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This paper briefly presents the few ancient testimonies connecting Livy to Thucydides, and the more numerous Thucydidean echoes found in Livy by modern scholars. It then explores the allusions to Thucydides in Livy’s account in Books 24 and 25 of the Roman siege of Syracuse in 213–212. There are several more or less secure echoes of Thucydides, but Livy chose to compose a less Thucydidean account than he could have. There may be some reversals of Thucydidean model situations, and if so, they consistently follow a pattern: Livy’s Syracusans continuously play the part of Thucydides’ Athenians and Livy’s Romans always perform better than Thucydides’ Greeks did. It is suggested that this was a means by which Livy intended to ensure his readers that this siege would end in Roman victory and to suggest the superiority of his own account over that of the Peloponnesian War’s historian. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The text attempts to trace the influence of Pavel Oliva’s monograph Sparta and Her Social Problems, published fifty years ago as of this year. Following a very brief presentation of Oliva’s research on Sparta, it traces the citations of his most important monograph in English, German, French, Italian, and Israeli scholarly literature, and more summarily in selected publications by Belgian, Dutch, Estonian, Greek, Polish, Serbian, and Spanish scholars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article deals with the pair muscida huba, found in several 14th- and 15th-century Latin-Czech glossaries. Its interpretation is not immediately clear, because there were two homonymous words húba in the Old Czech, the one meaning “muzzle”, the other “fungus”. Jan Gebauer, the author of the authoritative Old Czech dictionary, ascribed to the word huba paired with muscida the meaning “fungus”. On the basis of parallels from the translation of Ptolemy's Almagest written by Gerhard of Cremona in the 12th century and a Latin-Norman glossary from the 13th century, the author argues that the word actually meant “muzzle”. He also discusses the etymology of the Latin word and the route by which it found its way in Latin-Czech glossaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims at better understanding a unique phenomenon in Medieval Latin: the use of modo in the collection of Latin sermons known as Quadragesimale Admontense. Far from being an adverb as in Classical Latin, modo has become to be used predominantly as a discursive particle and a conjunction in Quadragesimale Admontense-, several times it even plays a role of a pronoun. Possibilities of finer categorisation are outlined. It is suggested that the probable reason for this idiosyncrasy is that the scribe used modo thoughtlessly to translate Old Czech an. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lysias' speech On the Murder of Eratosthenes deals with a case of a husband (named Euphiletus) who caught an adulterer (called Eratosthenes) in flagrante delicto with his wife, killed him and pleaded before a court that what he had done was in keeping with law. In a stimulating article written in 1997, J. R. Porter pointed out many parallels with plots of mimes and adduced some additional arguments from comparison with other Athenian court speeches, which led him to suggest that the speech has never been pronounced and is actually a rhetorical exhibition, made by Lysias in order to advertise his skill. The main purpose of this paper is to challenge this assumption. Further, a tentative suggestion concerning the date of the speech's composition is made. A problem of a familiarity of average Athenian with mimic productions is raised, too. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]