Katharina Volk
Biographic Data
| ID | 5626559 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Katharina Volk |
| GIVEN NAMES | Katharina |
| FAMILY NAME | Volk |
| SIGNATURE | VOLK K |
| AFFILIATIONS | Columbia University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9081-7393 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 49 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 27 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 45 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 4 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2000 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Trollope the Classicist
This article examines the classical writings of the Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope, The Commentaries of Caesar (1870) and The Life of Cicero (1880), contextualizing them in contemporary discussions of the late Roman Republic and the author’s own career and world-view
Cicero
Cicero's last dialogue, De amicitia, is a work of stylistic brilliance containing the fullest examination of the values and problems of friendship to survive from the Greco-Roman world. How do we make (and lose) friends? If a conflict arises between personal affection and ethical behavior, how do we decide what is right? What kinds of people make the most suitable friends? Written in 44 BCE, De amicitia provides both a striking analysis of the co…
Epicureanism in Pro Caelio (Cic. Cael. 42 and Epicurus Frag. 67 U., 22.1 A.)
As part of his strategy in Pro Caelio of making Caelius’ alleged disreputable lifestyle appear acceptable, Cicero among other things invokes the fashionable hedonism of Epicurean philosophy (41). This paper argues that at Cael. 42, there is a hitherto undetected allusion to a statement by Epicurus himself (frag. 67 U., 22.1 A.), which further contributes to Cicero’s argument
The Cambridge Critical Guide to Latin Literature
The Cambridge Critical Guide to Latin Literature offers a critical overview of work on Latin literature. Where are we? How did we get here? Where to next? Fifteen commissioned chapters, along with an extensive introduction and Mary Beard's postscript, approach these questions from a range of angles. They aim not to codify the field, but to give snapshots of the discipline from different perspectives, and to offer provocations for future developme…
Cicero and Epicurus on Pleasure and Friendship
Ancient writers, including philosophers such as Aristotle, often depict friendship as a source of pleasure; by contrast, in his Laelius de amicitia , Cicero describes such relationships as sweet and delightful, but never connects them with uoluptas , which for him is a largely negative term reserved for Epicurean doctrine. This paper argues that there is more to this pointed use of language than Cicero’s well-known dislike of Epicureanism. Consid…
Epicurus in Rome
The role of Greek thought in the final days of the Roman republic is a topic that has garnered much attention in recent years. This volume of essays, commissioned specially from a distinguished international group of scholars, explores the role and influence of Greek philosophy, specifically Epicureanism, in the late republic. It focuses primarily (although not exclusively) on the works and views of Cicero, premier politician and Roman philosophe…
Towards a Definition of Sapientia
This chapter examines Cicero’s Pro Marcello of 46 bce , a speech of thanksgiving to Julius Caesar for pardoning his civil-war for M. Claudius Marcellus. I argue that Cicero cleverly uses philosophical arguments to, as it were, entrap Caesar into working towards the restoration of the Republic. Philosophical wisdom is a leitmotif of the speech, and Caesar in particular is called sapiens or associated with sapientia nine times. The basic argument t…
Power and Persuasion in Cicero's Philosophy
Extensively trained as a philosopher, Cicero was also a working politician with a keen awareness of the distance between pure intellectual endeavor and effective strategies of persuasion. This volume explores a series of interrelated problems in his works, from the use of emotion, self-correction, and even fiction in intellectual inquiry, to the motives of political agents and the morality of political arguments, to the means of justifying the us…
Ovid’s Art of Life
This chapter reads Ovid’s erotodidactic poems, the Ars amatoria and Remedia amoris , as philosophical texts, arguing, first, that these poems are very much like philosophy , in that they are influenced by philosophical doctrines and discourses popular in Ovid’s time; and second and more controversially, that they are philosophical in their own right , putting forth and promoting their own theories of anthropology, psychology, and ethics. While an…
Caesar the Epicurean? A Matter of Life and Death
This chapter reexamines the question of Caesar’s putative Epicureanism. While there is no reason to believe that Caesar was a committed Epicurean, there exist tantalizing pieces of evidence that he may have adopted for himself a version of the tenet that “death is nothing to us.” These include his observation, in his speech about the convicted Catilinarians (as reported by Sallust), that death is not a punishment but the endpoint of all experienc…
Epicurus in Rome
The role of Greek thought in the final days of the Roman republic is a topic that has garnered much attention in recent years. This volume of essays, commissioned specially from a distinguished international group of scholars, explores the role and influence of Greek philosophy, specifically Epicureanism, in the late republic. It focuses primarily (although not exclusively) on the works and views of Cicero, premier politician and Roman philosophe…
Philosophy in Ovid, Ovid As Philosopher
Res publica of Letters
This chapter investigates the social world of late Republican intellectual activities and the ways in which the protagonists thought, spoke, and wrote about it. It seeks to debunk the widespread view that learned pursuits carried a stigma among the practically minded Romans and that upperclass men, therefore, felt the continuous need to justify their intellectual activities. Drawing mostly on the corpus of Cicero's letters, the chapter identifies…
Conclusion
This chapter details the interconnectedness of knowledge production and political activity among the late Republican Roman senatorial class. While the period's turbulent political events certainly acted as a catalyst for developments in the intellectual sphere—and occasionally vice versa—the perhaps most striking aspect of mid-first-century senatorial studia is their “Republican” nature. The chapter then highlights that the Republican political p…
The Invention of Rome
This chapter turns from the “imported” subject of philosophy to more intrinsically Roman concerns, examining mid-first-century explorations of Roman identity. It offers a general survey of the period's proliferating antiquarian studies, while also considering modern explanations for why late Republican authors were so fascinated by their own past. While disillusionment with the present political crisis may have played a role, Roman antiquarianism…
The Roman Republic of Letters
This book explores a fascinating chapter of intellectual history, focusing on the literary senators of the mid-first century BCE who came to blows over the future of Rome even as they debated philosophy, history, political theory, linguistics, science, and religion. It was a period of intense cultural flourishing and extreme political unrest—and the agents of each were very often the same people. Members of the senatorial class, including Cicero,…
The Roman Republic of Letters
An intellectual history of the late Roman Republic-and the senators who fought both scholarly debates and a civil warIn The Roman Republic of Letters, Katharina Volk explores a fascinating chapter of intellectual history, focusing on the literary senators of the mid-first century BCE who came to blows over the future of Rome even as they debated philosophy, history, political theory, linguistics, science, and religion.It was a period of intense c…
Plumbing the Ovidian Halieutica
Remaining agnostic about the question of authenticity, this chapter argues that the Halieutica is a pronouncedly ‘Ovidian’ poem. As a didactic poem, it sits well alongside Ovid’s erotodidactic oeuvre, and, like those texts, it expertly wields the traditional tropes of the genre while also mildly parodying them. The stress on ars also fits well with Ovid’s preoccupation with art, artistry, and artfulness throughout his career. In the Halieutica , …
Versions of Varro
Is this the Varronian moment? After decades of comparative neglect, especially in Anglophone scholarship, the late republican polymath is suddenly everywhere. There are conferences and conference panels dedicated to his work, some subsequently published as edited volumes. Varro is the subject of dissertations and monographs, either on his own or as a prime exhibit in discussions of such diverse subjects as ancient agricultural writing and late re…
Cato the Younger
Reviewed by: Cato the Younger: Life and Death at the End of the Roman Republic by Fred K. Drogula Katharina Volk Fred K. Drogula. Cato the Younger: Life and Death at the End of the Roman Republic. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. xviii, 350. $35.00. ISBN 978-0-19-086902-1. In this first modern scholarly biography of Cato the Younger in English, Fred K. Drogula sets out to recover “the real Cato” (8) from the legends that accrued to th…
Signs, Seers and Senators
Authority and Expertise in Ancient Scientific Culture
Feministische Kritiken und Menschenrechte
Roman Reflections
This book explores from different but mutually informing disciplinary viewpoints the rise at Rome in the first centuries bce and ce of philosophy as a distinctly Roman mode of discourse; a central objective (albeit not to the exclusion of Greek philosophical writing at Rome) is to examine the ways in which, and the extent to which, the expressive capabilities of the Latin language gave distinctive shape and character to Roman philosophical discou…
The Genre of Cicero’s De consulatu suo
The poetics of Latin didactic
1. Tell me, Muse: characteristics of the self-conscious poem 2. Improbable art: the theory and practice of ancient didactic poetry 3. The teacher's truth: Lucretius' De rerum natura 4. The poet's choice: Vergil's Georgics 5. The poem's success: Ovid's Ars amatoria and Remedia amoris 6. The song of the stars: Manilius' Astronomica Conclusion
Roman Reflections
This book explores from different but mutually informing disciplinary viewpoints the rise at Rome in the first centuries bce and ce of philosophy as a distinctly Roman mode of discourse; a central objective (albeit not to the exclusion of Greek philosophical writing at Rome) is to examine the ways in which, and the extent to which, the expressive capabilities of the Latin language gave distinctive shape and character to Roman philosophical discou…
The Roman Republic of Letters
An intellectual history of the late Roman Republic-and the senators who fought both scholarly debates and a civil warIn The Roman Republic of Letters, Katharina Volk explores a fascinating chapter of intellectual history, focusing on the literary senators of the mid-first century BCE who came to blows over the future of Rome even as they debated philosophy, history, political theory, linguistics, science, and religion.It was a period of intense c…
Lucretius' Prayer for Peace and the Date of De Rerum Natura
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Erotic Hardening and Softening in Vergil's Eighth Eclogue
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Seneca in Performance
The plays of Seneca the Younger, minister and philosopher under Nero, are today increasingly studied, appreciated - and performed. Here, in a collection of papers from an international cast, scholars explore both established questions, such as the playwright's subtleties of characterisation, his relation to contemporary Roman spectacle and art - and the problems arising in translating him to modern text or stage.
"Seneca, "Hercules Furens
Ovid, Aratus and Augustus
Conclusion
The conclusion summarizes the results of the discussion in the preceding chapters.
The Song of the Stars
This chapter examines Manilius' Astronomica, a poem in five books on astrology, considering the work specifically as a didactic poem. Like all didactic personae, the speaker of the Astronomica presents himself as both a teacher and a poet, but adds special legitimacy to his role by claiming that he has been charged with his task by his subject matter, the divine cosmos itself: that he acts as the uates mundi (‘poet/prophet of the universe’) and s…
The Teacher’s Truth
This chapter examines Lucretius' De rerum natura (‘On the Nature of Things’), a poem in six books on Epicurean natural philosophy, considering the work specifically as a didactic poem. After discussing the ways in which the Lucretian persona presents himself as a teacher and interacts with his student Memmius, the chapter focuses on the relationship of poetry and philosophy projected by the text. Reacting to Epicurus' rejection of poetry, Lucreti…
The Poem’s Success
The Poet’s Choice
‘Tell Me, Muse’
All poetic texts are recognizable as poetry by means of specific markers (e.g. verse) that are easily identified by each interpretive community. This chapter shows that some poems, in addition, explicitly present themselves as poetry, often by having their first-person speakers or personae identify themselves as poets and their utterances as poetry. It discusses the nature of such ‘self-conscious’ poems and traces the concept of ‘poetic self-cons…
‘Improbable Art’
This chapter opens with a survey of the few known ancient theoretical approaches to didactic poetry, including Aristotle's verdict that poetry like that of the philosopher Empedocles was not ‘mimetic’ and the view, found in the grammarian Diomedes, that the genre belongs to a type of poetry in which ‘the poet himself speaks’ (i.e. not characters). It then moves on to a new definition which identifies the following four criteria for the genre: poe…
ΚΛΕΟΣ ΑΦΘΙΤΟΝ Revisited
The poetics of Latin didactic
1. Tell me, Muse: characteristics of the self-conscious poem 2. Improbable art: the theory and practice of ancient didactic poetry 3. The teacher's truth: Lucretius' De rerum natura 4. The poet's choice: Vergil's Georgics 5. The poem's success: Ovid's Ars amatoria and Remedia amoris 6. The song of the stars: Manilius' Astronomica Conclusion
Manilius’ solitary chariot-ride ( Astronomica 2.138–40)
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Ille ego
Seeing Seneca Whole
Das vorklassische Lehrgedict der Römer (review)
Reviewed by: Das vorklassische Lehrgedict der Römer Katharina Volk Peter Kruschwitz and Matthias Schumacher. Das vorklassische Lehrgedict der Römer. Heidelberg: C. Winter, 2005. Pp. 168. €35.00 (pb.). ISBN 3-8253-1691-2. In a little-known poem that might well be described as didactic, A. E. Housman asks the question, "What was the date of Volcacius Sedigitus? / What might the date of that good man be?" only to answer himself, "We will not allow s…
Das vorklassische Lehrgedict der Römer
Erotic Hardening and Softening in Vergil's Eighth Eclogue
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Vergil's Georgics
1. Introduction: scholarly approaches to the Georgics since the 1970s 2. Agriculture and the Georgics 3. Prose into poetry: tradition and meaning in Vergil's Georgics 4. Authorial rhetoric in Vergil's Georgics 5. Vergil's metamorphoses: myth and allusion in the Georgics 6. Labor Improbus 7. Italian Vergil and the idea of Rome 8. Cosmology and national epic in the Georgics (Georgics 2.458-3.48) 9. Pindar and the proem to the third Georgic 10. Call…
Lucretius' Prayer for Peace and the Date of De Rerum Natura
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Forgotten Stars
The Astronomica of Manilius is a poem in five books, at least partly written under Augustus, which purports to teach the reader the art of astrology and the means by which an accurate horoscope may be cast. It is, therefore, a text from the classical age of Latin literature which deals with a topic to whose enduring popular interest any daily western newspaper will testify. And yet, despite some notable modern exceptions, the infamously harsh ver…
Forgotten Stars
"The 'Astronomica' of Manilius is a poem in five books, at least partly written under Augustus, which purports to teach the reader the art of astrology and the means by which an accurate horoscope may be cast. It is, therefore, a text from the classical age of Roman literature which deals with a topic to whose enduring popular interest any Western daily newspaper will testify. And yet, despite some notable modern exceptions, the infamously harsh …
Manilius, Marcus
Manilius was a Roman poet, author of Astronomica , a didactic poem on astrology in five books. Nothing is known about his life. A reference to the Roman defeat at the Teutoburg Forest in 9 CE (1.898–903) provides a terminus post quem for the work, though the exact date of the composition remains controversial.
Letters in the Sky
Aratus' Phaenomena describes the constellations as a sign system devised by Zeus for the benefit of human beings. This article argues that Aratus figuratively depicts these signs as though they were "letters in the sky," a veritable text inscribed in nature. Through a cumulative argument that considers, among other things, the hermeneutics of Aratean sign-reading, the myth of Dike, Aratus' acrostic and other forms of letter play, and the receptio…
The Genre of Cicero’s De consulatu suo
Art (37 works) · Classical Antiquity Studies (31 works) · Philosophy (31 works) · Literature (30 works) · History (24 works) · Classics (18 works) · Classical Philosophy and Thought (16 works) · Epistemology (15 works) · Cicero (14 works) · Poetry (12 works)