Vita e Pensiero

This paper focuses on the ‘Treaty of the Indus’, i.e., the peace pact between Candragupta Maurya and Seleucus I Nicator at the end of the fourth century BCE. Scholars are divided into those who consider such a treaty a peace pact  sanctioned through dynastic marriage and those who consider it a pact allowing the celebration of intermarriages between Greeks and Indians. This paper defends the first hypothesis according to the Indian sources on dharma and  artha. Dharmaśāstric texts never describe Greeks as foreigners but consider them part of a mixed class (and consequently part of the Brahmanical society). Therefore, no formal treaty allowing Indo-Greek intermarriages was  needed. Furthermore, Kauṭilya’s Arthaśāstra supports peace pacts sanctioned through marriages with foreign kings, as sometimes happened in Ancient Indian history.

P.Oxy. 5535, recently published, contains, more or less partially, biographical sketches about Perdiccas, Antipater, Polyperchon and presumably Craterus. This paper provides an Italian translation and a historical commentary...

This paper proposes a new synopsis of the three collations of the codex Hummelianus, a lost manuscript of Tacitus’ Germania, probably written during the seventh or eighth decades of the fifteenth century. After a brief introduction dealing with textual, palaeographical, and codicological aspects, the lectiones of the Hummelianus are arranged in columns together with the readings of the three editions used by Hummel, Longolius, and Selling to collate the manuscript in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries...