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Arguing against the long-standing belief that Thuc. 3.82.4 refers to words changing their meanings, this article shows that, according to the passage, the way in which people value actions and apply value-words to actions in peace differs from how they value and apply value-words to the same types of actions in stasis. But the meaning of the value-words themselves remains the same in both circumstances. The passage is about neither meaning nor the propagandistic manipulation of language but about the distorting effect of stasis on the moral assessment of actions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the theory of recollection in Plato's Meno and attempts to unravel some long-standing puzzles about it. What are the prenatal objects of the soul's vision? What are the post-natal objects of the soul's recollection? What is innate in the Meno ? Why does Socrates (prima facie) suggest that both knowledge and true opinion are innate? The article pays particular attention to the ana- prefix in the verbs aneuriskô , anakineô and analambanô , and suggests that they are used for two distinct stages of recollection: a phenomenological stage of 'finding again' or 'awakening' our innate content, which Plato calls doxa , and an epistemic stage of 'getting it back' as epistêmê. Thinking of the verbs with this 'back/again' sense of the ana- prefix (instead of as 'up', in the common translation of analambanô as 'take up') allows us to understand why Plato would simultaneously imply that our souls had prenatal epistêmê , have post-natal innate true opinion and have the potential to analambanein epistêmê. He is not talking about 'taking up' epistêmê that he also calls doxa , but about 'getting back' the epistêmê we had prenatally. The article concludes with an examination of what this innate content is, suggesting that it is a type of 'principle' and 'essential' mental content. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines and contextualizes a health wish formula found at the opening of eight Roman official letters inscribed in Greek, one of Caesar and seven of Octavian. In each letter the sender mentions that he is well 'with the army' (μετὰ τοῦ στρατεύματος), hence the term 'military' health wish. The health wish was borrowed from Latin letters into Roman letters written in Greek by means of phraseological imitation. The formulation employs appropriate Koine Greek. It was optional during the Republic for the wish to be used in letters either from or to a Roman holding imperium and commanding an army. Because Caesar and Octavian were in such positions, their use of the wish is conventional. The use of this health wish demonstrates that epistolographers working for Caesar and Octavian not only drafted letters that met the conventions of Hellenistic chanceries but also were proficient enough in the medium to incorporate Roman elements with effectiveness. Attestations of the military health wish declined during the Imperial period. The requirement that the sender or the recipient hold imperium would have restricted usage during the Republic but even more so under the Empire through administrative changes to the command of armies and the increasing centrality of the princeps. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the verb τιθαιβώσσω , a Homeric hapax legomenon of unknown meaning and etymology: it reviews its use in Hellenistic poetry and strives to provide a contextually plausible meaning for the verb ('to sting'), as well as for the related adjective θιβρός ('stinging, mordant, piquant'). It argues that τιθαιβώσσω is etymologically related to Latin fīgere 'insert, pierce', fībula 'pin', Lithuanian díegti 'to poke, sting', and Tocharian B tsākā - 'to bite'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents, for the first time in English, a translation of the two letters of the usurping emperor Magnus Maximus that are to be found within the Collectio Avellana (letters 39 and 40). The letters—from Maximus to the Emperor Valentinian II and from Maximus to Siricius, bishop of Rome—are each introduced with an extensive discussion of their subject matter, the circumstances of their composition, and their probable date. The article then considers possible reasons for these letters' unusual survival; as letters of a usurping emperor, one would have expected them to be destroyed, and the article explores how we may understand their inclusion in the Collectio Avellana. Finally, the translations are given, with extensive commentary in their notes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The focus of this article is on a curious episode at the end of the first book of Tacitus' Annals. It is argued that Tacitus here is at his most metaphoric and allusive, allowing a senatorial debate on the possibly prophetic meaning of an inundation of the Tiber to become a debate about the overwhelming power of the river's namesake Tiberius. Parallels from Dio (and perhaps also from Livy) indicate that inundations of the Tiber by the end of the Republic had become prophetic warnings of the rise of the dynasts undermining the stability of the Republic. In Tacitus, procedural anomalies and suggestive wordplay bring to the fore the religious and constitutional issues that in the Senate's handling of this Tiberine prodigium reflect its submission to the ever more oppressive power of Tiberius. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this article is to map the relationship between the main words that comprise the Homeric lexicon of roads, journeys, paths and travel. The central task is to explore the relationship between the words hodos and keleuthos ; along the way, the article will also address other terms that appear less frequently, such as atarp (it) os and poros. The article first teases out a difference in sense between keleuthos in the singular and in the plural. The discussion of keleuthos provides a key distinction, namely between 'object-concepts' and 'activity-concepts', that proves valuable in discussing different senses of the word hodos. Rather than differentiating the words keleuthos and hodos as others have suggested, however, this distinction should be used to differentiate domains of meaning within each word. The result will be what might be conceived of as a four-part grid, with the two words hodos and keleuthos split into two distinct parts along the 'activity-concept'/'object-concept' axis. Finally, concepts drawn from discussions of verbal aspect and philosophy of action are deployed heuristically to develop further the analysis of this semantic field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A close reading of the contexts of several Homeric passages reveals that Homer often uses εἰδώς with ironic force. This realization sheds light on several passages discussed herein, including: 1) Homer's description of the location of Ithaca, which is shown to be Odysseus' strategic lie that directs the Phaeacians to the local stronghold (nearby Dulichium), and 2) the manuscript reading of Parmenides B1.3, which is shown to harbour no internal conflict even if its εἰδότα φῶτα ('one who knows') is in a state of confusion (ἄτῃ), because εἰδότα can signal incomplete or confused knowledge, or even a lack of it. Other literary clues in Parmenides B1 are shown to support this reading. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines a pair of anecdotes in the works of Suetonius and Cassius Dio, describing Nero's passionate late-career interest in the instrument known as the hydraulis or water-organ. The first half of the article contextualizes the water-organ episode in light of both the history of the instrument's reputation and the wider characterization of Nero in the literary sources. The rest of the article uses the episode to shed light on Nero's self-representation as princeps , focussing on the significance of the water-organ as both a musical instrument and a technological marvel. On the one hand, the organ's popularity with Roman audiences of the Early Imperial period made it a politically strategic choice for a music-loving emperor with strong populist leanings. On the other hand, the association of the organ with the intellectual world of Hellenistic Alexandria appealed to a certain group of Roman elites (including Nero himself), who shared a keen interest in technological innovation and technical knowledge more broadly. In the end, however, Nero's experiments with the water-organ were cleverly trivialized by hostile writers and redeployed as an illustration of the emperor's most appalling vices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the propensity of Iliadic landscape similes to encourage reflections on human fragility. Landscape in the similes is usually interpreted as a medium which conveys a consistent symbolic value (for example storms as the hostility of nature); however, landscape is often a more flexible medium. By offering close readings of three Iliadic similes (winter torrents at 4.452–6, snowfall at 12.279–89 and clear night at 8.555–9), this article argues that landscape allowed the poet to frame the main narrative in various ways, both helping the listener to imagine described events and interrupting the listener's immersion in the main narrative. While many have analysed how similes offer analogies to the main narrative, the ways in which the same simile can also disrupt and reframe the narrative are less understood. This article observes that shifts in narrative space and time played a key role in changing the perspective of the listener. Taking a broadly phenomenological approach, it proposes that embodied descriptions of space, which recreate the experience of the moving body in landscape, invite the listener to consider the temporal scale of the natural world. By looking at how landscape in select similes shifts the listener's spatial and temporal experience, this article argues that landscape contributes to the wider Iliadic theme of human fragility. In particular, it identifies the potential for landscape similes to minimize the scale of human experience, question the possibility of human agency, and reveal the limitations of human perspectives and knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article re-examines the sole surviving fragment of Aeschylean elegy alongside the available contextual evidence in an attempt to enhance our currently very limited understanding of Aeschylus' elegiac output. The first section explores Theophrastus' citation of this fragment in the Historia Plantarum to demonstrate what we can learn about the original Aeschylean poem from its use within the later writer's discussion. The second section examines how the Italian focus of the fragment fits into a wider historical and literary discourse of interactions between Greeks and non-Greeks in the west. The third and concluding section builds on these findings to examine the possible Sicilian performance context of the original Aeschylean poem to which the fragment belongs. Ultimately the discussion demonstrates that the fragment is an important and hitherto underappreciated early witness of the development of influential cultural concepts regarding interactions between Greeks and non-Greeks in the west, and that the possibility that Aeschylus produced a poem relating to the victory of Hieron I of Syracuse over the Etruscans at Cumae in 474 b.c.e. is worth serious consideration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Plutarch's Moralia mentions that Theophrastus twice delivered his native city from tyrants (1097B, 1126F), a detail that has been difficult to make coherent with our existing understanding of Theophrastus' life. Theophrastus seems to be in the wrong place at the wrong time for this to have been possible, or to have been too undemocratic and scholastic a philosopher to have wanted to participate in these struggles in the first place. By more closely examining the nature of Plutarch's comment and the evidence for Theophrastus' political orientation and character, this article argues that there are, however, grounds on which to take Plutarch's report seriously. It presents a case for Theophrastus' participation in two liberation struggles in 334 and 332, without complicating the trajectory of his accompanying Aristotle to both Macedonia and Athens during this period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that the word ψυχαγωγία and its cognates which are found in the writings of Philodemus retain a semantic connection to the domain of magic and are best translated in terms of 'enchantment' rather than the more generic sense of 'entertainment'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses Roman grammarian Nonius Marcellus' sources and methods for compiling his dictionary "De compendiosa doctrina." Marcellus used 41 sources in the dictionary. In 1901, W. M. Lindsay presented the results of his analysis about the methods used by Marcellus. Lindsay observed that glossarial sources 26, 27 and 28 may have come from the same lexicographer.

The article presents a description of The Classical Association and "The Classical Quarterly." The Classical Association is an organization of 3,500 members worldwide who are commonly interested in the study of languages, literature, and Greek and Roman civilizations. "The Classical Quarterly" is a biannual publication on classical scholarship which contains research papers and short notes on topics regarding language, literature, history and philosophy.

The article discusses historical allusions as a rhetorical device in deliberative oratory that includes "things of the past." It is stated that this will make listeners inclined to better councel in the future. The article cites the paper of Aeschines entitled "Against Ctesiphon" and its use of historical allusion. This strategy is called imagining past and present. It is stated that the persuasive power of Aeschines strategy lies not only on the shared nostalgia of the past but also because of the aid it gets from contemporary democratic vocabularies, conversations, narratives, and existing forensic techniques.

This article argues that ἡμεροσκόπος at Lys. 849 constitutes a pun based on iotacism, a well-known feature of female speech in fifth-century Athens aptly illustrated by Socrates in Plato's Cratylus. By describing herself as ἡμεροσκόπος 'day watch' pronounced as ἱμεροσκόπος 'lust watch', Lysistrata perverts the military term associated with the occupation-plot to a sexually charged word associated with the strike-plot. Its use would be very appropriate in a scene in which the φαλληφόρια of the men (not just Cinesias' but later on also the Spartan herald's and the Spartan and Athenian delegates') become the subject of a φαλλοσκοπία by the women (not just Lysistrata but later on also the chorus of women) and perforce also by the onlooking audience. Additional contemporary evidence from orthographic mistakes made by schoolboys suggests that Athenian elite women of the late fifth century were the avant-garde of socially prestigious innovations such as iotacism, which would definitively catch on with the male population in the fourth century and change the face of Greek phonology forever. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Burnet's text at Pl. Ti. 55c7–d6 is at least questionable, and opting for a different reading at 55d5 (θεός instead of θεόν) would shed light on an intriguing argumentative aspect of Plato's cosmological account: God confirms the metaphysical reasons why there is just one perfect world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 'New Apuleius' is a set of Latin summaries of Plato's works first published in 2016 by Justin Stover, who attributed it to Apuleius. The present article attempts to assess two key aspects of Stover's argument, viz. his reconstruction of the manuscript transmission of the new text and his use of computer-assisted stylometric techniques. The authors suggest that both strands of his argument are inconclusive. First, it is argued that the transposition of gatherings in the archetype of the Apuleian philosophica as envisaged by Stover is highly unrealistic. Second, replications of Stover's stylometric experiments show that their results are highly dependent on the particular algorithm settings and on the composition of the corpus. It is further shown that Stover's choice of highly specialized stylometric techniques is suboptimal, because popular generalist methods for statistical data analysis are demonstrably more successful in correctly identifying authors of Latin text fragments and do not support the case for Apuleius' authorship of the new text. The authors conclude that there are no solid grounds to conclude that the 'New Apuleius' was indeed written by Apuleius. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article deals with Calchas' prophecy and Diomedes' and Ulysses' interventions during the mustering of the Greeks at Aulis in Statius' Achilleid (1.514–52). It will be argued that Calchas and Ulysses embody two different approaches to the generic tensions of the new epic which Statius' poem represents. Calchas, the old uates of the Homeric tradition, seems unable to fully understand the 'poetics of illusion' enacted by Thetis and Achilles in disguise, as is clear from his vision. His point of view is skilfully complemented by Ulysses, who turns out to be the true uates, as well as the perfect leader for Achilles' rescue. As the only figure who can face the fluid and ambiguous reality of the poem and its literary dynamics as well, Ulysses also stands as a poetic voice himself; through his speech, Statius reflects upon the tensions of his epic and the poetic effort needed to channel the narrative from the peaceful setting of Scyros to the martial horizon of Troy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Poetics 13, Aristotle claims that the protagonist in the most beautiful tragedies comes to ruin through some kind of 'failure'—in Greek, ἁμαρτία. There has been notorious disagreement among scholars about the moral responsibility involved in ἁμαρτία. This article defends the old reading of ἁμαρτία as a character flaw, but with an important modification: rather than explaining the hero's weakness as general weakness of will (ἀκρασία), it argues that the tragic hero is blinded by temper (θυμός) or by a pursuit for fine, good and desirable things—that is, by what may be labelled 'qualified' weakness of will. The upshot is that ἁμαρτία ends up as being less blameworthy than 'proper' ἀκρασία, but still explains why morally outstanding people are unsuitable for the most beautiful tragedies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a new interpretation of Apuleius' story of Cupid and Psyche. Most scholars have previously offered a second-time reading of this story, according to which the reader reaches Book 11 and then looks back at Psyche's story of fall and redemption as a parallel for Lucius' life. Following Graverini's and other scholars' emotional approach to the Metamorphoses, I argue that the ecphrasis of Cupid's palace within the story of Cupid and Psyche includes multiple re-enactments of the novel's prologue. These re-enactments invite the reader to undertake a first-time and immersive reading of this story, which focusses on Psyche's experience of Cupid and her reaction to his epiphany. In its use of immersion, this article draws from recent developments in cognitive narratology and pushes scholars of Apuleius to focus on the reader's immersive and emotional response in order to reassess the value of a second-time reading of the Metamorphoses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the first-century c.e.Laus Pisonis, an anonymous panegyric for a certain Piso that lays particular emphasis on his skill at lyre-playing, ball games and the board game, the ludus latrunculorum (155–210). Whereas this focus has often been a cause of consternation among critics, this article argues that play is a crucial element of the poem's poetic and political operations. The first section shows that the poem employs images of poetic maturity and of temporality in order to justify a light or ludic topic for an allegedly young poet. The second section identifies a hitherto unobserved telestich (M-O-R-A) in the passage describing the ludus latrunculorum and argues that this letter game defines a positive period of play within the poem. The third section further demonstrates that this letter game is aimed specifically at the patron Piso as he is represented within the poem. That is, the poet parallels Piso's potential to uncover the telestich in the text and his ability to uncover the poet's hidden talent. The concluding fourth section explores the wider impact of this reinterpretation of the Laus Pisonis for the literary history of the Early Principate. It proposes that the poem's playfulness should not be seen as reflecting the progressive disempowerment of the political elite. Rather, the poem is an early case of Roman political discourse encroaching on the value of the trivial and the boundaries of otium. The Laus Pisonis makes play political. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to a discussion raised more than forty years ago in this journal by Richard Stoneman on how to interpret the unexpected image of an eagle at Pind. Nem. 3.80. Without excluding the possibility of a reference to the poet himself, this article argues, mainly based on a survey on the traditional elements used in that passage, that the eagle also refers—at least partially—to the victorious athlete Aristocleides. This is demonstrated by an internal investigation of the structure of the ode and the use of signal words (–θεν, δέδορκεν, φάος). Moreover, the image of the eagle stands in a series of other ancient and traditional motifs, such as the 'song of milk and honey' (77–9) and '(far-)shining fame' (64, 81–4), which can be also found in the Rigveda and therefore can be regarded as an inheritance of the Indo-European (= IE) poetic tradition. Parallels from the Rigveda can be found for the avian imagery too, in which the eagle is compared to someone striving for fame in an athletic contest; this suggests that the image of the eagle is another traditional motif from IE times in Pindar, who uses it as a device to transition from a poetological to a laudatory part of the epinician, perhaps deliberately playing with the ambiguity of the image. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Xenophon's Socrates, like Plato's, holds that wisdom comes with practical abilities. But influential interpretations of Xenophon's Socrates attribute to him a splintered view of wisdom, on which there is no wisdom simpliciter which is specially connected to all good actions. This article argues that a crucial text (Memorabilia 3.9.5) is significantly more problematic for the splintered view than hitherto appreciated, while the texts which are supposed to support the splintered view do not. Instead, this article argues that for Xenophon's Socrates the unwise lack self-knowledge, and so also lack a special prohairetic ability needed for doing fine and good actions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Suetonius' Lives of the Caesars usually begin with a family tree. These family trees are often rhetorical, foreshadowing in the ancestors character traits that will be themes of the rest of the Life. This particular rhetorical strategy relies upon an older phenomenon of 'family identity'—namely, the literary application of similar characteristics to people in the same family—such as the one that tells us that the Claudii are proud and the Domitii Ahenobarbi are ferocious. Gary Farney studied 'family identity' as a phenomenon of the Republic. There, it was the association of a family with a certain characteristic, a kind of 'branding'. It would be perfectly obvious for Suetonius to use the family identities already in use for well-known families, but, as I show here, Suetonius' selection of ancestors creates different family identities rather than simply using the traditional ones he would have found in other sources. In this study I concentrate on Nero and Tiberius. I focus on these two emperors because they are individuals where there is a known family identity in other sources and they also have the most detailed and elaborate ancestry sections in Suetonius' Caesars. Family identity seems to be most interesting to Suetonius when it goes against expectations, and that is when Suetonius' family trees are most elaborate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article calls for a new understanding of the relationship between classicizing and Christian discourses of exemplarity through a close reading of the figure of Scipio Nasica in Livy, Ab urbe condita Book 29 and Augustine, De ciuitate Dei Books 1–2. Nasica, whose selection as a uir optimus by the Senate in 204 b.c.e. has puzzled modern scholars, was a source of historiographical difficulty for Livy that prompted him to reflect upon exemplarity, mythmaking and the tenuous relationship between past and present. For Augustine, on the other hand, Nasica was a pagan, and thus imperfect, realization of Christian pietas and restraint from luxurious behaviour. Although differing in their interpretations of the Republican exemplum, both Livy and Augustine point to the complexities inherent in invocations of paradigmatic Roman maiores. The close study of Scipio Nasica thus reveals the classicizing precedent lingering behind the supposedly 'Christian' rejections of pre-Christian Roman culture in the De ciuitate Dei. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This piece explores possible reasons for Lucilius' suggestive reference to worms, emblemate uermiculato, in the famous comment (about speech arranged akin to mosaics) which has survived from Book 2 of the satirist. The fragment can be set metatextually amid other extracts of Lucilius to show the poet's agency and skill, considered as having influenced aspects of its own afterlife (especially in Hor. Sat. 2.4) and appreciated in its historical context as a hit at Publius Mucius Scaevola, who died from phthiriasis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his dialogue Statesman (= Plt.), Plato first sets out one way of thinking of the statesperson, on the model of a nurturer of a herd such as a shepherd; then he sets out a very different way of thinking of him, on the model of a weaver of a social fabric. Critics have long been wondering whether Plato wants to combine the two models or, on the contrary, to abandon the nurturing model in favour of the weaving model. This article shows that a particular passage in the dialogue, 275d8–e1, is crucial for this question. As this passage is understood by all commentators and translators, it says that the statesperson is not a nurturer. This ought to have settled the question. But the article argues that we cannot read the passage like that. For an adjacent passage, 275b1–7, says that the statesperson is a nurturer. There is no way out of this contradiction, unless we reconsider the traditional reading of 275d8–e1. The article defends a different reading of 275d8–e1, which avoids the contradiction. On this new reading, the passage does not say that the statesperson is not a nurturer, it says that her/his being a nurturer is not the grounds for her/him deserving the title 'statesperson'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues for an allusion in Virgil's Eclogue 4 to one of Pindar's victory odes (Olympian 6). It will be suggested that this Pindaric pretext is viewed by the Latin poet through a Callimachean perspective which adds to it further layers of significance. Consequently, the evidence will be discussed for reading the allusion in terms of royal ideology which places Virgil's poem in the tradition of Hellenistic ruler-encomia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents information on the dossier of decrees about the Deceleans and the Demontionidae of Athens, Greece. Interpretation of the decrees; What cause division between the two; Continuation of debate on issue attempted in paper.

Retaliates against the arguments presented by Mortimer Chambers in a 1992 paper titled `The Archon's Name in the Athenian-Egesta Alliance' (IGI3 11).

The article informs that late Roger Mynors, in a letter to Sebastiano Timpanaro, stated that he had wondered "whether it might be a habit of Latin writers, when they were putting only one or two "parolette" between two pieces of Greek," to use Greek rather than Latin. He invents an example to depict the same. The answer to the above question is that they sometimes did, and the present paper records the observations of the article author on the above issue. The observations along with concerned text are recorded in the article.

The article focuses on the prose usage of the word "akoyein," which means "to read." When a reader encounters the following words, "A few moments ago, I think, you heard Plato saying that there is no specific name for the art which deals with the body," it is easy to put these into a literary context. One may imagine some kind of fictional dialogue, in which out of two or more partners one reminds another of what a few minutes ago Plato had said to them about a particular subject. In this paper, the article author argues that people should interpret statements of this kind as simple indications that someone has read something in a book.

The article focuses on the subjective style in mythological character Odysseus' wonderings. Even though Odysseus is a first-person narrator and hence is subject to certain restrictions, these are almost completely counterbalanced by his ex eventu knowledge. In this paper, the article author attempts to show that there is at least one important respect in which the narration of Odysseus differs from that of the primary narrator: his subjective style. Recent studies have shown that there is a marked difference in vocabulary between characters and primary narrator, in that emotional and evaluative language is only rarely used by the latter. However, the secondary narrator Odysseus does not shrink from using emotional language, or explicitly commenting on people and events.

Profiles the works of Manilius, as criticized by Valentinus Acidalius. Publication of the translation of his poem; Explanation of why someone attributed the annotations to Gronovius; Identification of the papers discovered from the library of Gevartius.

Attempts to show that the passage in which Plato prescribes astronomy as the fourth study in the education of the Guardians, if properly understood, permits us to recognize the positive impetus Plato gave to mathematical astronomy without requiring us to whitewash the anti-empirical strain in his whole philosophy. Interpretation by one school of thought that astronomy here is a purely speculative study of bodies in motion having no relation to the celestial objects that we see; Analysis of some excerpts of the passage to prove what Plato really meant by the phrase leaving the things in the heaven alone; Announcement that this paper retracts what the author wrote in "Selections Illustrating the History of Greek Mathematics."

Examines the poetry of Anacreon. Aim of this paper to show how correct analysis of the final section of the poem can lead the readers to a better understanding of the nature of Pindar's poetry; Assertion that it would not be surprising if a very formal style should need adaptation when directed to a tyrant whose status, power and demands were of a far more elevated nature; Analysis of some of the excerpts from the poetry of Anacreon; Conclusion of the analysis.

A treatise on rhetorical tropes is attributed in manuscripts to the first-century grammarian Trypho: this article considers for the first time a fifteenth-century manuscript of this work (Leiden, BPG 74G), which turns out to be the only complete witness of its hitherto unknown original version; this version (very fragmentarily transmitted by a fifth-century papyrus scrap) is also partly found in another fifteenth-century manuscript now kept in Olomouc (M 79). Four interesting poetic fragments are quoted in this newly discovered, fuller version of Ps.-Trypho's De Tropis: some lines from Callimachus' fifth and fourth Iambi (23–9 and 90–2 respectively: a radically new light is shed by this new witness on the parallel papyrus fragments carrying Callimachus' text), an epigram dubiously attributed to Simonides (FGE 44 Page, probably to be dated to the Hellenistic period: the text can be now restored to its complete form), and some enigmatic lines of "Hesiod"'s Wedding of Keyx, which the new witness finally makes fully understandable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the text of the work On Simples attributed to Dioscorides. It argues that in fifteen places the transmitted text is faulty, and it proposes emendations. It also studies certain types of insertions made in the text by its most recent editor, Max Wellmann, and concludes that they are unnecessary. Finally, it discusses two points where On Simples sheds light on Dioscorides' De materia medica. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines gift-giving within the Persian empire and its perception in Greek literary sources. Gift-giving in the Greek world was often framed in the language of friendship, and Greek authors subsequently articulated Persian traditions using the language and cultural norms of their intended audience. There were fundamental differences in the concepts of gift-exchange and reciprocity between the Greeks and the Persians. This article will examine Persian traditions of gift-giving followed by Greek traditions of gift-giving, and will argue that the Greek misrepresentation of Persian customs led to numerous misunderstandings in relations between Greek and Persian individuals. The use of Greek descriptive language, rather than more accurate terminology, to describe Persian traditions has hindered our understanding of gift-giving in the Persian empire. In addressing these misconceptions, this article will demonstrate the successful use of gift-giving in the Persian empire and the perils of Greek misrepresentation of foreign customs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the mid fourth century b.c. some Roman gentes drew on a Pythagorean tradition. In this tradition, Numa's role of Pythagoras' disciple connected Rome (and the gentes) with Greek elites and culture. The Marcii, between 304 and 300 b.c., used Numa's figure, recently reshaped by the Aemilii and the Pinarii for their propaganda, to promote the need for a plebeian pontificate. After the approval of the Ogulnium plebiscite (300 b.c.), the needs for this kind of propaganda fell away. When Marcius Censorinus became censor, Numa's pontificate was no longer relevant for promoting the gens. For this reason, the Marcii used another genealogy for similar propagandistic effect: the figure of Marsyas, a symbol of plebeian ideals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that the defamiliarization caused by extensive repetition, termed 'semantic satiation' in psychology, was used by ancient poets for specific effects. Five categories of repetition are identified. First, words undergo auditory deformation through syllable and sound repetition, as commonly in ancient etymologies. Second, a tradition of emphatic proper-name repetition is identified, in which the final instance of the name is given special emphasis; this tradition spans Greek and Latin poetry, and ultimately goes back to the Nireus entry in the Catalogue of Ships. Third, repetition is used for wordplay, where the final instance of the repeated term not only is emphasized but also incurs some change to its meaning or shape. Fourth, the incantatory repetition of divine names in hymns and cultic invocations amplifies a sense of divine presence behind and beyond the repetend. Fifth, repetition of half and full lines by different speakers in Old Comedy serves to undercut and parody the original sense of the repeated words. Extensive repetition in ancient literature was never merely ornamental but was used for a range of specific auditory and semantic effects with distinct and identifiable structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article sheds new light on Themistius' argument in what is philosophically the most original (and historically the most influential) section of his extant work, namely On Aristotle's On the Soul 100.16–109.3: here, Themistius offers a systematic interpretation of Aristotle's 'agent' intellect and its 'potential' and 'passive' counterparts. A solution to two textual difficulties at 101.36–102.2 is proposed, supported by the Arabic translation. This allows us to see that Themistius engages at length with a Platonizing reading of the enigmatic final lines of De anima III.5, where Aristotle explains 'why we do not remember' (without specifying when and what). This Platonizing reading (probably inspired by Aristotle's early dialogue Eudemus) can be safely identified with the one developed in a fragmentary text extant only in Arabic under the title Porphyry's treatise On the soul. While Themistius rejects this reading, he turns out to be heavily influenced by the author's interpretation of the 'agent', 'potential' and 'passive' intellect. These findings offer us a new glimpse into Themistius' philosophical programme: he is searching for an alternative to both the austere (and, by Themistius' lights, distorted) Aristotelianism of Alexander of Aphrodisias and the all too Platonizing reading of Aristotle adopted by thinkers such as Porphyry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article identifies a papyrus in Warsaw, P.Vars. 6, as a fragment of the large Latin–Greek glossary known as Ps.-Philoxenus. That glossary, published in volume II of G. Goetz's Corpus Glossariorum Latinorum on the basis of a ninth-century manuscript, is by far the most important of the bilingual glossaries surviving from antiquity, being derived from lost works of Roman scholarship and preserving valuable information about rare and archaic Latin words. It has long been considered a product of the sixth century a.d., but the papyrus dates to c.200, and internal evidence indicates that the glossary itself must be substantially older than that copy. The Ps.-Philoxenus glossary is therefore not a creation of Late Antiquity but of the Early Empire or perhaps even the Republic. Large bilingual glossaries in alphabetical order must have existed far earlier than has hitherto been believed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A significant strand of the ethical psychology, aesthetics and politics of Plato's Republic revolves around the concept of poikilia, 'fascinating variety'. Plato uses the concept to caution against harmful appetitive pleasures purveyed by democracy and such artistic or cultural practices as mimetic poetry. His aim, this article shows, is to contest a prominent conceptual connection between poikilia and beauty (kallos, to kalon). Exploiting tensions in the archaic and classical Greek concept, Plato associates poikilia with dangerous pleasures to redirect admiration toward a distinctly philosophical pursuit of the nature of beauty. This is to displace a prominent and problematic cultural sensibility—the aesthetics of poikilia—not to deny that fascinating variety, even in mimetic poetry, may be beautiful. Rather, Plato's cultural critique lays bare an epistemological problem in the ethical psychology of beauty: since they cannot be distinguished from what seems beautiful, how should one respond to fascinating yet dangerous attractions? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Quaestiones naturales 4b.4.2 Seneca states that in early spring the weather drastically changes: in the warmer sky larger water droplets are formed and cause rain. The description of this 'greater change' (maior inclinatio) is linked in the manuscript tradition to two different controversial readings, temporis and aeris, which are irregularly distributed. Most recent editors have printed the first reading, but H.M. Hine is probably right to accept aeris. A careful linguistic, stemmatic and stylistic examination shows that temporis is likely to be a Medieval Latin gloss of aeris: the equivalence of both words would be difficult to justify in Classical Latin, but in Late Latin and in Medieval Latin tempus developed a climatological meaning which is explicitly found in medieval writers and glossaries and is also very widespread in Romance languages. The presence of this gloss in the hyparchetype Ψ, which is ultimately the source for most medieval copies, accounts for the irregular distribution of both readings in the manuscript tradition; this hypothesis is particularly consistent with Hine's suggestion that Ψ probably had interlinear or marginal readings. This historical investigation on the meaning of tempus is also relevant to the end of the same passage, where stylistic and linguistic evidence supports the reading tepore rather than tempore. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the fourth century, the amount of money Athenians got from the polis for volunteering to sit on a jury and for attending the assembly diverged significantly. Jury pay remained at 3 obols a day, despite inflation, while the pay given for a principal (kyria) assembly eventually rose from 1 obol to 9 obols—outpacing inflation and overcompensating most citizens for their time. What demographic reconstruction of the jury can explain why the real value of jury pay never declined to the point that too few Athenians volunteered? Self-reliant citizens (penêtes) must have dominated the jury pool, and penêtes with young adult children would have volunteered most often. Having an additional source of household labour reduced the opportunity cost of jury service for these Athenians and made their participation more resilient in the face of the declining value of pay. Citizens who faced greater opportunity costs probably participated less over time, meaning that fourth-century juries gradually became less diverse. By contrast, the growth in assembly pay can best be understood in terms of the 'Lycurgan' agenda of the 330s and the 320s. Greater pay helped to ensure that the assembly's newly expanded meeting place on the Pnyx was filled to capacity with citizens from all over Attica. The result was a massive spectacle that celebrated a threatened democracy and stimulated the polis economy. Since the courts lacked the same capacity for spectacle, there was no political motivation to pay jurors more. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within Prudentius' Peristephanon there are three main episodes which focus upon the torture and/or death of women: the torture and death of Eulalia in Perist. 3, that of Encratis in Perist. 4 and the death of Agnes in Perist. 14. This article compares the variety and types of pain that these women are depicted as undergoing during their martyrdoms, analysing the extent to which gender and sexuality play a role in their responses to pain or to the threat of it. The article first examines the martyrdoms of Agnes and Eulalia and uses these as a basis for analysing the torture of Encratis who is depicted as suffering the most pain and who, even more than the other two, is represented as a liminal figure, not only in terms of gender but also in terms of her status as a living being. A comparison and contrast between Prudentius' representation of Encratis and his depiction of Loth's wife in his Hamartigenia will give further insight into the significance of Encratis' suffering and the way in which the slow and painful decay of her flesh links her with the city she protects. It will be shown how the vulnerability of these martyrs' female flesh and the threatened or actualized violation of their virginal bodies are rendered at once shocking and their source of triumph over traumatic pain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]