In recent years, our understanding of Archilochus has been transformed by the discovery of a major new fragment from the Oxyrhynchus collection (P Oxy. 4708), first published by Dirk Obbink. The new poem is not only the most substantial of Archilochus' elegiac fragments, but more importantly it is the first example we have of the poet's use of myth, for the surviving section narrates a mythological theme: the defeat of the Achaeans at the hands of Telephus during their first attempt to reach Troy. Scholars have found the choice and handling of the myth surprising, and the role that Telephus plays within the poem has been a subject of controversy. Yet this debate has tended to dwell on the Telephus myth in its general form, rather than focussing on the details of how Archilochus presents him in this particular context. This article will explore the significance that Telephus could have had for a Parian audience, and will use this to investigate the political and rhetorical impact of his presentation within the poem. I will argue that Archilochus highlights the aspects of Telephus' story which connect him most closely with Parian local myth, and that he does so in order to enhance the poem's central message: criticism and implicit mockery of the mythological battle and, by implication, of contemporary Parian military strategy.

The huge differences characterizing the main editions of the Greek epic poets of the Archaic period are well known. The sparse amount of information available poses serious problems; so too does the lack of unanimous acceptance of the same methodological principles with respect to the attribution of a citation to a given author and poem. The case of the Telegony is typical: Bernabé lists five fragments, Davies two (only one in common with Bernabé), and West six (four in common with Bernabé, one in common with Davies, and one published by Livrea ten years after the appearance of the editions of Bernabé and Davies). To alert the reader that the attribution of fragments 1 and 2 to the Telegony is conjectural and not based on ancient evidence, West attaches an asterisk to them. My aim is to discuss both what certain scholars have taken as one (and, for exactly 110 years, the only) of the two surviving lines from Eugammon's Telegony, that is fr. 1 (PEG 1, Bernabé = *1 West) = fr. 2 (Allen), and also what appears as fr. *2 in West's Loeb edition.

Nouns and personal names ending in –εύς –ῆϝος are unique to Greek, and have often been deemed pre-Hellenic in origin simply on account of the lack of Proto-Indo-European (PIE) correspondences. Our failure to find convincing etymologies for βασιλεύς, ἑρμηνεύς, and βραβεύς has itself contributed to this view. However, we should hesitate, for general reasons, to posit pre-Hellenic origins for these words, since viable explanations both of βασιλεύς and of ἑρμηνεύς (if not of βραβεύς) lie near to hand. Although the explanation of βασιλεύς that will be proposed below still presents difficulties, I believe that it improves on previous attempts.

Reports of lunar and solar eclipses are of interest to students of both history and the history of science. Used with care, they can anchor significant historical events in time. Greek literature, like that of other civilizations, has its fair share of such reports. Often they motivate the actions of characters or expose aspects of belief. Sometimes they shed light on the assumptions of the writer. There are three places in the Histories of Herodotus where the author mentions darkenings of the sky (generally taken to be solar eclipses), which have narrative significance and which assist in dating the wars between the Lydians and the Medes (1.74) and between the Greeks and the Persians (7.37 and 9.10).

No consensus has been reached about the reconstruction of Euripides' fragmentary tragedy Bellerophon, but two suggestions have not received the serious attention they deserve. The first is that Stheneboea is a character in the play, and the second that Euripides does not depict Bellerophon as an atheist or an impious hero. In this paper, I shall reconsider both of these suggestions. In fact, the addition of Stheneboea to the dramatis personae allows us to correct the second problem, as I shall propose that Stheneboea, not Bellerophon, speaks the infamous atheistic fragment.

This paper aims to explain the very sharp contrast between the portraits of Critias found in Plato and Xenophon. While depicted as a monster in Xenophon's Hellenica, Critias is described with at most mild criticism in Plato's writings. Each of these portraits is eccentric in its own way, and these eccentricities can be explained by considering the apologetic and polemic aims each author pursued. In doing so, I hope to shed light not only on the relations between these portraits and the works that contain them, but also on the personal relations between Plato and Xenophon and their manner of expressing them in literary productions.

In his second question of the Phaedrus, Socrates asks Phaedrus how he spent (διατριβή) his morning with Lysias. Phaedrus answers: ‘You'll learn, should you have the leisure (σχολή) to walk and listen.’ Socrates responds:

Not very long ago, Plato's Sophist was often presented as a dialogue devoted to the problem of being and not-being, entangled with limited success in an inquiry into the nature of the sophist. Thanks to the renewal of interest in the dramatic form of Plato's dialogues, recent works have shown that this entanglement is far from ill-conceived or anecdotal. However, the inquiry into the sophist is itself introduced by another question, concerning the nature of the Stranger from Elea himself. I would like to show that this question and the way in which it is raised in the prologue may themselves shed light on the relations between the many threads which run across this very complex dialogue.

The concept of mimēsis was ‘shared by most authors, philosophers and educated audiences in the classical period, in antiquity as a whole, and even later’, although it has probably never been developed into a well-articulated theory. As far as we can judge from the extant evidence, the meaning of the expressions μίμησις and μιμέομαι differs from author to author and sometimes even from passage to passage. Ancient Greek views on mimēsis have often been discussed in modern scholarship, mainly within the field of history of art, and it has been demonstrated repeatedly that the traditional English translation ‘imitation’ is not always appropriate for the ancient texts and that in many contexts it is rather misleading. In the following study I aim to focus on this concept as it was employed in the oldest Greek cosmological and philosophical theories. As a rule, the study of these theories is complicated by their fragmentary state of preservation and by their distortion through the specifically Platonic views that were dominant among the later doxographers. I shall suggest that the Platonizing tendency still prevalent today, which tends to translate and interpret mimēsis as ‘imitation’ or ‘copy’, should be carefully revised in the light of the Hippocratic evidence and specifically in view of De victu, probably the oldest authentic, non-fragmentary, and non-Platonic document attesting the concept of mimēsis.

Euclid famously stated that there is no royal road to geometry, but his use of δή does give an indication of the minimum level of knowledge and understanding which he required from his audience. The aim of this article is to gain insight into his interaction with his audience through a characterization of the use of δή in the Elements. I will argue that the primary use of δή indicates a lively interaction between Euclid and his audience. Furthermore, the specific contexts in which δή occurs reveal the considerable mathematical competence that Euclid expected from his audience.

The short treatise known as Περὶ κόσμου (De mundo) is a learned piece of protreptic addressed to Alexander, ‘the best of princes’, usually identified with Alexander the Great. The treatise is traditionally attributed to Aristotle, and although it does espouse recognizably Aristotelian views, it contains various doctrinal and linguistic elements which have led the large majority of scholars to regard it as inauthentic. The dating of the treatise is a more controversial matter, though most scholars would put it somewhere in the Hellenistic period.

The physician Herophilus of Chalcedon, who lived and worked in Alexandria in the early third century b.c., is best known and justly celebrated for his numerous and ground-breaking anatomical discoveries and advances in such areas as pulse theory. His systematic investigations into the human body led to some of the highest achievements of Hellenistic science, among which the best known is probably his discovery and detailed description of the nervous system and its functions. Yet certain aspects of his thought have seemed difficult to harmonize with the aims and methods of his medical research. One such is his attitude to causality. According to Galen, Herophilus had accepted the existence of causes merely on a hypothetical basis, and indeed had made the striking claim that ‘by nature it is not discoverable whether causes do or do not exist’. Galen associates these views directly with a number of arguments designed to prove that there are no such things as causes, but we are otherwise left with little in the way of context, and different interpretations have unsurprisingly suggested themselves.

Aratus has been notorious for his wordplay since the first decades of his reception. Hellenistic readers such as Callimachus, Leonidas, or ‘King Ptolemy’ seem to have picked up on the pun on the author's own name at Phaenomena 2, as well as on the famous λεπτή acrostic at Phaen. 783–6 that will be revisited here. Three carefully placed occurrences of the adjective have so far been uncovered in the passage, but for a full appreciation of its elegance we must note that Aratus has set his readers up to notice a fourth.

Recent decades have witnessed a growing interest in jeux de mots in Greek poetry. It was especially the discovery of the ΛΕΠΤΗ acrostic in Aratus' Phaenomena by J.-M. Jacques in 1960 that stimulated the desire for joining the elite club of those capable of detecting such encrypted messages. This period of intensive Rätselforschung recently found its culmination in the publication of C. Luz's monograph on linguistic games in Greek poetry, in which an impressive variety of these is discussed: acrostics, palindromes, anagrams, isopsephic poems, carmina figurata, and so forth. Yet even Luz's list is incomplete, and the present discussion aims to offer a brief supplement to her admirable book. I will discuss a playful device used by Greek poets which may not be as spectacular as acrostics but beats them in one hardly negligible respect – that a plausible new discovery may be easier to make in this field.

The last decades have shown that Nicander's Theriaca (second century b.c.e.), a didactic hexameter poem of 958 lines on snakes, scorpions, spiders, and the proper treatment of the wounds they inflict, is a markedly more playful work than most readers thought. Rather than considering the poem as a vehicle of authentic learning, literary approaches to the nature of Nicander's strange poetic world have focussed on his eye for Alexandrian aesthetics, intertextuality, linguistic innovation, and awareness of the didactic tradition that started with Hesiod's Works and Days, but also on his predilection for horror, voyeuristic sensationalism, and gory details. Although literary-minded readers have found it hard to disprove convincingly that Nicander may have had some professional knowledge of his subject matter, a glance at his arcane language is enough to convince any reader that the Theriaca cannot be concerned solely with its explicit subject. In this article I will make some additional observations on the way in which Nicander has turned the Theriaca into a work of literature, focussing on some of the choices that he has made with regard to his less than veracious depiction of snakes and animals. While Spatafora rightly points to Nicander's eye for detail when portraying floral beauty, I will argue that the poet's play with the topos of the locus amoenus has a darker side. Rather than creating an epic world of beauty, Nicander shows his talent for taking the reader along an unpleasant path of apprehension and negative feelings, portraying a choice selection of afflictions. Not only does he have many ways of giving his quasi-scientific account a markedly negative atmosphere, but his world may well be a deliberate reversal of that other well-known Hellenistic portrayal of the natural world, Theocritus' bucolics.

The death of Turnus is one of the Aeneid's most controversial and variously interpreted episodes – anything from the triumphant vindication of Aeneas and the Roman future, to the poet's last, resounding plaint against Augustan totalitarianism, with all the more nuanced shades of opinion in between. Virgilian scholarship has recently become tired of the opposition between ‘optimist’ and ‘pessimist’ perspectives, but one piece of potentially important evidence has not found its way into the argument. As often, it is a matter of intertexts, and it begins, unsurprisingly, with the Iliad.

Publishing a collection of fragments from a classical author is a risky business: the moment the book appears in print, it may already be outdated, as new fragments could have come to light. Or, in the words of Ecclesiasticus 18:7: ‘When a man hath done, then he beginneth; and when he leaveth off, then he shall be doubtful’ (Ὅταν συντελέσῃ ἄνθρωπος, τότε ἄρχεται, καὶ ὅταν παύσηται, τότε ἀπορηθήσεται). The same fate befell me shortly after the publication of my collection of fragments from Rufus of Ephesus' On Melancholy. Manfred Ullmann wrote to me that the late Rainer Degen had discovered a new fragment; in the course of my research, I came across some relevant quotations in the Hippocratic Treatments by the tenth-century author aṭ-Ṭabarī; and recently, Klaus-Dietrich Fischer published two related fragments. The following short note contains these new fragments together with an English translation and commentary. At the end, I also offer some addenda and corrigenda, partly in light of the reviews that have since appeared.

Pressing and urgent domestic problems were the justification for L. Cornelius Sulla's election to the dictatorship in 82 b.c. He responded with an extensive legislative programme which reorganized the judicial and legislative processes of the res publica. While there is agreement, in broad terms, about the nature of these changes, their purpose and significance remain debated. None the less, there is general consensus that the Senate's role in Sulla's res publica was enhanced in comparison with earlier periods. This conclusion is based on the increase in the size of the Senate; on the monopoly it resumed of judicial decision-making in the iudicia publica; and on the extension, in practice, of its legislative capacity, given that its decrees could not be vetoed by tribunes of the plebs, who had also lost their capacity to put forward legislation. Flower offers a recent and concise summary: ‘This new “consensus” of Sulla was based on force and on the necessity of agreeing with Sulla himself, and subsequently with his new, mighty senate that was expected to wield unprecedented power and absolute authority.’

In the 50s b.c. the Roman republic faced serious challenges, not least among them the related problems of electoral bribery and provincial extortion. The year 54 b.c., which this article takes as a case study, witnessed both the worst electoral scandal Rome had ever seen and the high-profile extortion trial of M. Aemilius Scaurus. These events defy analysis in terms of the political allegiances and prosopographical connections usually tracked. It is more helpful to think of problems and (attempted) solutions, in which the younger M. Porcius Cato played a leading role. Scaurus’ prosecutor summed up a vicious circle: governors who had engaged in extortion would buy the consulship with the money they had stolen and go on to plunder other provinces. Cato countered from both sides: in the Senate, he proposed a new form of process to combat electoral corruption; as president of the extortion court, he allowed the prosecution to hurry through a case that was as much about ambitus as repetundae. These initiatives, while not immediately successful, helped lay the groundwork for future reforms.

Caesar's description of the Germans' social organization and mores in the sixth book of his Bellum Gallicum (BG 6.21–8) has long been the subject of multiple scholarly controversies. Its focus on various seemingly random ethnographical details – above all the description of the Hercynian forest and its fantastical beasts – has so surprised readers that the very authenticity of the passage has been questioned. It has been convincingly argued that interpolation is not likely. However, the internal excursus describing the Hercynian forest, and the final section concerning its fauna in particular, remains a subject of intrigue, as a result of the extraordinary, semi-mythical nature of its contents. It is the latter portion of the excursus, concerning the beasts of the Hercynian forest, and the place and role of their portrayal within the ethnography as a whole, that I wish to elucidate in the present article. While it undeniably possesses great entertainment value, its presence cannot be justified merely on such grounds.