Lampas - Volume 58, Issue 4, 2025

The Acta Alexandrinorum are a number of fragmentary, fictitious stories about Alexandrian embassies visiting the Roman emperor that are generally interpreted as giving an Alexandrian perspective on relations with Rome. The supposedly pro-Alexandrian messages of these texts are based on the protagonists’ ‘heroic’ bold parlance, qualified by modern scholarship as ‘parrhesiastic’ and ‘patriotic’. A genealogy of this interpretation shows how contemporary scholarship has reproduced an early-20^th-century assumption. Additionally, historical evidence post-dating Musurillo’s still standard work from 1954 render his broadly accepted suggestion of the Acta Alexandrinorum’s origin in secret Alexandrian gymnasial clubs implausible. This article proposes a more differentiated approach to the so-called Acta Alexandrinorum. The conduct of the high-ranking Alexandrians featured in these acts in no way favours interpreting all texts as having a similar message. Instead, we should separate the narrative framework from the textual message. Contemporaneous Greek versions of the Oracle of the potter allow for such an approach. The Acta Alexandrinorum as historical sources can only be estimated at their true value if we are willing to revisit the communis opinio.

How did Romans organize and use time in their daily lives, and what does this reveal about their image of themselves and of others? In a lesson developed for secondary schools in early 2025, we explored the relationship between time and social norms in Rome in order to raise awareness of the social component of time use, which can be found in antiquity as well as in the everyday lives of modern students. The central texts discussed in this lesson are Martial’s epigrams 2.27, 4.8 and 8.67. In this article, we present this lesson and offer relevant background information. The first part presents an overview of how the Romans divided time in calendar years and months, weeks and hours. The second part gives a commentary on the relevant epigrams and the third part discusses the way in which we executed this lesson at several Dutch secondary schools.

In the last two decades, novel historical linguistic approaches such as historical sociolinguistics and historical pragmatics have been developed to explain how the use of language has changed over the course of time. Both approaches have only recently been applied to classical languages. This paper will demonstrate the utility of methods from the field of historical pragmatics, a field which aims to describe how patterns of language use changed across texts and periods in the past. The approach will be illustrated by the development of performative speech acts from archaic Greek to classical Greek. First, evidence is presented for the metaphorical origins of performative verbs; for example, performative verbs of begging have developed from literal meanings of ‘reach’ or ‘touch’. Next, the morphosyntactic changes are examined which erstwhile performative verb forms undergo diachronically, as they move to parenthetical positions, lose their complements and performative force, and obtain politeness functions over time. I also plea for further historical pragmatic investigations, not only to go beyond the synchronic pragmatic approach that has been dominant in the Netherlands, but also to exploit the linguistic potential of texts from later periods which are still underresearched.