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Browsing by Author "Bailey, Colin"

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    AΦEΣIMOΣ: a new reading in the Opramoas dossier from Rhodiapolis
    (2013) Bailey, Colin
    Although the Opramoas dossier at Rhodiapolis has been reconstructed and carefully studied, the size and extent of the inscription continue to invite analysis. This article focuses on the restoration of an adjective describing the days on which Opramoas' distributions took place. It traces some implications of the use of άφεσιμος and suggests that Opramoas described them as such in order to further advertise his munificence.
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    “Honor” in Rhodes: Dio Chrysostom’s thirty-first oration
    (2015) Bailey, Colin
    This article argues that Dio Chrysostom’s thirty-first Oration offers a commentary on the condition of the Greek polis in a Roman world. Dio addresses the practice of re-using statues in order to show the role that the past plays in contemporary constructions of identity. Statues honoring past benefactors enable present citizens, and therefore Rhodes, to compete with those past benefactors and to live up to their full potential. Dio shows that it is a failure to contend with past benefactors that threatens the ability of the polis to be a polis.
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    Introduction: conversations with the author
    (2022) Kemezis, Adam M.; Bailey, Colin; Poletti, Beatrice
    In the Rome of the Severan and Antonine eras, as at any time or place, literature was a social and even communal practice. The works we have were written not just by authors, but for, to, with, among, about, and against those authors' friends, neighbors, superiors, dependents, predecessors, and competitors. Books were produced and processed in a physical and human infrastructure of libraries, bookstores, reading circles, and literary staff personnel ranging from the elite to the enslaved. This is undoubtedly the world in which Cassius Dio lived, but one would hardly know it from his writings. He was a contemporary and, in some cases, likely an acquaintance of Philostratus, Galen, Aelian, and Athenaeus. But none of these men mentions him, nor he them. His contemporary books are full of self-portraiture: We see Dio as a senator, an administrator, and a privileged observer, but seldom in the role of author, and never as one author among others.
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    Lives within Lives: Plutarch’s “Life” of Perseus
    (2022) Bailey, Colin
    This article examines Plutarch’s treatment of Perseus of Macedonia in the Life of Aemilius and argues that Perseus is a secondary biographical subject. By directing our attention to aspects of the king’s birth and death, as well as his central moral traits, outstanding ancestors, and responses to changes in fortune, Plutarch integrates Perseus fully into the moral themes of the Aemilius-Timoleon. Aemilius, in his meetings with the king, reflects upon him as Plutarch suggests he himself studies his biographical subjects in the prologue to the pair, becoming a model reader of the Lives.
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    The repulsae of Aemilius Paulus in Plutarch’s Aemilius
    (2022) Bailey, Colin
    Plutarch’s Aemilius passes over much of the political career of Lucius Aemilius Paulus in silence, offering only the briefest sketch of his life and career before his second consulship in 168 bce and the Third Macedonian War. Among the details which Plutarch omits in the biography are several repulsae which delayed Aemilius’ first consulship until 182 bce, years after he was first eligible for the office. This is not simply Plutarch wishing to avoid reporting a failure on the part of his subject, for he, and he alone of our sources, does note a later repulsa, suffered sometime before Aemilius’ second consulship. Nor is it a matter of Plutarch having had access to relatively few sources on Aemilius, for he had access to and used Polybius and Livy,1 among others, the latter of whom specifically notes and even emphasizes Aemilius’ repeated electoral defeats. The omission of the early repulsae and the addition of a later one—or more likely, as I will suggest, the chronological transposition and conflation of the three early repulsae into one later repulsa—are deliberate strategies on Plutarch’s part, by which he distinguishes his Aemilius from earlier accounts of the man.