The intention of Theophrastus’ Characters still escapes us. This paper offers a new answer to that centuries-old question by looking closely at the one political sketch of the collection: ‘The Oligarch’ (C.26). We argue that C.26 reveals a political intention in the Characters, presenting oligarchy as the inherently flawed projection of a character trait onto political events. Read in this way, C.26 appears as a medium through which Theophrastus can take a definite but careful stance in contemporary Athenian politics.

This article examines Aristotle's method for defining the concept of happiness in his Eudemian and Nicomachean ethics. In particular, the article draws attention to a methodological passage (Eth. Eud. 1.6 1216b26–35), in which he claims that ‘If we start from what is truly yet not clearly spoken, clarity will be won as we make progress’. This expression comes from Plato's Statesman 275a and 281d. Aristotle then seems to adopt the Eleatic stranger's method in two ways to clarify the initial imprecise statement that happiness is the greatest and best of human goods: first, he distinguishes a target object from other similar objects, and second, he refers to appearances as illustrations to clarify more abstract ethical concepts. This analysis illuminates the influence of the later Platonic method on Aristotle's ethics from a new angle.

The article discusses a passage in book 15 of Pliny's Natural history which lists Livia among the creators of new fruit cultivar. It argues that Livia's unique position within and outside her family explains why she appears to be the only woman remembered for her direct involvement in arboriculture. The article then discusses grafting, which in ancient Rome was charged with many symbolic meanings, and contextualises the appearance of Livia in horticultural discourse within the ideology of the Augustan era and the increased interest in horticultural matters at that time.

ὑμετέρης γενεῆς τε καὶ αἵματος εὔχομαι εἶναι

(Eudocia's Laudes Antiochiae; cf. Il. 6.211, 20.241).1

The article argues that in Eudocia's fifth-century Martyrdom of St Cyprian – the only surviving Greek verse paraphrase of a hagiography – certain Odyssean lexical items and intertexts may be thematically grouped. A new category, the ‘diatext’, is introduced to describe this function of the Odyssey as an intermediate thematic model used to transpose the Cyprianic hagiographies (the ‘hypotext’) into Eudocia's verse paraphrase (the ‘hypertext’). A particularly important and complex example is the way in which Eudocia's metapoetic/narratorial and biographical alter ego, the ex-pagan Christian convert Cyprian, is modelled after Odysseus (especially in book 2).

This paper provides the first critical edition of two Greek lexica on accentuation and vowel quantity, recently discovered in a fourteenth-century manuscript now held in the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris. I shall argue that one of the main sources for the first lexicon (on accentuation) was the περὶ Ἀττικῆς προσῳδίας of the first-century BCE grammarian Trypho. As Trypho's work now survives only in fragments, this lexicon allows us to deepen our understanding and knowledge of his handbook. Additionally, some ancient fragments transmitted by these lexica are published here for the first time: one is attributed to the fifth-century BCE poet Eupolis, one to the famous Alexandrian grammarian Aristophanes of Byzantium (but it perhaps belongs to Demetrius Ixion (second century BCE) instead), four to Aristarchus of Samothrace (216–144 BCE) and one to the first-century BCE grammarian Seleucus (although this attribution is debatable: it overlaps with an already-known fragment attributed to Aristocles of Rhodes).

Thomas Saunders Evans’ Greek poem Mathematogonia. The mythological birth of the nymph Mathesis (1839) is one of the outstanding products of the British compositional tradition. The article begins with a brief account of Evans and of the historical context of the poem, which also belongs to the history of mathematics in Britain, and in particular, its teaching in nineteenth-century Cambridge. This is followed by a preliminary note on Mathematogonia; a reproduction of the text of the poem, with Evans’ original preface and notes; an English translation; notes detailing Evans’ sources and borrowings from Tragic texts; and an appendix listing the changes he made after its first publication. The aim is to show what Evans wrote, and to explain what prompted him to do so.

The Neoplatonist scholarch Proclus defined three categories of poetry: inspired, ‘middle’ and mimetic. Traditionally it has been thought that he considered only Homer to have excelled in all three, while other poets could fulfil one or at most two functions. It will be shown that Proclus also conceived of Hesiod as excelling in all three types and thereby assimilated Hesiodic authority to Homeric. He also considered Orpheus but assigned his poetry to just one category, not all three. In doing this, he increased his own authority as a teacher-hierophant, contributing to the dialogue between pagan Platonism and Christianity over the inspiration of texts.