The meetings of the Philological Society in the academic year 2025-26 are given below. For each of those meetings held in the Faculty, tea, coffee and cakes will be available beforehand from 4.00pm in G.22. The seminars themselves will be live-streamed via Zoom; links and reminders will be forthcoming in the week prior to each seminar.
16 October 2025: 4.30pm, Room G.21, Faculty of Classics (& on Zoom)
Dr Tomaž Potočnik, Queens’ College, University of Cambridge
How to Use Opinor in Latin: Data from Cicero’s Letters to Atticus
My aim with this paper is to investigate aspects of Latin conversation. As my case study, I take opinor, a highly frequent stance marker, which has surprisingly little to do with expressing opinion. In a pragmatic, radically context-bound investigation of Cicero’s letters to Atticus (a unique source of conversational—and quite un-Ciceronian—Latin), I try to see what opinor has to teach us about conversational routine and conversation management. In a wider sense, opinor provides an opportunity to discuss territories of knowledge, Bakhtinian speech genres, and language as form of action.
29 January 2026: 4.30pm, Room G.21, Faculty of Classics (& on Zoom)
Dr Giulia Maltagliati, Downing College, University of Cambridge
Hidden in Theory: Rhetoric and the Ethics of Concealment
Rhetoric is most effective when it hides itself. This is the paradoxical lesson of Aristotle’s Art of Rhetoric, one the earliest attempts to theorise the practice of rhetoric: the moment it attains the status of ‘art’, rhetoric wishes for that art to escape notice. This paper focusses on that theory/practice of (self)concealment and its ethical implications for the history of rhetoric. After tracing the language of concealment in the Art of Rhetoric against contemporary anxieties about the deceptions of oratorical practice, I reflect on the various layers of suspicion and trust that have since structured the discipline of rhetoric. By codifying the tools for its own critique, this paper argues, rhetorical theory raises questions of both ethics and hermeneutics in ways that have shaped assessments of oratorical texts ever since antiquity.
14 May 2026 4.30pm, Bradfield Room, Darwin College [AGM + seminar]; Zoom if possible:
Prof. Andrew Morrison Ruiz, University of Glasgow
Senders, Addressees, Dialogue across Greek and Latin Letter Collections
This paper explores the different patterns in the use of senders and addressees across Greek and Latin letter collections, including the different categories of sender and addressee (including more marginalised groups such as women, the poor/enslaved, non-Romans/non-Greeks), the varying numbers of senders/addressees across the corpus, including the different proportions of letters to one-off addressees or frequent correspondents, the different roles senders/addressees play in the structuring of letter collections, and the different degrees to which collections allow for dialogue between correspondents. The patterns uncovered will demonstrate how fundamental the figures of sender and addressee are to the structure and nature of ancient letter collections.
Speaker bio: https://www.gla.ac.uk/schools/humanities/staff/andrewmorrison/#biography
More information about the Philological society and about how to become a member (which includes a subscription to CCJ) can be found at https://www.classics.cam.ac.uk/seminars/philological
We look forward to seeing you at some or all of the meetings!
Dr Helen Van Noorden (Programme Secretary)