Apuleius was a Numidian Latin-language prose writer, Platonist philosopher and rhetorician. He was born in the Roman province of Numidia, in the Berber city of Madauros, modern-day M'Daourouch, Algeria. He studied Platonism in Athens, travelled to Italy, Asia Minor, and Egypt, and was an initiate in several cults or mysteries. The most famous incident in his life was when he was accused of using magic to gain the attentions of a wealthy widow. He declaimed and then distributed his own defense before the proconsul and a court of magistrates convened in Sabratha, near Oea. This is known as the Apologia.
Gaius Valerius Catullus, called Catullus, was a Latin neoteric poet of the late Roman Republic. His surviving works remain widely read due to their popularity as teaching tools and more personal or sexually explicit themes.
Ermolao or Hermolao Barbaro, also Hermolaus Barbarus, was an Italian Renaissance scholar.
Demetrios Chalkokondyles, Latinized as Demetrius Chalcocondyles and found variously as Demetricocondyles, Chalcocondylas or Chalcondyles was one of the most eminent Greek scholars in the West. He taught in Italy for over forty years; his colleagues included Marsilio Ficino, Poliziano, and Theodorus Gaza in the revival of letters in the Western world, and Chalkokondyles was the last of the Greek humanists who taught Greek literature at the great universities of the Italian Renaissance. One of his pupils at Florence was the famous Johann Reuchlin. Chalkokondyles published the first printed publications of Homer, of Isocrates, and of the Suda lexicon.
The Metamorphoses of Apuleius, which Augustine of Hippo referred to as The Golden Ass, is the only ancient Roman novel in Latin to survive in its entirety.
Cupid and Psyche is a story originally from Metamorphoses, written in the 2nd century AD by Lucius Apuleius Madaurensis. The tale concerns the overcoming of obstacles to the love between Psyche and Cupid or Amor, and their ultimate union in a sacred marriage. Although the only extended narrative from antiquity is that of Apuleius from 2nd century AD, Eros and Psyche appear in Greek art as early as the 4th century BC. The story's Neoplatonic elements and allusions to mystery religions accommodate multiple interpretations, and it has been analyzed as an allegory and in light of folktale, Märchen or fairy tale, and myth.
Catullus 3 is a poem by Roman poet Gaius Valerius Catullus that laments the death of a pet sparrow (passer) for which an unnamed girl (puella), possibly Catullus' lover Lesbia, had an affection. Written in hendecasyllabic meter, it is considered to be one of the most famous of Latin poems.
Michael Tarchaniota Marullus was a Greek Renaissance scholar, Neo-Latin poet, humanist and soldier.
Francesco Barbaro (1390–1454) was an Italian politician, diplomat, and humanist from Venice and a member of the patrician Barbaro family. He is interred in the Church of the Frari, Venice.
Pierio Valeriano (1477–1558), born Giovanni Pietro dalle Fosse, was an Italian Renaissance humanist, specializing in the early study of Egyptian hieroglyphs. His most famous works were On the Ill Fortune of Learned Men and Hieroglyphica, sive, De sacris Aegyptiorvm literis commentarii, a study on hieroglyphics and their use in allegory.
Giovanni Andrea Bussi (1417–1475), also Giovan de' Bussi or Joannes Andreae, was an Italian Renaissance humanist and the Bishop of Aleria. He was a major editor of classical texts and produced many incunabular editiones principes. In his hands the preface was expanded from its former role as a private letter to a patron, to become a public lecture, and at times a bully pulpit.
James Henry Weldon Morwood was an English classicist and author. He taught at Harrow School, where he was Head of Classics, and at Oxford University, where he was a Fellow of Wadham College, and also Dean. He wrote almost thirty books, ranging from biography to translations and academic studies of Classical literature.
Rosemond Teresa Marie Tuve was an American scholar of English literature, specializing in Renaissance literature—in particular, Edmund Spenser. She published four books on the subject along with several essays.
Susan Treggiari is an English scholar of Ancient Rome, emeritus professor of Stanford University and retired member of the Faculty of Classics at the University of Oxford. Her specialist areas of study are the family and marriage in ancient Rome, Cicero and the late Roman Republic.
Maria Wyke is professor of Latin at University College, London. She is a specialist in Latin love poetry, classical reception studies, and the interpretation of the roles of men and women in the ancient world. She has also written widely on the role of the figure of Julius Caesar in Western culture.
Barbara Elizabeth Goff is a Classics Professor at the University of Reading. She specialises in Greek tragedy and its reception; women in antiquity; postcolonial classics and reception of Greek political thought.
Cornelia Catlin Coulter was an American classicist and academic who was Professor of Latin at Mount Holyoke College from 1926 to 1951. She is known in particular for her work on the Medieval and Renaissance use of Classical sources and for her presidency of and advocacy for the Classical Association of New England.
Jane Rowlandson was a British ancient historian who specialised in the economic and social history of Egypt during the Greek and Roman periods. She was a lecturer in Ancient History at King's College, London for 16 years, retiring in 2005. In 1996 she published the influential book Landowners and Tenants in Roman Egypt. She died in 2018.
Nancy Worman is Professor of Classics at Barnard and Columbia University. She is an expert on ancient Greek drama and oratory, on ancient literary criticism and literary theory, and on the reception of ancient Greece in the post-classical world.
