Helenus' description of the sea-monster Scylla's lair at Aeneid 3.432: resonantia saxa . The allusion tropes its own intertextual status as an ‘echo’ and contributes to the ludic confusion of the two Scyllas in this episode and elsewhere. The collision of the ‘tiny pebble’ with the Virgilian…

  • Bce and All That: The Romanness of Republican Tragedy

    Robert CowanCHAPTERBrill's companion to Roman tragedy2015

  • How's Your Father? A Recurrent Bilingual Wordplay in Martial

    Open AccessRobert CowanARTICLEThe Classical Quarterly2015Cited by: 3References: 4

    The primary obscenity futuo (‘the male part in sexual intercourse with a woman’) is unsurprisingly rare in literary Latin. Apart from a single occurrence in Horace's Satires (1.2.127, in a passage evoking the adultery mime), its usage is limited to the even lower genre of scoptic epigram, as represented by Catullus, Octavian, Martial and the Priapeia , though it frequently occurs in graffiti. Adams has shown how it tends to be a neutral and even …