A hexameter text of ‘Dionysiac’ subject, recently discovered in a late-antique palimpsest in the Monastery of St Catherine on Mt Sinai, and arguably the first fragment of direct transmission of the famous Orphic Rhapsodies, offers a very remarkable story. Aphrodite raises a divine child on Mt Nysa; the child disappears during an absence of the goddess, who looks for him through the whole universe. She eventually finds him in the Underworld, where he is in the charge of Persephone, who relates an oracle about him and his offspring. Aphrodite and the child remain in the Underworld until he grows to puberty, and they beget Hermes Chthonios. Many features of this tale find parallels in various versions of the story of Adonis. The child of the new poem, though, is identified as Dionysus. In this article, making use also of previously neglected Neoplatonic sources, I show that the identification between Dionysus and Adonis was an important feature of the last chronological stage of the Theogony narrated in the Orphic Rhapsodies, where Adonis was one of the ‘images’ of Dionysus, which played a key part in the creation of the mortal world.

This article argues that the Historia Augusta retrojected fourth-century rituals of the imperial court into its presentation of the reign of Severus Alexander in order to criticise the “oriental” and un-Roman practices of the contemporary emperors of the fourth century. The Historia Augusta’s two descriptions of Alexander Severus’ admission ritual (salutatio) are suffused with fourth-century ritual elements which have no place in the early third century. A simplistic reading might interpret these anachronisms as evidence of the HA’s sloppiness and incompetence. However, I argue instead that they are conscious and deliberate. These two descriptions highlight a contrast between the adoratio of the fourth century and the restrained and moderate civilitas of the traditional princeps, and the descriptions also innovatively present the adoratio as Persian. This article thus demonstrates the contemporary political argument of the Historia Augusta, which sought to contribute to wider intellectual debates about the ideal emperor and the importance of civilitas in the fourth century.

The textual criticism of various passages of Propertius.

There has been no dearth, since Plutarch’s day at least, of erudite theories about what message the E at Apollo’s temple was meant to convey to visitors. Yet no account so far has added up to a truly compelling answer, not for lack of ingenuity, but because the various approaches have tended so strongly towards the sophisticated and artful, rather than the probable. This article will review why the familiar answers are more impressive than convincing, and will propose in their place a much simpler explanation: namely that the E was meant to represent the mysterious itself, reminding pilgrims that they were entering a realm where logos continued to hold sway, to be sure, as the other inscriptions testified, but where the human intellect must leave room for mantic wisdom, and where logical reasoning must be supplemented with contemplation and meditation upon the enigmatic, the hidden, and the ineffable.

This paper investigates the information that can be drawn from the Linear B tablets in Rooms 7–8 (Archives Complex) and their context, which advocate the ephemeral character of these documents. The morphological and syntactical traits of the various scribes, as well as the physical characteristics of the artifacts themselves, point to non-conventional organisation patterns. The lack of systematic arrangement at all levels of scribal production raises questions regarding the likelihood of having a storage area for tablets kept in the Archives Complex (AC) for an extended period, from several months to a year. Whether these rooms could cope with storing long term (from 2–3 months up to 1 year?) an ever-increasing number of written documents is now open to question. In all aspects, the Linear B documents and their spatially limited context present us with difficulties in accepting their categorisation as an official, archival, assemblage. Moreover, all the archaeological data point to a more temporary and slipshod corpus of tablets than previously thought.

The following article discusses the significance of a stool carried by persons referred to in ancient Greek sources (from Old Comedy to Plutarch) as diphrophoroi. As I argue, the iconography suggests that this piece of furniture was often used by attendants responsible for their mistresses’ outfit, make-up and hairstyle. By extension, the most famous representation of two girls with stools on their heads on the east Parthenon frieze can be interpreted as an allusion to the ritual dressing and embellishing of Athena's statue.