Humanitas

The bright side of the flood in the rural world: decoding the Roman rural experience of Nature’s dynamics and environmental knowledge

Nelson Henrique da S. Ferreira

This article offers a semiotic analysis of Roman riverine landscapes to reconstruct how rural communities interpreted water, moisture, and floods as meaningful environmental signs. Drawing on agronomic, historical, and poetic sources – including Cato, Varro, Columella, Pliny, Vergil, Seneca, and Livy – the study examines how observable features such as flow, saturation, alluvium, and drought functioned as culturally intelligible perceptual cues. “Signs of meaning” emerged from shared rural experience and shaped both technical instructions and literary representations of landscape.

Methodologically, the article identifies recurrent sign-patterns in descriptive passages and evaluates how they were codified in literary language. Particular attention is given to the contrast between agronomic treatises, which reduce explicit symbolic language when addressing practical procedures, and poetic or historical texts, which preserve richer layers of symbolic and emotional meaning. This comparison reveals how different genres articulated the same environmental knowledge with distinct expressive aims.

The analysis shows that water operated simultaneously as a material resource and a semiotic agent that structured notions of fertility, balance, risk, and disruption. The study concludes that Roman conceptions of landscape were shaped by a culturally transmitted environmental awareness rooted in agricultural routines, and that literary texts indirectly preserve the perceptual world of the rural “silent people.” More broadly, the article demonstrates how semiotic methods can recover traditional ecological knowledge embedded in ancient representations of rivers, floods, and cultivation.

Télefo, grego e bárbaro. Um paradoxo de identidade

Fátima Silva; Marisa Henriques

O confronto entre Gregos e Bárbaros conheceu na literatura grega antiga uma popularidade frutuosa. O próprio fluir histórico proporcionou inúmeras oportunidades de ponderar sobre o tema, a partir do momento em que fenómenos como colonização ou conflitos armados – para falar de dois mais relevantes – colocaram frente a frente diversas culturas. O Télefo de Eurípides, uma peça particularmente bem acolhida na produção de Eurípides regressou ao assunto de uma forma particularmente original, sobrepondo numa só personagem os dois estatutos, o que assumia as caraterísticas de uma identidade paradoxal.

En torno a Sobre las salazones de Eutidemo de Atenas: un recorrido por las fuentes paralelas de Ath. 3.116 A-C

Fernando Pérez Lambás

La obra Sobre las salazones de Eutidemo de Atenas es únicamente conocida gracias a los pocos fragmentos transmitidos por Ateneo de Náucratis. En Ath. 3.116 A-C, se transmite un fragmento que formaba parte de la mencionada obra de Eutidemo, quien a su vez lo atribuyó a Hesíodo, una autoría cuestionada incluso por el mismo narrador del banquete. Un análisis más detallado de los puntos en común entre estos versos y la poesía didáctica de temática gastronómica, especialmente la Hedypatheia de Arquéstrato de Gela, puede ayudarnos a entender mejor la temática de la obra de Eutidemo, así como la relación de este tratado con la literatura gastronómica de temática similar.

En torno a Sobre las salazones de Eutidemo de Atenas: un recorrido por las fuentes paralelas de Ath. 3.116 A-C

Fernando Pérez Lambás

En torno a Sobre las salazones de Eutidemo de Atenas: un recorrido por las fuentes paralelas de Ath. 3.116 A-C

Fernando Pérez Lambás