There are in the Iliad nine examples of individuals, either human or divine, who recount their ancestry in some detail. The overlap of situation, assertion and vocabulary among these nine examples seems to be sufficient to constitute a theme of lineage-boasting.

The papyrus text of the Partheneion, discovered in 1855 and now in the Louvre, consists of 101 lines in three columns. Of these the first 34 lines (column i) are badly mutilated owing to the disappearance of the left-hand side of the column, whereas lines 35–101 (columns ii and iii) can be restored with almost complete confidence. Of a fourth column nothing is legible, though a coronis opposite the fifth line of column iii shows that the poem ended only four lines after our text runs out. The lengths of the existing columns are 34 lines (i), 34 lines (ii), 33 lines (iii). If a full column of 35 lines has been lost before our column i—a pre-eminently reasonable hypothesis—the entire poem will have consisted of 140 lines. Since each strophe consists of fourteen lines, we may thus imagine the whole to have consisted of ten strophes. By a curious coincidence the part of the poem which is almost intact and which deals with the occasion consists of five strophes or seventy lines: it seems to be the case, thus, that the lost or damaged part also consisted of five strophes or seventy lines of choral lyric and dealt with myth: what we can make out, certainly, appears to be exclusively myth and attendant moralising.

It has become a commonplace to say that, in classical Greek and Roman religion, to know the name of a god was to have power over him. The idea was rejected by Martin Nilsson, but he did not argue the point at any great length and a more detailed discussion may be of use. In this paper, I shall examine those contexts where it might be maintained that gods' names possessed some kind of intrinsic power but I shall conclude that the phenomenon is marginal and not universally true of Greek religion as a whole. To do this, we shall have to consider the whole question of how far the Greeks were worried about divine names and what the motives for this may have been. Evidence derived from prayers is of particular importance in this.

In 427 B.c. the Athenian assembly passed a decree bearing on the recently suppressed revolt on the island of Lesbos. All citizens in Mytilene, the city which had led the revolt, were to be executed and their women and children sold into slavery. A trireme was swiftly dispatched to Paches with instructions to execute the decree. But the Athenians had arrived at their decision in a fit of anger; and when presently their ργ subsided, they experienced grave misgivings over an action which now seemed in their own estimation cruel and excessive. They earnestly sought to reconsider the matter, and so within the space of a day they convened once more to debate Mytilene (3.36).

Plutarch, Aet. Graec. 5 = Moralia 292b: ‘Tνες οἱ παρ’ Ἀρκσι καì Λακεδαιμονíοις χρηστο;᾽ Λακεδαιμνιοι Τεγεταις διαλλαγντες ποισαντο συνθκας κα στλην π᾽ Ἀλϕειῳ κοινν νστησαν, ν ᾑ μετ των ἄλλων γγραπται Μεσσηνους κβαλειν κ της χώρας κα μ ξειναι χρηστοὺς ποιειν. ξηγομενος οὐν Ἀριστοτλης τουτ ϕησι δνασθαι τ μ ποκτιννναι βοηθεας χριν τοις λακωνζουσι των Tεγεατων.

This difficult and evidently corrupt text of Aristotle has given rise to a variety of differing readings among the commentators. I shall propose a new and conservative emendation of the text, which, I believe, resolves all of the difficulties. But it is helpful first to take stock of those difficulties, in order to see what is required of a solution.

One of the more intriguing figures of the first period of the Successors is Nicanor, the lieutenant and admiral of Cassander. He came into prominence when he assumed command of the Macedonian garrison at Athens, late in 319 B.c. After distinguishing himself there he took a fleet to the Bosporus, where with Antigonus' collaboration he won a decisive victory over Polyperchon's royal navy. Subsequently his aspirations became sufficiently lofty to threaten his patron's security, and Cassander took elaborate precautions to ensure his arrest and condemnation. Nicanor was clearly a figure of considerable importance; yet no source even hints at his origins and family background. Can conjecture go any way to filling the gaps?

Theocritus' twenty-second idyll is cast in the form of a hymn to the Dioscuri, who are addressed in the proem as saviours of men, horses, and ships. This opening section of the idyll is modelled loosely on the short thirty-third Homeric hymn, and like that hymn contains an expanded account of the twins' rescue of ships about to be lost in a storm. As is hardly surprising, Theocritus in reworking the Homeric hymn draws on other literary antecedents as well, and like other Alexandrian poets makes prominent use of diction borrowed and adapted from the Homeric epics. At the same time, the proem also shares several points of contact, largely overlooked or disputed by previous scholarship, with the poetry of Theocritus' own contemporaries. In the present paper, I shall suggest that in the storm scene of the proem references to Aratus' Phaenomena and Apollonius Rhodius' Argonautica occur in a carefully arranged pattern with potentially significant implications for our understanding of the proem and the idyll as a whole.

The tattered remains of a few paragraphs of a work on harmonic theory were published in 1986 as P. Oxy. LIII.3706, with a careful commentary by M. W. Haslam. There are six fragments. Four of them (frr. 3–6) are too small for any substantial sense to be recovered; and while fr. 2 and the second column of fr. 1 allow us to pick out significant words and phrases here and there, the remnants of these columns are very narrow, and the line of reasoning seems inaccessible. Musicological analysis must focus on the first column of fr. 1. There is little enough even of that, and in attempting a relatively detailed interpretation I shall have to be rather less cautious than Haslam quite properly was. But I think that something can be made of it without stretching speculation too far, and if I am right the piece is of some genuine interest. Here are the two versions of the text that Haslam prints. The first records what is decipherable on the papyrus itself, while the second represents a partial reconstruction, restoring word-divisions and some of the missing letters.

Developments in the Academy from the time of Arcesilaus to that of Carneades and his successors tend to be classified under two heads: scepticism and probabilism. Carneades was principally responsible for the Academy's view of the latter subject, and our sources credit him with an elaborate discussion of it. The evidence furnished by those sources is, however, frequently confusing and sometimes self-contradictory. My aim in this paper is to extract a coherent account of Carneades' theory of probability from the testimony with a further end in view, namely to understand better the uses to which that theory was put by the Academy in its debate with the Stoa. Though it is not its principal object, the investigation should also help make clear how the Academy's scepticism and its probabilism were related to each other as parts of a single consistent practice of philosophy.

Stasis-theory seeks to classify rhetorical problems (declamation themes, or real forensic and deliberative situations) acccording to the underlying structure of the dispute that each involves. Such a classification is of interest to the practising rhetor, since it may help him identify an appropriate argumentative strategy; for example, patterns of argument appropriate to a question of fact (did the defendant do what is alleged?) may be irrelevant in an evaluative dispute (was the defendant justified in doing that?).

This paper seeks to dispel the notion that Mark Antony and the Senate indulged in a cat-and-mouse game over the control of Caesar's archives (his commentarii) in the weeks immediately following the Ides of March. At stake was whether unpublished documents drawn up by Caesar before his death should be ratified and put into force. The belief that the Senate and Antony contended over this issue and that Antony got the upper hand rests primarily on what I hope to show is a misinterpretation of two key passages in the Philippics. Moreover, since the standard interpretation of these two passages appears to be supported by Dio's account of how Antony cajoled the Senate into permitting him a freer hand to review and publish documents found in Caesar's archives, it will be necessary to have a closer look at Dio's probable sources for this particular section of his history.

This satire has often been accounted a poor poem, repetitive, irrelevant and self-indulgent. Rather than recover one more cultured display of refinement as disguise, this essay explores instead the fall-out that radiates from a classic text's play with the ‘loose talk’ of plebeian gossip. The proposal here is that Horace and his intimates could, and can, easily share a view of the view of ‘their’ populace, but at the price of surrendering control over the import of their intervention. This claim turns on the figure ‘Brutus’, which noises a republican politics of resistance to tyranny through what linguists term nonphonation: as we shall find, Horace both tells a dummy tale about ‘przemilczenie’ (῾not speaking about something, ‘failing to mention something’) and at the same time performs a dumbshow of his own.

These notes discuss some passages where what Livy wrote may not be printed in standard editions. In some a new reading, or new punctuation, is proposed; in others the merits of neglected conjectures are canvassed.

By far the best edition is that of L. D. Reynolds (OCT, 1965). Other modern editions referred to are those of W. C. Summers (Select Letters, 1910); R. M. Gummere (Loeb edition, 1918–25); F. Préchac (texte) et H. Noblot (traduction) (Budé edition, 1945–64).

The extravagant, not to say fulsome, praise showered upon Nero in Lucan's proem to his De Bello Civili (1.33–66) tends to divide scholars neatly into two factions. In the blue corner are those for whom it is ‘obviously’ sarcastic or ironic in some degree, whether they consider it intended to be circulated privately or understood only by a small group of initiates, or else see it as actually being designed to offend the princeps. In the red we find those who attempt to explain what the modern palate finds offensive by reference to the Realien of Nero's reign and to the processes of literary representation in general—and what we loosely call ‘rhetoric’ in particular—current in the poetry of the time.

‘[Valerius'] Argonautica is a story of high adventure, not a poème à thèse’: so stated Garson in 1965. Strand later added that the essential nature of this poem and the choice of subject-matter was determined by poetic inability; he describes the prooemium to Valerius' Argonautica as ‘a recusatio: the theme of the fall of Jerusalem is beyond his powers, and it would instead be treated by Domitian who was fit for such an arduous task; Valerius had to content himself with the theme of an old myth’. It is these two opinions that I wish to question in this article. Indeed, alarm bells immediately sound at Strand's interpretation of the poet's recusatio. It has long been recognized that the original Callimachean recusatio was twisted by the Augustan poets. Gordon Williams analyses their practice thus: ‘They sadly regret that their poor talents will not rise to great subjects – and the subjects to which they will not rise are not the old mythological tales but the great affairs of contemporary Roman history and, in particular, the deeds of Augustus. It is clear, however, that they are using this form of poem to enumerate and praise the great deeds of Augustus, under the guise of proposing their own inability.’ No-one hesitates to agree that Valerius was well versed in the Augustan poets. It is dangerous, therefore, to assume without question that he was deceived by their insincerity. There is in fact good reason to examine the alternative possibility, namely that Valerius understood well the practice of his literary predecessors, that he dared to tread in their footsteps and that he succeeded in the supreme duty of a poet, that is to say, the business of ensuring that ars celavit artem.

Histories 1.40 is designed to set the scene for Galba's assassination. It begins by bringing the emperor into the crowded Forum, but then it switches to Otho and his followers, dwelling on the horror, not of the act they plan (that is reserved for chapter 41), but of their readiness to commit it. The text is not problematical, but since the point behind the first two sentences is not entirely clear, this has prompted occasional emendation, repeated discussion, and continuing perplexity. The difficulty arises, in good measure, from the assumption that Tacitus is saying much the same as Plutarch (Galb. 26.4–6). As has been remarked more than once, the two authors no doubt drew their material from the common source, but they have in mind different time-frames and different viewpoints. Nor does this end the matter. A skewed perspective on these sentences has also led one scholar to dissect the chapter in a manner purporting to show that Galba's fate, not the Othonians' willingness to bring it about, is Tacitus' main concern.

The Passio Typasii survives in only one manuscript and was published for the first time in 1890. It purports to describe the trial and death of a Mauretanian martyr, a military veteran by the name of Typasius, during the Diocletianic persecution. However as recently demonstrated its literary borrowings, from the Breviarium of Eutropius and the Vita Martini of Sulpicius Severus, suggest that it is a mere fiction and that it should be dated after c. A.d. 396. It is the purpose of this note to draw attention to its preservation of an otherwise unattested title, that of the praepositus saltus, and to expand upon the significance of this title for the interpretation of the work. This title only occurs fully in one passage, being elsewhere abbreviated to praepositus, and this passage is of some interest therefore.

The only explicit indication in the text of Ammianus Marcellinus as to the historian's origin comes in the famous epilogue to the Res Gestae, that he had written ‘as once a soldier, and a Greek’ (‘ut miles quondam et Graecus’; 31.16.9), supported by various passages in which he refers to the Greek language as his own. The evidence that, through the length and breadth of the Greek-speaking world, we should look to Syrian Antioch for his place of origin, is provided by the orator of that city, Libanius, in a letter (Ep. 1063) written late in 392 ‘to Marcellinus’. The purpose of this article is to set out explicitly the arguments for the identification of Libanius' correspondent as Ammianus Marcellinus in the light of the recent challenges to the accepted view offered by G. W. Bowersock, C. W. Fornara, and T. D. Barnes. Since the discussion requires that the letter be considered in detail, it is given here, in Foerster's Teubner text followed by a translation of Libanius' often very allusive language