Papers
Studies on the Acenes Codex (PHerc. 1667)
PHerc. 1667 was recovered from the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum and read for the first time in 2025. These are studies of what it contains. They are published here in full, chapter by chapter, so that a single argument can be read, cited and linked on its own.
Each chapter is its own page. Citations follow the standard divisions of the ancient texts rather than any one edition.
Prohairesis Before the Stoa
The Acenes Codex is the earliest surviving evidence that the faculty Epictetus would formalise as prohairesis -- the sovereign capacity for deliberate moral choice -- was already operative in Laconian ethical thought about 120 years before Zeno of Citium founded the Stoa at Athens.
Feed the Monster
Every civilisation that has produced warriors has faced the Monster Problem: how to build the human capacity for violence, deploy it when circumstances require, and cage it afterward. Twelve traditions are measured against six requirements. Only one surviving text satisfies all six.
Acenes of Sparta: The Dragon Slayer
A dragon is the reason the 300 died. Leonidas used the magic of the gods to bind Kalaxes beneath Taygetus, and the price was his life and his men's. Sixty-two years later a seven-year-old of the agoge falls into the dragon's crypt and inherits the unpaid balance.
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