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This volume contains the first edition of 66 papyri and ostraca in the collection of the Leiden Papyrological Institute. The texts are dated between the third century BCE and the eighth century CE and originate from Egypt. They include two Demotic literary papyri (one of which is written in Hieratic script), 19 Demotic ostraca, 44 Greek documentary papyri and one Coptic ostracon. All texts are published with transcription, translation, commentary and colour photographs.

This article seeks to combine the viewpoints of formal semantics and pragmatics, typology, historical linguistics, and philology, in order to give a diachronic overview of the semantic and pragmatic changes observable for the Imperfect indicative within the recorded history Greek. Since its development does not adhere to typologically expected stages of semantic change, I provide a pragmatic account by taking into consideration not only the Imperfect but also the rest of the past-tense system of Greek, namely the Aorist and Perfect. With this holistic approach, I am able to motivate a development that is otherwise typologically anomalous.

Wood identification of 13 samples is made for the first time for the well-preserved coffin from the Bosporan Kingdom exhibited in the State Hermitage Museum. Due to the decay state, observation was carried out with Scanning Electron Microscopy. Additional information was obtained from macerated material. The samples studied show a complex of characteristics common to the Cupressaceae family: axial tracheids without helical thickenings, presence of axial parenchyma, homogeneous rays, cupressoid cross-field pits, and absence of resin canals. The presence of dark-stained content in the ray cells and the structure of its end walls, as well as the size of the rays, allow the determination of the wood samples as Cupressus sp. and Juniperus sp. The supporting parts of the coffin construction are made from cypress, while the decorative details and an inner bed are from juniper. These results support the dating of the coffin and the known information about different usage of timbers in the production of coffins in the Bosporan Kingdom.

Originally, Ancient Greek employed the letter digamma ( ϝ) to represent the /w/ sound. Over time, this sound disappeared, alongside the digamma that denoted it. However, to transcribe those archaic, dialectal, or foreign words that still retained this sound, lexicographers employed other letters, whose sound was close enough to /w/. Among these, there is the letter gamma (γ), attested mostly but not only in the Lexicon of Hesychius. Given what we know about the sound of gamma, it is difficult to explain this use. The most straightforward hypothesis suggests that the scribes who copied these words misread the capital digamma (Ϝ) as gamma (Γ). Presenting new and old evidence of gamma used to denote digamma in Ancient Greek literary and documentary papyri, lexicography, and medieval manuscripts, this paper refutes this hypothesis, and demonstrates that a peculiar evolution in the pronunciation of gamma in Post-Classical Greek triggered a systematic use of this letter to denote the sound once represented by the digamma.

Plato puts goodness at the center of all practical thinking but offers no definition of it and implies that philosophy must find one. Aristotle demurs, arguing that there is no such thing as universal goodness. What we need, instead, is an understanding of the human good. Plato and Aristotle are alike in the attention they give to the category of the beneficial, and they agree that since some things are beneficial only as means, there must be others that are non-derivatively beneficial. When G. E. Moore proposed in the early twentieth century that goodness is, as Plato had said, the foundation of ethics, he rejected not only the assumption that goodness needs a definition, but also that goodness is beneficial – that is, good for someone. This article traces the development of this debate as it plays out in the writings of Prichard, Ross, Geach, Thomson, and Scanlon.

Source-oriented explanation in typology challenges a number of well-established universals, including the correlational universals of harmonic ordering of heads and dependents. It dispenses with functional or cognitive explanations of these because harmonic orders may simply be explained as one order emerging from the other and thus as historical accidents. We provide twofold evidence against this approach and show that (i) universally preferred structures may emerge without any preconditions in the grammaticalization source and (ii) that universally dispreferred structures of the source disappear in the course of time. First, we demonstrate that the development of the three harmonic, head-first word orders (VO, AdpN, NGen) in Postclassical Greek can hardly be considered a historical coincidence, because they match chronologically and, at the same time, are entirely unrelated etymologically, and because neither of these had a bias for ordering heads before dependents in the source. The emergence of the three harmonic word orders is extremely improbable under the null hypothesis of a development by chance (odds 0.037). Secondly, we provide evidence for the reverse case: cross-linguistically dispreferred properties inherited from the source are abandoned in the course of the development.

On the 20th to 22nd July 2018 the 11th MOISA International Conference was held at the University of Reading, organised by Ian Rutherford, Donatella Restani and James Lloyd. Nineteen papers were presented, all engaging with the theme of ‘Music and Materiality’. This report explores the areas where future research on music and materiality might prove fruitful, as evidenced by the rich and varied set of topics and methodologies presented during the conference.

This article reviews The Cambridge Grammar of Classical Greek, a major resource for learners and teachers that incorporates many insights from modern linguistics. While not a full replacement for older reference grammars of ancient Greek, it is particularly valuable for its up-to-date approach to topics such as verbal aspect and the tenses, particles, and word order.

This article discusses the challenges facing scholars exploring the nature of belief in ancient Greek religion. While recent scholarship has raised questions about individual religious activities, and work on ritual, the body, and the senses has broadened our methodological palette, the nature and dynamics of generally held “low intensity” beliefs still tend to be described simply as “unquestioned” or “embedded” in society. But examining scholarship on divine personifications suggests that ancient beliefs were — and our perceptions of them are — more complex. This article first explores the example of Tyche (“Chance”), in order to highlight some of the problems that surround the use of the term “belief.” It then turns to the theories of “ideology” of Slavoj Žižek and Robert Pfaller and argues that these can offer provocative insights into the nature and dynamics of ritual and belief in ancient Greek culture.

The semantics of ancient Indo-European noun stems has not yet received enough attention from scholars. However, the noun stems exhibit an inner semantic coherence arranged in accordance with the basic linguistic principles of categorisation. My aim in this paper is to demonstrate the internal semantic coherence of the Ancient Greek οι-stem noun category and to compare it with other well-studied morphosemantic categories in order to suggest a particular meaning structure.

In this piece, I contend that the war-trumpet (salpinx) was understood in ancient Greek literature as connected to the divine and invincible. I show how this understanding arose from a focus on the sound of the war-trumpet, accompanied by silence around the physical act of playing it, inasmuch as this act, in the parallel case of the aulos, reveals embodiment and vulnerability. In archaic and classical texts, ranging among Aristophanes, Thucydides, Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles and Aristotle, we see that the sound of the salpinx is both infallible and capable of connoting the domination of Greek males in several fields: battles, courts of law, and the imagining of human and nonhuman ontology.

This report provides a conspectus of the nine papers presented at ‘The Graduate Workshop in Ancient Greek and Roman Music’, held at the University of Oxford in June 2018. The workshop was organised with the intent of showcasing the innovative work of postgraduates in the field of ancient Greek and Roman music. Based around the themes of theory and practice, drama, and ritual, the papers reflect current areas of focus within the field and suggest promising avenues for further enquiry.

We study the distribution of the nominal and copular construction of predicate nominals in a subset of authors from the Ancient Greek Dependency Treebank (AGDT). We concentrate on the texts of the historians Herodotus, Thucydides (both 5th century BCE) and Polybius (2nd century BCE). The data comprise a sample of 440 sentences (Hdt = 175, Thuc = 91, Pol = 174). We analyze the impact of four features that have been discussed in the literature and can be observed in the annotation of AGDT: (1) order of constituents, (2) part of speech of the subjects, (3) type of clause and (4) length of the clause. Furthermore, we test how the predictive power of these factors varies in time from Herodotus and Thucydides to Polybius with the help of a logistic-regression model. The analysis shows that, contrary to a simplistic opinion, the nominal construction does not drop into irrelevance in Hellenistic Greek. Moreover, an analysis of the distributions in the authors highlights a remarkable continuity in the usage patterns. Further work is needed to improve the predictive power of our logistic-regression model and to integrate more data in view of a more comprehensive quantitative diachronic study.

Every summer, from July 2004 to July 2011, the Music Department at the Ionian University in Corfu (Greece) held a week-long Seminar on Ancient Greek and Roman Music, attended by students and scholars from all over the world, contributing to the formation of younger generations of researchers in the field. In 2012, because of the financial crisis in Greece, the annual seminar had to be cancelled: but in 2014 it was revived in Riva del Garda (Italy) thanks to the joint support of the MOISA and the ARION Societies and has taken place every year since then.

In this chapter, Arnaud Mace analyses Derrida’s complex reading of Plato’s Phaedrus in detail. Derrida sought to locate the structure upon which the history of philosophy in his view rests, a structure he terms “phonocentrism” or “logocentrism,” in the very activity of reading texts passed on to us from ancient Greek thinkers. Nowhere is such a structure more thoroughly integrated than in Plato’s Phaedrus, and the only way to uncover it is to read the Phaedrus as a whole and write down the experience of reading it, as Derrida does in Plato’s Pharmacy. In this chapter, Arnaud Mace endeavors to read Derrida’s Pharmacy, uncovering three layers in its reading of the Phaedrus, which provides a successively deeper understanding of the structure of logocentrism. The first layer is concerned with finding the thread that unifies the whole dialogue in the opposition between writing and true knowledge expressed in live speech; the second finds that Plato deconstructed this first opposition by conceiving true knowledge through metaphors of writing and by building his ontology on a grammatical scheme; the third shows how Plato’s writing proves that a trial against writing is needed in order to discover the nature of the text as forever differentiating the many layers of its meaning and prompting the desire for it. Derrida’s Pharmacy, Mace argues, is nothing but a reading of the Phaedrus that lets the dialogue unfold the very structure of metaphysics that is enshrined in it.

The pattern (Setting – Topic –) Focus. NB: The Verb always follows, which was proposed by H. Dik in order to describe AG’s left periphery, raises some issues. In particular, it presents a number of exceptions, which scholars (Matić and others) have variously attempted to resolve. In the present contribution, based on case studies drawn from Homer, the following pattern for the Homeric left periphery is proposed: (Setting – Topic – Focus). NB: Unmarked elements follow. This is not dramatically different from Dik’s pattern; rather, it is an extension of it.

Conjunctive adverbs have generally been neglected in Ancient Greek grammars. In this language, textual cohesion is mostly assured by a battery of connective particles. While connective particles exhibit fixed position, conjunctive adverbs show a certain degree of positional variability. They usually take initial position, as well as medial position when preceded by a preposed constituent. Final position is very rare and most instances are due to ellipsis. This is comparable to the early phases of the development of similar adverbs in other languages.

This article explores the emergence of the sage as an exemplar in Greek and Jewish antiquity. Greek philosophical writings and Jewish literary accounts are analysed, the latter including texts written in both Hebrew and Greek. The Greek and Jewish sources are compared in order to highlight (dis)similarities between them. It will be argued that the conception of the sage as an idealized figure and object of emulation originates from the classical Greek world, but it becomes integrated into the Jewish discourse on wisdom and good life in the later Hellenistic period. In spite of this shared element, the portrayals of the sage vary regarding the amount of concreteness and the discursive strategies in which his exemplarity is constructed.

The Diorisis Ancient Greek Corpus is a digital collection of ancient Greek texts (from Homer to the early fifth century ad) compiled for linguistic analyses, and specifically with the purpose of developing a computational model of semantic change in Ancient Greek. The corpus consists of 820 texts sourced from open access digital libraries. The texts have been automatically enriched with morphological information for each word. The automatic assignment of words to the correct dictionary entry (lemmatization) has been disambiguated with the implementation of a part-of-speech tagger (a computer programme that may select the part of speech to which an ambiguous word belongs).

Compared to Greek genitive absolutes, Latin ablative absolutes are of two types. The first have agents that are non-coreferential with the subject of the main clause. The second have agents thatarecoreferential with the subject of the main clause. The first type strongly resemble Greek genitive absolutes because of their high frequency of animate subject complements and the similar way in which they articulate referential coherence. The second type, which always contains a perfect passive participle, from a comparative perspective can be seen as a paradigmatic filler, which is a Latin alternative to an anterior active participle. Their subject complements are less frequently animate and in the word order (iconically) placed close to the subject of the main clause that is also the agent of the ablative absolute. However, paradigmatic differences have only minor consequences for the preferred sentence position of the absolute constructions and their internal complexity.

In this paper, I set out to study the distribution of some accentual types of two different word shapes in the Homeric hexameter: iambs and iambic ending words and dactyls and dactylic ending words. Following Nagy 2000 and 2010 and David 2006, I start from the idea that accent has a role in Ancient Greek poetry, which has been corroborated in Abritta 2015 by studying the distribution of trochaic ending words. In the sections corresponding to each word shape, after a statistical consideration of the distribution, I examine some literary uses of accentual types, which the poet places in the line apparently in order to produce a certain effect on the audience. The article is conceived as a first approximation to the study of accentual distribution in Ancient Greek poetry.

Modality can be expressed through a variety of different linguistic means within and across languages, of which one manifestation is through noncanonical case marking of the subject. In Ancient Greek several predicates show a systematic alternation between constructions with nominative and oblique subjects, which coincides with a difference in meaning, yielding a modal meaning in the latter case. We show how this modal meaning cannot be derived from the meaning of the individual parts of the construction, neither from the lexical material nor from the relevant grammatical elements. Instead, the data call for a constructional analysis of a modal subconstruction of the oblique subject construction, for which the modality must be attributed to the construction itself. We argue that this can be viewed through the lens of subjectification in the sense of Traugott (2003), here demonstrating that the semantic relation holding between the subject referent and the oblique case marking selected by the verb has been extended to the empathic relation holding between the speaker and his/her attitude towards the proposition uttered (Barðdal 2004). This, we believe, is how the concept of modality came to be associated with oblique case marking of subjects.

Through an approach that combines the academic study of religions with motherhood studies, this article examines rarely considered maternal aspects of Demeter, a goddess of the pantheon of ancient Greek religion. We first discuss theoretical input and concepts drawn from maternal theory that are relevant to uncover innovative lines of research on religious representations and practices in polytheistic systems of the past. In this way we also contribute to broader epistemological reflections in the history and study of religions. Then, considering theHomeric Hymnas well as key ritual elements of theThesmophoriafestival through the lenses of maternal theory, we examine the mother-daughter relationship and the role of the mother as maternal trainer. This concrete case study from the ancient Greek world demonstrates the relevance for historians of religions of considering past polytheistic systems while harnessing the fruitful interdisciplinary potential of maternal theory.

This paper proposes a new interpretation of a controversial inscription found in 1988 at Kara Kamar, Uzbekistan. Despite several problems in its reading and interpretation, in fact, the inscription has been generally considered a dedicatory (?) epigraph written in ancient Greek. This paper, however, shows that a significant part of the inscription makes sense when considered written in Korean language and alphabet. Therefore, the paper suggests the possibility that the author of the epigraph might have been a Korean individual lived in modern/contemporary epoch.

In his Histories, Polybius compares the descent of the rule of King Philip v of Macedon to tyranny to Plato’s description from the Republic of a man transforming into a werewolf. Such imagery is unique in classical Greek historiography, and exemplifies Polybius’ reliance on the idea of men acting like animals to describe when individuals or groups lose self-restraint, an idea found in Plato’s Republic. Plato uses θηριώδης to describe the ‘base desires’ of the soul that must be constrained by reason otherwise the individual will resort to crime or political revolution to satiate them. Polybius employs ἀποθηριόω in situations when individuals or groups lose part or all of their self-control, which results in self-destruction. The parallels in language and ideas indicate that Polybius’ idea of humans acting like animals derives from Plato. Recognizing this intellectual origin provides readers with a better understanding of the universal lessons of the Histories.

On a particular use of the substantive adjective (ἡ) ἀντίστροφος, “piece of the song in response to the strophe”, “antistrophe”: in some passages of the Aristotelian corpus (Rh. 1409a27, a 27, b 27, [Prob.] 19.15 and 19.30) it is used, generally in the plural, to refer to the whole antistrophic pair, not only to the antistrophe. Such a peculiar use, generally unrecognized, should be integrated into modern dictionaries of Ancient Greek.

Arguably, the most famous myth told about Persephone is her abduction and marriage to Hades. The story clearly articulates the strong connection between marriage and death, and this episode became significant in both literature and religious practice in the wider classical Greek world. Reference to the story of Persephone’s abduction came to be used as a shorthand for evoking this connection, particularly in myth. This paper discusses two particular ways in which Persephone’s narrative was used in marriage and death. I examine the pre-marriage offerings to Persephone at Lokroi Epizephyrioi, in southern Italy, and the tradition of Athenian girls who died unmarried being buried as brides. These cultic instances frame a discussion of Brides of Hades, particularly in tragedy. Overall, I conclude that these girls do not attempt to replace Persephone, but rather to imitate her: they ‘play the role’ of Persephone at various stages of her own abduction and marriage story.

The description of god as phthoneros (‘envious’, ‘jealous’, ‘grudging’) in the works of Pindar, Aeschylus, and Herodotus has played an important role in the later understanding of archaic and classical Greek religion. This paper explores the genesis and development of several interpretations of the Greek concept of φθόνος θεῶν that have arisen since the Renaissance, and how these relate to wider debates on the relationship between Christianity and ‘paganism’, including the ‘jealous God’ of Scripture. I outline three principal approaches to the topic. First, a Platonizing or Christianizing interpretation whereby divine phthonos is god’s moral disapproval of human ‘hubris’, impiety, or arrogance and thus a form of ‘divine justice’; second, a ‘Paganizing’ interpretation, whereby divine phthonos is an immoral resentment of human success or simply a hostility towards humanity, and represents an essential difference between the ‘moral’ theology of Christianity and ‘amoral’ pagan theology; third, a ‘developmental’ explanation posited in the late Enlightenment (and later popularized in a different form by anthropologists and philologists) as part of a thesis for the religious development of mankind as a whole. In this third view, divine phthonos was initially an ‘amoral’ emotion, felt by the gods of ‘primitive’ religious systems, but the concept was ‘purified’ in the course of the Greeks’ theological development, so that divine phthonos became a ‘moral’ response to hybris. By exploring the intellectual climate which gave rise to each of these interpretations, I trace the origins of the tacit but total disagreement over the meaning of ‘divine phthonos’ in classical scholarship today, and encourage a return to the long-standing debates about a theme at the heart of Herodotus’s Histories and our understanding of Greek religion more generally.

This essay initially distinguishes Athenian democracy from what I call ‘hyphenated-democracies’, each of which adds a conceptual framework developed in early modern Europe to the language of democracy: representative-democracy, liberal-democracy, constitutional-democracy, republican-democracy. These hyphenated-democracies emphasize the restraints placed on the power of political authorities. In contrast, Athenian democracy with the people ruling over themselves rested on the fundamental principle of equality rather than the limitations placed on that rule. However, equality as the defining normative principle of democracy raises its own problems, namely: How do we – of limited vision – identify who is equal, and what injustices attend the criteria used to establish who is equal? Consideration of several ancient tragedies illustrates how the Athenian playwrights explored these questions and how they identified the challenges faced by those who understand democracy as grounded on egalitarian principles.

There is a rising scholarly consensus that consulting the divine will did not altogether cease in the Second Temple period. Rather, it took different forms, and one was consulting the divine will via existing texts. Meanwhile, the identity of such interpreters remains unclear. This paper explores the possible identities of interpreters by comparing the figures that interpret Jewish oracles with the chresmologoi that appear in ancient Greek compositions. Such a comparison provides new insights into the divinatory use of written oracles. The interpreters of the Jewish and Greek texts operated at least partly in similar ways. While their methods of interrogating the oracles are somewhat alike, Jewish interpreters enjoyed a status similar to that of prophetic figures, whereas Greek interpreters operated more independently and without a similarly evident divine mandate.

A critical assessment of The Brill Dictionary of Ancient Greek, in which this recent publication is compared to its predecessors and judged on its merits and defects.

The Weil-Reinach edition of the De musica attributed to Plutarch is the result of a close collaboration of two among the best philologists and specialists of ancient Greek music active in France between the 19th and the 20th centuries : H. Weil and his pupil Th. Reinach. The latter (who personally provided the collation of the manuscripts, some of the exegetical notes and the index) put together the material, but it was Weil who should be regarded as primarily responsible for the work, whose overall organization and component parts are perfectly consistent with the principles and methods that he had already applied to his previous editions : the subordination of the criticism of the texts, founded on the recension of manuscripts, to their history and interpretation. The interventionism typical of this publication derives from the extremely ambitious target that Weil imposed on all his ecdotic works : the reconstruction not of the corrupt archetype of the extant Byzantine and Humanist manuscripts, but of the original condition of the ancient texts. Viewed in this light, the Weil-Reinach edition of the De musica is a treasure of erudition and intelligence, in which the textual problems of a text, which had been deeply altered since antiquity, are raised for the first time.

Ancient sources often describe non-human primates as imitative animals, i.e., living beings able to reproduce, with different degrees of perfection, gestures and movements carried out by human beings. Indeed monkeys are often characterized asmimeloi, mimetikoi, terms coming from the same semantic field of the nounmimos(< *mim-).But what about the world of sounds? Are non-human primates regarded as good imitators and performers also when it comes to music and singing? Ancient evidence clearly indicates that other animal species (like nightingales or partridges), and not monkeys, were mainly regarded as excellent singers worthy of imitation by human beings. Through a detailed analysis of ancient Greek sources, especially some passages in Galen, this paper aims at investigating why non-human primates were not considered good singers. In particular, this survey tries to shed a new light on some cultural associations, according to which the small and weak voice of monkeys (µικροφωνία) and the voice of other figures in ancient society (like actors, musicians, kids, eunuchs and so on) were described in a similar way.

Animal choruses are familiar in ancient Greek comedy. Besides Aristophanes, there are 13 examples of them. Vase paintings provide evidence from the beginnings of Old Comedy. They had to sing the traditional melic parts of the agon and the parabasis. Aristophanes used the comic animal chorus in Knights (424 bc), Wasps (422), Birds (414), Frogs (405) and Storks (395-387). Moreover, with the song of the Hoopoe in the Birds 227-62, Aristophanes presents an animal as soloist which sings an extended monody, a perfect example of the astropha, the structure of which is defined by content, changes of metre and probably of music, but not by alternating strophes and antistrophes. It can be demonstrated that the Hoopoe’s monody follows the model of the late astrophic monodies of Euripides and mirrors the astrophic structures of the New Dithyramb, later parodied by Aristophanes (Birds 1373-1409) in the person of the dithyrambic poet Cinesias.

Taking its departure from Page duBois’ monograph Torture and Truth, this essay points toward a gap in the history conveyed by duBois, yet hinted at by the painting reproduced on the book’s cover – Nicolas Poussin’s “Martyrdom of Saint Erasmus” (1629). DuBois relates classical Greek juridical practices, in which the tortured slave body is the site of the production of truth, to the subsequent history of Western philosophy, of which Heidegger is a privileged exemplum. This essay in turn inserts a history of Christian martyrdom (both early modern and ancient) into that narrative. The tight linking of truth with torture persists in martyrdom texts (including the Gospels), and the juridical context highlighted by duBois remains decisive for their interpretation. So too does the context of Roman imperial rule, together with the public spectacles of violence through which imperial power was performed. However, whereas classical Greek practice frames the slave as the passive container of a truth that another can claim, the ideology of Christian martyrdom assigns truth to the tortured subject herself. The legacy of martyrdom may explain the ease with which some today all too easily disavow complicity with torture to the point of denying that it continues, while also all too easily laying claim to the authority of suffering truth. It may illumine, as well, the limits of torture’s power and the potential sources of its subversion and critique.

This response to the essays collected here considers questions of torture, slavery, and resistance. Building on the fruitful extension of earlier work on ancient Greek practices of the basanos, or “touchstone,” and on slavery in the ancient world and in antebellum America, the response takes account of the valuable and thought-provoking use of duBois’ work in the new contexts of early Christianity. The response also points to her recent work on the relationship of torture, crucifixion, slavery, forms of resistance, and the persistence, in new forms, of what Hellenists tend to call “polytheism”.